When he worked days, my father came home around the same time as Basia, Father carrying his lunch pail, my sister stepping from the school bus on her crutches. Most of the students on the special bus had polio and were in wheelchairs.
It was better when Walter Wozniak worked nights. Then Barbara, Basia in Polish, and I wouldn’t see him much. He’d go upstairs to sleep around four, which meant we had to be quiet after school, but at least he couldn’t steal from us. During the weeks he worked nights, my friends couldn’t play in the yard, and if they came in the house, they had to whisper the way my sister, Ma, and I whispered.
My dad had been a Great Lakes seaman. He spoke often about his first trip out of Superior. At seventeen, he’d worked on “the Black Gang” of the LaBelle shoveling coal. Just when Walter Wozniak as a young man had settled down enough to sleep after a four-hour watch with his crewmates, the bosun yelled “Rise and shine, you scum of the sea!” On the lake boats in those days, many jobs went unregulated. One day my father would shovel coal four-hours-on, four-off. The next day he’d clean engines with carbon tetrachloride in unventilated areas. A jack-of-all-trades, now he worked on land. By recalling the past, he tolerated the present.
Perhaps he wanted to steal our words so desperately because at the flour mill it was hard to speak to or to hear anyone. Besides, who was there to talk to? Bruno Slinker? Adam Zimski, the Polish displaced person who couldn’t talk because he was deaf and dumb? Another non-talker was Joe Bluebird, the Indian from Bad River. My dad thought that a man should be heard in his own kitchen when he was drinking a beer.
He sat in his T-shirt. As my sister set the table, Ma prepared cabbage rolls. Usually when I came in, I didn’t say anything. Father needed to talk, even if it meant telling us again about the grain elevators of Buffalo.
“But, Papa, let me tell a story,” my sister would say. She’d begin, “Once there was a princess—” Understanding it was no use, she’d give up. “Tell us how hot it was when you worked belowdecks. Tell us how the coal dust bothered you. Tell us about the bird that committed suicide.”
“I’ll tell that one,” Mother said. “Your great aunt was bitter. To hear her tell it, nothing had gone right for her. Now she had a parakeet named ‘Squawky.’ No one could stand to be around her but him. Whenever someone visited, she poked her finger into the parakeet’s cage and said, ‘Sing! SING!’ which sounded like ‘Zing! Zing!’ with her accent. Usually, a bird like that won’t stop singing, but even Squawky, brave as he was, turned against her one day, gave up, and dropped from his perch.”
With the story over, Father through with his beer, we ate supper. In October, the windows steamed up from Ma’s cooking.
So, this was the bird story. On the other hand, this is also the story of why a coal heaver on the Great Lakes ended up like he did. For the time being, everything will be about Walter Wozniak. Everything is Walter Wozniak, coal passer, millhand, forty-five-year-old Polish Club member. When he drank a beer, he looked in the direction of the flour mill. This was when he was on days and could keep a regular schedule for a week.
Understanding that no one’s perfect, there’s more to say about Walt Wozniak and the words we didn’t speak to him. Words were rain. Words were autumn leaves. When he insisted we listen to him, he must not have thought he was stealing. It was important that we knew he paid the bills and didn’t drink much in a hard-drinking town. Every few years he spent his vacation scraping and painting the house, the wooden extension ladder bowing as he climbed to the second story with a brush and a can of paint. Before I was big enough to take over, he shoveled snow, cut the grass, made sure the car ran, raked leaves, stoked the furnace, put up storm windows, attended Holy Name Society at church and Polish Club meetings when he could; and he walked a mile to and a mile back from King Midas five or six days a week so as not to get the car dirty.
He worked in the “roller mill.” You can see it from the highway. There are harder jobs. If you talk to “Bull” Milszewski or Ted Nowazinski, now retired, they’ll tell you about this. One loaded boxcars with sacks of flour for eight hours. The other blew grain dust from motors. My father had plenty to busy him. Sometimes for a couple of days, he’d run conduit through underground passages—Walt Wozniak beneath the mill with his flashlight and the conduit. When he was under there, I bet he thought about my sister and me.
Barbara and I had a speech problem. There were probably eight or ten words we couldn’t pronounce right. We’d outgrow this lazy speech, but it troubled our father when I’d say “tagger” for “tiger” or “tall” for “towel.” Barbara would say “Whenesday” for “Wednesday” or “which” for “witch.” “There’s a ‘which’ in the princess story, Father,” she said that afternoon at supper. “Witch,” the thief replied. He corrected Ma on one thing or another too. This isn’t to say he wasn’t a good man. Before he got sick, I’m sure he’d planned for our future during his shifts at the flour mill. Maybe it was the sickness that made him steal words or correct us, and so my mother, Basia, and I talked less and less.
Similar worries about raising children must have troubled the ore punchers on the NP dock, the car knockers in the railroad roundhouse, the welders at the shipyard, the lime plant workers, foundrymen, butchers, longshoremen, railroad section hands. Some drank away their problems. But would it have helped my father to go to the Warsaw Tavern? What would he confess there, that his family didn’t talk to him? Though living on land, he was drowning, and so he’d repeat to us everything he could about the LaBelle or the Frontenac, two of the lake boats he’d sailed on and that were now sinking from memory.
One day an owl had gotten into the engine room at the mill. This is a dangerous place which is why metal railings surround the machines and the main conveyor belt. Mice and rats have been crushed on the belt. Cats have died there. Hank Goering and the guys thought the owl had flown in through a front door that had been left open. “Things get in,” our father said at supper, “but I hate when it’s an owl. We’ve been taping around the windows and other places. We have to seal the mill to make it tight. Then we’ll shut down for fumigation.”
After informing us of this, he didn’t talk much. He went to his basement workbench to sit. Maybe he whispered to himself down there. Basia said she hoped someday to see a snowy owl. After that, she said only a few words; instead drawing in the sketch pad Ma had given her as I read in a book about birds.
The book must have had three hundred color portraits. Plates forty-three through forty-five showed thirteen kinds of North American owls. This is where I learned snowy owls breed “on the barren grounds and islands of the far north,” that “many individuals wander south in the winter to milder climes,” and that “heavy migrations are called ‘irrruptions’ and ‘Snowy Owl Years.’”
When my classmates went home for lunch, I walked to the bay to look for the owl. The mill stood on a long pier. Grain cars lined the tracks. Unless my father went into the office for something first, he entered the mill through the tall, gray engine room doors. The place had a vaulted ceiling, arched windows. Machinery pounded, belts spun. The man-lift carried workers to the upper floors and back. After the mill’s “sanitarian” had taped up his signs, METHYL BROMIDE IN USE, and set out his poison, the engine room would be still, except for the owl in the shadows.
When methyl bromide reacts with moisture in the air or grain, a colorless, odorless gas forms. The gas causes the lungs of rodents to swell as they struggle to breathe. My father saw a squirrel die in a grain bin after one mill shutdown. Now an owl was there, and the mill would close for the poisoning.
Joe Bluebird yelled at the owl to frighten it. My dad steadied a ladder for Mr. Goering. Over the noise of the machines, he said, “Get me the long pole from the loading dock.”
High on a ledge, white against gray bricks, perched the owl. Even with the pole they couldn’t reach it. “It’s too bad. It’s just too bad,” Mr. Goering said.
When my dad saw me, he asked, “Why aren’t you home for lunch, Tomasz?” Hoping to impress him, I pointed to the owl and said “biały, white” in Polish. “Come,” said my father.
With the boiler room doors closed to block the sounds of the engine room, we sat beside the coal pile where he gave me the sandwich from his lunch box.
“You’ll go hungry,” I said.
“Tell your mother to serve your supper as usual. We have to finish here. We shut down after this. Bring a candy bar for your sister later.” He gave me a nickel for the vending machine they had down there.
On the walk to school, I looked around for the owl.
“I know how to say ‘white,’” I told Sister Benitia when I got back. “But what’s the word for ‘whiteness’ and ‘snow’?”
When my father came in later, he didn’t want to be bothered in either language. Then the watchman from the mill called. With methyl bromide poisoning everything, the watchman, Joe Bluebird working overtime, wanted to know if he could go back inside to try once more to rescue the owl. “It’s too late,” my dad said. Then he said something I couldn’t hear. Too late for what? With the phone call over, he said, “If it snows tonight, shovel the sidewalk tomorrow, Tomasz.”
Later, my mother saw the light in Basia’s room. She and I were looking at the map of Poland. “Maybe that’s where the owl has come from. A lot of names start with ‘white.’ Biała Panieńska is ‘White Maiden,’ Biało Brzegi is ‘White Shore.’”
Basia read more about boreal owls. “Their love song has ‘a curious, liquid note, like ting, ting, ting, many times repeated.’ Another owl makes ‘a screeching ku-wee sound followed by a kind of whistling sound.’” With our father at his basement workbench and the heat registers shut in the room, we talked freely. As if such a thing is possible, we were inventing a language of owls.
So, this is the story of the two birds. “Sing. Sing!” our great aunt had said to one of them, and now the snowy owl. These owls “are some of the heaviest North American owls. The female may have a wingspread of over six feet,” I read. The language of mispronounced words my sister and I shared went along with the way father acted when he was getting sick.
“In winter, there’s so much white,” she’d say, lowering her eyes. My shy, quiet sister. On cold mornings, Mother lit the oven in the kitchen. As she braided my sister’s hair, Basia rested her legs on the open oven door. Yet still from my father no talk of the owl.
With Monday being like a day off for him because he didn’t report until the night shift, he could tell the stories he pleased, except none about an owl. No sooner did I ask about it than the subject changed.
After school, I searched by the ore dock and along the Nemadji River, places an owl could hide. Tomasz Wozniak in pursuit of his owl while his sister sat at home with her crutches and braces.
On these late fall days, my heart turned against my father who didn’t care that something so beautiful had died.
“It is father,” I told Basia. “On the phone, he was whispering to the watchman about how he’d poisoned the owl. He never talks about it because he’s guilty,” I said, quietly enough so that no one could hear.
My poor father. He’d come from northeastern Poland. Białystok, White Slope, lay on the edge of memory and was fading away like everything else. At least he remembered which shift he worked and remembered about grain weevils and flour beetles. He still remembered how the mill had shut down for fumigation.
On Basia’s name day, she recited how her patron saint had rejected the suitors her father chose for her, how she was imprisoned for converting to Christianity, how her father was struck by lightning, and how people have invoked Saint Barbara’s name during storms. In Polish households, a name day is sometimes more important than a birthday. From my mother and father on this day called Imieniny, she received a wool dress; from me, a set of colored pencils. We celebrated and sang “Sto Lat” to her. “May You Live To Be a Hundred.”
By then, the harbor was icing over. Not long and shipping season would end. Each day, she was impatient having to walk on crutches, impatient that she had leg braces. When he came home from the afternoon shift, my father’s hair and face white with dust, we could hear him cough. We heard him struggle for breath walking downstairs to the workbench. We heard him cough in the middle of the night.
“Why don’t you let me speak?” she asked one day. “You want to cripple me more than I am.”
“I want you to remember me,” he told her.
“If you don’t want to hear me, I won’t remember you.”
Before I came to the table, I looked out the pantry window. We could see the mill. Against the leg of the table, Basia tapped one leg brace. Finally, my mother said, “Eat, Basia.” But she couldn’t. Whenever she brought up the owl, my father corrected her.
“I can only say it ‘All,’ Father.”
“It’s ‘owl.’ ‘Ow-ul,’” he replied.
I wanted to stand up for her, protect her.
With him preoccupied, nothing came of this. My sister’s anger passed. We went back to the comfort of old patterns, watching TV, doing homework, attending Sunday Mass. Mother kept the house up. The bills were paid when they arrived, which was “the Polish way,” my father said. Everything was normal.
Day after day, Basia drew her pictures unless I interrupted her to remind her our father was the sanitarian. He’d never told us this, but I knew it as sure as I knew anything.
*
Once or twice a year, Mr. Goering needed him to return to work. The phone would ring in the pantry. Through the window, we could see if the mill was dark, which meant it had lost power and was down. Whenever Hank Goering called outside of working hours, my father instructed me to tell him he wasn’t in. With my dad signaling, “Say what you have to, Tomasz,” I’d blurt out, “He’s gone. He might be at my aunt’s.”
Mr. Goering knew I was lying. “Well, tell him to get down here.”
All this time, I was deciding how to punish my father, to steal my father’s words.
Though winter passed, the cold remained. June was still two months away when clouds sank low and the day grew warm. Dirt lay along the sides of the streets. Old newspapers and cigarette butts mixed with the salt and sand the city had applied during the winter.
At school, Sister opened the classroom windows. Though this far north, elm trees don’t leaf out until mid-May, the air was sweet with the smell of balsam poplars. How good the warmth must have felt to a man on the way home from work. Even the upstairs bedrooms, warm and stuffy for the first time in months, would feel good.
As my father read the paper, the sky darkened. A few days like this and I’d have to get out the lawn mower.
At seven-thirty, we heard thunder. Basia read in her Lives of the Saints how Dioscorus, the future saint’s father, was struck by lightning and turned to ash. Something would come of this strange night, I thought.
“Tomasz,” he said, “can you see the mill?” “The power’s out down there.”
“You better turn off the television then. We’re lucky to have power. Call upstairs to your sister. Tell her to come down. Are things secured outside?”
As lightning brightened the kitchen window, Father said, “Saint Barbara, help us!”
The phone rang. “Is he in? Is your father in?” Mr. Goering asked.
The kitchen light flickered. Basia said, “Tell him he’s out, that Father’s gone, Tomasz. There’s never been such a terrible night.”
I held the phone so that she could hear Mr. Goering. “I need to talk to him.
Tell Walt to get here right away. The mill’s down.”
As Basia watched me, dumbstruck, I didn’t soften toward my father. Mother raised her hands to heaven, said “Jesu kochanej,” and began to cry. As I turned into a thief of words, something I’d regret the rest of my life, I looked at Walter Wozniak, my father, and said, “He’s here. He’s here.”
He was gone a long time. We were lost without him, I thought. Mother lit holy candles. In the midst of the storm, the phone rang. Maybe it was Mr. Goering or Aunt Helen. Maybe it was my father.
Finally, the storm quieted. A fog settled in. I left my mother and sister. Where’s Tomasz? they must have wondered, Mother probably looking outside and upstairs. As I hurried under the Second Street viaduct out of sight of the house, I realized I’d never been outdoors alone so late at night. What had I done to Walter Wozniak?
When I saw the lights, I remembered how Father had worked twelve or thirteen hours that day at the mill plus all the worries about the storm.
If the power’s back on at the mill, he’s coming home, I thought. Though sensing I was near where the tracks split, the east tracks going to Ashland and the Upper Peninsula, west tracks to the railroad yard by the mill, I still wasn’t certain where I was. The fog obscured the switches, the boxcars, the railroad water tower. When he was hardly older than I was, my father had walked this way to the freighter LaBelle to sign on as a coal passer.
“Tomasz,” he said, my name softened by the fog. “Where are you?”
“Stay there. We’ll walk together. Your ma will worry, but we’ll be home soon.
What are you doing out?”
“I thought the lightning would strike you. I’ve come to say I’m sorry. I thought you’d be turned to ash.”
“I am ash. I’m very sick. I’ve been sick a long time. I’ve done nothing to protect myself. All these years at the mill and on the boats, there were no rules, or very few. When I fumigated grain, I got into the habit of not wearing protective gear, if there ever was any. Maybe it’s good you don’t see me. I’ve poisoned you. I’m poisoned. But listen how loud the creek’s running. You know that on the boats carrying grain to Lake Erie and Buffalo in these modern days, the pest control man puts out ‘wheat pills.’ He rigs up a fan system that spreads the poisonous gas around. Then he collects everything and climbs out of the hold, knowing that on the trip, grain pests will suffocate.”
My father went on without making sense. Every word was distilled from the rain, the fog, sounds of a night in spring. Pointing me toward the house, he said, “Help your sister. When you’re older, come here on nights like this to think of me.” “I don’t want you to leave us again. When you were gone, the lightning hit something close to the house. I don’t like when the mill’s down. I thought it was a sin telling Mr. Goering you were out all those times, but it’s not a sin because I did it for you. You have a right to say no to him, or I will say no for you. You’re tired. I’ve been little help to you.”
“Nic nie szkodzi . . . It doesn’t matter,” he said.
But it did matter the way I’d been. Now at least I’d returned something to him.
On that night, it rained again, gently. The night was strange and beautiful. If the neighborhood was awake, it would have wondered that something so precious could happen in the East End of Superior, Wisconsin, a father rescuing his son after a terrible thunderstorm. I wanted to be close to him, to touch his work shirt, anything now that I realized how important he was for working like this, for taking care of us. This is the Polish way.
The owl might have been the only creature out that night. In this story it has to be the snowy owl from the flour mill heading north above the creek. It will be best for everyone to read the story this way. Then whoever learns about it can interpret the owl as they wish. Probably some families, the Zatkos, the Moniaks, the Nikulas, and Codas, had opened their windows to let in the air. Maybe they were half asleep. Maybe they were muttering as in dreams. In the morning when the neighborhood smelled like balsam poplar, they would try to explain what they’d heard and seen. I doubt they saw what we did. We’d heard it fly above us.
“Look up there!” he said, as he took my hand and led me home.
As the book says, the very secretive snowy owl has a large wingspread. It was returning “to the barren grounds and islands of the far north.” My father had told the truth about the owl. All along, he’d insisted that it had escaped.
After that night, little by little my father grew worse. He’d leave his lunch pail at work or forget to bring the collection envelope to Mass. If you asked about the owl, he had to think for a moment.
*
His last escape occurred on an autumn morning a few years later when he left for work but got no closer to the mill than where the tracks split. We think he didn’t know whether to go on or to walk toward the LaBelle, which, in his mind, was loading iron ore at the NP dock. When the mill called, Mother went looking for him. She found him walking slowly along the bay. He said he was going to sea again.
This has been hard for me to tell. I’ve tried to portray Walter Wozniak as a strong man, a laborer who gave everything to the company that paid him. Despite ill health, he went to his job at King Midas to do what was asked. On Sundays, he attended St. Adalbert’s, stepping outside when his coughing got worse.
My father’s been gone for many years, years of great loneliness for me. I’ve worked hard and have a good job high up with Cargill, the grain elevator company. Basia lives with Mother in Duluth. I have my own house in Superior.
Late on foggy nights, I go to the place he told me to return to, down by the viaduct where the creek runs fast after a rain. I imagine him with his lunch box by the railroad shack walking toward me. I can’t escort him to the house because it’s no longer ours, but I escort him to the place in my heart that he never left. That’s the Polish Way. And each time he’s there, each time I miss him, Walter Wozniak of the Polish Club, Walter Wozniak of the St. Adalbert’s Holy Name Society, Wozniak the laborer, I say over and over in two languages, “Father . . . Father,” as rain and memory bring him back to me.
Emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, Anthony Bukoski is the author of seven short story collections, most recently The Blondes of Wisconsin (UW Press 2021). Born and raised in Superior, the city where his Polish immigrant grandparents settled, he is past president of the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Fraternal Aid Society there, the Polish Club.