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Show 22 Helen in the Past Past Past This is how it was at the end. Stanley Pell didn't live in his house anymore, he haunted it. He was practicing being dead. He stayed in the basement and coughed and moaned. He walked like his feet were on the ceiling. He was nowhere except for his noise which was everywhere. He was through being anything but noise and he was almost through with that. He didn't even come up for supper anymore and his wife Esther didn't send anything down. It was getting hard to see that that's what everybody wanted. He got particularly noisy after supper, when your belly was full and your head empty, and that's why Helen liked to go out to the back yard to the pens and xxx feed the animals, throw fxx feed to the chickens and ducks, hold off the big male rabbits by the scruff while the females ate, feel the cats against her legs crying for garbage. "Watch the animals," Esther told her, "and you learn something." The worst part of feeding the chickens was finding the dead ones tufted and bloody in the corner of the coop. Esther, Helen's mother, came to America after her father worked himself to death in the Polish mines, except there was no Poland then, her birth certificate said she was Austro-Hungarian. She had an uncle who was the monsignor at the largest Polish church in Erie, Pennsylvania, Holy Rosary, and her mother sent her there to keep house for her uncle at the rectory and celebrate holy days v/ith the priests and nuns and have her marriage arranged to Stanley Pelkowski, a furniture salesman. Her mother sent her own wedding dress for the wedding and Holy Rosary had a celebration as big as Easter. V |