31

 

“GEORGE. THANK GOD you’re home,” Mom cried as he came through the kitchen door surrounded by a blast of cold air. It was half-past midnight. I’d gone to bed but couldn’t sleep, so she let me sit up and wait with her.

“I’ve been so worried . . . Where on earth have you been? . . . I didn’t hear the car pull up . . . Why aren’t you wearing your overcoat?” Her sentences poured forth like patrons from a burning theater but came to a screeching halt as she took a good hard look at her husband.

His suit was disheveled and stained with dirt at the knees as if he’d fallen; he clutched his Sunday hat like a crumpled paper bag. He was obviously drunk, but it wasn’t only the ashen complexion and bloodshot eyes that frightened me. I hardly recognized my father’s face. It was somehow transformed as if he wore a rubber Halloween mask. Each labored breath came through his half-open mouth, oddly contorted in a grimace. Then I saw that his forehead had a horizontal red welt, already coloring up.

“Daddy, what happened?” I rushed over to take his hand and guide him to a chair, while my mother stood back in angry silence. As soon as I touched his ice-cold flesh, he flung my hand away as if bothered by some pest. He didn’t even look at me. Dread curdled in my belly and rose to my throat like vomit. My father staggered silently to the living room, then flopped face down on the couch.

He didn’t move until noonday next. At my mother’s urging, he managed to sit up and call a tow truck to pull the Bel Air out of a ditch, about four miles down Highway 2. Thankfully, it was undamaged, just stuck in the mud. He’d banged his head hard on the steering wheel when the car plowed into the ditch, and the red welt had turned purple. Dad lost his overcoat, too—didn’t know where. It was brand new, as was the suit, from a men’s clothing store in Duluth. Mom backtracked from home to the Snowshoe Lounge, where my father spent the previous evening. She hoped to find it dropped somewhere along the way. Having no luck, she swallowed her pride and went inside to inquire; the man at the bar said that no one had turned in a lost coat.

 

 

AT MY MOTHER’S insistence, I kept my father’s Halloween escapade a secret for nearly two weeks. I wasn’t supposed to tell Sparrow, and I was forbidden to mention it in my letters to Tante Gudy. I’d already been forced to lie to her about my birthday party; Mom made me write that it came off “just fine.” I couldn’t stand it any longer. I needed to tell my friend how bad things were at home because it looked like I might be leaving Blackstone before the year was out.

We bundled up and went on a long walk so no one could overhear as I aired the family laundry. I decided it was my right—it was my laundry too.

“I think it’s partly the darkness,” Sparrow said. “November is the darkest month . . . it gets to a lot of people. Grandpa Gorski’s been acting pretty weird these days,” she sympathized.

“Does he drink, too?”

“All men drink,” she said with an air of authority. “Grandpa keeps a flask and toots all day long. I’ve seen ’im passed out on the couch, but he never drives drunk off his ass. Lately, he hardly moves from that woodstove, ’cept when he’s out chopping wood . . . or in the outhouse. He sleeps all afternoon and then sits up all night. Now he’s started talking to himself. It was mumbling at first. I’d hear him at night when he thought I was asleep. Lately, he’s been talking in broad daylight. It’s like he’s having a conversation; sometimes he don’t even notice that I’m standing right there.”

“What’s he saying?”

“It’s all in Polish. I asked my ma, but she says she can’t understand him. I think she knows, but won’t say. He sits on his chair beside a big pile of stove wood. Instead of stoking it so’s it’ll burn for a while, he feeds it one or two pieces at a time. Sometimes he keeps the door open and just stares at the flames. Creepy,” she concluded.

“Creepy,” I agreed. “But my father has bigger problems than the winter darkness.”

“Hear any news yet?” she asked.

“They stopped talking to me about it. Mom says I should focus on school. When Dad wants to talk in private, he tells me to take my paints and go work in the chalet, ’cause it might as well get some use.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’m learning to mix colors. You’re supposed to start by painting a bowl of fruit. It seems boring. I’d rather look out the window and paint the river . . . the trees. Have you heard anything from the Indian side?”

“I’d have told ya if I did. When I’m with Pa, they don’t say a word about it. I know they talk, though, ’cause I can make ’em stop pretty quick by walking into the office. What do you think will happen if—?”

“If the Stony River Band takes back the land, and we can’t make a living from Parsons’ Lodge?” I finished her question. “We’ll go back to Racine and live with my aunt. Mom’s already talked about it. That’s why I wanted you to know what a mess we’re in.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I don’t know anymore. When I got here, all I wanted to do was go home. But now I’d miss the river and the woods . . . the quiet. Most of all, I’d miss you.”

“I’d miss you too,” she admitted.

“Of course, it would be great to be with Aunt Gudrun again . . . and Kitty. But it doesn’t really matter what I want. Didn’t matter when we left and it doesn’t matter now. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I can’t wait to grow up! I never felt that way before. I mean, I daydreamed about it . . . how many kids I’d have . . . what kind of house. But I wasn’t in any hurry. I feel like that little sparrow, getting blown around. My father is the wind. It’s all I can do to keep up. When we get to be adults, life will be so much easier—we can do whatever we want.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she said.

“Of course we can.”

“Did your mother wanna move to Blackstone and run a lodge?”

“Uh . . . well, she said she did. But I think she only wanted to please my father. I know she regrets it now.”

“My ma didn’t want to be left in a shack with a sick baby, but that’s just what Lester did to her. And I know she wished my pa would’ve married her. Still does, though she don’t come out and say so.”

“You’re right. Argh.” I stomped my foot for emphasis. “Seems like us girls never get to do what we want.”

“Seems that way . . . but the men don’t always get what they want, neither.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“When my mother was young,” she went on, “the Germans invaded Poland. They lined up the men from her town and shot ’em in droves—not only Jews, but Polish Christians. They put loads of Polish people into those concentration camps and most of them died there. My ma ended up in one of those camps. So did Grandpa Gorski.”

I was stunned. “That’s horrible. My father liberated people from a concentration camp when he was a soldier, stationed over in Germany. He didn’t say much about it, but I could tell something really bad happened there. I never would’ve guessed about your mother—I thought they only put Jews in those camps. Did she tell you what it was like?”

“She said it was like the gates of hell were thrown open and Satan’s armies took over the earth. People were dying every day. My ma had a whole family. Her grandmother was living, and she had a mother, a sister, and two brothers. The Germans killed her grandma straight off. She saw her ma and sister die in the camp, but the men were separated from the women, so she didn’t know if any of them survived until after it was over. Only her father made it. He was taken to a death camp—I think it was called Belzec—but they put him to work instead of killing him. Ma suspected that Grandpa Gorski had it a little easier; the Germans gave some Polish prisoners special jobs that came with extra rations, but Grandpa never really told her what happened. He don’t talk about it . . . hardly talks, period. Anyway, Ma got the chance to immigrate to America as a refugee, but her father wouldn’t leave Poland until he’d found out what happened to his sons. He hoped they were still alive somewhere . . . spent years searching all over Europe, even went to Russia—anywhere Polish refugees might have gone. Finally gave them up for dead.”

“How did the prisoners die, exactly?”

“Ma said she and her sister were starved and frozen and forced to work long hours. Her mother died the first month in, but somehow, they hung on ’til the end. It was the Russians who set them free, only . . . her sister didn’t make it through the day.”

“Aw. What happened?”

“One of the soldiers gave them a loaf of fresh black bread. Ma said it made her feel sick after a few bites, even though she was starving—it was too rich ’cause they were used to eating stale bread. Her sister managed to eat most of the loaf, and I guess her stomach just couldn’t handle it—I think it burst or something. She wasn’t the only one to die that way. My ma still cries about Lisa sometimes . . . says over and over how she should’ve stopped her. She was only sixteen.”

I began to weep, understanding at last the source of my father’s agony. “A whole damned Hershey bar,” he’d lamented. “But why . . . why did the Germans put Polish and Jewish people in those camps? Why didn’t somebody stop them?”

“I don’t know, but they hated the Jews even worse than the Poles. Hitler set out to kill every last one of them—worked them to death, and if they didn’t drop dead, they killed them in the gas chambers.”

“Gas chambers? What’s that?”

“A building where they killed people with poison gas.”

“Jesus!”

“Then they burned the bodies in ovens. My ma saw the smokestacks pouring out black smoke—she said the smell was sickening. The Germans killed about six million people before they lost the war. In the last days, there was always smoke, because they tried to get rid of all the bodies before the Allies got there. That’s why my mother hates it when the woodstove backs up into the house. She runs outside no matter how cold it is, even if she’s not dressed for it.”

I sat on a log with my head in my hands. “I haven’t been this shocked since I found out about my dead baby brother. Only this is much worse. I feel like an idiot. Why don’t my parents ever tell me the truth about anything . . . about life?”

“Your mom and dad are just protective of you, is all.”

“They sure are good at keeping secrets . . . my aunt, too. But I’m not a little kid anymore.” I looked into her eyes. “I want you to tell me everything you know.”

There’s nothing like the first time one hears about the holocaust, of cattle cars disgorging terrified people and children ripped from their mother’s arms. I tried to imagine the women with shorn heads being herded like sheep into a building from which they never emerged, and naked skeletal bodies stacked like frozen piles of wood. Sparrow had not yet been told about the torturous medical experiments, so I was spared a while longer. I don’t think I would have been able to bear it.

“That explains why my father got ulcers. He got sent home sick with bleeding ulcers, but I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. No wonder he hates the Germans—they must be the sickest people in the world.”

“Ya, sure seems that way,” Sparrow agreed.

“Then again, there must’ve been some good Germans.” I contradicted myself. “Kitty’s mother was really sweet. And I’m one-eighth German on the Schimschack side. Hey, wait a sec . . . how could your mom have married someone of German descent after what happened to her family?”

“Your great-grandfather wasn’t just German. He was born to Jewish parents.”

“What? I’m Jewish too?”

“I don’t know how that works, but I don’t see how you can inherit a religion. Ernst Schimschack wasn’t a religious Jew. He left Germany and married a Finnish girl and the family had no religion.”

“You know more about my family than I do. Do you know what Old Man Schimschack did to get carted off to jail?”

“No idea.”

“So I guess there are some good Germans and lots of bad ones.”

“Must’ve been that Hitler. He was their leader—he put ’em up to it,” she offered.

“But how? He didn’t round up millions of people and herd ’em onto trains . . . and build concentration camps all by himself. How could one man make everybody do such terrible things?”

She shrugged. “Maybe people were afraid of what might happen to them if they didn’t go along with it.”

“Maybe. I guess you’re right; even for the men, being a grownup is no picnic. Seems like we’re all just sparrows in the wind.”