Then Came Heaven

  Much to his regret, he and Jean never found time to finish their private conversation. When he rounded up the girls and headed for the truck, others were doing the same. Liz, her husband, Ron, and several of the children formed a knot that moved with them toward the parked vehicles. Frank came, too, and even Bertha, though Eddie suspected her motive was less to bid him farewell than to keep him from being alone with Jean. There was little chance of that anyway, with Anne and Lucy beside him all the time.

  When they were inside the truck with the engine started, Jean’s hands were the last folded over the window edge.

  “Goodbye, girls. Say hello to everybody back home.”

  “ ’Bye, Sister.”

  “ ’Bye, Sister.” They had forgotten themselves and called her by her old name. She merely smiled at the slip, then turned that smile to their father.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Olczak. Please come again.”

  “I will. Goodbye.” He, too, found it difficult to say Jean for the first time.

  But as he put the truck in reverse and backed out onto the gravel road, he promised himself he would. And soon. As soon as he could get back here to pay a call on her.

  Without the girls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  One week passed, one hot, lengthy, impatient July week with the sun so intense it seemed to have faded the blue out of the sky. In the garden, the string beans grew so fast they needed picking twice a day. Morning and evening Jean picked them, and during the day, helped her mother can them.

  And all the while she thought of Eddie.

  In Browerville, Eddie passed the week sanding and varnishing school desks, dizzy from the scent of resin and alcohol, if not from his thoughts of Jean. He’d made up his mind he’d drive back to the farm and visit her the following Saturday night, though the girls were campaigning for him to go with them and watch the free movie under the water tower. Every Saturday night during the summer, the city put up a screen and sold popcorn from a popcorn wagon while every kid in town watched the Three Stooges or Ma and Pa Kettle, and scratched their mosquito bites until their ankles bled. Eddie could think of a lot better way to spend his Saturday night.

  On Thursday he told his sister-in-law Rose, “I need a favor on Saturday night.”

  “Sure, anything, Eddie.”

  “I need to have the kids go to the free show with your kids, then sleep overnight at your house afterwards.”

  “Oh, really? Aren’t you going to the show?”

  Eddie cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “No, I’m not.”

  “Oh, where you going?” Rose didn’t mean to be nosy. It was just that life in such a small town was so predictable, it was the exception rather than the rule when someone broke with tradition. And the free movies under the water tower were tradition.

  “I’m going to visit someone.”

  “Someone? Why so secretive?”

  “Actually, it’s... ah, Sister Regina.”

  “Sister Regina?” Rose repeated, her mouth and eyes widening as if she’d just inhaled gasoline fumes. “You mean our Sister Regina who isn’t a nun anymore?”

  “That’s right. Only her name is Jean now. Jean Potlocki. She lives over toward Foley.”

  Rose said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Eddie shifted his weight back to the first foot and said nothing.

  “How long has this been going on?” Rose asked, point-blank.

  “What?”

  “You. And our ex-nun.”

  “You mean the kids didn’t tell you the girls and I went to see her this past weekend?”

  “No! I didn’t hear anything about it!” She sounded put out that nobody had slipped her such juicy news. “So what’s going on? Are you dating her?”

  “Aw, come on, Rose.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “No. I told you, I’m just going over to visit her.”

  Rose pointed a finger at him and got a sly look on her face. “Eddieeee... Eddie, Eddie, you’re blushiiiing.” She ended in a singsong.

  “Look!” he said, his patience growing short. “If I have to go through the third degree just to leave the kids here overnight, I’ll find someplace else to take them!”

  “Settle down, Eddie, I won’t ask any more questions. Of course you can leave the kids here. Does Romaine know about this?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m gonna tell him.”

  “I’m sure you will. And everybody else in town, too, I suppose.”

  “Well, is it a secret?”

  “No. How can it be a secret when I took my own two kids along last Sunday?”

  “Well, then...” Rose looked very pleased with herself. Eddie walked out of her kitchen, shaking his head.

  ________

  He bought new clothes for Saturday night, a pair of pleated trousers, blue, and a nice light, cottony shirt with short sleeves and pale blue-and-white stripes. When the girls saw him getting dressed up they asked if he was going to a dance.

  “No. No dance.”

  “Then where?”

  It was harder to tell them the truth than Rose.

  “Well... what if I said I’m going to see Sis... Jean again?”

  “Without us?!”

  “But I thought you wanted to go to the free show.”

  “Well, we do, but...”

  He knew he had them because Browerville didn’t have a theater, so those free shows were the most exciting thing that happened around here. Cars started pulling in with two hours to go before sunset, and every kid in town went early and goofed around. Sometimes the car horns started honking, demanding the show before it was quite dark, and the cartoons were so vague you had to squint to make out the figures on the screen. Add to that the novelty of buying their own popcorn, and he knew his kids wouldn’t object too loudly to being left behind.

  Lucy tried a new angle. “Why don’t you wait till tomorrow, Daddy? Then we can go with you.”

  “Thought I was going to take you fishing tomorrow at Thunder lake.”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  Another quandary, because he’d taken them fishing three times this summer, and now that they’d caught their first sunfish, they loved that, too. Also, he let them take their bathing suits along and go swimming for a while along the shore.

  So, shortly after supper on Saturday night, he found them each a blanket to take to the free show, and walked them down to the end of the alley to the water tower, where cars were already starting to park around the perimeter, and kids in pajamas were running everywhere trailing quilts and army blankets. He gave them each money for popcorn, and left them with their older cousins with a full two hours of daylight left.

  ________

  Jean recognized his truck coming down the road, raising a cloud of dust, and thought, Oh no, oh no, why didn’t I follow my instincts and take a bath and put on some decent clothes and let the beans go for just one night? But she’d been afraid to believe he’d come again so soon, so she’d slipped on her dad’s barn boots, tied a dish towel on her head to keep the gnats out of her hair, and had gone out to the garden to pick the second batch of beans in the evening cool.

  She stood there in the middle of the bean patch, straight as a scarecrow, watching his truck approach and flicker along on the other side of a tall, wide band of raspberry bushes that separated her from the road.

  He didn’t notice her there, but drove into the yard, parked and walked up to the house.

  The garden was huge. She was fifty yards from the back door when she saw her mother answer his knock and point down at the bean patch.

  He turned, searched, and she knew the moment he spotted her, for he didn’t waste any time starting her way. She wanted to move, but couldn’t. It felt as if her feet had taken root with the bean plants, and her heart seemed to be swelling faster than the doggone string beans themselves, which she desperately wished she would have forgotten till morning. Instead, there she stood, looking an absolute fright
while the man she loved walked straight toward her between the vegetable rows.

  He thought how cute she looked in the four-buckle overshoes that reached halfway to her knees and the white dish towel flattening her hair. The dish towel made her look more familiar, more like the nun he remembered, yet not enough to mar the realization that she was just plain Jean now. There wasn’t the first hint of a smile on her face. She looked merely breathless as he continued toward her, forcing himself to walk when he felt like racing.

  He stopped one bucket of beans away from her, his toe nearly touching the galvanized pail that sat between the rows, half-full.

  There was so much to say, yet they thought of nothing, only to gaze at each other while the sun sat on the horizon and the shadows from the trees in the distant farmyard stretched clear down the sloping garden and painted it with gloaming. They had waited so long for this first moment alone, and had weathered so many repressed emotions that the burst of them, allowable at last, quite overwhelmed them both.

  He spoke at last, only after the silence had become intolerable with yearning.

  “Hello, Jean,” he said, speaking her given name for the first time ever.

  “Hello, Eddie,” she replied, for the first time, too.

  Their voices fell softly, in keeping with the twilight and the cabbage moths he had disturbed with his passing.

  “I hope it’s okay that I came back so soon.”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied avidly, too honest, too ingenuous to try to hide her breathlessness.

  “I would have telephoned, but..” He didn’t bother finishing.

  “And I would have taken a bath and gotten dressed, but...”

  She shrugged, and they both laughed.

  “I’m glad you didn’t. I like finding you out here like an ordinary woman.”

  “A little too ordinary, I’m afraid,” she said, touching the dish towel on her head. “I look a fright.”

  “Not to me you don’t.”

  She dropped her hand and her eyes, and said self-consciously, “No man has ever paid a call on me before. I didn’t picture it happening with a dish towel on my head and my daddy’s barn boots on my feet.”

  “Actually, neither did I. Ever since last Sunday I’ve been picturing your hair the way it looked when we were talking under the birch trees.”

  She lifted her eyes. “My hair is very plain.”

  “I like the color of it. I wondered a long time what color it would be. Do you mind?” he asked, reaching toward the dish towel.

  Her stillness became acquiescence. He had to take one diagonal step spanning the pail and a row of beans in order to reach the towel. When he’d swept it from her hair they stood in place, letting him get his fill of her. She felt her color rising, but made no objection as he studied her openly.

  Finally he said, “There are so many questions I want to ask you. Things I wasn’t allowed to ask before.”

  “Ask me now. Ask me anything.”

  “Not here,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the house and pulling his foot back beneath him. “Can we walk?”

  “For miles and miles,” she replied and turned away from him, leaving the bucket of beans where it was. They walked side by side along two adjacent rows, in the opposite direction from the house. When they reached the end of the garden, she turned left along a fence line and said, “The mosquitoes are coming out. It’ll be better on the road.”

  As they reached the road, the sun disappeared behind them. They walked slowly to accommodate her feet in her dad’s oversized boots, whose heels dragged with every step. She untied the knot from the dish towel and slung it around her neck, holding the ends with both hands.

  “What was it you wanted to ask me?”

  “Last Sunday, remember when we were talking and Liz interrupted? You were about to say that the day you left Browerville you wanted to find me and... and what?”

  “I wanted to find you and tell you that my dispensation had come through and I was leaving. I wanted to tell you goodbye. I wanted you to know where you could find me.”

  “I found you anyway, but I went through hell before I got your letter and realized that something prevented you from saying goodbye.”

  “I believe we’ve both gone through a lot of that since Krystyna died, haven’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you doing in that regard?”

  “Without Krystyna? Going through some guilt since I started having feelings for you. How are you doing in that regard?”

  “About the same. I loved Krystyna.”

  “Everybody loved Krystyna.”

  “I think both you and I will always love Krystyna, and I think that’s a lovely note on which to start our friendship.”

  “Friendship?” he repeated and stopped walking. “Hey, come back here.”

  She turned around and went back to him, leaving heel scrapes in the road.

  “I asked you this once before, but you refused to answer, so let’s clear it up right now. Do you... do you have feelings for me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Eddie Olczak, I do.” She smiled and tilted her head. “I most certainly do. But it would have broken about a dozen holy rules, not to mention my vow of chastity, if I’d answered you then.”

  He took her hands off the ends of the dish towel and held them. “Then there’s one other thing I have to know. Am I the reason you quit?”

  She considered awhile before replying. “No. You were a part of it, but certainly not what started it.”

  He released a breath that relaxed his shoulders. “I’m so relieved. I didn’t want to be responsible for that.”

  He rubbed the backs of her hands with his thumbs and they averted their faces to study their joined hands. Hers were fine-boned and stained green on the fingertips. His were wide and coarse, his thumbs callused as they moved over hers.

  “Then why did you quit?”

  She told him, going clear back to a year before Krystyna had died, including the events surrounding Krystyna’s death that had truly crystallized her decision to seek a dispensation. She spoke of all her misgivings with life in the religious community, and the anguish she’d gone through while making the decision, and the role his children had played in making her realize she wanted children of her own, and her fear of the feelings she felt herself having for him. She told him about coming home at Christmas and the scene at Christmas dinner when Grandma Rosella had burst into tears, and of going to St. Ben’s in spite of her family’s displeasure and being informed that the Catholic Church wouldn’t let her teach in its school anymore once she received her dispensation.

  “I was so afraid, Eddie.”

  In the midst of Jean’s recital the afterglow of sunset had streaked the western sky like smeared fruit, but already it began to fade as he studied her downturned face.

  “So was I. I told you so that day in the flower room. I’m still afraid.”

  She looked up in surprise. “Of what?”

  “Lots of things. Starting rumors by coming over here too soon. That I still might not be over Krystyna’s death. What my kids might say. Kissing a nun for the first time.”

  Jolted by shyness, she immediately dropped her gaze again. His voice fell to a softer note. “Tell me, how do I get over the notion that if I kiss you, I’d be kissing Sister Regina?”

  “The last time I was kissed I believe I was something like ten years old, so you’re not the only one who’s scared, Eddie.”

  He put his hands on her face and beckoned her to lift it. When she did, he held it like a chalice, his rough fingertips reaching beyond her hairline which had been covered all the years he’d known her by a wimple. “Then let’s get this over with,” he whispered, lowering his head and touching his lips to hers with a pressure so slight they made no demands. Her lips remained closed, her body stiffly angled toward him from one step too far away. For the duration of the kiss, she held her breath, and he realized she didn’t know any better.

  He drew back only far eno
ugh to whisper, “Want me to teach you a way that’s more fun?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, terrified, intrigued, eager and halting all at once.

  “Open your mouth.”

  He showed her, placing his warm open lips over hers and encouraging her to enjoy it. She flinched when his tongue first touched her. He smiled against her mouth and waited patiently for her to lose her inhibitions.

  He finally lifted his mouth and told her, “It’s okay to breathe.” Reaching between them, he captured her hands. “And it’s okay to put your arms around me. There are no holy rules now.”

  He placed her arms around his neck and held them there as a new kiss began, and she became a willing student. When her tongue made a shy foray and touched the warmth of his for the first time, the pleasant shock rippled clear through her insides. She crossed her arms on his collar, and drawn by his arms, curved against him like the new moon against the eastern sky.

  And at last the kiss flowered.

  They stood beneath that rising moon ushering out the tired day with a ceremony as old as time. First kiss, standing between the ditches where the wild evening primroses opened their yellow petals and perfumed the air like vanilla. Second kiss, with his strong arms lifting her free of the road and her big black overshoes dropping off her feet to the gravel. Third kiss, ending when he lowered her down to stand on his shiny black shoes, and some frogs started croaking in a pond they hadn’t noticed was there.

  Standing on his shoes, she hid her face against his crisp, striped shirt, which smelled of factory starch.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she whispered, breathing hard, “it’s much different when you’re thirty.”

  “Is that how old you are? I always wondered.”

  “I was thirty in May.” She looked up. “How old are you?”

  “I was thirty-five in March.”

  They were comparing ages like people with serious intentions. To leaven the seriousness, she said, “Well, you know what they say, a person is never too old to learn.”

  He smiled and asked, “So what did you think of it?”