The Grave of God's Daughter (13 page)

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

Martin snorted quickly, sensing the lie. “Let’s just go to sleep. Tomorrow things will be better.”

I wanted to believe him. However, I couldn’t fall asleep that night for hours. I was waiting for a sound, even the faintest hint, to assure me that my mother was still in there and that she was
still alive. The tension made me restless, though I wouldn’t dare move, not a muscle. Martin was sleeping and I was afraid to wake him. I was also afraid that even a brief shift in weight might obscure the noise I awaited. My neck stiffened into a solid, unrelenting cramp and the muscles tingled with pinpricks of pain. It was a strange sensation, like a twinkling of lights under the flesh, and I pictured myself glowing in the dark apartment, as though my skin were made of stars. After hours of waiting, I must have plunged into sleep. I bolted awake in the dead of night and craned to see through the darkness.

The door to the washroom was open. The door to my parents’ bedroom was closed. That meant that my mother had returned to bed. I sank back against the wall, relieved, then a feeling overtook me, one far worse than dread. The sudden pain in my bladder almost doubled me over. I had to brace myself against the bed frame to gather my strength so I could climb over Martin without waking him.

As I forced my feet into my boots, worry began its steady climb from my belly to my brain. I gulped it back down. I took the roll of toilet paper from the shelf by the door where we kept it and hurried out into the frigid night air without my coat. The cramping was so violent it made me forget my self-consciousness about being seen in my nightclothes.

The alley was dark. No light shone in any of the windows. The moon was obscured, bound in dense clouds. I dashed around the side of the apartment, the tips of my toes barely touching the ground, barely breaking the frosty outer crust of the mud.

The door to the outhouse was ajar. I gave it one hard, warning kick, and when there was no sign of fleeing rats, I flung open the
door and slid inside without taking the time to shut it all the way behind me. The burning soreness in my bladder released and subsided. It was like waking from a bad dream. I felt conscious again. I wiped myself, pushed my nightdress down, and was about to run back out when I heard something, not the scurrying of feet but a thumping in a three-part beat. It was the unmistakable, plodding rhythm of Swatka Pani stalking across the mud with her cane.

She was wending her way along the back of the apartments, checking the outhouses, I guessed. It was then that I noticed I hadn’t completely closed the door to the outhouse and had forgotten to lock it. I leaned close to the jamb, poised to run if I had to. Swatka Pani’s pace slowed. She was mere yards away. Then came another set of footfalls. These were light and quick and coming off Third, right toward the row of outhouses. The wind was picking up, blurring the sounds from outside. The laundry on the lines was snapping. The walls of the outhouses trembled.

The wind slowed, but I could no longer hear the footsteps. Neither Swatka Pani nor the other person had gone away, but they weren’t moving either. The muffled hiss of whispers rose out of the silence. Swatka Pani was talking to whomever she had encountered, though not in her normal, brittle tone. This was different.

As I strained to decipher the words as well as the voice of the other person, I let my gaze fall to the stone slab floor. Three rats had crept into the outhouse or had been inside all the while, hidden. I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. One scurried along the wall while the others sniffed at shallow puddles on the ground. I was surrounded.

The voices outside stopped for a moment. I pinched my nostrils and held my breath, waiting, then the whispering resumed. I raised
myself onto my toes and watched as one of the rats neared, boldly nosing my boot. Another rat followed, whiskers glinting. Tears boiled over onto my cheeks, each a burning bead on the chilly flesh.

The whispers grew into sharp, nasty rasps. They were speaking in Polish, but the words were running together. Then I heard one word chime over the rest.

Smierc.

It was the word for death.

My body began to quake. I was standing on my tiptoes in the freezing night air, clad only in my nightdress, and my legs were threatening to give out. The three rats had encircled me, tails snaking alongside my boots. Then, from under the wall, two more rats entered, hopping onto the stone slab and darting across the floor to join the others. A scream welled in my lungs, rising like a glass bubble. I gripped it in my throat, swallowing over and over again. I tried to stifle the chattering of my teeth, gritting them, but it was no use. I wedged the heel of my hand under my chin to drive my teeth together, but still my jaw continued to quiver. The cold had taken over.

The conversation outside ended abruptly. The voices dropped off. I held my breath again until I heard the footsteps of the other person. I leaned into the door, trying to see through the narrow crack between it and the jamb. I glimpsed a shifting shadow. The person was marching off, away, back toward Third. I could see a sliver of Swatka Pani in profile. She did not move, not for a few moments. She was watching the person leave, making sure they had gone for good. I suddenly felt a weight on my foot. Without looking, I knew what it was. One of the rats had climbed onto my boot.

The scream that had clogged my throat was replaced by the urge to retch. The rat was balancing itself on the toe of my boot and snuffling at the laces. My stomach heaved. I gritted my teeth harder and dug my icy fingers into my cheeks. Through the crack in the door, I watched the silhouette of Swatka Pani wavering, then turning. The shuffle of feet and the thud of her cane hitting the mud began again and slowly receded as she made her way back along the outhouses to her house at the end of the alley.

After that ominous cadence had died down to nothing, I jerked my nearly frozen leg with all my might and catapulted the rat into the air, hurling it against the outhouse wall. I threw myself against the door with both hands, sending it flying back on its hinges as the other rats scattered. I was running blind, my feet hitting the ground in time with the thrashing of my heart.

I ripped open the door to our apartment and the bottled-up scream bled out of my lips in a whimper. My knees buckled. I grabbed a chair to keep from falling to the floor. My body was so numb with cold, I imagined that if I fell, I would literally shatter. Soon the icy weight of my body was too much to bear. I sank to my knees and slumped on the floor.

The coal in the stove had long since burned out, yet a faint current of warmth was still drifting through the room. I lay there on the floor, letting the heat swim over my body. Even the floorboards were warm against my skin. I tried to get up, but every muscle had hardened. The only things I could move were my eyes, and the first thing I saw was the sleeping figure of my brother, his body curled tightly under the blanket, his cheek nestled deep in the pillow.

Silent sobs rippled inside my chest. Tears flowed down the
sides of my face, tracing paths along my ears and into my scalp, where I could feel them purling around each strand of hair. My flesh stung as it warmed, then I started to shiver uncontrollably. My bones were rattling inside me and my teeth were clattering. My body was no longer my own. It belonged to the cold.

As I lay there on the floor, I decided that hell was not the fiery inferno the nuns insisted it was. Hell was a frigid, desolate plain where there was no shelter, no rescue from the cold. Once the shaking let up, I crawled on my hands and knees across the floor to my bed. I didn’t want to wake Martin, but the numbness left me clumsy and I ended up dragging my unwieldy legs over his. The motion shook him out of his sleep. Drowsy, he blinked at me, eyes heavy.

“Are you all right?” Martin asked.

I was too weak to answer, so I lay down beside him and huddled close.

“You’re so cold,” he said. “What happened?”

“Just stay next to me,” I said. “That’s all. Stay next to me.”

I
AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING
to Martin tapping my shoulder, gentle yet persistent. “Please wake up,” he was saying softly. “Please.”

“What is it?” I asked, reluctant to open my eyes. It was as though I’d fallen asleep only seconds ago.

“Something’s going on.”

Sallow, watery light was draining in through the window. It must have been a little past dawn.

“Listen,” Martin whispered.

From outside came the unmistakable murmur of voices, doors opening, footsteps. That would have been normal on any weekday,
but it was Saturday. Martin waved me over to the window. “Come and look.”

My body was still sore and stiff. When my feet touched the floor, each muscle ached with the renewed burden of carrying my own weight. I struggled to the window where Martin was waiting. He had pulled over a chair and was kneeling on top of it.

“See,” he said. “Something must have happened.”

Third was a flurry of activity. Women in their robes and nightdresses were standing in the alley or on each other’s stoops, clutching their clothes tightly to keep warm while whispering to one another and pointing toward the far end of Third. A few children huddled close to their mothers, listening in and gawking at something down the alley that I couldn’t see. Then a man in a police uniform strode by, his pace swift.

“I told you,” Martin said. “The police are here.”

Another policeman was at the door of one of the apartments across the alley. He was talking to a woman who had her coat on over her nightdress and rags knotted in her hair. Rollers were costly, so women used rags or even newspaper instead and slept with them on so their hair would be curly come morning. The woman shook her head at the policeman, jostling the rags, then gestured to the end of the road at the thing that we could not see.

“What are they all pointing at?”

“I don’t know,” Martin said.

I was going to the door to see for myself when Martin grabbed my sleeve. “What are you doing?”

“I want to see what they’re all talking about.”

Martin was about to warn me not to when the door to my par
ents’ bedroom opened. “What’s going on?” my mother asked, pulling her robe tightly around her waist. Her hair was tangled, her eyes dark. “What are you doing up?” Martin hurried off the chair, saying, “Something—”

The key slid in the front door and it swung open, cutting Martin off. My father charged inside. He had his coat over his arm, then hurled it aside, revealing a towel below. A bright red bloodstain was blossoming on the cloth.

“I fell. There was glass on the floor. I didn’t think it was that deep at first, but…”

My father collapsed onto a chair and laid his bleeding arm on the table. His eyes drooped. I thought it was the pain that had weakened him, then I realized he was drunk. My mother rushed to him and realized the same.

My father’s face was covered in a thin layer of soot, as it often was when he returned home from work, but there was also a long smudge of dirt running down his cheek, as if someone had taken a swing at him and grazed him. I couldn’t ask him what had happened and my mother chose not to. She didn’t seem to want to know.

She peeled back the towel, exposing a short but deep gash in the underside of my father’s forearm. A steady stream of blood cascaded from the wound as soon as the towel was removed. Martin immediately began whimpering.

“Take your brother outside,” my mother ordered.

“No, no, I won’t leave,” Martin protested, panic-stricken. He was gaping at my father’s slashed arm, unable to move.

“Go outside,” my mother shouted.

“No,” Martin squalled, tears falling freely. “I don’t want to go.”

“Do as you’re told,” my father snapped.

Martin searched my father’s face and found only hardness, then he turned to me. I couldn’t say a word and simply implored him to go with my eyes. He burst into frantic tears as he struggled into his coat and boots, then bolted out the door, slamming it behind him.

“Get me another towel and the soap and the iodine,” my mother commanded. “And that shirt I was mending. Get it and the scissors too.”

I did as I was told without thinking. As soon as I set the shirt down on the table, it dawned on me what my mother was about to do. My father knew too.

“Put the kettle on,” my mother instructed.

I filled the kettle and shoveled all the coal we had into the stove, stoking the fire as fast as I could while my mother pressed the clean towel firmly against my father’s forearm. The force of her hand was enough to make him flinch.

“Hold it there,” she told my father with reproach. She took the threaded needle from the collar of the shirt and pulled the thread even and taut.

“Is the water boiling?” she asked through clenched teeth as she bit the end off the thread and knotted it.

Slowly, the water began to bubble. I was willing the kettle to sing. Minutes passed in silence as my mother waited for my answer. Finally, the kettle wailed a single high note. “Get a pot and pour it in.”

I grabbed a pot and the steaming kettle in one swift motion and delivered them to her. My mother soaped the towel and cleaned my father’s wound, then used another corner of the towel
to swab iodine onto the gash. My father chewed the inside of his cheek, anticipating what was to come.

“You’re going to have to help me,” my mother told me.

All I could do was nod and stare at the opening in my father’s flesh. I moved in close to him and he turned his head to look the other way, ashamed.

My mother held out her hand to him. “Give me your matches.”

He dug in his pocket and dropped the pack into her palm. She struck one and carefully ran the needle through the flame.

“You’re going to have to hold each end tight so the cut stays closed,” she explained without looking at me. “And keep your fingers away.”

My mother didn’t wait for an answer from me. She slid the needle into my father’s skin, and he gnashed his teeth to keep himself from jerking his arm back. She threaded the needle through the other side of the cut, drawing the skin together and tugging it up. “Keep it tight,” she reminded me.

Eyes closed, jaw clenched, my father sat as still as he could. Though he was drunk, he appeared to feel everything, from the jab of the needle to the unnatural wrenching of thread through skin.

With swift precision, my mother wove six minute stitches. She didn’t glance up once to check on my father, merely kept to the task. As she tied off the last stitch, my father began to squirm. The raw pain of the procedure was making him nauseous. My mother made a triple knot, snipped the thread with the scissors, and was about to wipe the closed wound down with iodine when my father jumped up, gagging, and dashed for the sink. He coughed and spat, but did not vomit.

“I’ll clean it,” he mumbled over his shoulder.

My mother laid the towel next to the pot full of water and stood up. There was no thank you, no hug, no kiss, no moment between them. She removed the remaining thread from the needle, then drove it back into the collar of my father’s shirt and strode into the bedroom.

The needle was still bloody and it left flecks of red on the pale blue fabric of the collar. I couldn’t be sure if my mother had forgotten about the blood or if she had made the stain on purpose, a reminder to my father of what he had done and what she had done for him.

My father waited until the door to their bedroom shut to turn around. He surveyed the table, the evidence of the impromptu surgery. The towel he had come in with was laying in a lump, the blood still bright, and steam was rising off the pot of water as it cooled. He seemed unable to approach the table, almost afraid, so I took the other towel and rung it out in the water, then soaped one corner and offered it to him. He hesitantly took the towel and blotted the wound clean, putting his back to me again. That way I wouldn’t see him grimacing at the pain.

“I’ll get the tape,” I said and my father gave a little nod. Real bandages were expensive, so my mother bought lengths of what was used as surgical tape at the time. It was white and gluey, and each time Martin or I got a cut, we dreaded the tape. Pulling it off meant practically ripping the wound back open or at least taking some skin off with the tape.

I retrieved the roll of bandaging tape and brought it to my father. He moved to take the tape from me but paused. He couldn’t wrap his arm himself. He never met my gaze, only offered his forearm to me by moving it ever so slightly in my direction.

I was more afraid of bandaging my father’s arm than having to hold his skin closed for my mother to sew shut. That was an urgent cause, beyond necessary, but this was more like a favor, a plea. My father needed me.

I gingerly wound the tape around his arm, careful not to wrap it too tightly. The tape made a ripping sound as it spooled off the roll, and my mother would undoubtedly have heard the noise from the other room and known what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept watch to see if she would appear at the door.

After I finished, I tried to tear off the end of the tape, but it wouldn’t budge. The tape was stubbornly sticky and bent in on itself as I tugged at it. I was embarrassed that I was making a mess of such a small duty. I picked at the tape, which only made it worse, clumping the length together in a matted ball.

“Get a knife,” my father said solemnly.

The phrase rattled me, yet I did as he said, choosing the smallest knife we had. He took the roll and held it out, away from his arm, leaving me room to cut.

“Go on,” he told me.

I sawed at the tape, not wanting to press too hard, but it just buckled in on itself again, forcing me to work the knife faster, ashamed that I still couldn’t get this right. My father was starting to lose his patience. I had to do something. In one brisk stroke, I brought the knife down on the edge of the tape, severing it instantly.

Freed from the tape, my father leaped up. The front door opened and Martin peeked in. He was about to speak, then he saw me holding the knife and our father hovering over me. Nobody said anything. Martin stared.

“Swatka Pani is dead,” he announced.

“What?” My father’s arm fell to his side.

I reeled at the news. Snippets of the previous night streaked through my mind—Swatka Pani’s cane thumping in the mud, her foreboding silhouette, her frenzied whispers.

“Did you hear that?” Martin said, looking past me. “She’s—”

“I heard you,” my mother replied. She was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, only half visible behind the partly open door.

My father snatched his coat and marched outside yanking down his sleeve to cover the bandaged wound. Martin followed on his heels. I was about to join them, but turned back. My mother was staring right at me, as if she knew that was exactly what I would do, like she had made me do it. She was still hidden halfway behind the door, keeping it in front of her, and she was holding me with her eyes, refusing to let go.

It was the chance I had pined for, for her to want to see me, to look at me as though I was there. An unnameable joy crested in my heart, a feeling so fragile I was afraid to believe it.

Then it was gone as quickly as it had come. I watched my mother grip the side of the door and shut it. That was how she slipped away from me. I must have stood in that spot for minutes without moving. I wasn’t sure what had happened, what I had done to get her to see me, then to lose her. I felt as if I was crying, wailing and screaming with every fiber of my being, but I wasn’t even blinking.

I
DO NOT REMEMBER LEAVING
the house. The next thing I knew I had my coat on over my nightdress and was walking over to join Martin and my father, who were gathered at the end of Third with a growing crowd. Other people were rushing past me, racing to see what all the commotion was about. Third was jangling with noise and movement. The alley most people feared to traverse was now nearly packed.

“What’s going on?” one man asked.

“Somebody killed her,” a woman answered.

“Good riddance,” another woman snorted. “I hope they find the man who did it so I can kiss him.” A few other women laughed.

“Killed her down at the river,” a man announced as he passed me.

“Pushed her down the stairs,” someone else offered.

The crowd was pooled around the front of Swatka Pani’s clapboard house, huddled close to her stub of a porch. One policeman was guarding the open front door. Two others could be seen through the windows, searching the house. I wove my way into the crowd next to Martin. He was sticking close to my father’s side and was almost on top of him. I could tell that Martin wanted to hold his hand but knew better than to reach for it.

“The police are inside. Everybody says they’re looking for clues,” Martin pronounced, pleased to have something to report.

“Clues to what?”

“To who killed Swatka Pani.”

“But I thought someone said she was killed at the river.”

Martin shrugged. He was too intent on enjoying the excitement to bother with an answer.

When I’d first heard Martin say the words
Swatka Pani is dead
,
they had melted into the air, into nothing. It wasn’t real. However, once I saw the people and heard them talking, alarm wound its way into my brain and knotted itself there.

“What if she just fell down the stairs?” I asked. “Maybe nobody killed her.”

Martin rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Swatka Pani doesn’t go to the river. Everybody knows that.”

It was true. Nothing could get her to go to the river. At least, nothing in the past.

“Then why was she there?” I asked.

Martin preferred asking questions, not answering them, and he was getting tired of having his attention pulled away from watching the policeman on the porch, who was simply standing there with his hands on his hips, trying to look important.

“I don’t know,” Martin snorted.

“Quiet,” my father ordered. “Somebody’s coming out.”

Two police officers exited Swatka Pani’s house empty-handed. The crowd surged forward, bombarding the officers with questions.