kind of company she kept, this Polish woman. The names on the gravestones echoed his question—Lurye, Sher,Vogel, Pomush, Edelstein, Kaner, Cohen, Marcovich, Handlovsky. . . . The old people knew Polish. They’d lived in Poland. “You become like the company you keep.”
As is customary, atop his parents’ graves he placed a few stones from the cemetery road. They symbolized a rock-strewn desert landscape and how all are equal in death. He gathered a few stones to keep in his pocket. He prayed for his parents’ souls, spoke aloud to them as the warm, spring breeze swept through the willow groves along the river below the cemetery. Stones on a grave are more permanent than flowers.
On the way home, he decided the next time the Polish woman was at work he would cross the highway and walk down Irondale Road past her house. What was the harm in going by her place? Jews and Poles had lived together for centuries.
Before he had a chance to do so, it was June. Her garden had been transformed by gentle rains, by the warm sun on the side of the house no one saw. As the third week of summer school passed, there were more butterflies in Sofia’s garden than she’d ever seen. The flowers and bushes she planted attracted them. She wanted to read her husband’s letters to them all day long; but in addition to a morning filled with teaching, she’d agreed to perform certain administrative tasks in the afternoon. When she finished, she hurried home.
She was still at school when Joe Rubin saw the company she kept. Even from the road, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Flying about, carried on slight, warm breezes, the butterflies in Sofia’s garden looked like rich silk. They tumbled and fluttered, purple, yellow, orange, blue, lighting on the flowers, glancing against the bright, delighted leaves. No one but Joe Rubin saw them, in his pocket the stones from the cemetery, which in his amazement he left on the road in front of her house and in her yard.
When she returned home at four o’clock, she thought at first it was Jerzy in the butterfly garden. “Jerzy?” she cried, thinking her theory was right about the peace and strength butterflies bring to those in need. She thought her husband had brought her a letter.
When she saw who it really was, however, and that this was no sailor’s ghost of Jerzy Stepan with a love letter, her heart fell for just a moment, but then she murmured, “That’s all right.You can come in,” to the trespasser, to the man who looked for mouse, hare, and fox tracks in winter and who now gently swept the butterflies from his shirt and hands.
Holy Walker
PANI PILSUDSKI kept a busy professional and social calendar. Today she had a nun’s aching feet to soothe, then a rosary sodality meeting to lead in prayer. She hurried over the railroad trestle and around the edge of Novack’s barley field. “Call me Pilsudski, the Wetter, do they, Pilsudski, the Couch Dampener!” She imagined the ladies whispering other slanderous things about her. Ceil Zawacki would say, “She permanently crippled and disabled Alec Mihalek when she repaired his callus. Do you see how he limps? Guess what else, girls? When she got up from our love seat, she left a wet spot I had to clean with spot remover.” Mrs. Pilsudski, who battled fluid retention and whose poor, swollen legs bothered her, knew Barbara Trianowski would start in next: “That’s nothing. She never flushes our toilet.”
Lies! Lies! Terrible lies! thought the old widow who struggled to do God’s work on her knees with such tools as a paring knife and a basin of water.
She’d come to your house if your feet bothered you. Despite her good intentions about your feet, it was very easy for her to make mistakes. She lived alone in a big, gray house hard by the railroad trestle. Over the years its front porch had heaved from frost, so that you climbed up three steps, then descended four or five inches to the door. If you left the front door open one minute, inside doors squeaked and swung shut the next, because, over decades, the winter cold had shifted the ancient foundation. Then, too, the upstairs rooms shook so from passing freight trains that Mrs. Pilsudski had to grab the headboard of her bed to steady herself. The house seemed confused, bewildered. Was it a railroad depot or was it Mrs. Pilsudski’s house? When C&NW freights rumbled past, it was like heaven was falling into tumult. Crucifixes on the wall shuddered; statues of Mary and Joseph toppled. The shrine of St. Anthony of Padua once marched two feet across the top of her cedar chest to jitterbug with St. Jude, Patron of Lost Causes.
The freight trains contributed to her shaking hands; maybe they were the reason she retained water, because she was so nervous all the time—then a slip of the knife, then a cry of pain, then a customer’s toe to bandage. If her mistakes continued, she’d lose people’s trust.When it all got too much, the widow stared at herself in a mirror and wept. “Starość nieradość,” she’d exclaim. “Old age is no good.” The loneliness, too. If she didn’t keep the television on to distract her, she’d think all day how life conspired against her.
Lord, how much there was to dwell on. She still hated the sodality women for bringing up an old story about her. During Mass once, she’d had to make a quick exit. In the ladies’ room, she pulled down her living girdle to relieve herself of what she called “water buildup.” As she hurried back to receive communion, a lengthy piece of toilet paper clung to her skirt. Though Mrs. Pilsudski concentrated on the Body of Our Savior during this sacred moment, on the trip back to her pew, people snickered, altar boys laughed. The parish was still laughing, because certain sodality women couldn’t shut up about the toilet paper that’d looked like a miniature bridal train. Even the priest at coffee hour said to her as though she were Mr. Whipple, “Don’t squeeze the Charmin, Stella.”
“Jezu kochanej,” she muttered, embarrassed even now at the memory.
At home she’d rouged her cheeks, pulled her gray hair into a bun, put on eyeglasses that pinched her ears. Despite resistance from her girdle, she’d pushed her body forward to work her feet into good, solid shoes. Finally, out came the wool coat she wore year round. Thus prepared, she set out across the trestle above the Left-Handed River, gradually coming to her wits’ end what with the heat and with the heavy work and social pace she’d been setting for herself.
Clear of the trestle now and of the barley field where in the fall she picked caraway seeds to chew on the way to Mass, she spied St. Adalbert’s Church and across from it the school with its gymnasium where the sodality circle met. She felt the coat hang heavily from her shoulders. Something else hung in her mind: the demons who would talk about her and her wet spot, Baba this, Baba that. The main thing was that she—the once envied, respected Mrs. Pilsudski—was leading rosary sodality tonight, and there was nothing they could do about it.
Each so-called Rose, or worship group, was here. She heard the good Polish ladies of Rose One chattering in the school gym downstairs; the Lithuanians of Rose Two; the Slovaks of Rose Three. (Oh, those Slovaks irritated her using their word sokol instead of the proper English word sodality. Harriet Bendis especially got to her the way she always played up to the priest.) On and on Mrs. Pilsudski counted how many Slovaks were here, how many Lithuanians, how many Poles.
Upstairs above the classroom and gym, Sister Dorota in coif and wimple sat on a couch with white lace doilies. Wiping the remains of a heavy supper from her chin, she wiggled her toes in the warm water of the metal pan Mrs. Pilsudski kept with the nuns.
“How are your feet?” inquired the podiatrist when she came in, out of breath from climbing the stairs.
Falling heavily to her knees, she swished water in the basin, trying to concentrate on the rosary sodality. But all she could think of was the thief and grocer Harriet, the Slovak the ladies called Jadzia, who’d recently presented the old church a new confessional. Jadzia, Jadzia, she hated the name! “If Jadzia’s behind the counter at her store and you order a pound of wieners and are just a little over,
