The Grave of God's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

sort of commotion. Most men knew that if they wanted to brawl, it was in their best interest to do so outside.
    Though the Silver Slipper was almost as inhospitable and dangerous as the steel mill, it was the only place where my father could go to see his brother, William. An undeclared but bitter war had been waged years ago between my father’s family and my mother, and though I was never told the reasons behind it, it was clear that this was why we were never allowed to see our relatives. When Martin was still a baby and I had learned that the other children in my school had cousins, I asked my parents if I had cousins too. My mother and father swapped a fast glance, then he stormed out of the apartment. Afterward, my mother pinched me on the arm and hissed at me, “Don’t ask those kind of questions. Do you want to start trouble?”
    I never raised the subject again. Once Martin was old enough to start wondering, I told him of the incident and warned him not to bring up our relatives. Normally, such a suggestion wouldn’t have been enough to curtail his curiosity, but something in the way I recounted the event must have convinced him that his questions weren’t worth the risk.
    To talk of family was forbidden in our house, though occasionally the topic would creep into my parents’ conversation. What I could glean from those exchanges was meager, a threadbare history patched together with scraps of dialogue and innuendo. For my mother, love and loss were synonymous. They could have been the same word. Her father had died during her youth. A heart attack sent him to his grave when my mother was just half my age.Then her younger brother, Stephen, died a year later of scarlet fever. Shortly afterward, my mother lost her own mother to pneumonia. The litany of loss spanned most of her lifetime. My mother would never speak of the deaths, not any of them, not to lament them nor to question them. I couldn’t help but think that God had turned against my mother, that He had forsaken her. But I had been taught that you didn’t have to be a sinner to suffer undue misfortune. That was simply our lot. Still, I wondered if it was luck or some other force that had conspired to keep the people she cared for from her.
    My mother had watched each member of her family consigned to a grave, then she had buried each of their memories along with them. Though all of my father’s siblings were still alive, his brother and two sisters, he saw his brother only from time to time and that was at the Silver Slipper, a place my mother would not normally set foot in. There seemed to be an unspoken deal between my mother and father—he could see his family as long as the rest of us didn’t. For my father, it was an unfair arrangement, but he agreed to it nonetheless.
    In those weeks that April after the little girl drowned, things had begun to change. My father hadn’t been coming home for breakfast. We would hear the mill’s whistle blow and wait for him at the table, our food growing cold, but he would not appear. My mother would tell us that he must have been working overtime and not to worry, to go ahead and eat without him. Martin believed her, but I knew better. The money my father spent buying drinks at the Silver Slipper was money that never went to buy groceries or to pay the rent, so in my mother’s mind, it was money lost. We had too little of everything to waste anything, not food,not clothes, not time, and, least of all, money. The fact that my father would spend even a nickel more than necessary was a slap in the face for all of the effort my mother put in trying to support us. Pawning her beloved painting was worse than if he’d quit his job altogether.
    “So where did it go?” Martin asked as we trudged through the alley toward the schoolhouse. He and I spoke in English when we were alone. Most other children did too, though not around their families. At home, everyone spoke Polish. In private, however, Martin and I chose