leg?” Pa asks Thaddeus.
“Healed up okay. In two weeks, I’ll be over there with this map. Sprout,” he says to me, “I’m going to promote you from a nonentity to a private first class. ‘To All Who Hear These Presents, Greetings,’” he says like he’s reading a proclamation. Then he gives me a blue booklet whose cover reads:
CONSTITUTION AND BY-LAWS OF THE THADDEUS KOSCIUSZKO CLUB. COMPOSED OF ALL THE SLAVIC PEOPLE IN THE SUPERIOR, WISC. AREA. ORGANIZED AUGUST 1ST, 1928
“I joined up,”Tad says. “All you have to do is pay the membership fee, first year’s dues of six dollars, and prove you’re Polish, which ain’t hard in this neighborhood. I wanna lay claim to being in the Polish Club of Superior. If I get killed in Vietnam, then at least you’ll always know I joined the club. I’ll have a map, too. It’ll be close by so a medic can get it for me while I’m dying. In the newspapers, you’ll read about the casualty of a hometown boy. Shit, I’m gonna have to leave home!” He kisses the map. “Edda, the Purple Heart is authentic. They gave it to me. But what did I get it for? I hate to tell you this. I might never see you again. Geez, I’ve had too much beer tonight—I’m a cook, Edda. Christ, like Mrs. Pilsudski or some Polish baba. A cook! Never told no one. The guys like my cooking. They ask for pierogi when they come back from search-and-destroy operations near An Ho. Pierogi, of all things. Oh, I’m glad I joined the club.”
He is almost crying, but I know Tad is strong, and he is cool in sunglasses. Even Pa thinks so and will not accept that Tad is only a cook in the marines.
I take a sip of Tad’s vodka.
“Andy, don’t let them have no more in there,” Ma calls to me. “And what are you doing with the men?”
“It’s a map,” I say. “Tad’s got the Polish Club membership rules with him, too.”
Trying to change the subject from Tad’s culinary skills for the marines, my father points to the Nemadji River my cousin’s just kissed. Pa is saying, “These lines show the height of hill and valley. You read the lay of the land by them. The purple waving lines, the contour lines, represent ten-foot intervals. Says so right here.You don’t needa believe me, but you should believe what a map before you says on this very table in a Polish household.”
Near where both my grandfathers rest in the cemetery, the Nemadji River, which translated from the Ojibwe means “Left-Handed River,” sweeps in a wide blue arc on the topographical map. Flowing beneath the Chicago & North Western trestle, the river runs through a swamp, then past more neighbors’ houses.
As Thaddeus bends to kiss another area of the map, I figure that, according to the contour lines, the land above the river must drop thirty feet as it nears the bay. All of this is marked on the map. Sometimes, in real life, the Left-Handed River reverses course. Instead of entering the bay from the south, the way it normally does, the river appears as if it’s running back to where it came from. This happens when northwest winds create whitecaps on the lake.
“If I kiss the place,” Tad’s saying, “then I’m okay. But how do you kiss a neighborhood? I’ve never done nothing brave. At least lemme study this map a little and get some strength.”
“You’ll be home soon.You’ll be discharged,” my father says.
Seeing the mark on the map where the water tower used to be, I point to it, telling them to look. Pa must swallow his Żubrówka the wrong way, because he has to cough. “It’s the old railroad water tower near the bay,” he says. “‘WT’ means water tower. I forgot about it. Now my kid spots ’er. The round tank, the funnel that trains got water from. Great. You’re some map reader, Andy,” he congratulates me. “The water tower has been torn down for a long time.”
“What’s this on the map, the ‘Pesthouse’?” I ask.
“It’s not here anymore,” he tells me.
“Am I here?” asks Tad. “Do I exist? Man, too much beer and vodka.”
We study the map’s contours as though they were contours of our lives, and Pa says, “In purple at the bottom it’s got ‘Revisions compiled and map edited 1964.’ But over here . . . ‘Topography from aerial photographs taken 1959.’ It’s 1968. I’m looking at ’er and seeing things have changed. No ‘Home for the Aged.’ No ‘Poor Farm.’ No ‘Pesthouse.’ Tore down so many years ago like other things. I suppose it’s how they do things at a map company.”
“I don’t know why they sent me an old map.”
Despite the map’s insufficiencies, Tad kisses it again, and I wonder if I could ever feel such love for the East End.
It is strange when the church bell rings. At 6:00, storm or not, it rings everyday; but now the kitchen clock reads 6:07, and we’re examining a map of old places, and the bell rings and startles me.
It must be the weather; snow changes contours. In winter blizzards, in summer heat, I’ve heard the bell as I explored beneath the trestle, floated in Burbul’s canoe on the river, or walked over the ice on the bay before the first snow. I’ve heard the bell out on Hog Island and heard it at the cemetery above the Left-Handed River. Always at six o’clock. Now today, it rings late.
In the living room, Pani says, “Beat-beat.” Her head falls. She dozes.
“Rivers don’t change,” Tad says. “Goddam. I’ve gotta do something brave. I want to be remembered as the East End man who wore a Purple Heart on his chest. Oh, this heart, Uncle Edda and Fuzz Mold! A crate of eggs fell on me. Then a barrel of S.O.S. on top . . . chipped beef, chunks of ground beef in a cream sauce. ‘S.O.S.’ is short for ‘Sheet on a shingle,’ as Mrs. Pilsudski would say. There mighta been bread involved in this incident, five or six loaves. Sausage links. Oatmeal. They all fell. A food accident crushed me. I have the leg to prove it.We were going to the field to bring a meal to the grunts. We’d rewarm it when we got there. Intelligence said everything was hunky-dory on the road. They cleared us to go. Our convoy carried field stoves, food, ice for tea, immersion heaters for the troops to dip mess kits in hot water after chow—
“Staff Sergeant Farrazzi was up in the cab with the driver. We didn’t rope stuff down good. Only the eggs were secured, but that didn’t help. The driver swerved to miss a peasant walking his water buffalo. The peasant was heading through this storm swirl of butterflies, which the driver tried to avoid. The driver’d got his military license for that size of truck only a month before. Here I am a lance corporal who’d made many a tasty soufflé and who wanted his Belgian waffles to be the best in the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade, and I’m wounded by eggs and bread. I’m drunk. Did you know Ho Chi Minh collected butterflies?”
“Don’t talk none about war,” my pop says. “You’re my sister’s boy. It is a shame you can’t feel like a hero. I don’t believe what you told us.You’re no cook.You’re a hero, even if you’re drunk.”
“I could make you something to eat,” Thaddeus says. “Eggs and toast, kielbasa and eggs to prove my courage. Everybody likes Polish sausage.”
“Won’t kielbasa remind you of combat?” I ask.
“What are you talking about?” Mother asks as she comes into the room. “Get your cousin a cup of coffee right now, Andrew. He has to sober up. You all sound rattle-brained. Stop drinking before you get too crazy. Straighten up.”
“He
