The Grave of God's Daughter (14 page)

“Who did it?” one man shouted.

“How’d she die?” another yelled.

“You gonna catch the guy?” someone else demanded.

“Yeah, what about us?” a woman sang out. “There’s a killer out there. What are you going to do about it?”

Nods and murmurs rippled through the crowd, yet the policemen said nothing. The one who was standing on the porch led the others down the steps and pushed his way through the onlookers, saying, “Make way. Make way,” in Polish.

The crowd pressed farther in. More questions flared and went unanswered. The police officers climbed into the police car that
was waiting at the end of the alley. It was almost silly that they had driven. The police station was a minute’s walk from the alley. The only thing closer was the Silver Slipper. The police car just added to the show.

As the policemen took off, the people booed them. Some muttered curses. Yet, we all remained there, watching them drive away.

After the police were out of sight, nobody knew what to do with themselves. People milled around outside Swatka Pani’s house, whispering speculation, then the group began to disperse. Women hustled their children back to their apartments while most of the men headed off to the Slipper, eager to break the news to their friends and trump up the tale of what little they had seen.

“Go on back to the house,” my father told us, wanting to join the other men.

“Don’t leave now,” Martin pleaded.

My father couldn’t stand it when Martin begged. Martin’s plaintive whine would always set him off, as if that wasn’t what boys were supposed to do.

“You heard me,” my father said, raising his voice.

“What about your dinner?” Martin was grasping at anything to change his mind.

“I’m not hungry.” He was already walking away in the direction the other men had gone.

“But?”

“It’s okay,” I offered. “He’s got to get hungry sometime.”

Martin rolled his eyes, disappointed. We both knew my father wouldn’t be back for hours, if at all.

“All right,” Martin sighed. “We can go back now.”

“You sure? We can stay if you want.”

“No, there’s nothing to see.”

And there wasn’t. All that was there was the same house we had seen every day of our lives, the house we never dared play near, the house we ran past if it was getting dark. Swatka Pani was dead. It was a concept I couldn’t grasp. The fact that she had been killed, that someone had murdered her only hours after I had seen her, defied my comprehension. The long shadow of the stranger was all I could think of.

A few men were still loitering outside Swatka Pani’s porch. I overheard one say that they were going to the river to see where it had happened.

“Let’s follow them,” I whispered to Martin.

“Why?” he protested. “I heard the policeman say they took her away to the big hospital in Pittsburgh. Anyway, we’re not supposed to go to the river.”

“Don’t you just want to see?”

Curiosity made him relent. “I guess.”

We trailed behind the men, staying far enough back that they wouldn’t notice us.

“What if they get mad that we followed them?” Martin asked.

“What can they be mad about? You said she’s not there anymore. So really, we’re only going to look at the river. What harm can that do?”

Martin frowned but came along anyway.

At the river, the men studied the stairway, shaking the railing to test it and trying to gauge the distance down to the water. Beyond them, the cross stood on the mountaintop, a bright form against the dawn sky. The men were huddled in a tight circle, their backs to us. I edged nearer, trying to hear what they were saying.

“Too close,” Martin whispered, pulling me back. Still, I pushed in closer, drawing him along with me against his will.

“Forty feet, easy,” one man said.

“Maybe even fifty,” another corrected.

“She could’ve slipped. The steps might have iced over in the night.”

“Railing’s rickety as hell too.”

“Nasty way to go. A fall down these steps would have broken every bone she had.”

“Mean old bitch probably did slip.”

“Just proves that God’ll get you if the devil doesn’t first.”

The conversation was upsetting Martin. He tried dragging me away. As he did, he slid on some gravel. One of the men spun around, then the rest.

“What are you doing here?” one demanded.

Neither Martin nor I replied.

“This isn’t no place for you. Go on home,” another told us.

“It’s just the river,” I said.

One man was about to argue but stopped himself. We were all thinking the same thing. This wasn’t just the river anymore. It never would be again. People died in those waters all the time. It was a given that the river would claim the victims it wanted and ignore the others. Yet, we all flocked to it, offering ourselves up like sacrifices. Swatka Pani’s death was different. She hadn’t drowned. The river hadn’t chosen her at random like it had the rest.

“Something’s gone on here and it’s nothing that kids should be seeing,” one man declared.

“What’s there to see?” I asked, knowing as well as he did that
nothing tangible had changed. The stairs would still creak when you stepped on them. The railing would still shift under your weight. And the river would roll by indifferently, as always.

“There could be blood down there or something,” a different man insisted. “It’s not for children’s eyes.”

I wanted to laugh out loud.
If you only knew what my eyes have seen,
I thought.

Whatever awaited on those stairs didn’t frighten me. It would be nothing compared to what I had already witnessed even in the last hour. I stood my ground, unmoving, and the men stared at me.

Martin tugged my sleeve. “Come on,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

This time, I let him pull me away. Once we were halfway down River Road and far enough away, Martin laid into me. “Are you crazy? What were you thinking?”

“We had as much right to be there as they did.”

“But they’re grown-ups and we’re not, so if they say go home, we go home.”

I knew there wasn’t anything down on the river’s edge, but I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to see the spot where Swatka Pani had died. I wanted to be convinced that she was dead.

Martin took the lead, setting a brisk pace. He was anxious to get home. I was lagging behind, straining to remember every shred of sound I had overheard the night before. All that came to me was
smierc
.

Death.

“Hurry up,” Martin called. “It’s cold.”

A flicker of movement caught my eye as I glanced up to answer
him. The curtain in the front window of the decrepit house where the old woman lived was being drawn aside. A corner of the woman’s face came into view. She was watching the men at the river.

“Look, Marty,” I said, wheeling him around by the arm.

“What?”

When I spun back, the window was empty. The curtain had returned to its place.

“Did you see her? She was there. In the window.”

“Who? What window?”

“The woman I told you about.”

“So?” Martin said, shaking his arm free and marching on.

“Don’t you want to see her? Don’t you want to see that she’s real?”

“No, I want to go home.”

He went on ahead, leaving me alone outside the woman’s house. I waited, hoping for some other sign of movement. But the house stood there as still and blank as before.

M
Y MOTHER WAS BUSY
with the wash when we returned. She cleaned each garment by hand in the sink. The process usually took hours because she scrubbed every piece so ardently, almost unforgivingly. From that morning and on into the afternoon, my mother kept to her work, soaping and rinsing the clothes with an all-consuming fervor. She was rubbing the cake of soap into the clothes, driving it into every fiber of the cloth, then she thrust each garment underwater, rinsing it of soap, then wrung it dry, squeez
ing out each drop of water. She seemed to have forgotten we were there with her in the apartment. She simply continued washing.

The rest of the day inched by, one long hour after another. Our only distraction was the radio. My mother hadn’t let us play it in weeks, so the music was a balm against the quiet. I don’t remember what Martin and I did. All I remember was the heavy, leaden feel of exhaustion and the fact that my father didn’t return until it was nearly time for us to go to bed. We heard him on the front step, talking to someone in the alley, then at last, my mother pulled the stopper from the sink and the water began to drain. A heaping basketful of wet clothes sat at her feet.

“Hang these while I fix supper,” she told me.

I was hungry and tired and tempted to refuse, though I didn’t dare. The weight of the overloaded basket was almost too much for me. I heaved it into my arms and struggled to open the door. Neither Martin nor my mother noticed, so neither came to help. I didn’t want to put the basket back down for fear of not being able to pick it up again.

Gravity was taking over and the basket was slowly inching its way down my stomach and over my knees. My fingers slid frantically over the knob. Without warning, the door opened, bumping the basket and jarring me backward. It was my father, stunned to find me there, blocking his way. I rushed past him and into the alley, lugging the basket.

It was practically dark by then, too late to be hanging wash. The wet clothes would probably freeze, then we would have to leave them there for an extra day to let the hardened fabric thaw. Afterward, the clothes wouldn’t feel the same. All of the softness would have been beaten out of them by wind and frost.

Night was gusting in, rattling the clothesline and making it difficult for me to get the clothes to stay on it. One clothespin popped off and dropped into the mud, and another, then I would have to wipe them clean on the side of the basket. With every fallen clothespin, my frustration mounted and I had to fight to keep from crying. The outhouse was entering my peripheral vision as I worked my way down the clothesline. Once I reached the outhouse, the first tear fell. I cried until I’d finished hanging every piece of clothing my mother had washed. I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I would not miss Swatka Pani. I didn’t mourn her death. Then I realized that that was the very reason for my tears. She was dead and I didn’t care.

I didn’t want to go back inside, yet I couldn’t bear to stay out there either. I blotted my cheeks on the sleeve of my sweater and stared into the wind to dry my eyes, then returned to the apartment.

“Wash up. Supper’s on,” my mother said as I entered.

I ducked into the washroom and Martin followed. “Were you crying?” he asked.

“It was just cold out.”

“You were crying. I can tell.”

“So what if I was,” I answered, splashing water on my face.

“Were you crying because of Swatka Pani?”

“No,” I scoffed, though it was another lie.

Swatka Pani had embodied every fear I’d ever known. Each time she skulked down Third, her cane piercing the mud, I knew what was coming. Her presence would sound a warning in my mind. With her gone, there would no longer be a sign, no signal. All things frightful could now roam freely on the alley. I cried because I would no longer be able to see them coming.

“I’m not going to cry about Swatka Pani,” Martin declared. “I’m glad she’s gone.”

“Don’t say that,” I scolded with a glance upward. “He can hear you. God can always hear you.”

“Yeah, and I bet He knew Swatka Pani was going to hell, so he let the devil take her. That’s who killed her, you know. The devil. He came to collect her the way she comes to collect our rent money.”

“Martin, stop it. Stop saying things like that. It’s not true. That’s not how it works.”

“How do you know?”

I stormed out of the washroom to avoid answering. Both of my parents looked up from the table. “What’s going on in there?” my father asked.

“Nothing. It was nothing.”

I took my seat at the table and Martin followed. We dropped our heads to pray over the meal of chicken, onions, and potatoes. My father lowered his head and mouthed the words as usual, like a song he was singing only to himself. My mother was always the loudest, enunciating each syllable crisply, her voice overriding ours. That day she was murmuring the prayer. Even Martin’s small voice boomed over hers.

My father lit a cigarette, as he did before each meal, then we all began to eat. The radio was still playing and a news program was on. Two men were discussing the German army and their steady spread across Europe.

“Filthy Germans,” my father muttered, responding to a comment one of the newscasters had made.

“Why are they filthy?” Martin asked.

“They’re greedy. They want everything they can put their hands on.”

Martin still didn’t understand. “Does that make their hands dirty?”

That was one question too many for my father. “No, damn it, I don’t mean dirty. Filthy’s just an expression. It doesn’t mean that they’re really filthy.” He took an irritated drag on his cigarette and exhaled a wrathful stream of smoke across the table.

“Well, I didn’t know,” Martin pouted.

“Well, now you do.”

My father pushed aside his plate and mechanically finished his cigarette while he listened to the newscasters bicker over where the German army would head next, south to France or east and deeper into Europe. He nodded his head when he agreed with what the men were saying or clucked his disagreement with his tongue.

The radio program came to an end and music returned. An upbeat tune wafted through the apartment, then was interrupted by a knock on the door. My father grudgingly got up to answer it, as though he’d been in the middle of something.

A policeman was on the other side of the door. “Evening,” he said in Polish. “Come by to ask about…” He gestured toward the end of the alley and Swatka Pani’s house. “You mind if I come in?”

The policeman wore a long, heavy overcoat and stood almost a head taller than my father, who backed away to let him enter. The officer’s presence threw the rest of the apartment out of scale. He seemed enormous in the small room.