Then Came Heaven

  “Yes, Father. I will.”

  “Very well. And may I add, Sister, that I would hate to lose you here at St. Joseph’s. You’re an excellent teacher, and well liked by the children. I’ve always believed that a pupil who likes his teacher is going to do better in school than the one who can’t stand her. I feel that your talking to Sister Agnes might avert a terrible loss, not only to you, but to your religious community and the students as well.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  He gave her a remarkably slight penance: undoubtedly he knew that the struggle she was going through was penance enough for any nun who’d been dedicated to her vocation for as long as Sister Regina had.

  They left church through the door they’d entered. Father took the left branch of the walk to his house. Sister Regina took the right, and halfway to the convent encountered Eddie Olczak widening the path through the snow. He stopped shoveling and stepped aside, resting one hand on top of the shovel handle.

  “Good morning, Sister,” he said quietly as she approached.

  She kept her head down and one arm anchoring her knit shawl over her chest.

  “Good morning, Mr. Olczak.”

  “Sister, wait.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” she replied, and hurried on without looking back.

  Everything in Eddie had seized up at her approach. What had passed between them the previous day created an unholy tension he could not ignore. He watched her until she reached the rear stoop of the convent and climbed the stone steps. Only when she opened the kitchen door and disappeared inside did he sigh and, with a leaden feeling inside, go back to work.

  ________

  She decided against talking to Sister Agnes right away, thinking perhaps she hadn’t prayed, meditated or done penance enough. She would do more of all three, and if that didn’t work, then she’d talk to Sister Agnes.

  The weather stayed as somber and joyless as her reflection, while November advanced toward Thanksgiving and she called upon Christ to let His will be known to her. She devoted herself to an intense period of soul-searching during which she prayed in a state of profound supplication many hours each day, often kneeling on a chain-metal doormat that left painful ridges in her knees. She routinely fasted from breakfast until supper, offering up her hunger as further penance for her doubtfulness. Meditation and reflection became a deeper part of each day, but they yielded little beyond continued confusion. She expected the answer to descend upon her in a nimbus of recognition, a shimmering knowledge that would suddenly light her from within and telegraph to her a certainty of which choice to make. She pictured herself, after making that choice, like a figure surrounded by fox fire, a nun yet—for that’s what she thought her choice should be—but one who moved in a continual halo of contentment, like the pictures on holy cards. It would be, she thought, a saintliness that would suddenly lift all doubt and supplant it with such peace as only the souls in heaven know.

  But this did not happen.

  If Christ knew what he wanted her to do, He was keeping it to Himself.

  During Thanksgiving week she wrote to her grandmother about the anguish she was going through. But the letter went unposted, because once again their Constitution dictated that all outgoing mail be placed, unsealed, on the superior’s desk. Sister Regina put the letter away in her drawer, resenting the fact that she could never send it, adding yet another notch on her tally of repressions.

  Her guilt over writing the letter and the subsequent anger over being unable to send it drove her into a state of renewed piety. Father had admonished her to do more penance, and perhaps if she did the ultimate penance she would find her answer.

  The ultimate penance, as far as Sister Regina was concerned, was commonly referred to as “taking the Discipline,” something she’d only once done and wasn’t sure she believed in. “Taking the Discipline” was the genteel expression for self-flagellation. This was done in the bathroom on Friday nights, with a small weapon that looked like a coat hanger with lengths of finely linked chain hanging from it by an oval loop. She remembered the first time she’d seen one of these contraptions. She’d been a novitiate, a beginner, and as such it wouldn’t do to ask questions. The general rule was, what and when you need to know, you’ll be told. An older nun named Sister Serenity, the official rosary fixer, had been fashioning the metal spirals with a pair of pliers during evening recreation, and Sister Regina thought it was a wind chime of some sort. She asked Sister Serenity to hold it up so she could hear it. Later that night, Sister Serenity had drawn her to the side and, in private, told her it was called a “Discipline.” Fridays, Sister Serenity said, were the days when each nun “took the Discipline.” It was done in turn, in the bathroom after lights out, during Grand Silence.

  Young Regina Marie Potlocki, fresh off the farm, had never heard of such a thing. She thought she’d misunderstood.

  “Do what with it?” she’d said, horrified.

  Sister Serenity had gently demonstrated, raising her sleeve and striking herself on her bare arm, where small red marks appeared between the pale blue veins. “The object is not to draw blood, but just to thwack yourself with it till it stings. But not usually on the arm. Back here.” She indicated her posterior. “Underneath your nightgown.” Regina’s blood seemed to drop to the soles of her feet. “B... but why?”

  “In memory of Christ’s passion.”

  She’d stared at the evil-looking thing again and muttered, “I don’t understand. What good will it do?”

  “It’s a way of uniting our sufferings, both sought and unsought, with those of our lord's,” Sister Serenity explained. “It’s a mystery how each tiny penance can gather to itself such meaning, and be joined to the infinite sufferings of Christ. But we believe this, that He suffered for us, so we suffer for and with and in Him, and that suffering touches the world, heals it.”

  The young novitiate, Sister Regina Marie, tried valiantly to believe this, but found only absurdity in the awkward physical act of administering pseudo self-torture. The first night she hoisted up her nightgown in the bathroom during Grand Silence and attempted to flog herself, she had not yet memorized the Miserere, which was to be recited, kneeling, throughout the taking of the Discipline. She tried propping the prayer book on a chair seat, but she needed one hand to hold up her gown, and one to hold the weapon, so the book flipped shut and fell on the floor. She tried it another way, but this time she flogged the chair instead of herself, and when she finally managed to strike her own backside she felt like a complete idiot. She could find no value in the mortification of the flesh.

  Perhaps that’s when her doubts actually began, for she had never again attempted taking the Discipline. Instead, on Friday nights when she took her turn in the bathroom, she said the Miserere prone on the floor. She’d spent many hours over the duration of her years as a nun examining and reexamining what Holy Rule said about penance. It merely stated that “the religious should esteem, love and practice penance according to their strength.” Which threw the entire issue right back at her conscience.

  Her conscience told her that while taking the discipline she’d felt as if she was caught in some miserable charade at which God himself was probably laughing. So she had never done it again.

  It was a measure of Sister Regina’s desperation that during the agonizing process of deciding what to do with the rest of her life, and in an effort to give her vocation every possible chance, she attempted to take the Discipline again.

  But when she was closed inside the bathroom with the tool in her hands, the idea of applying it to herself seemed profane. She could not believe that a benevolent God wanted her to punish herself for something as human as feeling love for another human being. For if she truly was falling in love with Mr. Olczak, wasn’t that love itself a gift from God?

  The odd thing was, once she’d made the decision to set the Discipline aside without using it, she forgot to pray the Miserere. She remembered later that night, when she was lying in bed th
inking of Eddie Olczak and reaching the conclusion that living as his wife would be as noble a way of life as this she was living: raising children and teaching them to be good people, being part of a union in which love was a driving force.

  Oh, Mr. Olczak, she thought, kind and good Mr. Olczak, what should I do?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On Thanksgiving Eddie’s mother butchered three turkeys she’d been raising all summer, roasted one herself and had a couple of her daughters roast the others. She peeled about a washtub full of potatoes, everybody brought side dishes, and forty-seven people piled into her house for dinner.

  Hedy and Cass still lived on the home place east of town, where they farmed a hundred and sixty acres, milked a dozen cows by hand twice a day, raised about ten or fifteen pigs each year, had their own laying hens and put in a vegetable garden about the size of Horseshoe lake.

  When people asked Cass when he was going to slow down, he’d lift off his stained blue Osh Kosh B’Gosh cap by its threadbare bill, scratch his pure white head between the eight stringy hairs still there, and reply, “Hell, I don’t know. Ain’t had enough time to sit down and think about it.” Then he'd settle his cap back in place, covering up the white and leaving a windburned red below.

  Every year Hedy said, “I ain’t puttin’ in so big of a garden this year. My knees just can’t take it no more.” But the garden never shrunk, her knees always managed to hold up just fine, and at the end of the summer her root cellar was filled with about a thousand pounds of potatoes, and rutabagas and squash and a few hundred jars of home-canned jams, and jellies, and vegetables, and pickles, and relish and sauces of every kind imaginable. She also canned beef, pork and chicken, and ended up giving most of it to her married kids, because Hedy could never send anyone away from her door empty-handed.

  Cass and Hedy’s kids came flocking home for Thanksgiving on a day with lowered skies and a nasty wind. What remained of the early November snow lay in crusty bands between the rows of tarnished corn stubble. It stippled the tops of the new haystacks that hunkered near the oversized red barn with its immense gambrel roof. The farmyard had frozen in ruts, and the garden, which Cass had plowed under, looked like lengths of broad black chain, each bordered by white snow. The kids had all come home in mid-October and helped Cass put up his winter firewood. It stood in orderly rows halfway down the path to the outhouse. Woodsmoke rose from the chimney and blew eastward in fragrant ribbons as Eddie parked his green pickup among a half-dozen vehicles already there.

  “Come on, girls,” he said, swinging them down from the truck seat and slamming the door.

  The kitchen door flew open when they were halfway up the path, and his mother leaned out, dressed in a flowered housedress, bibbed apron and black Cuban-heeled shoes. “Theeeere’s my girls!” she yelled exuberantly. “Get in here before you catch your death, you two!”

  “Hey, Grandma, guess what!” They barreled right at her and got hugs and kisses and told her, “Grandma Gaffke’s teaching us how to make doll clothes on her sewing machine!”

  Eddie came next, and got his hug in the open doorway with the cold swirling into the kitchen around him.

  “There’s my Eddie-boy,” she said, softer, giving him a tighter hug than usual, and a kiss on the cheek. They both knew this day was going to be difficult for him, his first holiday without Krystyna.

  “Hi, Mommo,” he said and squeezed her plump waist.

  He drew back and looked into her eyes, and neither one of them had to say it: each knew what the other was thinking. So they hugged hard, wordless, one more time before she backed up and wiped her eyes inside her rimless glasses with the skirt of her apron, and said, “Come on inside. Cold air’s gettin’ in.”

  Inside it smelled like turkey and dressing and roasting garlic, and there were people everywhere. Potatoes were boiling on the stove and the windows were white with condensation. The cast-iron stove was as big as a ’49 Ford, and covered with so many kettles you couldn’t see the top of it. Kids were running everywhere, their clothing still clean so early in the day. The grownups were drinking beer and at the kitchen table a foursome was already playing cards. On top of the woodbox a skinny striped cat nervously watched the hubbub with dilated pupils.

  Lucy said to one of her cousins, “We brought doll clothes to dress Stringbean. Let’s get ’er!” They dove for the cat and hauled her off upstairs.

  Eddie’s dad found him, and put a beer in his hand and gave him a slap on the back, then stood for a while with his hand there, between Eddie’s shoulder blades, rubbing a little.

  They might not be glib people, his family, but they had feelings, and understood his.

  He'd needed a day like this, a gathering of people he loved who loved him. Play some cards, tell some jokes, eat Mommo’s cooking, drink a few beers, and in the late afternoon go out with all his brothers to help Poppo with the chores.

  That’s what they were doing, Eddie and his brothers, helping with the milking late in the day just before dusk, when the teasing began. In the barn, where they’d all had to help as boys, they became boys again, tossing insults, ribbing each other, falling to the milking with nostalgic vigor.

  “So, Eddie,” his brother Vernon said from someplace behind Eddie while Eddie sat with his forehead against a black-and-white cow, sending pulsating streams of milk into his pail, “when you gonna give that little Irene Pribil a tumble?”

  From down the line of cows came a wolf call. “Woo-woo! That Irene, she’s waitin’, that’s for sure!” That was his brother Romaine.

  “Who called Irene little?” came Clayton’s voice from the other direction.

  “She’s little all right, a sweet little piglet!”

  “You know what they say about the plump ones, don’t you?”

  About four voices chorused all together, “Yeah... warmth in the winter and shade in the summer.”

  Then Clayton’s voice again. “Anybody know how you find the right place on a fat girl?”

  “How?”

  “Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot!”

  Eddie laughed right along with all the rest of them. “Hey, Eddie, you got any flour at your house?” his brother Bill called.

  Romaine answered. “He buys it in hundred-pound bags.”

  A bunch of howling laughter, then, “Irene’ll be at the dance Saturday night. Last one before Advent starts.” Church tradition forbade dancing during Advent and lent, so the dance halls closed down then.

  “Who’s playing?”

  “Rainbow Valley Boys at Knotty Pine.”

  “Ruth and I will be there.”

  “So will we.”

  “Hey, Eddie, why don’t you bring your flour and come?”

  Cass’s voice came next. “You boys lay off Eddie, now.” And Eddie’s. “It’s okay, Poppo. I know a bunch of jackasses when I hear ’em braying.”

  It was a sign of his healing that he could take their teasing this way, and everybody in that barn knew it.

  ________

  On Saturday night Eddie hired Dorrie Anderson to watch the girls, and he got spiffed up in a white shirt and tie, and his brown wool suit, and went to the dance at Knotty Pine. A whole slew of his sisters and brothers were there, and so was Irene, with lots of curls in her hair, straight seams in her nylons and bright-red lipstick to match her bright-red dress.

  His damned brothers danced with her, one after the other, and flashed him grins from the dance floor as if to say, You’re next, Eddie, so you might as well give in. When Romaine led Irene off the floor they went right to the booth where Eddie was sitting with a bunch of others.

  She was warm, her face shiny as she pushed back her hair and fanned herself with one hand.

  “Hoo! Hot!” she said.

  “Here, sit down, Irene,” Romaine said and pointed to an empty space next to Eddie. Eddie jigged over, making a little extra space for her, and she sat down.

  The waitress was there taking orders and Romaine said, “Buy you a drink, Irene??
??

  “Sure,” she said. “A Grain Belt.”

  “Make that two. Anybody else?”

  When the waitress went away the table talk continued quite loudly. Under its cover Irene said quietly, “How’re you tonight, Eddie? You’re not dancing much.” She got out her compact, flipped it open and checked her face in the mirror.

  Eddie said, “What is it about girls that they can’t stand to see a man not dancing?”

  Irene got out a Kleenex and dabbed her forehead, then flipped some curls into place and put the compact away in her pocket.

  “Advent starts tomorrow. That means no more dances till after Christmas,” she said. “Last chance for four weeks, that’s all.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If they play ‘Goodnight Irene,’ I’ll dance with you.” It was a popular song that year and you could hardly turn the radio on without hearing it.

  “I’ll make sure they do,” she said, flashing him a saucy smile.

  It was a crowded booth. Eddie put his arm along the back of it and Irene’s curls brushed his wrist. Someone came and pushed into the open end, forcing her closer against his side. Their beers arrived, and everybody touched bottles and said, “Bumps,” then took long swigs. Irene never went back to her own booth. She stayed and laughed at the Olczak boys’ jokes, and visited with their wives, and remained hip-to-hip with Eddie.

  The Rainbow Valley Boys saved “Goodnight Irene” until the very end. Truth was, Eddie had expected this, for the song had fast become the traditional last dance of the night, its words so simple everyone ended up singing along with it.

  Irene was a good dancer without trying to be. She never made a misstep and followed so effortlessly she made a man feel masterful leading her. Dancing with her was a lot like dancing with Krystyna, except she was shaped differently. She smiled all the while they waltzed, staying her distance, enjoying the dancing for dancing’s sake. They waltzed quite imposingly, taking wide, sweeping steps on every first beat. He liked that she didn’t try any coy snuggling because if anything started between them, he wanted to be the one to start it. And stop it, too, as the case may be.