Then Came Heaven Read Online Free Page A

spotted the red warning cloud from the fusee long before they saw the train itself. By now the cloud had stretched and drifted clear across the highway, stinging the air with its acrid sulphur fumes. The train, one of the little local freights, was only about twenty cars long, carrying hardware, grain, machinery, mail—hardly a deadly cargo, only the trappings of the ordinary lives lived in this peaceful rural area. They passed the caboose—even it had cleared the crossing—and paralleled the train until they saw, up ahead, on the shoulder of the highway, a gathering of vehicles: Constable Cecil Monnie’s Chevrolet, a truck from Leo Reamer’s D-X station, the sheriff’s car and Iten & Heid’s hearse. Browerville was too small to have a hospital, so when the need arose, Ed Iten used his hearse as an ambulance.
    As Father slowed down, Eddie stared. “It pushed her all this way?” he said, dazed. Then he saw his car, flattened and ripped and peeled off of the locomotive in sections. Beside the train a body was laid out on a stretcher.
    He left the Buick and stumbled through hip-high grass down a swale in the ditch, up the other side, with Father and Con close on his heels. The train was still steaming, its pressure kept up by Merle who would periodically climb up to read the gauges and throw another shovelful of coal into the firebox. The engine gave a hiccup, while across the tracks a herd of holsteins watched the goings-on from behind a barbed-wire fence. Nearer, the conductor, with his clipboard, stopped gathering accident data for the railroad company and stood in silent respect, watching the party of three arrive.
    Never again would Eddie Olczak fear hell, for on that day, during those broken minutes while he knelt beside Krystyna’s body, he experienced a hell so unfair, so unmerciful that nothing in this life or the next could hurt more.
    “Oh, Krystyna, K... Krystyna, why...”
    Kneeling beside her, he wept as the souls in purgatory surely wept, to be set free from the pain and the loss. With his face contorted, he looked up at those standing above him and asked, repeatedly, “Why? Why?” But they could only touch his shoulder and stand by mutely. “How am I g... going to tell my little girls? What will they d... do without her? What will any of us d... do without her?” They didn’t know what to say, but stood by, feeling the shock of mortality come to stun them, too, as Eddie looked down at his dead wife. He took the collar of her dress between his fingers. “Sh... she made the... this dress.” He looked up at them again, fixing on the pitiful fact. “D... did you know th... that? She m... made this dress hers... self.” He touched it, bloody as it was, while Father Kuzdek kissed and donned his stole and dropped to one knee to pray.
    “ In nomine Patris ...”
    Eddie listened to the murmuring of Father’s voice as he administered Extreme Unction, the same voice that had prayed their wedding Mass and baptized their children. He watched Father’s oversized thumb anoint his wife’s forehead with oils and make the sign of the cross on her ravaged skin.
    Krystyna’s parents came, and her sister Irene, and they clung to Eddie in a forlorn, weeping band, and fell to their knees on the cinders, keening and rocking while Eddie repeated the same thing over and over. “Sh... she was on her way out to your house to c... can pickles with you... that’s all she was g... going to do, Mary. That’s where sh... she should be right n... now. She should b... be at your h... house.” And they stared through their tears at the wreckage of the fruit jars strewn along the railroad tracks, reflecting the noon sun like waves on a lake, imagining her loading them in the car a couple of hours ago, thinking she’d be returning home that night with all of the jars filled.
    When they’d had time for weeping, Father gave a blessing to Mary, Richard and Irene, and the stretcher was borne through the ditch to the hearse,