FROM PAIN TO PARADISE

I had bought some material a few weeks before for new dresses for Victa and me. On the first of September before I went to work I asked mother to go to Bristol to see if sister Maryanna would make the dresses for us so we would have them for September 7th. Mother promised to go, but after I went to work at six in the morning, the foreman went to mother asking her if she could come for two or three days to help with the rest of the haying. They were short of steady workers so he was gathering extra hands. He needed more help from the housewives to finish the hay because after September 8th it was beets and potatoes digging time.
So mother forgot the dresses. She thought for two or three days she would try to make a few dollars for herself as the extra hands got more pay per day, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon than the regular daily workers. The daily workers were also getting the use of some land to do their planting, whatever they wanted to raise.
Mother thought she would be home before me and I wouldn’t know that she was working. So she went to work.
A driver brought the workers on wagons to work and brought them home for lunch. The drivers started to race one another, who was going to be home first. The ones that kept to the road got home first, but Adam Petrowski thought himself smart and told his people to hold on tight and he would give them some ride! Before the people had a chance to protect themselves, Adam turned onto a side road - a shorter road home. But that was a forgotten and forbidden road to drivers.
That part of the forest had new trees planted there and strangers going through with their wagons were stealing the young trees, so the foresters were told to dig ditches across the road every few feet so the wagons wouldn’t be able to go through there.
But Adam wanted to have fun, so as he came to the first ditch the four horses were jumping over it and the first wheels of the wagon fell into the ditch. The hay ladder the people were sitting on broke. The younger folks came jumping out with twisted arms, broken ankles or some bruises and scratches, but my poor mother was forty-nine years old with her stiff spine from when she was hurt as a younger woman. She was in the middle where the ladder broke into the ditch and the back wheels rolled over her and crushed her ribs and her intestines. She was brought home unconscious.
When I came home at 6:00 p.m., I found the house full of villagers. When I was told what had happened and how it happened, I said,
“Oh, mother, why didn’t you listen to me this morning and go to Maryanna’s! You wouldn’t be suffering here now!”
I was told that the doctor was there. Pivnickis sent their horses to the city, Rypkin, for him. But the doctor said that there was no hope. If that was done in America, Adam would be punished for his murder. Here nobody questioned him for it. May God have mercy on his soul!
The next day, Pivnicki sent for the Priest of our parish. The Priest wasn’t home from his vacation yet. He was away for a month. There was no other Priest around during the week days, so Pivnicki sent for one to the city Rypkin. There were three Priests in Rypkin, but everyone was out on duty. The dopey driver didn’t know enough to wait for one, and came home without a Priest.
On September 4th at 1 a.m. mother died. Aunt Mary, Grandpa and Maryanna came to help. Maryanna and Victa made a dress for mother. Grandpa went to notify the church taker to ring the bell for mother at her funeral and see if the Priest was there to have a Mass for her.
Grandpa found out that our Priest just came back home, so Grandpa went to see him and asked the Priest to have a Mass. We wanted mother’s body in church through the Mass as people always have. The Priest asked if she had confessed. Grandpa told him she was killed, and the Priest wasn’t here and we couldn’t get a Priest from Rypkin. The Priest looked at Grandpa and said,
“Your daughter can’t be let into the church and can’t have a Mass because she wasn’t confessed.”