Then Came Heaven Read Free Page A

regimented everyone’s days.
    And nobody was more regimented than Eddie.
    At 7:30 each weekday morning he rang what was simply referred to as  the first bell:  six monotone  clangs  to give everyone a half-hour warning that church would soon start. At 8:00  A.M.  he rang all three bells in unison to start Mass. At precisely noon he was there to toll the Angelus—twelve peals on a single bell that stopped all of downtown for lunch and reminded the very pious to pause and recite the Angelus prayer. During summer vacation every kid in town knew that when he heard the noon Angelus ring he had five minutes to get home to dinner or he’d be in  big trouble ! And at the end of each workday, though Eddie himself was usually home by five-thirty, he ran back to church at six  P.M.  to ring the evening Angelus that sat the entire town down to supper. On Sunday mornings when both High and Low Mass were celebrated, he rang one additional time; then again for Sunday Vespers. And on Saturday evenings, for the rosary and Benediction, he was there, too, before the service.
    Bells were required at special times of the year as well: during Lent whenever the Stations of the Cross were prayed, plus at all requiem Masses and funerals. It was also Polish Catholic tradition that whenever somebody died, the death toll announced it to the entire town, ringing once for each year the person had lived.
    Given all this ringing, and the requirement that sometimes a minute of silence had to pass between each pull on the rope, Eddie had grown not only regimented, but patient as well.
    Working around the children had taught him an even deeper form of patience. They spilled milk in the lunchroom, dropped chalky erasers on the floor, licked the frost off the windowpanes in the winter, clomped in with mud on their shoes in the spring, stuck their forbidden bubble gum beneath their desks and wiped their boogers on the undersides of the fold-up seats whenever they forgot their hankies. Worst of all, right after summer vacation, when all the floors were gleaming with a fresh coat of varnish, they worked their feet like windshield wipers underneath their desks and scratched it all up again.
    But Eddie didn’t care. He loved the children. And this year he had both of his own in Sister Regina’s room—Anne in the fourth grade and Lucy in the third. He had seen them outside at morning recess a little while ago, playing drop-the-hanky on the rolling green playground that climbed to the west behind the convent. Sister Regina had been out there with them, playing too, her black veils luffing in the autumn breeze.
    They were back inside now, the drift of their childish voices no longer floating across the pleasant morning as Eddie did autumn cleanup around the grounds. Instead he listened to the whirr of the feed mill from across town. It ran all day long at this time of year, grinding the grain that the farmers hauled in as they harvested. Eddie liked the smell of it, dusty and oaty; reminded him of the granary on the farm when he was a boy.
    The town was busy. There were other sounds as well: from Wenzel’s lumberyard, a half block away, came the intermittent  bzzzz  of an electric saw slicing through a piece of lumber, and occasionally the rumble of the big silver milk trucks returning to the milk plant with full loads, their horns bleating for admittance. Now and then the southwest wind would carry the metallic  pang-pang  of hammers from the two blacksmith’s shops—Sam Berczyk’s on Main Street, and Frank Plotnik’s right across the street from Eddie’s own house.
    Some might disdain his town because it was small and backward, clinging to a lot of old-country customs, but Eddie knew every person in it, every sound lifting from it, and who made that sound. He was a contented man as he loaded a wheelbarrow with tools and pushed it over to the fishpond in Father Kuzdek’s front yard to clean out the concrete basin that had grown green with algae