LITMIR.BIZ

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how the Lord suffered in the garden, she resolved to suffer herself and struggled through ten beads, through an Our Father, then through two more beads.

      When the air got thick in the gym, she was moaning, “Hail Mary,Who art in heaven, Green Acres is the place for me.”

      “Stella-dear. Stella,” they were saying, coaxing her back to consciousness. Someone opened the gym windows.

      “Thy kingdom come,Thy will be done,” the widow kept on, then muttered how much she liked Eva Gabor, even though Eva was Hungarian. She felt drowsy . . . couldn’t for the life of her recall the character Pat Buttram played on Green Acres. The ladies lifted and fanned Mrs. Pilsudski’s hair after they undid the bun. Even Harriet dabbed a wet handkerchief to the widow’s flushed temples.

      “I’m okay. Get away wit’ that hankie. I saw a horse. I experienced a miracle. God on a horse. The horse neighed. A Polish horse, not Slovak!”

      “You forgot your prayer, Stella.You were saying the Apostles’ Creed, then talking about Green Acres. You dear thing, doing God’s bidding like this.”

      “No, a talking horse,” Mrs. Pilsudski said. “The owner’s Wilbur. T’at’s it, it’s Wilbur.”

      The ladies congratulated her on her suffering and devotion to prayer.

      “I always do what I can,” said Mrs. Pilsudski humbly.

      She wished the praise would continue until she realized how foolish she must look slumped over, head lolling, glasses steamed up. She was angry that Jadzia Bendis, a poker and pincher of frankfurters, had gotten to her.

      When Mrs. Pilsudski stood up, she felt something. Oh, Lord! She couldn’t look down at the “wetting accident.” All the time smiling nervously, she grabbed her coat, side-stepped to the wall.

      “Stella, stay for coffee,” said Harriet.

      “No coffee, no coffee,” said Stella, then mouthed the word ac-ci-dent.

      She wrapped the coat about her. God help me, I am a baba! she thought as she made her way out, for strength touching the sodality ribbon and pin that honored the Blessed Virgin.

      Though completely done in, she managed to make her way down Third Street through the field onto the trestle. With no train coming, it was a clean walk home. A wooden railing rose from the walkway beside the trestle tracks. On one side was the forest and the river’s long curve through it. Often from her kitchen window she’d watched people come across the trestle, just as someone could be watching her this very moment, huffing and puffing, the setting sun at her back. Maybe Mr. Boruczki, the neighbor, was drinking vodka and watching her before he went to his night shift at the gas plant. Or maybe Joseph Lesczyk was watching from the hill.

      So this was God’s punishment of the faithful: wetting your favorite girdle, she thought. When I’ve given so much to the poor and offered Christian witness through podiatry work, why this? When she tried recalling exactly what charitable work she’d done, though, she shamefully recalled pulling down the shades when she spotted the March of Dimes lady making her neighborhood collection. When Stella’d heard the lady knocking at the door, she hadn’t answered. Later she spent the money she should have given to charity on a facial scrub and a loofah brush at Walgreen’s. She did the same when “Jerry’s Kids” knocked for Muscular Dystrophy. Who was really close with her money, though? Harriet Bendis was!—the Jadzia that God “punished” by giving her a corner grocery store, while she, poor Stella, scraped people’s feet for a living.

      The widow recalled a million terrible things about Harriet, such as the time, one summer evening, that Mrs. Respectability gave her, Stella, a head of cabbage from her garden for free, a present, but then at the end of the month she found on her grocery bill: “Head of Cabbage, Price—Fifty Cents.” Calluses, nuns, bouffants, sodalities; she was through with them all. And she was really through with Jadzia!

      Angry at having been embarrassed, she took the sodality pin from her dress, looked over the side, then dropped it from the trestle. The blue ribbon floated down, landing in muddy water. Mrs. Pilsudski watched it spin out of sight before she headed home thinking how—though it might offend the Church—she would extend her podiatry practice to Baptists and Lutherans.

      For years she’d come this way to Bendis’s market, to footcare patients’ homes, to church, to sodality. She’d taken care of her feet; others neglected theirs. Now the lot of them could suffer the sorrow and heartbreak of burning, itching feet, she was thinking spitefully when she heard the whistle.

      Until it blew again, she couldn’t tell the direction. At the end of the trestle, the tracks curved through the trees. You couldn’t see far ahead. Behind her now, though, a beam of light bounced up and down.

      Heavenly Mary, more than half a trestle to go, she thought, and the whistle blowing for the crossing on the avenue. She tried walking faster, but it was so hard. Her glasses steamed up. Oh, Lord, that whistle! She concentrated on a rusted bolt holding the wooden guard railing together. Clutching the railing, she felt herself grow wetter. A minute later, the living girdle was newly soaked. Onto the trestle rattled the engine—hopper car, tank car, flatcar. From the terrifying whistle alone, the trestle would shake apart, she thought. Her hands clutching the railing, she remembered her missal lesson: “When hands are occupied, indulgences for saying the rosary may be gained as long as the beads are on one’s person.” Fearful of losing a grip on the railing, she couldn’t get to her rosary.

      “Ouch!” she cried, feeling sharp pain as the locomotive rumbled past. Her poor heart seemed to burst. Petrified, she looked at the sky through the diesel smoke, felt the rusted bolt moving as though it would come out and the entire trestle fall into the river and float down to the abandoned ore dock.

      “Ow,” she kept saying. “Ouch. Oh, God. Ow,” she said. Each time a boxcar passed, she remembered a sin she’d hidden from others and from the priest.

      The train came, cars swaying, clicking. “Make me a rose in Your service,” she said to God as an empty flatcar threw sawdust in her face, then a tank car with a yellow crust of sulfur and the words HYDROGEN SULFIDE rolled toward her. Now a tank car with CLAY SLURRY written on it. Now one with bauxite that blew more dust into her face. Now another car with INHALATION HAZARD painted on it. “Ow! Ouch!”

      She stood dumb a moment. Another click. The rails stilled. Prying loose her fingers, she inched a step forward to see whether her legs could hold her up. Beyond the widow’s house, the train blew for the crossing. Now it was quiet, as if a haze, a blue veil, had descended over the earth and over the widow.

      Mist formed above the Left-Handed River. The moon rose. The air looked so blue and fresh, she thought. For the first time, she felt at peace.

      A mystery, a blessed mystery of Christ!—kneeling before the nun, leading prayer, being struck dumb with anger and pride, the ordeal with the locomotive. Throughout all of this, she believed she’d grown even more beautiful, a faithful, dewy rose of Christ whose sins had been forgiven.

      It was a splendid evening, cool enough now that the coat felt good. Frogs sang. Lightning bugs flitted among the trees. Lake boats far off in the harbor blew their whistles; the tugs responded. Familiar, comforting sights and sounds.

      Still, a deep sadness filled her. Feeling something missing from her heart, she remembered the sodality pin with the blue ribbon floating in the air as it descended to the river. What would she do with that empty place over her heart? Or was it her heart that was empty?

      Opening the porch door, which closed when she opened it and opened when she closed it, she looked for her sodality’s sheet of membership rules and principles. There it was atop the lace cloth on the dining room table. “Each bead of a rosary represents a crown of roses woven in Mary’s honor,” she read. Then she read again how women of “slowackiego (Slovak), czeskiego (Czech), rusinskiego (Ruthenian), or litewskiego (Lithuanian) extraction” could join the sodality. Still shaky, she couldn’t read more. She felt certain she’d fix Blessed Mary’s feet in heaven someday

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