Stone Upon Stone Read Free Page A

own they have to pay for the whole thing on their own, with their own money. Even if you borrow from someone, they’ll suck the blood out of you afterwards, anything to make sure you don’t accidentally die before you’ve paid them back.
    Actually, the tomb alone might not have cost me all that much. But I’d a yen to have a vestibule as well. And a vestibule is almost a third the size of the tomb, and of course that means the cost is one third more. On the other hand, with a vestibule you can go in and turn around properly. The casket can be put in like it should be, not just shoved in there like a barrel of cabbage. The deceased isn’t being tugged about and twisted and shaken. That way people aren’t distracted from their mourning. And you can tell just from their behavior that this is for all eternity.
    Also, I had partitions built to make separate compartments, broad onesbecause I can’t stand being cramped for space, even in a tomb. Not like other people’s, where they’re all on top of each other like beetroots in a beet pit, on rails. Then they rot and collapse onto each other. In my tomb the deceased is slipped in like bread into an oven, and walled in, and at least in the next world no one’s going to come poking their nose in there. Because let me tell you, there’s no lack of people who’d be snooping around in there if they only could. There are eight compartments, four on top, four below. That’s how many I counted there ought to be in our closest family. Mother, father, Antek, Stasiek, their wives, Michał, and of course me.
    I didn’t include our grandparents either on mother’s side or father’s. They say grandparents are close family too, but it’s been so many years since they died. And they were buried just normally, in the earth, so the earth will have worked them over long ago. On top of that, the war mixed all the graves up in our cemetery, so it’d be hard to even find where they are. Today there’s probably someone else in their place.
    Besides, on mother’s side I never even knew my grandfather Łukasz or my grandmother Rozalia. Way back in the last century grandfather killed a farm overseer and had to run away to America. And he stayed in his new land. Apparently the overseer was a brute and he would make passes at grandmother, while grandfather wasn’t the type to take any nonsense even from the lord of the manor himself. One time when they were in the fields during harvest, the overseer patted grandmother on the backside. Grandfather grabbed him by the throat and squeezed him against the sheaves till his eyes almost popped out. To get his own back, the overseer counted two days less work when grandfather was mowing the barley. Grandfather couldn’t count, but he remembered every day he’d worked. He got furious. He grabbed the tally stick that the overseer wrote the days of work on, tore it from his hand, snapped it over his knee, and tossed it aside. How do you like that, you son of a bitch! Grandfather thought he’d taken revenge on him big time. But all the overseer did was laugh so loud the field rang. Andafter he was done laughing he said to grandfather, get the hell out of here! Without a second thought grandfather swung his scythe at the other man’s neck, and the overseer’s head went rolling all the way to the horses’ hooves. The horses took fright and tipped over a cart full of grain, and one of them broke its leg and had to be put down. The Cossack militiamen came; they turned the house upside down and combed the village from one end to the other, but grandfather was already on his way to America.
    For a long time he gave no sign, no one even knew he was there. It was only a few years later, when everyone thought he was dead, that he sent Grandmother Rozalia a few dollars and a letter. He wrote to say he wasn’t ever coming back to the village, and that he didn’t regret what he’d done, because at least there was one less villain in the world, so it was a