Chapter 9 The Expressway

The city came for the block in the spring of 1963, and it came the way cities come, with a map that had already been decided and a meeting that had not. The plan called it a spur, a new road from the mills down to the new bridge, and it was going to run, if the plan was followed, along the grain of the old streets, which meant that it was going to take the west half of the four blocks of Little Roccalba, which meant that it was going to take the church, the parlor at 114 Verri Street, and a good deal else. Salvatore heard it first from a customer, who heard it from a cousin, who worked in the building where the maps were drawn, and by the time it was in the paper the whole street had known for a week, and there was a meeting at St. Anselmo in the school hall, and eleven hundred people came to it, and it did not matter, and everyone in that hall knew that it did not matter, and they came anyway, because that is what a neighborhood does when the thing has already been decided, and because a man wants to be able to tell his children that he was there. Salvatore was at the meeting. He was forty-three and he had the hearing of a man who runs a business, and he heard two things in that hall that night that most of the people around him did not hear, because he listened the way his father had learned to look at ground, which is to say he listened for where the work was going to be. The first was that the road was going to disturb ground, and the disturbed ground in that part of the city was full of the dead. There were three old burial grounds in the way of the spur, one of them the old parish ground behind St. Anselmo, where the poor of the parish had been laid since the first men came down from the hills, and the city was going to have to move every one of them, and pay somebody to do it, and do it in a way that would not put the widows in the street with their hair down. The second was that the church did not have the money to pay for a thing like that itself, and the city, for its own reasons, did not want a contractor from outside the parish to come in with a trench machine and a crew of strangers and start lifting the neighbors out of the ground. There had to be a man of the parish to do it. There had to be a home, a known door, that the families could come to with their questions and their rage, and that could keep the record straight, and that could say, at the end of it, that a person had been moved with their name on them and would be moved back with their name on them, and be believed. Salvatore walked home from that meeting in the dark along the doomed half of Verri Street, past the Puleo fish stall with its shutters down, past the shoemaker, past the grocery with the room behind it where an old man had once opened a safe to show a boy what a life looks like, and he was not thinking about the dead. He was doing arithmetic. Three grounds, twelve hundred graves, some in boxes and some in the old way without, removal, reinterment, the re-boxing of what had gone to pieces, the new plots at Sereno Fields, which the cemetery would sell the family and the family would sell the parish, the whole of it flowing, for one year, through the one door on the street that could carry it. It was more work than the home on Verri Street had done in the previous ten years put together, and he had a cold board and a new engine and a sister who could put a stranger's face back together, and he had, that spring, a building that the city was going to take from him whether he liked it or not, and a loan against that building that he was, if he was honest with himself in the dark walking home, not at all sure he had been paying as fast as the book said. The contract came together over that summer, in the parish house and in the front room at 114, and it was the strangest instrument any of them had ever put their name to, because it had two faces. On the city's face it was a public contract for the removal and reinterment of the parish dead. On the parish's face it was a promise that the neighbors would be lifted by hands they knew, in a year that was going to be hard enough without strangers standing in the ground. Father Damiano, who had taken St. Anselmo after the old priest died, sat in the front room through most of the summer with a pencil and a list of the graves, and he and Salvatore went over it a line at a time, because a church record kept in two languages by three hands over sixty years is not a list. It is a rumor with a date on it. There were graves on the parish ground whose stones said one name and whose church record said another, and there were stones with no record at all, and there was one man, Father Damiano said, who had been buried twice in the space of a year because the family had changed its mind about the ground, and nobody could now say for certain which of the two holes held him. Salvatore listened to all of it and made his own list, and his list had a column the priest's list did not have, which was a column for the cost of a proper removal as against the cost of a rushed one, and the difference between those two numbers, multiplied by twelve hundred, was the whole of the year's profit and the whole of the year's risk, and he kept that column in his head and did not write it down, and it was, in the end, the only column that mattered. They agreed to do the removals in numbered lots, one ground at a time, with a crate for each set of remains and a brass tag stamped with the number, and the crates to be stacked in the back of the old shed behind 114 until the new section at Sereno Fields was ready to receive them. There was a clerk at the city office who had to sign each certificate, and the clerk's name was Natalino Cusumano, and he had grown up three blocks over and had gone to the parish school with Salvatore and had once been owed money by him. The two of them met that August in a room with a fan and a single window and shook hands like men who were going to be seeing a great deal of each other. He stopped at the corner and looked back at the sign, which the streetlight had picked out of the dark, MARZULLO & SONS, and the painted hand under it, gone dim with weather, and he thought that a man's whole life can turn on a single dark street if the arithmetic is good and the door is open, and that this was the year the house had been waiting for, even though it was the year the city was tearing the street down around them. He did not yet know what it was going to cost, or who would pay it, or that the price would be taken out of a page in a book in a woman's careful hand, in two languages, from a column that had never been meant to lie. ---