Time Between Trains - Anthony Bukoski

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one afternoon, “Yes, it’s a nice day,” several months had passed. He’d traveled hundreds of miles round-trip from Superior to Chub Lake. He’d seen the spring sun erase mouse and hare tracks in the snow. He’d even noticed willows along the route turning yellow. Their leaves would appear in a month.

      Two nights in February, on the other hand, she’d stayed at school for open house. One night in March, she had drunk too much Irish coffee, finding herself staring at the M.P. 15.9 sign. Another night that month, she had reread all her husband’s letters, whispering “Jerzy” in Polish.

      In April, when the wind is sharp (wind that sounds like her husband’s name), then in the shelter of ditches bloom delicate cowslips, which her husband had called marsh marigolds. He’d ask in letters from Buffalo, New York, or Lorain, Ohio, “Are the marsh marigolds blooming, Sofia?”

      “The cowslips, don’t you mean?” she’d answer, jokingly.

      He never bothered to correct her. A wheelsman on the ore boat William F. Sutter, he drowned in a Lake Michigan storm when the marsh marigolds were blooming back home. As a widow she learned that the chaliced, yellow flowers with heart-shaped leaves really are called marsh marigolds as often as cowslips. Each year for the ten years since her husband’s death, they bloomed. Each April she was sad.

      She didn’t know the track inspector’s name, but on her way to school, she was aware of his truck on the tracks paralleling the highway. She knew from a lifetime of learning important and unimportant facts that James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, had brought the railroad through here in the late 1800s, that her dear mother came from a part of Poland now called Silesia, that Douglas County has high unemployment, that a bulbul is a Persian bird, that the moisture content of hay in silos has to be checked to be sure that the hay doesn’t combust, that cowslips are marsh marigolds, and that during the Middle Ages, Poland was a haven for Jews. She knew this last like she knew what a trapezoid is—or a parallelogram (her husband had accumulated compasses, rulers, protractors). What she knew about Catholic Poland and the Jews, that miscellaneous fact, would matter to Joe Rubin and the teacher. Now in a gusty April, however, she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.

      When she was thinking of the track inspector—which she did at odd moments, happy to know that if he was at M.P. 15.9 then her house would be safe from intruders—the wanderer was thinking of her.When he had time, he’d surprise her, stand at the crossroads, wave to her. What did she mean saying he would become like the company he kept when he had no company? He imagined he saw those who really mattered, the people of the Diaspora, in the winter prints and tracks, in the forest shadows when the snow left, in the brown grass of fields, in the pictures on his walls. He could trace them back to Noah. His ancestors had remained four hundred and thirty years in Egypt. Such was the company Joe Rubin kept! If he hadn’t found a home and still wandered the earth, enduring hardship and insult, such was his lot, he told himself as he radioed the dispatcher for a track warrant.

      The one thing Sofia Stepan did with delight was to grow a garden out of sight of the railroad tracks and the county trunk highway. Except for this garden, she in no other way indulged herself. Though the garden stood in sunlight all afternoon on the south side of the house, by six o’clock—no matter the warmth of the day—it was cool and quiet. There she grew aster, yarrow, phlox, black-eyed Susan, hollyhock, butterfly bush. Coreopsis and lantana were not unknown to her. From flower to flower fluttered cabbage butterflies, mourning cloaks, monarchs, swallowtails. One afternoon she counted sixty-five butterflies. Sofia thought the butterflies could impart something of their beautiful delicacy to you in proportion to how much peace and strength you needed after a decade of disappointments.

      Though Joe Rubin hadn’t seen her garden, he thought of the woman at the crossroads often. In May, convinced that the language she spoke was Polish and that she appeared to like seeing him at the crossroads, he thought of no one but her. One evening in the Hebrew Cemetery, where he hadn’t been in months, he wondered exactly what 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.

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