Stone Upon Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

started calling him names, you little idiot, I’d never want a kid like you again! Not on your life!
    Afterward father had to sell off a calf to pay back what he owed at the pub. The only good to come of it was that the next day, when grandfather sobered up and he just had an awful headache, he promised father that when Poland got its independence back he’d remember for sure. There was still time. The fighting was still going on. Because without an independent Poland those papers weren’t worth anything anyway, and that was why he couldn’t remember where he’d buried them. But Poland got its independence and he still didn’t remember.
    Then he swore it would come to him when he was dying, because in the hour of death a person remembers their whole life. The person’s life stands by their bedside with a great book and says, I am Kacper Pietruszka, see all you’ve forgotten and all the sins you’ve committed, it’s written right here. You got crushed one time by that cart loaded with grain, you’d forgotten about it, but here it is. You never returned the sack of oats you borrowed from your neighbor Dereń, here it is. You wouldn’t give the Lord God your money that one time on Palm Sunday, here it is. And here are those papers you buried, right here on the first page. Written in the biggest letters in the whole book. But there was no way you could have remembered before the book was opened. Shall I read it to you?
    Father watched over him like a dog for three days and three nights when grandfather lay dying, he didn’t have a moment’s sleep, because for some reason grandfather wasn’t able to die. It even seemed he might get better, because that had happened once before, he got better after he’d been given last rites. Goddammit, he’d said back then, there I was thinking I was already dead, and I was just dreaming it. On the third day father dozed off for a minute and that was when grandfather died. Ever so quietly, as if a little fly had flown out of the house. So when father woke up he asked grandfather one more time:
    “So then, does it say in that book of yours where you buried them?”
    It wouldn’t have been right for father to be mad at a dead person, but he put on a funeral for grandfather that wasn’t the kind a father should have. The casket was made of pine boards that weren’t even painted, just varnished over. And the priest didn’t lead the body out of the house, but only from the church. And at the cemetery all he did was sprinkle the casket and the family with holy water, throw in a piece of earth, and leave, because father didn’t even want those few words said over grandfather’s grave, that’s how bitter he was. And for years afterwards he never once looked in on grandfather, though grandfather and grandmother were in the same cemetery and closeto each other, and he visited grandmother, but it was only mother and us grandsons that visited grandfather. He never gave money for a mass to be said for grandfather, mother had to do it on the quiet. And he never said grandfather’s name out loud. He would just give a sigh from time to time and say we could use more land than we had, because what was he going to leave to his four sons.
    And he kept digging. He dug at random, wherever he felt he should, because there was no one left to say to him, Not here. He dug in the barn, in the grain bins, in the cattle sheds under the mangers, round the wagon house, by the front door. He even wanted to dig inside the house, but mother wouldn’t let him. One time he dreamt that the papers were buried under the dog’s kennel, so he moved the kennel to the other side of the yard, then he moved it somewhere else, then somewhere else again. He must have moved it ten times or more, and he dug in each of those ten places, as if we had ten kennels and ten dogs. But we only had the one. And from having his kennel moved around the whole time the dog stopped knowing what he was supposed to bark at. So he