Time Between Trains by Anthony Bukoski

Author:Anthony Bukoski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
Published: 2011-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

After the first hour of stripping paint, he realized the job was bigger than he thought. The confessional seemed larger without curtains. It had been built big to accommodate the gruff workers with mortal sins needing confession and absolution—railroad car knockers, ore punchers, sailors off the lake boats, millhands guilty of terrible deeds.All those years of sinning. He worked for another hour with cloth and scraper, then, cautioning himself to slow down, reminding himself he was retired, he sat awhile in the priest’s side of the confessional. He recalled some of the parishioners who’d knelt to confess: Mrs. Pilsudski, Michael Zimski, the Milszewski boy with a Purple Heart, Louie Ste-fanko. He recalled how rarely Mr. Zielinski observed the Fourth Commandment, how it was whispered that Mr. Dzelak was remiss in areas of life covered by the Fifth Commandment, how Mr. Marsolek, Mr. Novazinski, and Mrs. Petruska, the school teacher, were remiss in the Sixth Commandment. As though someone were in the garage to hear him, he called out his parents’ names as among the sinners. What a silly thing, to sit alone in retirement and say names aloud to yourself. He repeated relatives’ names, repeated his own and his wife’s names, but when he said “Mother” again, as though asking her something he’d wondered about, he broke the stillness in such a way that he felt it would be better to leave the confessor’s center part to kneel in one of the penitent’s boxes. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . . ,” he said and began, as a kind of Examination of Conscience, to retell the passions of his and his mother’s lives.

He remembered her in the kitchen years before saying, “Do it for me, Joseph.” Over half a century earlier, he’d knelt in the back pew of St. Adalbert’s Church and wondered, “Have I neglected my parents in their necessity?”

“Dad says no. I’m not supposed to go to the drugstore for you. He says the stuff makes you sick and crazy.”

“You can do it for me,” she implored. He was nine, ten perhaps. Life had passed so quickly since then. Now he himself was old.

“For me, Joe. Run an errand for your mom. Sure, you won’t mind doing that.You’re a good boy.”

It was a fine afternoon this time she’d wanted her Asthmador Powder. He was on his way to play football with the neighbor boys. “Just take your bike and run an errand to the drugstore for me,” she said.

“No, I can’t, Mother.”

Why she hadn’t pulled on a sweater and walked to the store herself, he couldn’t understand. “Please, Joe, go after it for me?” she asked again. “Then deliver this note to Mr. Mrozek.”

How blue the sky was back then but for that slight smoke haze in the distance. Every autumn, people set fire to their vacant lots and fields and burned their piles of leaves.

Now, not so many years later, needing to leave the confessional, he decided to rake leaves beneath the apple tree for an hour.

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