Small Town Girl

'Well, Con, what the heck are you doing up here at this time of day? Come to help me clean out this slimy fishpond?'

Con stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the grass. He looked pale and shaken.

'Hey, Con, you don't look so good. What's…'

Con squatted down on one heel in the shade beside the pond. Eddie noticed the muscles around his mouth quivering and his whiskers blacker than ever against his white face.

'What's the matter, Con?'

'Eddie, I'm afraid I got some bad news. There's, ah…' Con paused and cleared his throat. 'There's been an accident.'

Eddie tensed and looked southward, toward his house. His backside lifted off his heels. 'Krystyna…'

' 'Fraid so,' Con said.

'She okay, Con?'

Con cleared his throat again and dragged in a deep breath.

'I'm… I'm afraid not, Eddie.'

'Well, what's…'

'A train hit her car at the crossing out by her folks' place.'

'Jezus, Maria. ' Eddie said in Polish- Yezhush, Maree-uh-and made the sign of the cross. It took a while before he could make himself ask, 'How bad is it?'

When Con failed to reply Eddie shouted, 'She's alive, isn't she, Con!' He gripped Con's arms, repeating, 'Con, she's alive! She's just hurt, isn't she!'

Con's mouth worked and the rims of his eyelids got bright red. When he spoke his voice sounded wheezy and unnatural.

'This is the hardest thing I ever had to say to anybody.'

'Oh God, Con, no.'

'She's dead, Eddie. May her soul rest in peace.'

Eddie's hands convulsed on Con's arms. 'No…' His face contorted and he began rocking forward and backward in tiny pulsing beats. 'She can't be. She's… she's…' Eddie looked north toward his in-laws. 'She's out at her ma's house canning pickles. She said she was… she and her ma were… oh, Con, no, Jesus, no… not Krystyna!'

Eddie started weeping and Con caught him when he crumpled. Over at Wenzel's the saw started up. It sang a while and stopped, leaving only the sound of Eddie's sobbing.

'Not my Krystyna,' he wailed. 'Not my Krystyna…'

Con waited a while, then urged, 'Come on, Eddie, let's go tell Father, and he'll say a prayer with you…'

Eddie let himself be hauled to his feet, but turned as if to head toward the school building on the far side of the church. 'The girls…'

'Not now, Eddie. Plenty of time to tell them later. Let's go see Father first, okay?'

Father Kuzdek answered the door himself, a massive, balding Polish man with a neck and shoulders like a draft horse. He was in his early forties with glasses like President Truman's, their wire bows denting the sides of his round, pink face. He wore his black cassock most of the time and had it on today as he opened the door of his glassed-in porch and saw who was on his step.

'Con, Eddie… what's wrong?'

'There's been an accident, Father,' Con told him.

'Come in.'

While they moved inside Con explained, 'It's Krystyna… she… her car… it was hit by the train.'

Father went as still as if riddled by two hundred ten volts. Eddie had worked for the parish for twelve years. Father's concern for him went far beyond that of a priest for a pa-rishioner. 'Kyrie eleison,' he whispered in Latin. Lord have mercy. 'Is she dead?'

Con could do no more than nod.

Father Kuzdek's breath left him like air escaping a ruptured tire. Rocking back on both heels he closed his eyes and lifted his face, as if begging divine sustenance. 'Erue, Domine, animam ejus.' Deliver her soul, O Lord, he prayed in an undertone, then caught Eddie around the shoulders with one beefy arm.

'Ah, Eddie, Eddie… what a tragedy. This is terrible. So young, your Krystyna, and such a good woman.'

They took some time for their emotions to swell, then Father made a cross in the air over Eddie's head and murmured in Latin. He laid both of his huge hands right on Eddie's head and went on praying, ending in English, 'The Lord bless you in this time of trial. May He guide you and keep you in this hour of travail.' After making another cross in the air, Father dropped his hands to Eddie's shoulders and said, 'I ask you to remember, my son, that it's not ours to question why and when the Lord chooses to take those we love. He has His reasons, Eddie.'

Eddie, still weeping, bobbed his head, facing the floor.

Father dropped his hands and asked Con, 'How long ago?'

'Less than an hour.'

'Where?'

'The junction of County Road 89 and Highway 71 north of town.'

'I'll get my things.'

Father Kuzdek came back wearing his black biretta, carrying a small leather case containing his holy oils. They followed him to his garage, a small, separate building crowding close to the north side of his house and the rear of the church. He backed out his black Buick and Eddie got in the front, Con in the back.

The Reverend Anastasius T. Kuzdek commanded the driver's seat the way he commanded the respect of the town, for though Browerville had a mayor, its undisputed leader was this priest. In an area of the state where the vein of old world Catholicism ran deep, none ran deeper than in Father Kuzdek's parish. Legends were told about the man, about the time neither family members nor the local constable could break up a fight between two drunken brothers-in-law at a family reunion. But when Father Kuzdek was called in, he grabbed the pair in his beefy hands, conked their noggins together as if they were little more than two pool balls, and ended the fistfight on the spot. When he stood in the pulpit and announced, 'The convent needs wood,' firewood appeared like Our Lady appeared at Fatima, miraculously delivered into the nuns' yard already dried and split. When he ordered school closed on the feast day of St. Anastasius, his patron saint, there was no school and no complaint from the Archdiocese. Some bigwigs in St. Paul once decided that Highway 71 should be rerouted to bypass Browerville, taking along with it the frequent tourists who had stopped to see St. Joseph's, both the church and the grounds, and drop their money in the offerings box and spend more of it at the businesses in town. Kuzdek took on the Minnesota State Highway Department and won. Highway 71 still cut smack through downtown, creating its main street and flanking the front steps of St. Joseph's Church.

Father turned left onto the highway now. When he said, driving his Buick toward the scene of the accident, 'Let us pray…' they did.

They spotted the red warning cloud from the fusee long before they saw the train itself. By now the cloud had stretched and drifted clear across the highway, stinging the air with its acrid sulphur fumes. The train, one of the little local freights, was only about twenty cars long, carrying hardware, grain, machinery, mail-hardly a deadly cargo, only the trappings of the ordinary lives lived in this peaceful rural area. They passed the caboose-even it had cleared the crossing-and paralleled the the train until they saw, up ahead, on the shoulder of the highway a gathering of vehicles: Constable Cecil Monnie's Chevrolet, a truck from Leo Reamer's D-X station, the sheriff's car, and Iten & Heid's hearse. Browerville was too small to have a hospital, so when the need arose, Ed Iten used his hearse as an ambulance.

As Father slowed down, Eddie stared. 'It pushed her all this way?' he said, dazed. Then he saw his car, flattened and ripped and peeled off of the locomotive in sections. Beside the train a body was laid out on a stretcher.

He left the Buick and stumbled through hip-high grass down a swale in the ditch, up the other side, with Father and Con close on his heels. The train was still steaming, its pressure kept up by Merle who would periodically climb up to read the gauges and throw another shovelful of coal into the firebox. The engine gave a hiccup while across the tracks the herd of hoi steins continued to watch the goings-on from behind the barbed-wire fence. Nearer, the