recalling exactly what charitable work she’d done, though, she shamefully recalled pulling down the shades when she spotted the March of Dimes lady making her neighborhood collection. When Stella’d heard the lady knocking at the door, she hadn’t answered. Later she spent the money she should have given to charity on a facial scrub and a loofah brush at Walgreen’s. She did the same when “Jerry’s Kids” knocked for Muscular Dystrophy. Who was really close with her money, though? Harriet Bendis was!—the Jadzia that God “punished” by giving her a corner grocery store, while she, poor Stella, scraped people’s feet for a living.
The widow recalled a million terrible things about Harriet, such as the time, one summer evening, that Mrs. Respectability gave her, Stella, a head of cabbage from her garden for free, a present, but then at the end of the month she found on her grocery bill: “Head of Cabbage, Price—Fifty Cents.” Calluses, nuns, bouffants, sodalities; she was through with them all. And she was really through with Jadzia!
Angry at having been embarrassed, she took the sodality pin from her dress, looked over the side, then dropped it from the trestle. The blue ribbon floated down, landing in muddy water. Mrs. Pilsudski watched it spin out of sight before she headed home thinking how—though it might offend the Church—she would extend her podiatry practice to Baptists and Lutherans.
For years she’d come this way to Bendis’s market, to footcare patients’ homes, to church, to sodality. She’d taken care of her feet; others neglected theirs. Now the lot of them could suffer the sorrow and heartbreak of burning, itching feet, she was thinking spitefully when she heard the whistle.
Until it blew again, she couldn’t tell the direction. At the end of the trestle, the tracks curved through the trees. You couldn’t see far ahead. Behind her now, though, a beam of light bounced up and down.
Heavenly Mary, more than half a trestle to go, she thought, and the whistle blowing for the crossing on the avenue. She tried walking faster, but it was so hard. Her glasses steamed up. Oh, Lord, that whistle! She concentrated on a rusted bolt holding the wooden guard railing together. Clutching the railing, she felt herself grow wetter. A minute later, the living girdle was newly soaked. Onto the trestle rattled the engine—hopper car, tank car, flatcar. From the terrifying whistle alone, the trestle would shake apart, she thought. Her hands clutching the railing, she remembered her missal lesson: “When hands are occupied, indulgences for saying the rosary may be gained as long as the beads are on one’s person.” Fearful of losing a grip on the railing, she couldn’t get to her rosary.
“Ouch!” she cried, feeling sharp pain as the locomotive rumbled past. Her poor heart seemed to burst. Petrified, she looked at the sky through the diesel smoke, felt the rusted bolt moving as though it would come out and the entire trestle fall into the river and float down to the abandoned ore dock.
“Ow,” she kept saying. “Ouch. Oh, God. Ow,” she said. Each time a boxcar passed, she remembered a sin she’d hidden from others and from the priest.
The train came, cars swaying, clicking. “Make me a rose in Your service,” she said to God as an empty flatcar threw sawdust in her face, then a tank car with a yellow crust of sulfur and the words HYDROGEN SULFIDE rolled toward her. Now a tank car with CLAY SLURRY written on it. Now one with bauxite that blew more dust into her face. Now another car with INHALATION HAZARD painted on it. “Ow! Ouch!”
She stood dumb a moment. Another click. The rails stilled. Prying loose her fingers, she inched a step forward to see whether her legs could hold her up. Beyond the widow’s house, the train blew for the crossing. Now it was quiet, as if a haze, a blue veil, had descended over the earth and over the widow.
Mist formed above the Left-Handed River. The moon rose. The air looked so blue and fresh, she thought. For the first time, she felt at peace.
A mystery, a blessed mystery of Christ!—kneeling before the nun, leading prayer, being struck dumb with anger and pride, the ordeal with the locomotive. Throughout all of this, she believed she’d grown even more beautiful, a faithful, dewy rose of Christ whose sins had been forgiven.
It was a splendid evening, cool enough now that the coat felt good. Frogs sang. Lightning bugs flitted among the trees. Lake boats far off in the harbor blew their whistles; the tugs responded. Familiar, comforting sights and sounds.
Still, a deep sadness filled her. Feeling something missing from her heart, she remembered the sodality pin with the blue ribbon floating in the air as it descended to the river. What would she do with that empty place over her heart? Or was it her heart that was empty?
Opening the porch door, which closed when she opened it and opened when she closed it, she looked for her sodality’s sheet of membership rules and principles. There it was atop the lace cloth on the dining room table. “Each bead of a rosary represents a crown of roses woven in Mary’s honor,” she read. Then she read again how women of “slowackiego (Slovak), czeskiego (Czech), rusinskiego (Ruthenian), or litewskiego (Lithuanian) extraction” could join the sodality. Still shaky, she couldn’t read more. She felt certain she’d fix Blessed Mary’s feet in heaven someday for having been through all this on earth. After seeing those delicate feet crushing the head of serpents so often on statues and in pictures, she knew the Virgin’s tired feet would need skilled attention. Stella Pilsudski was the podiatrist for Blessed Mary! EXPERIENCED FOOT CARE, she’d advertise in heaven.
Mrs. Pilsudski expected the upstairs to be a mess after the long freight train’s passage, Mary and Joseph fallen from the dresser, St. Anthony from the cedar chest. When she went upstairs, though, she found the saints abiding in her absence as she’d left them. Despite her wobbling legs, she kissed each saint, then kissed the feet of the Savior on the cross. Around her fingers she strung the rosary beads, wishing she could keep her hands forever steady with the rosary, steady the way her mind was now that she’d survived the ordeal on the trestle.
Looking out at the darkening river, she closed her window shades to change out of her dress, girdle, stockings. Surely Jesus could forgive a faithful woman’s incontinence.
Next she washed up, studying her face in the bathroom mirror. A wrinkled face, but pink like a rose. She let the loosened knot of gray hair fall to her shoulders. Ready for bed, she sat in the wing chair—first, to praise God, then to thank Him for her blameless life. She next sought a blessing on the house, thinking how each room had stood up courageously over the years to the violent surprises of a life near the tracks. “A good house, too,” whispered Pani Pilsudski, thinking of this bedroom, of the adjoining very holy and sacred bathroom, of the holy spare room down the hall. Then she thought of the living room below her with the flex-steel hide-a-bed and reupholstered chairs, holy as well; then of the holy kitchen, bright and airy with the good counter space, stainless steel sink, oven, stove, the dependable, holy, frost-free refrigerator. She prayed for her rooms, her knickknacks, her loofah brush—all precious because she’d worked hard to acquire them. And she was the holy woman at their center, a truly holy woman radiating goodness and humility.
Next she prayed for the salmon patties in the refrigerator, for the ham and bean soup, for the half-eaten wienie bought from Jadzia’s store. She prayed for herself, too, and for her dear, deceased husband, Stasiu, but mainly for herself, beseeching Jesus to allow her to keep on with Blessed Footcare Work. In fact, once the 9:17 freight passed through tomorrow morning, during the hour she could stand up without the house shaking apart, she’d clean the leftovers out of the refrigerator, then, before the next freight came through, hurry across the trestle, first to confession in the new confessional, then to buy a pound of ground chuck or a soup bone at the market. Once there, she, Stella, would drop a quarter into the March of Dimes canister—no, make that thirty cents, she thought.
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