Read The Grave of God's Daughter Online

Authors: Brett Ellen Block

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #General, #Allegheny River Valley (Pa. And N.Y.), #Allegheny Mountains Region - History, #Allegheny Mountains Region, #Iron and Steel Workers, #Bildungsromans, #Polish American Families, #Sagas, #Mothers and daughters, #Domestic fiction

The Grave of God's Daughter (29 page)

BOOK: The Grave of God's Daughter
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I never told Martin what I had learned about our mother or about what she had done, but Martin sensed I was holding some
thing back from him, like he sensed every other lie, and for that, he never forgave me. I came to believe that the man I knew as my father must also have known the truth, maybe not all the details, but enough.

My mother had been an unparalleled beauty and there could be no doubt that he would have married her for that and that alone. Perhaps she’d lied to him about being pregnant and made him believe that I was his. Eventually he must have figured out that I wasn’t. I pictured him studying me as an infant and as I grew, not seeing himself in my face. I imagined his doubt rising and swelling, so much so that he drank to keep that doubt at bay.

In the absence of truth, my imagination was all I had. I tried to piece together my mother’s life, to envision her with the priest. I concocted a love story out of nothing and embroidered it with fictional details of stolen glances and tender moments. They would have met when she was a teenager, when she’d first taken the job at the church after her father had died. I could see her cooking meals for him at the rectory, pots steaming, mending a lost button on his sleeve or making his bed. I imagined that the spot where we always sat in church might have been the spot where she first saw him or the spot where they first spoke. I could never know the truth, but the romantic tale I’d fashioned in my mind gave me solace.

Imagination also let me piece together how my mother had fallen prey to Swatka Pani. When the old woman from the house on River Road refused to pay, Swatka Pani sought my mother out and threatened her with exposure. I pictured Swatka Pani hissing about how she would let her secret loose if my mother didn’t pay her off. I decided that was how it had all begun. My mother sold everything she had, yet it would never be enough. I surmised that
she’d even started stealing things from the rectory to pawn, then finally, she’d had to sell her beloved painting of the Black Madonna. Still, Swatka Pani wanted more. When the man who I believed was my father started using most of our money for alcohol, my mother could no longer make her payments. Then Swatka Pani must have grown impatient and upped her threats. The truth about my identity would shame us all. It would have ruined me. But my mother wouldn’t let that happen.

That night when Leonard knocked on our door, it was not a visit, but a reminder. Swatka Pani had sent him to make sure my mother met her to deliver the money. And they did meet that night, out by the laundry lines. It was my mother I’d overheard arguing with Swatka Pani while I was trapped in the outhouse. My mother must have told her that she would have the money later, but that Swatka Pani would have to meet her at the river to get it. Money was the only thing that would have gotten Swatka Pani there. In my heart, I knew my mother planned to kill Swatka Pani. She thought God had closed His eyes on her for what had happened with the priest and that there was little she could do to save herself. She could save me.

I could image countless things about that night when she met Swatka Pani at the river, the dark moon, the stairway, the bright shadow of the cross shining on the water. But the only thing I chose to believe was that in that moment, my mother loved me more than she could ever say or show or even feel.

T
HE PRIEST HAS BROUGHT THE FUNERAL
to a close. I have heard nothing he has said, nothing except the sound of the wind blustering against my coat, flickering the grass and sending a hushing rustle through the trees. The other mourners step back, away from my mother’s grave, preparing to take their turns in line to throw dirt on the coffin, but they are waiting for Martin and me, courtesy for kin.

“Do you want me to go first?” Martin asks quietly.

I can only manage to nod.

Martin scoops up a handful of dirt from beside our mother’s coffin and clutches it in his fist, then opens his palm and lets the dirt drop in one heavy torrent.

“It’s your turn,” he says, moving aside, away from the coffin, leaving it all to me.

I fill my hands with dirt and the soil feels as solid as stone, the cold giving it heft. I spread my fingers and the dirt falls away, sifting and catching on the breeze, refusing to come to rest on the coffin. A few granules of dirt skitter over the top and glance off the wood, making brief contact, but that is all. This was how my mother knew love, only in passing. It was a thing that never stayed, lingering just long enough to make you miss it once it was gone. Her father, her mother, her brother, her husband, her God, and the one man she cared for, they had all left her, and their departure twisted her heart inside out. There was no room inside, no place to put Martin or me.

“You have to let them go now,” Martin tells me, touching my arm. The other mourners are waiting.

I step back, giving them room, and each man and woman toss their handful of dirt onto the coffin, then they head off down the rutted path from which they came.

“Do you want to stay for a while?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You can,” he offers. “They can’t make you leave.” He is trying to joke, then he realizes the vague irony in his choice of words. After a moment, he adds, “I’m not going to stay. Not unless you want me to.”

“No, not unless you want to.”

Martin furrows his hands deeper into his pockets. “No, I’m going to go.”

“All right then.”

“Are you staying in town over night?”

“No, no I hadn’t…” I let my voice trail off.

Disappointment dulls his reply. “That’s okay. It’s a long drive back.”

My brother knows I have a family now, a husband, children, another life, a life that is waiting for me somewhere else.

As we stand there in silence for a moment more, I yearn to lean over to him and take his hand from his pocket and put it in mine.

“I’m gonna get going,” he tells me and I don’t stop him. “I’ll be down…well, you know where to find me.”

Martin looks around one last time straining to come up with something else to say. “Don’t stay too long. Looks like rain.”

With that, my brother turns from me and hastens along the path toward town. I watch him walk away then vanish down the road into nothing. In the distance, beyond the high point of path, lays the potter’s field. The rows of headstones stipple the land in wide, uneven arcs. I vaguely wonder which one was his, which one belonged to the priest, my father. There are so many, too many to count.

The cemetery’s caretaker appears, plodding up the path with a shovel slung over his shoulder, a wool scarf wound around his neck.

“Oh,” he says, surprised to see me. “I thought everyone had gone. I’d come back later, but…” He gestures to the sky and the looming clouds.

“No, it’s fine. I’m done here.”

“You sure?”

I nod, but don’t make a move to leave. “What do you do now?” I ask.

“What? With the grave?” He is hesitant to answer. “I’ve got to
lower the casket and fill it back. Then I have to relay the grass. Put a little fertilizer on so it takes.”

“Are all of the plots here sold?”

“No, not all of ’em. But most. This is an old cemetery, you know.”

“What about this one?”

An empty stretch of grass waits next to my mother’s grave, a so-far-unclaimed plot.

“What? Right here?”

“Yes, right here.”

“These are good spots. Most been bought a long time back. I can tell you this one was bought over forty years ago. Bought and paid for by—” The man motions at my mother’s grave and stops himself, embarrassed. “I don’t know if the one next to ’ers been bought,” he replies. “Have to check.”

“Could you do that?”

“What? Right now?”

My silence is my reply. A gust of wind surges over the ridge, thick with the scent of impending rain, and the man’s face sours. He glances back at the open grave ruefully.

“All right, I s’pose,” he huffs, hoisting the shovel back onto his shoulder. “I’ll check.”

The man trudges toward the cemetery’s front gate, disappearing down the path as Martin did.

I am alone as the first raindrops fall, landing softly on my mother’s coffin and rolling lazily down to the dirt. I was wrong. The rain has come. Not a downpour or a deluge. Just a simple rain falling in the only direction it has to go.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to my parents for their unflagging support and encouragement. Thanks is also due to my friends—Ruth Foxe Blader, Grace Tseng, Ann Rollert, Heather and Gavin Frater, Amy and Brad Miller, Alex Parsons, Alice Dickens, Sarah Gegenheimer, Anne Engelhardt, Sue Zwick, Maureen Squillace, Matthew Vaeth, Barbara Sheffer, and the Kapustik family.

I would also especially like to thank Jonathan Pecarsky, my literary agent, as well as my editor, Clair Wachtel.

I am deeply grateful to James Michener and the Copernicus Society of America for their grant, without which this book would not have been possible.

About the Author

B
RETT
E
LLEN
B
LOCK
is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of East Anglia’s fiction writing program in England. She won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her debut collection of stories,
Destination Known
, and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

A
LSO BY
B
RETT
E
LLEN
B
LOCK

Destination Known: Stories

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE GRAVE OF GOD’S DAUGHTER
. Copyright © 2004 by Brett Ellen Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-191590-1

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BOOK: The Grave of God's Daughter
6.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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