A Grievous Wrong: One Boy's Story

A Grievous Wrong

By Elaine Oelker

Copyright 2014 Elaine Oelker

Smashwords edition

Cover by Rita Toews at http://www.yourbookcover.com

Cover image:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/j3net/280322306/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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Chapter 1

At the keening wail, John jerked his head up on his way home from serving Mrs. Sinchak’s funeral mass. For a split second he thought he was graveside after a mine accident, but he was not. He emerged from the Crabtree Row Three houses to see across the street down Row Six.

Men stood on a porch of a house and another in the backyard that abutted a hillside leading up to the Row Eight houses where he lived. John crossed the street in hesitant curiosity. He saw Mrs. Borko with an infant in her arms kneeling beside a man stretched out on the ground. The men hurtled sheets and pillows onto the street to join the kettles and broken plates already sprouting like weeds across the dirt road.

Mrs. Borko wailed again as a chair flipped by her, the legs snapping at each impact. She shielded the man on the ground beside her. Two young boys crouched under the front porch.

John moved closer to the shadow of a nearby porch. A shade was pulled in a house across the street.

The thugs raucously hurtled quart jars of tomatoes that they had toted up from the basement. Tomatoes and glass slid down the steps against the background of insults and laughter. A third man dragged a thin mattress through the tomatoes and threw it into the street. John could see a big man behind the house swinging a hoe at a squawking flock of hens as his thick-soled boots tramped through rows of young onions and peas at the foot of the hillside. The booted man reached into a box of last year’s cabbages and dumped them and drunkenly smashed them with his heel.

When the house was emptied, the men nailed two by fours across the door. The blows echoed down the silent rows of houses. John shrunk back in this corner as they headed to their truck parked at the end of the row. He peered at the chipping paint on the porch posts thinking invisibility. The hiccuping cries of the baby hung in the air.

John stepped into the street. Cold rain dropped from the overcast sky, a mist blurred the distant hills across the broad valley. John sank his anger. Those men felt justified. It was their job. This was a land where opposites lived side by side. It was a mean puzzle. The lyrics the third grade practiced this spring, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave stuck in his head. He had listened to the eighteen hissed es’s in the first verse as he stared out the seventh grade window waiting for school to be out. Though he heard it repeatedly, he could not make head nor tail out of who was brave or free here in this America his folks had been so glad to come to.

John moved forward reluctantly to Mrs. Borko’s side and watched as she used her apron to blot blood oozing from Mr. Borko’s ears, not that a body could tell who it was. The man’s face was purple and swollen, his lips split and stained with blood. John stooped to pull the mattress closer and helped roll the man gently onto it. He glanced over at a classmate that appeared with a granite ware basin of steaming water. Anne Marie was the one quiet girl in his class. He watched as she bent to bathe the raw skin keeping her eyes away from Mrs. Borko. John was clear sighted enough to know that Mrs. Borko’s spirit was bruised and beaten and wouldn’t recover any sooner than her husband’s body. You couldn’t live here and not see a lot of that kind of hurt, the kind others didn’t excuse. You chose not to look at her face.

The crunch of stones in the dirt road drew John’s attention in a moment of fear. It was just Lame Lushko parking a large handcart in front of Borko’s porch where he began to stack chairs in the cart. Unable to help with Anne Marie’s work John moved to fold and stack thin, stained sheets and towels beneath the chairs. The boys crept out from under the porch to retrieve pots and dishes. Their eyes were yet wide and their noses running.

Anne Marie called to John, You need to go for the doctor. He’ll have medicine to keep him unconscious, and he’ll be able to splint the bones that need it. As her hands worked she tossed her lank brown hair to the side, but it would fall back over half her face again.

A lot of good Doc Buzzard will be. John wished the words back. Mrs. Borko didn’t have a lot of hope, and his words probably quelled any that had surfaced.

Just try, John.

John felt shamed by her use of his name. She sounded like a mother with a stubborn child.

As John loped away he bit at his lip. He would never speak in anger at home. But in the world there were things to be angry at. He turned out of Row Six and headed down the road past the other row houses to the main street and the Blandenburg Company Store. The doctor’s office was housed in a lean-to attached to the far side. The streets were quiet as if Mrs. Borko had never wailed or the men had never detonated their violence. John knew that the women left at home in those houses were chained inside from fear for their own security. Then on Saturday afternoon one by one they would go to confession and speak the words, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I did not help my neighbor in need. John knew this. He had learned that sins of omission were as serious as sins of offense. He wanted to see them come out of their houses like the furies and turn their fear into vehemence and shame those thugs into submission. Didn’t they see that alone they would always be powerless and afraid?

John crossed in front of the company store, glad that no one was out front. He remembered dropping a square carton of eggs on the store porch last summer. His head had flushed hot for long moments as he scooped up the slippery whites and yolks knowing his mother would use them as best she could. The men on the porch leaned back in their chairs and hooted about the poor dumb hunkey. Shame burned into one’s mind and never left.

Dr. Buzzard trudged behind John to Row Six with hoarse throat clearings every six steps. The liquid harumphs skewered John in discomfort and were so regular that he counted the steps between.

Haraugh! You foreigners don’t have enough sense to take care of a good thing.

…two…three…four…

Foreigners were everybody else though maybe his own kids would not be outsiders. You were a foreigner if you bore the name of Slavick or Maggiano. Those that took on an escape from the mine camps for other places soon shortened or changed their names.

Haraugh! You say this is the Borko’s? Sounds like a circus act. Their kids are always croupy. Don’t have enough sense to keep the house warm and dry.

John listened and imitated a wise nod. Company steam heat was havoc on planning. House One kept windows open to make the house bearable and House Six had extra stoves to add heat. The steam amount changed from day to day. Now the gray sky was thickening, and the wind picked up buffeting his cheeks.

Haraugh! Haraugh! Too damp to come out. Got to be available for real emergencies in the mine. Men with crushed body parts go into shock quickly.

…five…six…seven. John counted his steps and thought about finding mushrooms in the hills and bottomlands. Sponge-like morels would soon spring up under trees in abandoned orchards and around rotted elm stumps. They just needed a steamy day in May after a good soaking. John lifted his eyes to the cloud wrapped hill behind the row houses. He slowed his footsteps to let Dr. Buzzard go down Row Six ahead of him.

Buzzard looked down at the group of kids around the mattress holding Mr. Borko. He looked over at the cart piled high with their belongings.

Haraugh! Mrs. Borko looked up expectantly.

John felt guilty at thinking of the scrambled eggs and mushrooms and onions his mother would fix when they found the first spring morels.

Buzzard began to attend the injured man. John lingered at a distance. Anne Marie stood and moved to his side and spoke in an undertone. Mrs. Borko told the Lame One that she could perhaps make it to Greensberg by late night, and her sister would find room for them in her three room house with her family—they just needed floor space for Mr. Borko to recover in. She’ll try to work-- scrub floors and do laundry for the northenders to help out her sister’s family. Lame One agreed to help pull the cart if her sister would let him rest there and have a bite.

John felt relieved. Lame One would take responsibility until tomorrow.

Anne Marie smiled tentatively at him. When I’m a nurse someday, my family will get by better’n most. And I won’t marry a miner, to be sure.

John bit at the corner of his lip before he spoke, The more you know, the better you fare. He hoped she picked a husband that was not hot-headed and determined to provide for them alone. Working women didn’t count for much with most men around here.

My grandma will take me in so I can go to high school in Greensberg. I can take care of her to help pay for my room. It’s a first step, John, getting to high school. Remember that.

John felt useless. Anne Marie went forward to help undress the man as Dr. Buzzard did his work. John retrieved one of the cleanest of the blankets and set it beside Mrs. Borko. She could wrap her husband in it for the trip to Greensberg. He uttered a soft goodbye to the group and turned to climb the hill behind Borko’s house, the short cut to the Row Eight houses. Borko’s garden was muddy. The delicate pale green sprays of pea plants were mangled in the mud. The green onion spires crushed flat. John looked uphill the rest of the way.

John entered the kitchen by the back door and was startled to see his mother and father standing before a huge bowl of yellow dough. Fearing to ask what brought his father home before dusk, he sat down at the far end of the table in silence.

Chapter 2

If you cut the noodles thin, they dry in half the time, don’t you see?

I know that Steven, but the thick ones take less time to cut and less space to dry.

It doesn’t matter so much, mother. A thin noodle is perfect like my mother made in the old country. He quirked a sly smile at John.

Steven, it is all right that they be this way. I make the noodles. You dig the coal.

Ah, but, Anna, the mine was a groaning awful today, and we were sent home while the shoring team went in. Here he winked at John. The good Lord has sent you help with your noodles to do them right.

John watched his mother and waited for an impatient response. Instead, she smiled indulgently. Cut the noodles thin this once. I want to see you happy. Happy like you were back in Slovakia.

She wants to see me happy. Those are words of sweetest honey. A man like me should not want more of heaven.

John’s heart felt joy come back to hear the teasing words. To see them like this was like that rare slice of warm apple pie on a chill fall day. His mother’s floury hands pressed the dough onto the scrubbed table top, then, rolled a clean round whiskey bottle over it flattening and pressing it outward.

How did Mrs. Sinchak’s funeral go today? Were there relatives from afar? His mother rubbed her chin briefly with the back of her hand. Her dark hair was pulled neatly back out of the way of food and laundry and babies.

I guess there were not many here, only her two daughters from Greensberg and two of her neighbors. John remembered hearing how Mr. Sinchak had passed away long ago from the white damp in the mines.

She lived and died lonely then. Steven’s mind spoke softly while memories surfaced silently.

John scanned the familiar objects on the yolk yellow enameled walls hung with three tall blue cupboards. Gray enameled pans hung from hooks in the stove corner. The fat black bakelite cook with a grocery list printed on her long white apron hung against one cupboard. Little pegs were stuck at the bottom of the apron to be placed in holes near each item as need demanded. It was strange to think that anyone could just pick up butter, cheese, or eggs when needed, but his father had won it as a door prize at an Order of the Slovak’s meeting. When the little ones were sick, they were allowed to fondle it and move the pegs. Two windows flanked the tall cupboards their casements crowded with tin can tomatoes growing toward the sun each day.

His mother lifted a great lump of dough from the bowl and began turning and pressing the dough. I remember the year after Mr. Sinchak passed away. I remember that she was in a horror of her sons going into the mines. She drove them to go west to seek work. She leaned forward to flatten the dough to the table and then rolling the whiskey bottle back and forth over its smooth surface.

Ah, well, she didn’t lose them to the mine, at least, Steven mused. But she heard from them less and less until they did not write at all. What can you do? You just make choices the best you can.

Anna judged the shape of the rounded rectangle of dough, heaved a small sigh, and began to lift the short edge and tightly wind the dough up like a roll of carpeting. Hard to say if it would have been easier to see them go down into the mine. Her thoughts too had drifted away.

A gleam of challenge shot through his father’s eye. He lifted the roll onto a piece of board and began to slice thin pinwheels of dough. "See how thin it is, look! But I say this, mother. One day my boys and I will have a fine farm with a cow or