Authors: LaVyrle Spencer
It took a surprising amount of effort to swing an inert bell that large, and a modicum of experience to haul on the rope just hard enough to make it ring once. But Eddie had done it so many times it was second nature to him.
Today, however, when his hands gripped the rope, nothing happened. Only his fists closing around the sisal.
I can do this,
he thought,
I can do this. I will do it for Krystyna.
His grip tightened.
His shoulders rounded.
His eyes stung.
Bonng.
The bell tolled once... for the first year of her life—born on the bed in her parents’ bedroom out on the farm where they still lived, raised in the Polish Catholic tradition, baptized in this very church.
He waited a full minute, the longest minute of his life, while pictures of her flashed before him, a spectrum of pictures, from photographs of her as a child to imagined pictures of her last few seconds of life before the train hit the car. Oh, Krystyna, why did you do it? Why did you try to beat that train? If only I had been with you, I would have said,
Stop, wait, you can’t make it!
Bonng.
The bell tolled again... for the second year of her life—when she was photographed on the back of a draft horse so broad her legs stuck out like a dragonfly’s wings. That was long before Eddie Olczak knew her, or loved her, or kissed her, or stood in this church and spoke vows with her or became the father of her children.
Bonnng
... for the third year when...
Surely this was all a mistake. Surely when he finished and walked home Krystyna would be there, the same as always, wearing an apron, standing at the kitchen table, setting some woman’s hair in pin curls. She would flash him a smile as he entered, and say, “Well, look who’s here. It’s my Eddie spaghetti.” (Or sometimes she’d say Eddie confetti, or Eddie my steady, or whatever rhyming word came to her mind that day.) And he’d pour a cup of coffee, and lean against the kitchen cabinets and watch while she worked, and visit with the women, and wonder what Krystyna was saving up for this time. Twenty-five cents she earned for each head she set. Fifty cents for giving a Toni home permanent, which took her four full hours to do. She loved pretty clothes, and jewelry, loved to go dancing on Saturday nights over to the Clarissa Ballroom or out to the Knotty Pine Coliseum. Sometimes she bought perfume and lipstick from the Avon lady. Most often though, she spent her money on yard goods to sew clothes for herself and the kids.
But no more. No more.
Bonnng.
Oh, Krystyna, Krystyna, why were you taken so soon? How can I go on without you? How can I face that house at the end of every day, and who’ll be there for the children?
Bonnng.
Twenty-seven times he rang that bell. Twenty-seven minutes it took him to tell the town she was gone, while he remained dry-eyed and stoic in the face of duty. And then, at the end, according to custom, he grasped all three ropes at once, sending up a glorious tintinnabulation of rejoicing
—life everlasting, amen
!—and it was then, as he rang the bells in unison, that Eddie finally broke. Surrounded by the deafening sound, his tears came all at once, and with them anger and condemnation. He hauled on those ropes as if to punish them, or himself, or to curse a fate too cruel to be borne, sometimes hauling so hard that the weight of the bells pulled his boots several inches off the floor, weeping and howling out his sorrow and rage where only God and Krystyna could see him, while above his head the bells poured forth a celebration of her arrival in heaven.
CHAPTER THREE
Eddie might have thought all the nuns went to the convent after the school buses left, but Sister Regina did not. She returned to her room and remained alone, listening to the soft weeping in the hall, the voices fading away, and his footsteps leaving the building. She had overheard the conversation and knew Mr. Olczak was going over to the church to ring his own wife’s death knell. In the quiet of the schoolroom she waited for it to begin. The sound of the first bell, and the picture of him ringing it, drove her to her knees in profound sympathy.
It was there Mother Agnes found her, with her back to the door, her forehead on her sleeve and her sleeve on the edge of the desk.
“Sister Regina?”
She lifted her head and discreetly wiped her eyes before turning, still kneeling, to face her superior.
“Yes, Reverend Mother?”
Mother Agnes was in her late fifties with a prominent chin, ruddy complexion, and pale blue eyes that appeared huge and watery behind thick glasses. “Have you forgotten Matins and Lauds?”
“No, Mother. I haven’t.”
“Ah,” Mother Agnes said, then stood thoughtfully for a moment. “We waited for you.”
“I’m sorry, Reverend Mother, I...” A truly obedient nun would have followed her superior without a word, and this is what Mother Agnes expected. But Sister Regina felt as if she would suffocate if she had to kneel in the tiny chapel at the convent with seven other nuns praying Matins and Lauds, when she was having trouble drawing a steady breath without bursting into tears.
The death bell rang again, a lugubrious clong that seemed to reverberate forever.
“I beg your indulgence, Mother Agnes. I wish to stay here awhile, in the school. I feel that I need some time alone.” Permission was needed for everything that differed from commonality within the religious community. Matins and Lauds were the ultimate example of commonality: universal prayers being sent up by every religious the world over at the same time of day. One did not ask to be alone to pray Matins and Lauds when your community was doing it together. To do so was to break your vow of obedience.
She knew immediately Mother Agnes was not pleased. Her watery blue eyes might hold a degree of understanding, but her mind was as fixed as the polar star: she had been a member of the Order of St. Benedict much longer than Sister Regina, and she understood the value of giving up
self
in order to serve God. Sister Regina had not fully learned how to give up
self.
“It’s the children, isn’t it?” Mother Agnes asked.
“Yes, Mother, it is.” Sister Regina rose and faced her superior.
“You aren’t forgetting what Holy Rule says?” Mother Agnes referred to
The Rule of Benedict
by its common name.
“No, Mother, I’m not.” Holy Rule said familiarity with the secular was to be avoided.
“At times such as these, when one feels compelled to offer sympathy, it would be easy to become too familiar.”
Given the attraction the Olczak girls held for Sister Regina—of which Mother Agnes was fully cognizant—the situation bore watching.
“They’re so young to lose their mother.”
“Yes, they are, but your concern for them would be better directed toward prayer than grief, and the sublimation of your own sorrow toward the greater glory of God.”
Sister Regina felt a flutter of resentment that surprised her. She’d had Anne in her third-grade class last year and had tried very hard not to favor her, but within her black habit beat a very human heart that could not help being warmed by the child. Now this year, not only did she have Anne again in fourth grade, but along came little Lucy, equally beguiling, and Sister Regina felt herself drawn to her in the same way. To see them—her favorites out of her entire two classes—lose their mother, who also had been a favorite layperson, was the most traumatic thing Sister Regina had experienced since taking her vows. To be told she should sublimate her feelings, which were overwhelming at the moment, brought her such a piercing wish to rebel that she felt it best to keep silent.
Both nuns knew all of this as Mother Agnes waited in the doorway and the death bell sounded again. Furthermore, they both knew that Sister Regina had taken vows of poverty, chastity
and obedience,
and that of the three, obedience had always been the most difficult for Sister Regina to swallow. Mother Agnes was subtly reminding her of that vow. But Sister Regina was, at times, willful, and this, too, was against Holy Rule. Being obedient meant subjugating oneself to the will of God, renouncing the vanity of self-concerns so that only Godlike thoughts could flow within one, and the movement of grace could be felt within the soul. Sister Regina had tried to accept this. She had struggled to find inner peace, to spend time in contemplative prayer so as to reach that quiet place within, where she could feel herself in communion with God. But she was not sure she had ever succeeded. Furthermore, she could not understand how subduing her grief today could do her soul or those of the Olczak children any good. What she wanted to do was weep for them, and do it alone.
Mother Agnes, however, had other ideas.
“We must be watchful of worldly cares, Sister, lest they creep in and distract us from our one true purpose, which is to esteem a perfect union with God.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Mother Agnes paused momentarily to let her message sink in. “So you’ll return to the convent for meditation?” Meditation always followed Matins and Lauds.
“Yes, Mother.”
“Very well, then...” Sister Regina knelt to receive Mother Superior’s blessing, then the two of them left the schoolroom together. While they trod the silent hall in their high-topped black shoes, the death bell rang again and Sister Agnes said, “Remember, Sister Regina, we must not question God’s will.”
“Yes, Mother.”
As they left the yellow brick schoolhouse Sister Regina worked very hard to quell her resentment, to humble herself in God’s eyes and accept Mother Superior’s admonition. She focused all her thoughts on obedience and willed all worldly distractions out of her mind to let obedience flow in, and with it godliness. The two nuns walked side by side to the square white clapboard house a mere thirty feet away. It sat to the west of the school building and was shaded by a pair of elms half again as high as the three-story structure. They climbed a set of stone steps and entered via the back door, into an immaculate kitchen that smelled of freshly baked bread. The room had a single wall of built-in cupboards, a cast-iron wood range on one wall and in the center of the room an oversized worktable with a built-in bin that held fifty pounds of flour. Mr. Olczak filled it for them whenever it got empty, often with flour that his wife had bought and donated to the nuns.
Sister Ignatius, the cook, and Sister Cecelia, the housekeeper, were nowhere to be seen. The house was as silent as a cave.
They passed into the central hall that divided the house in half with a long strip of linoleum flooring that shone from a recent waxing, past the doors of the community room and two empty music rooms with their pianos closed for the day, up the hardwood steps to the second story, past the row of closed bedroom doors, to the tiny chapel in the northwest comer.
Inside the chapel six nuns knelt on six prie-dieux. Two other prie-dieux waited, empty. Mother Agnes knelt on one, Sister Regina on the other. Not a word was spoken. Not a head turned. Not a veil fluttered in the absolute stillness of the chapel. At the rear of the room an organ without an organist hunkered in the shadows. At the front, above a miniature altar, a pair of candles burned at the foot of an alabaster crucifix. The light from a pair of north-facing windows was muted by stretched brown lace that tinted the chapel the dim rusty hue of tea.
Neither the elbow rests nor the kneelers of the prie-dieux were padded. Sister Regina knelt on the unforgiving oak and felt it telegraph a pain clear up to her hip joints. She offered it up for the faithful departed, welcoming the discomfort for the betterment of her soul, and in the hope that she might more gracefully fulfill the vows she had taken. One of those was the vow of poverty: austerity and a lack of creature comforts, presently padded kneelers, were part of that poverty. She accepted this the way she accepted the sky being blue and the chapel being darkened: as part of her life as a Benedictine nun, and after eleven years since entering the postulate, she no longer thought of the softness of the furniture at home, or the luxury of drinking all the warm milk she wanted straight from the cow, or the greater luxury of occasionally staying in bed until midmorning. She folded her hands, closed her eyes and bowed her head like her sisters.
Meditation had begun.
Meditation happened twice a day, in the morning before breakfast, and in the afternoon, immediately following Matins and Lauds. It was a time in which it was possible to get closest to God, but to do that one had to grow empty of
self
and full of His divine love.
It was while Sister Regina was attempting to empty herself of
self
that the three church bells began pealing in unison, signifying the beginning of life everlasting for Krystyna Olczak. At their celebratory note, Sister Regina’s head came up and her eyes opened. It was he ringing them, Mr. Olczak—but, oh, how could he bear it? They should not have let him; one of his brothers should have wrested the job from him and sent him away without subjecting him to this most dolorous duty. Oh my, how heartbreaking for a man who obviously loved his wife the way Mr. Olczak did, to
celebrate
her death. She pictured him, toiling at the ropes, and became filled with a mild form of outrage on his behalf, the second time that anger had menaced her that day. Once again she tried to free herself of it by reciting Holy Rule. Holy Rule said anger robbed you of sublimity and thereby held grace from flowing freely through you.
But she found it difficult to eradicate anger from her thoughts today. It felt good, and just, and deserved!
She spent the rest of meditation doing exactly what Reverend Mother had warned her not to do, questioning the why and wherefore of Krystyna Olczak’s death. She longed, during her moments of doubt, to discuss it with her grandmother Rosella, who’d had such a profound influence on her as a child. Grandma Rosella Potlocki had been the most deeply religious person the young Regina Potlocki had ever known. Grandma never questioned God’s will, as Sister Regina was doing now. It was Grandma Rosella who had been unshakably certain that it was God’s will young Regina become a nun.