the history of a life, must run like purple lines that show its depth, and I suddenly believe this map of Tad’s should include other people who’ve lived in the East End of Superior and sat together on stormy nights in kitchens, as well as the people on the Old Country map you see at the Warsaw Tavern. Now Tad is making a place for himself on the map of memory. I am, too, thinking that among the storm’s windfall of trees and branches this very All Saints’ Eve, departed souls are waiting for another soul to depart—this one for Vietnam. Maybe it’s storming in Old Country Poland now, too. It’s possible, I think, that the herb connects us—the herb, our history, and this old Polish language Thaddeus is trying to speak.
Now Ma tells Pani Pilsudski, “Don’t worry. We’ll get you home.”
Helping her up, Mother hugs her so she knows she’s okay.As Mrs. Pilsudski puts on her wool coat and boots, I throw on a jacket, push open the porch door against the storm.
Between our house and hers, two feet of snow drift over the sidewalk. On the nearby railroad trestle, a train passes quietly. When we’ve crossed the new contours, Mrs. Pilsudski thanks us, tells us she will say a rosary for us. “Arriba,” she says. “Beat-beat bongos.”
“Arriba,” we say. “Beat-beat.”
I figure Thaddeus will now return to his map; but he goes off into the night wearing his tassel cap, blue sunglasses, and uniform overcoat—stumbling into the wind, maybe to his mother’s home, maybe to the Polish Club. “I’m doing fine,” he’s saying.
I lose sight of him in the storm. As I walk back into the house, I see Pa stumbling a little but know he’ll be okay.
I page through the blue booklet Tad gave me. Sixteen pages in Polish, a language I am trying to study but now need Pa’s help to read.“ Celem Towarzystwa Bratniej Pomocy im. Tadeusza Kościusz-ki . . . ,” it starts, then goes, “będzie skupienie pod swój sztander Polaków, ku wzajemnemu I moralnemu poparciu. . . .” “Look-it,” I say, “‘The Club’s purpose is the gathering of Poles under their own standard for mutual and moral support.’” I read in Polish after Pa how the Kosciuszko Club and Lodge is also for “‘the fostering among club members of the feeling of love and brotherhood, for the defending of Polish honor, and finally for the furtherance of the principles and immortal deeds of one of Poland’s greatest sons.’”
“It’s a symbol,” Pa says.
“You’re drunk, Edda,” Mother says.
“Drinking’ll kill me,” says my father.
“Go to bed, Andrew,” Ma says as the telephone rings.
I answer it. Mr. and Mrs. Novazinski are both talking at once: “Andy! Your cousin says he wants to kiss our walls and floors while he’s out trick-or-treating. He never wants to leave East End, he says. We gave him some candy, told him to get going. Call his house. Tell his parents the kid’s crazy drunk.”
Handing Ma the phone, I go upstairs. I stare at my weeds. I read a little in my Polish heritage book. When people die in houses in the Old Country, it says, mirrors are turned in to face the wall, and windows are opened so the spirit isn’t trapped inside the house.
Even though no one has died tonight that I know of, I still turn my mirror backward to the wall when the phone rings again.
It rings again later. It must be about Tad. Then my dad is in the next room getting ready for work.
“Hawkweed, Tansy, Goldenrod,” I whisper to my collection. I quietly raise the window, then the storm window behind it to let out the spirits of the dead—or in Tad’s case, the living. The warm air of spirits rushes out through the screen. I have followed the old custom.
Hearing Pa go downstairs, I stop whispering and think there is finally peace this night of souls, until a little while later I hear a pounding on the storm door. As I peer through the window into the swirling wind and snow, I see Thaddeus in uniform.
“It’s me,” he’s saying, drunk, frightened. “It’s Thaddeus. Remember where I stood on All Saints’ Eve. Don’t forget where I stood.”
“You’re no Kosciuszko,Tad,” I say to him from my window.
“I know. I want to be. I want to win the war. I want to be a hero.” He’s holding open a paper bag. “See? This is a start. I got a bag full of candy. I can do great things if I set my mind to it.”
Downstairs, the phone rings again. I hear Ma’s voice through the furnace register. “Tad, people are calling about you,” I yell out to him. “They say you’re kissing their houses, you’re kissing their porches and steps . . . even their doors and mailboxes.Your folks are pretty angry. My pop sure is, with the phone ringing so much. Be careful out there, will ya, Tad? Don’t drink no more. Don’t go trick or treating no more.”
“I won’t,” he says.
He kneels down to clear the snow with his hands. I see the earth underneath that he loves. I see this one dark spot in the world of white. He is uncovering the center of the world.
When Pa steps outside on his way to the gas plant, crazy Tad, like he can’t take his hands from the cold earth of northern Wisconsin, is working at the snow, saying, “I knelt here once. Remember me. Remember where I stood and knelt. Remember the earth I kissed just as winter came.”
When Pa looks down, Tad says, “I’ll show the Viet Cong something they’ll never forget. Oo-la-la, war is hard.”
Still stumbling from the Żubrówka, now Pa kicks at the snow to clear a little more away, as if this could keep Thaddeus in the East End forever.
Time Between Trains
FIVE DAYS A WEEK, the track inspector checked the rail line from the Superior waterfront up to Chub Lake. During summer and autumn dry spells, he worked weekends looking for fires set by sparks from train wheels. From the cab of his rail truck, he spotted undercuts, washouts, and fires in the tinder-dry grass, reporting them to the radio dispatcher at the railyard in Superior. Joe Rubin extinguished small fires himself. With a track warrant for every portion of his trip, he went along in the special truck that had rubber tires for road and highway travel and flanged, locomotive-style wheels for railroad travel. To switch from one to the other mode, he would center the truck at a railroad crossing, climb down, grab a metal pole to insert into the wheel mechanism, and raise the steel, flanged wheels, leaving the rubber tires resting on the track. Backing up the truck, he would stop, turn the steering wheel, drive forward, and be back on dirt or pavement.
In his fourteen years with the Burlington Northern–Santa Fe, Joe Rubin looked for sun kinks, broken rails, broken bonds, wooden ties left on the tracks, and other potentially deadly defects or impediments on or alongside the way to Chub Lake. When Joe Rubin reported a sun kink (when the sun expands a steel rail, bending it out of place), the section crew got after it. When he reported a pull apart (in bitter cold, railroad tracks contract and can pull apart), the section crew came to lay kerosene-soaked ropes next to the rails and waited for the heated track sections to snap together.
Along the east-west tracks before the Crawford Creek signals (where flashing yellow means a track inspector can move onto the main line at Saunders) were the broken ties he reported one day last November. West of there was a section of track ballast to keep an eye on near that boggy run before the Vet’s Crossing. Farther along, past Boylston, almost to the
