Chapter 19 Opening the Book

They opened the grave in the third week of June, on a clear morning, with the dew still on the new section of Sereno Fields, and they did the work in the family's own hands, which is to say Rocco and Sera and a man named Purcell who drove for the house and two retired sextons who had buried half of Brackwater between them and had come out of retirement for the day because the priest had asked, and it was a small crew and it moved slowly and no machine touched the ground. They opened the Trapani plot first, because it was the farthest from the gate and because Sera had insisted they open and close the two in the same morning so that neither of the wrong dead would lie apart another night, and under the Trapani stone they found a woman, and there were the remains of a woman's shoes and a woman's dress pin, and the two sextons, who had done this all their lives, stood back without being asked, and Rocco went down into the ground himself with his sleeves rolled and did the lifting, because he would not let another man's hands be the ones in that hole. Then they opened the Milazzo plot, and under the stone that had the name Assunta Milazzo on it there was a man, and there was a man's belt buckle and the buttons of a man's coat, and Rocco went into the ground again and brought him up, and the two sets of remains were laid in the two waiting crates, tagged, and for the first time in sixty years the tags matched the contents, and the whole work took the morning, and the light went from dew to noon the way it does in June, and at the end of it the two crates stood side by side in the shade of a maple, and the family stood with their hats in their hands, and nobody said a word. The whole of it cost fourteen thousand dollars, which was the cost of the two openings and the two removals and the two new boxes and the two new stones and the two new burials and the repair of both graves, and the money came from the sale of the Ferrona Avenue building, which the family had sold in May to a group that put small clinics in old funeral homes, and it had been a hard sale and a cheap one and it had cost the house its address and its chapel and its parking, and Rocco had signed it in the office with the pen his father had used to write the false line, and had then put the pen in his pocket and had never used it again. They moved the practice into a storefront two blocks north, in an old neighborhood that was coming back, with a plate-glass window and a small chapel behind it that held forty chairs and a light at the back, and Sera paid for the painting herself and would not be thanked for it, and on the new door they put a new sign, which was the third sign the family had ever had, and it said the family's name and the words funeral home, and it said nothing else, and there was no hand on it and no sons, and Sera had it made that way on purpose and Rocco did not argue. They paid Gaspare Sperandio in the office, on a Tuesday, with a check for the principal of the old note, nine thousand and change, and no interest, because there was no interest in the note that had ever been intended as interest, and Gaspare looked at the check for a while and then did the thing none of them expected, which was that he wrote on the back of it, above the line where he was to sign, the words for the ground of the parish, and he signed it and pushed it back across the table and said that his grandfather had put nine thousand dollars of the street's money into a coffee tin's children and had never once taken a penny of it for himself, and that the interest in the note was never his grandfather's and was never the Marzullos' either, and that he had come to Brackwater for the answer to a question and had got it, and did not need the money to be the whole of it. Rocco wrote the true line into the keeping book that night, in the new office, in the third volume with the red stripe, under his father's false line, in a hand that was not his mother's and not his father's, and he wrote the balance that had really been owed and the date it was really paid and the name of the man who had really received it, and then he wrote, below that, in the column that was for the names, the other two, Assunta Milazzo and Rosario Trapani, and beside Assunta's name the date of her removal and her reinterment in the ground her family had stood on and now stood on again, and above all of it he copied the note his grandmother had written on the first page of the first book in the year everything was new, in the old language, in her careful hand, the one word that meant a gift, and he drew a line under the whole account the way his mother had drawn lines under the sums she was sure of, and it was the first completely honest line the book had held in fifty-six years. Sera watched him do it. She had come to understand, over the summer, that the keeping book was not the family's ledger and not its record and not the truth about anything that could be counted, and that it was, instead, the only place the family had ever put the things that could not be put anywhere else, the empty amounts and the gifts and the lamp in the margin and the name of a stranger's child, and that a person who reads a book like that as a set of accounts has missed the whole point of it, and that a person who reads it as a set of accounts and finds in it one false line has found the smallest of its secrets. She said as much to Rocco, quietly, as he closed the book. "It was never about the money," she said. "No," he said. "It was never about the money. But the money was the part of it that could be paid." ---