Then Came Heaven Read Free

soon as he hits Browerville. That her purse?”
    They all looked down at it in Cy’s oversized hands. It was a little wedge-shaped white plastic affair with hard sides. Its handle had been broken in the accident, and its jaws skewed so the metal clasp no longer worked.
    Cy opened it and looked inside. He picked things out very gingerly, then set them back in with the greatest care: a clean white handkerchief, a rosary with blue glass beads, a pack of Sen-Sen. And a small black prayer book, which he examined more slowly. Stuck in its pages was a recipe for “Washday Pickles,” written on the back of an envelope, with the word  Mother  in the upper right-hand comer. A name was written on the front of the envelope with its canceled three-cent stamp and its simple address of  Browerville, Minn.  The same name was written on the inside cover of the prayer book, and on a social-security card they found in a small pocketbook that also held some school pictures of two little girls, and a dollar bill plus eighteen cents in change.
    Her name was Krystyna Olczak.
    ________
     
    Everybody in Browerville knew Eddie Olczak. Everybody in Browerville liked him. He was about the eighth or ninth kid of Hedwig and Casimir Olczak, Polish immigrants from out east of town. Eighth or ninth they said because Hedy and Cass had fourteen, and when there are that many in one family the order can get a little jumbled. Eddie lived half a block off Main Street, on the west side of the alley behind the Lee State Bank and the Quality Inn Cafe, in the oldest house in town. He had fixed it up real nice when he married that cute little Krystyna Pribil, whose folks farmed just off the Clarissa Highway out north of town. Richard and Mary Pribil had seven kids of their own, but everybody remembered Krystyna best because she had been the Todd County Dairy Princess the summer before she married Eddie.
    The children around town knew Eddie because he was the janitor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and had been for twelve years. He took care of the parochial school as well, so his tall thin figure was a familiar sight moving around the parish property, pushing dust mops, hauling milk bottles, ringing the church bells at all hours of the day and night. He had nieces and nephews all over the place, and occasionally on a Saturday or Sunday he’d prevail upon one of them to ring the Angelus for him at noon or six  P.M.  In truth, weekends meant little to Eddie; he had no such thing as a day off. He worked seven days a week, for there was never a morning without Mass, and when there was Mass, Eddie was there to ring the bells, most often attending the service himself. He lived a scant block and half from church, so when the Angelus needed ringing, he ran to church and rang it.
    The bells of St. Joseph’s pretty much regulated the activities of the entire town, for nearly everybody in Browerville was Catholic. Folks who passed through often said how amazing it was that a little burg like that, with only eight hundred people, boasted not just one Catholic church, but  two!  There was St. Peter’s, of course, at the south end of town, but St. Joe’s had been there first and was Polish, whereas St. Pete’s was an offshoot started by a bunch of disgruntled Germans who’d argued about parish debts and objected to the use of the Polish language in liturgy, then marched off to the other end of town with the attitude,  to hell with all you Polaks, we ’ll build our own!
    And they did.
    But St. Peter’s lacked the commanding presence of St. Joseph’s with its grandiose neo-baroque structure, onion-shaped minarets, Corinthian columns and five splendid altars. Neither had it the surrounding grounds with the impressive statuary and grotto that tourists came to see. Nor the  real  pipe organ whose full diapason trembled the rafters on Christmas Eve. Nor the clock tower, visible up and down the length of Main Street. Nor the cupola with  three  bells that