Chapter 15 Burying the Old Man

Salvatore Marzullo died in the last week of that April, three days before the man from the capital was due to arrive, which the family noticed and which no one said in front of the priest. He had gone down slowly, over three years, the way a strong man goes down, a little less of him each season and all of his mind to the end. He was ninety-nine. He had outlived his father by forty-one years and his sister by twenty-six and his wife by nine, and in the last months he had taken to sitting in the chapel in the afternoons, in the back, on the low chair, with the light falling the way he had designed it to fall, and he would sit there for hours without speaking, and the two women who came in to look after him had been told not to disturb him, and he had never once explained what he was doing and no one had ever asked him. Rocco did the work himself. There was never any question. He washed his father at the table in the prep room, in the gray light from the high window, and he laid him out in the good suit, and he set the jaw and closed the mouth with the thread, and he put the color back into a face that he had been looking at for sixty-nine years, working slowly, with the family in the room and himself not in it, exactly as his mother had taught him and his grandfather before her, and when it was done he stood back and looked at his father for a long time. What he saw was not the old man in the chapel chair. It was the man who had taken him into the trade at fourteen and had taught him that a family in grief will trust a man who is not afraid to sit in the silence with them, and who had, in the same voice and the same week, taught him to write a false line in a book and had told him it was a trust. Both of those men had been his father. Rocco had spent his whole life trying to keep the first man and not become the second, and he stood at the table with his sleeves rolled and understood that he had failed at exactly half of it, and that he would find out which half at the grave. The funeral was at St. Anselmo, which no longer stood on Verri Street, because Verri Street no longer existed; the parish had moved north to a new building in 1981, and the old church had been torn down for the spur, and the ground where it had stood was under a parking ramp, and the old parish ground had long since been moved to Sereno Fields, in numbered lots, by the family's own hands. So the mass was said in the new church, by the priest who had written to Rocco about the registers, and Rocco noticed the priest watching him through the whole of it, with the kind of patience that a man learns when he has been set to reconcile two sets of records that do not agree. The church was not full. It was fuller than Rocco had expected, which is the way a reputation is tested at the end, and the people who came were the ones anyone would have named and a good many more who no one would have. There was a woman in the back pew who had been a girl in 1963 and whose mother the family had buried out of the old front room. There was a man from the mill, ninety years old, in a wheelchair, who had been carried up the hill at his own wife's funeral by Gaetano Marzullo in 1929 and had come to repay the favor in the only coin he had left, which was attendance. There were families whose names were in all three keeping books, and there were families whose names were in none of them, because they had never paid, and Nunzia had written their lines and left the amounts empty, in two languages, for sixty years, and no one had ever collected. Rocco gave the eulogy. He wrote it the night before and threw it away and spoke without it, and what he said was short, and what he did not say was the whole of his inheritance, sitting on the desk at the office, closed, for the reading. The reading was two days later, in the front room of the house on Ferrona Avenue, with the family's lawyer, a man named Purcell who had gone to school with Rocco, which is to say almost the whole of Brackwater's old business was in that room and had been for three generations. The will was short. The building and the business went to Rocco. The house went to Rocco. There was a bequest to Sera of the contents of the keeping books, which the lawyer read out and did not understand, and which Rocco understood at once, and which meant, in the plain arithmetic of the family, that the books were to pass out of the house that kept them. And there was a codicil, added in his father's hand in the last year, when the hand had started to go the way his mother's had gone, and the codicil said that the house was encumbered by a note held against it, of long standing, and that Rocco was to do as his conscience directed and not as the paper required, which Rocco read three times and then folded and put in his jacket and did not discuss, because it was not the kind of sentence a man reads out loud in a room with a lawyer in it. That evening the man from the capital came to the house. Gaspare Sperandio was a man in his sixties with his grandfather's stillness and none of his warmth, and he came in without apology and sat in the front room and put a book on the table, and the book was Don Placido's own, the one from the safe behind the grocery, and Gaspare opened it to the autumn of 1951 and turned it so that Rocco could see, and there was the note, in the old man's hand, for nine thousand dollars, entered and never struck, and beside it, in a different ink, a small annotation that Don Placido had made years later, when he was dying, which said only this: the boy will decide. ---