…spraying a fine white mist across the ceiling joists with a pump sprayer, while my grandfather knelt below him on the soaking floor, scrubbing a baseboard with a stiff brush and a bucket of bleach. The air was so thick I could taste it. Grandpa had no mask, no gloves and no goggles. He had a handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth, the kind he wore in the mines, and he was coughing into it in dry, ragged barks. Black speckles climbed the wall behind the washer like soot. I did not say a word. I ran down the last three steps, hooked both arms under his shoulders and hauled him up the stairs.
I got him out onto the back porch and sat him on the glider, and I held a bottle of water to his lips while he coughed until his eyes streamed. “Jessie,” he gasped, “you should not have come down there. It is not safe.” “Grandpa, that is exactly what I am saying,” I said. Uncle Frank came up the stairs behind us, pulling off his mask, with his sprayer still dripping in one hand. “Jess, would you relax,” he said. “We had a pipe burst in March. A little mold. Pop volunteered to scrub, and I am doing the spraying. Everybody knows bleach kills it.” I looked at the white mask on his face and at the bare face of my grandfather.
I asked the question that I had been holding for a year. “Uncle Frank, why did you not hire a remediation company?” He sniffed. “They quoted me six thousand dollars,” he said. “For a basement. I have a perfectly good father who is happy to do it for nothing.” My grandfather lowered his eyes. I realized, in that moment, how many weekends he had spent kneeling on that wet floor, breathing in the air that his son would not breathe himself. “Pop,” I said, “did you tell him you did not mind?” Grandpa nodded slowly. “I told him I did not want him to worry,” he whispered. “I did not want him to think I was too old.”
A bleach bucket left on a wet basement floor gave one granddaughter the weekend to bring her grandfather back to the church pew in Scranton.
I called an ambulance, though my grandfather argued, and I set out my terms on the porch while we waited. A licensed company would clear and treat the basement, and Frank would pay for all of it. The doctor bills that came from this would also be paid by Frank, every dollar. Grandpa would come to live with me and my daughter on the first floor of our house in Dunmore, in the room with the big window, and Frank would come to dinner on Sundays, with a clean shirt and a mask in his pocket, so he could remember what it was like to look at his father without one.
The paramedics listened to his lungs for a long time. One of them, a young woman with a braid, looked at me and said quietly, “He has been breathing in a lot of fumes. We are going to take him in.” Grandpa protested, but without any force. In the ambulance, he held my hand. “Jessie, I do not want to be a burden,” he said. “Your father always told me never to be a burden.” I leaned close and told him that being a burden was just another word for being loved by people who had the strength to carry him. He closed his eyes and, for the first time in a year, his cough eased.
The doctor at Moses Taylor Hospital kept him two nights. The scans showed irritated airways, nothing worse, and she told us the bleach fumes and the spores had made an angry combination. “Mr. Kowalski, another few weeks and we would be having a different conversation,” she said. My uncle stood in the corner of the room with his hat in both hands, and I saw his face go slack. Frank is sixty one, and he has always been the loud one in the family, but he did not say a word. When the doctor left, he stepped to the bed and said, in a cracked voice, “Pop, I am so sorry.”
Grandpa took his hand. “Francis, I did it because I wanted you to need me,” he said. “That is all. I am eighty six years old. A man who spent forty years underground, in the dark, loves to be of use in the light.” My uncle sat down on the edge of the bed and began to cry, openly, with his shoulders shaking. “I was cheap,” Frank said. “I did not want to spend six thousand dollars. That is the stupidest thing I have ever done.” My grandfather patted his arm, as if he were the one comforting him. I stood at the window and let them have the room.
The money consequences came quickly and in full. Frank paid for the remediation, which turned out to cost seven thousand, two hundred dollars, and he paid every medical bill without complaint. The company sealed the walls, replaced the joists and put in a dehumidifier. When they were finished, the basement looked like a surgical suite. Frank sold his motorcycle to cover the cost, and he told me he did not miss it. Every Sunday, he drove down to Dunmore with a pierogi platter from the church kitchen, and he sat beside my grandfather at the table, in a clean shirt, quiet and attentive.
In the name of Grandpa, Stanley Kowalski, who spent forty years in the anthracite mines of Lackawanna County, I started the Anthracite Lamp Fund. It pays for respiratory checkups, air filters, masks and licensed home remediation for retired miners and their families who cannot afford to fix their own basements. In the first year, we cleaned and sealed forty four homes. A retired miner of ninety, wearing oxygen tubes and a Scranton Miners cap, stood in his freshly cleaned basement and said, “Young lady, I have breathed worse air than this. But I never thought anybody would ask me to breathe better.”
On Palm Sunday, I walked my grandfather to Mass at St. Mary, the way he had done every morning of his working life. He moved slowly, one hand on my arm and one on his cane, and he stopped on the sidewalk to catch his breath and look up at the bell tower. The sun was bright on the old brick. His cough was almost gone. “Jessie, this is what I like,” he said. “Not the work. The walking.” At the church door, Uncle Frank was waiting in his good suit, holding the heavy door open with both hands. Grandpa winked at me, and we went inside together.