Chapter 2 The Shed on Verri Street

The first Marzullo burial happened by accident, the way most of the good things and most of the bad things in that family happened, which is to say it happened because Gaetano was standing where someone needed a hand. It was April, and the frost was out of the ground, and he had begun to be known on the hill as a man who dug well and did not drink the wages. Purcell kept him on past the winter, and there was enough work that Gaetano had begun to bring Cirino up with him on the days the mill was short, and the two of them would come down at night with their hands raw and their boots heavy and split a loaf at a table that Nunzia had covered with a newspaper two weeks old. In the same boarding house on Verri Street there lived a family named Cusumano, a mother and a father and a girl who sewed. In the second week of April the girl's child came early and came dead, and the family, who had almost nothing, could not find a man to bury it for less than a price that would have taken the whole winter's rent. The mother stood in the hallway for a long time with her hand on the rail, working up to asking, and Gaetano watched her work up to it and could not stand to see her reach the end of the asking. He said he would do it. He did not know the price. He did not know the words. He said it anyway. A dead infant is not buried on the hill in the same ground as a man, and Gaetano learned that from the parish. Father Ilario, at St. Anselmo on the corner, was a thin old priest of the same country as the three of them, or near enough, and he told Gaetano, in the language they both could manage, that the child could be buried in the parish ground behind the church if there was a box. The priest said it without pity, the way one workman tells another the size of a job. So there had to be a box. Gaetano had never built a coffin. He had, in the old country, built a door and a table and a coffin for his own father, and if you have built those three things a coffin is not a fourth thing, whatever the trade pretends. He bought two boards of poplar at a yard down by the river, and he carried them on his shoulder up Verri Street the way he had carried everything in his life, and he borrowed the shop of a carpenter named Orazio, an old man out of the same war of the same country, who had a bench and a set of tools and no work to speak of, and who let him in without asking what the boards were for and then, when he saw, did not ask again. They worked the afternoon. The word for what they made sat in Gaetano's mouth for a long time before he said it, because in English the plain word for the box was the same as the word for the work, the whole trade, and he could not decide whether that was a country being practical or a country being cruel, and after fifty years he still had not decided, and he had stopped needing to. Orazio planed. Gaetano cut the joints and set the little panel and did the small, careful thing that no one had taught him, which was to taper the shoulders of the box so that it would look, if a person looked kindly, less like a crate and more like a bed. He did not know why he did this. He knew it hurt the mother to look at the plain raw thing and it did not hurt her to look at the tapered one, and that was enough reason, and it would be the reason he gave all his life for the only kinds of decisions he ever trusted. They carried it up to the house at dusk. The mother had laid the child out on the table, washed and wrapped, and Gaetano and Orazio put her in the box and put the lid on loose, because the priest had said the lid should be loose until the ground, and there was a moment at the door where the mother put her hand flat on the wood and left it there, and no one said anything for a while, and then she took her hand away and they went out. They buried her in the parish ground in the morning. For that work Gaetano was paid nothing, and for that work he was paid for the next forty years. The Cusumano mother told the story to the whole street, and the story, in the telling, was not about the child, whom she had lost and would always miss, but about the man who had not named a price. By the end of the month three other families had found their way to the room on Verri Street, and by the end of the summer Gaetano had bought the poplar for four boxes before anyone had asked him for one, and he had moved the tools out of Orazio's shop and into a rented shed in the yard behind the boarding house, a shed with a dirt floor and a tin roof and a padlock, which he regarded as the finest building he had ever caused to exist. Nunzia, who had a head for the money and a tongue she could hold, began to keep the account. She kept it in a school copybook, ruled and cheap, and she ruled it herself into columns with a straightedge and a pencil because the copybook was for children and did not have the columns a business needs. Down the left she put the name. Beside it the date. Beside that what was owed, and beside that what was paid, and across the bottom a running line that she added and re-added until it agreed. She wrote in two hands, the old and the new, because she was still learning the new one and a name entered wrong is a wrong that stays entered. When she could not spell a name she asked the person to say it again and wrote it the way they said it, and years later, when the book was thick and the ink had gone from blue to brown, a stranger reading it could have heard the whole street speak. She called it the keeping book, because in the old language the word for keeping and the word for holding on to are the same word, and she did not see any reason to give it a grander name, and neither did anyone after her. That first entry, in the spring of the year, was the child of the girl in the boarding house, and the line for what was owed was left empty, and in the place where the amount should have gone Nunzia wrote, small, in the old language, one word that meant a gift. Gaetano saw it that night and said nothing, and about it they never spoke, and both of them knew it was there. It would be a long time before anyone found that page a reason to be angry. But the book was the book, and beginnings are patient, and the page was waiting. ---