The Cold Wave, 1958

by Brett Rutherford

i

Slept on a church pew, walnut-hard
close enough to the still-hot radiator
she could roll up her thin cloth coat
to pillow her head. She licked cracked lips;
her numbed toes finally warmed. Three days
below zero and no sign of better to come!
She dreamt of a steam-hot kitchen, turkey
baking as in those long-gone Thanksgivings,
Charles and LeRoi anticipating
how much stuffing and sweet potatoes.

Lights red, lights blue, lights amber gold,
not from the Christmas tree past but from
the stained-glass morning sun-up
warming her face, oh! just an hour,
an hour longer rest; no one would know
how the unlocked Methodist Episcopal
had been her hotel for one night only.
She’d wash up in the bathroom below,
then come back up and give a nod to Jesus,
thank him out loud before she tip-toed
out to frozen ice-pack of sidewalk.

After what seemed only an eye-blink,
the windows were brighter, hotter,
and a hand poked at her shoulder
rudely. “Ma’am,” a man’s voice,
low like summer thunder on the hills’
other hollows, rumbled, “Ma’am, wake up."
Cora sat bolt upright, one hand tugged
down her long black skirt, the other across
her bosom, sliding away from where
the unwanted hand had prodded her.
The man’s form changed, dark silhouette
to sun-paint, his white skin mosaic’d red
and blue and gold. His name was Ernest.
She knew him, and sometimes she mended
the clothes his mother brought over,
piecework she did for many in town.

“Ma’am,” he told her, “You can’t be sleepin’ here.
It’s not allowed.” “Hmm,” she muttered, and took
the coat and slowly unrolled it. She rose
to bundle herself back up for the winter air.
“I don’t mean to be a bother. I —” She stopped
as Ernest suddenly backed away. He saw her face.
He didn’t know her at all. Of course we are the same
and all alike to them, she thought. And then he did
the thing with his nose, that testing-the-air twitch
to see if you smelled funny. No matter
that Charles always told her no lady
had ever smelled so nice as when
she morning’d him with her rosy air.

“I’ll get in trouble if the pastor sees.
You’d better go down and out the back, now.”
He pointed. He looked at his watch.
His teeth looked to chatter squirrel-like.
“I’ll be on my way, Mr. Ernest,”
she answered him. “Just let me give
a nod to the Lord, and I’ll not trouble you.”
Before he could protest she reached the altar-rail,
looked up in awe at how the morning light halo’d
the sad Christ, while red-glow dabbles
daubed his wounds and nails that put them
in hell-light. He may have fed five thousand,
but a house and a warm bed were something else.

ii

She had to walk slowly. Loucks Avenue
was piled with snow. One narrow way
had been shoveled and tramped to some
resemblance to a foot-path. Somewhere beneath
the hillocks of snow were peoples’ cars.
Her shoes slid this-way, that-way; she tumbled
sideways more than once until Broadway
where she could walk the roadway.
Few cars were out, and let them make way
for her instead of she for them. She was
seventy, and seventy should have at least
the right of way on a Sunday morning.

Nothing was warming up. Trees groaned
as they tried to gird themselves in
against the killing cold. Her thoughts
in the mile she’d have to walk, were on
the sun that would soon pain her eyes
as it slid its low path into noon-time.

That sun might warm her house a little,
she reasoned. And there was one last plan
to get her through the cold spell. But first
she had to tread the long walk of mill-fence —
nothing shoveled, no path except the road —
along the smokey factory that made long tubes
of shiny metal that filled the rail-cars, day
and night of pounding and grinding, lights
on and off at all hours. Coal, coke
and the working of the earth’s metals were all
that this town was about. Charles had worked,
until the black lung killed him, one mine
and then another and another, always
the parts of the mines the white men avoided.

Charlie and the Negro gang worked side
by side with a bunch of Hungarians, almost
as much despised for their one-off language,
their dark-eyed pride and intransigence.
Just to defy and baffle their bosses,
some of the Negro miners learned “Hunky talk,”
enough to joke and drink together, enough
to be able to fool the foreman and warn each other
when something too dangerous was asked for.
She went along. The Hunky women didn’t like it
when she learned a few words on her own
and Charlie and the Kovacs and she
would laugh and pass a bottle amongst them.
But that was before …

iii

Over the bridge and past Caruso’s, the store
that gave her credit and saved her more
times than she could count, then up the hill
to her own steep-stepped house she went.
In through the unlocked door, into the kitchen.
Lightless, heatless, her breath went icy
the moment she got inside. It was colder here,
for she had covered up the window so wind
would not get in, but neither did the sunlight.

No matter. She had her plan, the one
that came to her just as she awakened.
She only needed a little coal. The furnace, dead,
would never come to life until a truck came,
filling the chute below with welcome fuel.
But the coal stove would do, and huddled near
she could get through the day. Tomorrow’s mail
might bring the cash that LeRoi sent
each month from his pay in far-off Korea.

This was pride swallowed, her pride of home
and of needing nothing, ever, ’cept what folks paid
when she helped them out, or sewed, or watched
a baby that needed minding. Now she, Cora,
would beg from door to door. The neighbors
would hear her bowed voice a-tremble and ask
for just a bucket or two of coal. That’s all.

She lifted the bucket. She opened the door.
Five houses this side of Kingview Road, five
on the other side. That ought to do it.
They must all be home. Smoke rose black
from every chimney. It wasn’t as though
she was really begging: the loan of some coal
was all she would ask, and then she’d pay
it back when the delivery came. That’s all.

Knocked on one door. They yelled inside,
argued on who should answer her knocking.
Man’s voice bellowing, woman in turn.
Two lions in a cage would have been quieter.
She knocked again. Lace curtain parted.
Two eyes regarded her from shadowed parlor.
Then from behind those eyes, the man
called out, “Get off our steps! Go on!
Whatever you’re selling or preaching,
just go away!” She turned and sighed.

At the Polish neighbors’ home, despite
the puffing chimney, there was no answer.
They went to Mass early, she remembered.
They would be back, confession-clean,
but not for hours to come. She tried
another door, the old widower’s, but no,
he didn’t answer, either. The bottles piled
along the porch floor told a dead-drunk tale.
He might not rouse himself till after noon.

Her feet gone numb again, she knocked
at the Kovak house. Charlie had worked
with their father until the explosion
made Mrs. Kovak a widow, her sons
into angry orphans always in trouble.
Now Cora smiled as someone came running
for she had a way in mind to reach out
to the reclusive and suspicious widow.
It was the younger boy who answered.
He had just got out of bed; his hair
was awry in every direction; he rubbed
his eyes and tried to make out her face.
“What d’ye want,” he asked her angrily.
“Let me talk to your mother, please.”
He shrugged and walked away. She waited
and felt the rush of warm air from the open
doorway. The disheveled mother came.

She spoke almost no English, after all these years!
“Mit akarsz?” she demanded, closing the door
so only her head and shoulders stuck out. —
“I am your neighbor, Mrs. Kovac.” She paused,
then sorting her memory of the old days,
“Szomszéd. Neighbor.” — The woman started.
“Mit akarsz?” she asked again. What do you want? —
“I am Charlie’s wife. Charles felesége. Szomszéd.” —
The woman held out her hands in consternation.
Cora raised the empty bucket. “I need some coal.
Van … szén?” — Then Mrs. Kovac backed away.
The door got wide again. An older boy 
came up behind her. He had a stick.
He slapped it against his open palm. “Some coal.
Van … szén?” Had she forgotten everything? What word
would make her message clear except, “Please, please?”
There it was: the word. “Kérem. Van szén?”
The door slammed shut. At five more houses,
there was no one present, or everyone pretended
to be somewhere else, intent on television.

Cora sat in the kitchen. She wrapped herself
in a blanket, tied rags around her feet to keep
the frost at bay. She’d seen a movie once
where they broke up the furniture to feed a stove,
but she didn’t know how to do that. Two hands,
at seventy, frost-bitten and without a hammer,
what could she do? Would the neighbors talk?
Would they come around at last when they realized
she was there alone with no light or stove or coal?
Did the Methodist Episcopal Jesus care?

iv

I was ten years old when the police came,
and then an ambulance, and there she was
on a stretcher, the bundled-up frozen woman.
The door had blown open; the mailman found her.
Neighbors flowed out of their homes like wax
atop a fast-melting candle. All bundled up
against the cold wave, the word balloons
above all their comic-book faces repeated:
She froze to death. She froze to death.
          She froze to death.

One voice opined, “How could this happen here,
right in our midst, right on our street?”
“She was too proud to ask for help”
          someone else offered.
The new word-balloon passed among them.
It was taken up as an anthem, too proud, too proud
to ask for help, of course we would have helped.
Too proud, too proud to ask for help.

And then the little Hungarian boy called out,
“But there was a Negro lady asking for coal.
I saw her. A Negro lady asking —”

A hand reached out and covered his mouth.
The crowd went on murmuring
          until the ambulance was gone.
As the last door to the last house closed
the word-balloon lingered, one cloud
over all the chimneys, lettering
She froze to death. 
          She froze to death.
                    She froze —

 From the forthcoming book, The Pumpkined Heart: The Pennsylvania Poems.