第1章 The Hill Above the Water

Gaetano Marzullo came up out of the lower deck on the last cold morning of February with his collar buttoned wrong and his brother's hand flat between his shoulder blades, and the first thing he saw of Brackwater was not the city at all but the smoke of it, laid across the water in one long gray sheet that nobody had thought to take up. He had crossed with two hundred others in a space that smelled of tar and vinegar and the sleeping breath of strangers, and he had spent the crossing teaching himself four sentences in the new language, which he had bought off a man in the queue at the harbor for the price of a good knife. Two of the sentences he could still say. The other two the man had forgotten by the time the money changed hands, which should have told Gaetano something about the world he was stepping into, and did, though he was too grateful to notice it for a year. The gangway put them down in a crowd that moved the way water moves when a gate is opened, without anyone deciding, and the crowd carried the three of them past a shed where a man in a uniform wrote down names. Cirino gave the name. Gaetano gave the age, which he had rehearsed, and which was two years less than the truth, and Nunzia, who had said almost nothing since the coast of the old country had gone down behind them, gave her own name in a voice so low that the officer leaned over the page as though he were listening for a leak. Then the crowd let them go, and Brackwater took them in. They walked because they had been told the walking was free. The streets were gray and ran with melt, and the buildings put their shoulders together in a way no street in Roccalba had ever done, four and five stories of brick with iron balconies that looked like the railings of a great many small boats tied up together and forgotten. Above the doors there were names, in English, in gold leaf that the weather had gone at, and Gaetano read the ones he could and kept the others for later, the way a man puts aside an unfamiliar tool. A streetcar went past with a sound like a kettle dragging its chain, and the people on it looked down at the three of them without interest, which Gaetano found, to his surprise, a kind of kindness. Cirino talked the whole way. Cirino had learned, on the crossing, that a man who talks does not have to think, and he had been talking ever since, about wages, about a cousin of a cousin who had written a letter two years old, about the price of a bed and the price of a coat and the price of a wife. Gaetano let it run off him the way rain runs off a roof with a good pitch. Nunzia held the bundle of their papers inside her coat with both hands, and every block or two she touched her chest, the way a woman touches the place where she has pinned a brooch so that she can feel it is still there. They were to go up the hill. The hill was behind the streets, and the streets climbed toward it whether they meant to or not, and at the top, where the buildings stopped, there was ground, and on the ground there was a wall, and behind the wall there were stones. Sereno Fields, the drivers called it, and Gaetano, who had been told there was work in it, stood at the gate in the rain and looked at the rows. He had never seen so much flat. In Roccalba the dead lay on a slope you had to climb to, in family plots the size of a good kitchen, each with its little house and its photograph behind glass and its name chiseled in the language he had known all his life. Here the ground was level and regular, and the stones went away in rows to the far fence, small and pale and all the same size, and there were so many of them that the rain seemed to be falling on a field of low white teeth. It made a man small. He understood at once that this was a country that buried everybody, the rich and the poor alike, in the same bright rows, and that there would be work in it for a man who did not mind the wet. The caretaker was a Yankee with a bad shoulder named Purcell, who kept his office in a stone gatehouse that smelled of coal and wet wool and who looked at the three of them the way a man looks at weather he has decided to work through. "You dig?" he said. "Dig," Gaetano said, and held out his hands, which were a farmer's hands, flat and wide at the palm and used to stone. Purcell looked at them a while. Then he said a price, and Gaetano, who had rehearsed his sums, understood about half of it and nodded at the half, which was enough. The wage was for a winter of graves. Purcell handed him a shovel from the rack as though he were handing over a room, and Gaetano curled his fingers around the handle and found it was a good shovel, hickory and honest, and he was suddenly, stupidly grateful for a country that made a good shovel, and would say so to anyone who asked him for the next fifty years. Nunzia and Cirino went back down to a room they had taken in a boarding house on Verri Street, two rooms and a shared pump, and Gaetano stayed up on the hill with the shovel, because the ground had been booked and the ground did not care that he had crossed an ocean two days ago. The digging in February was not digging. It was a negotiation between a man and a lid of frost, and the first foot of it came up in slabs that rang on the spade like the lid of a box. Gaetano learned that day that the hill was old riverbed, sand under the frost and easy under a sand with — he worked and thought in the old language, and the thought was that the ground was a man asleep under a good blanket, and that a man could move a sleeping man's pillow if he was patient. He dug four feet before the light went. Purcell came out once to look at the hole, swung the lantern into it, grunted, and said something Gaetano took for praise, and it was not until years later, in a room full of men who would not have known a spade from a hat, that Gaetano confessed he had been sure in that moment that Purcell had cursed him, and had gone home happy anyway. What he remembered of that first evening was not the cold and not the hole. It was the view. The hill above the water ended the city at his feet, and at dusk the city lit itself all at once, the windows coming on in the rowhouses below the wall and the lamps along the river held up like a row of small promises on sticks. He could not see a single light he knew. On the far bank the mills put up their own smoke, and the smoke and the dusk and the river went the same color and were hard to tell one from another. Somewhere down in that flare of windows, in a rented room with a shared pump, his wife was warming her hands over a stove she did not understand, and in the language she did not yet speak. His brother would be telling her something that was not true and would be cheerful about it. And here he stood, on the highest ground in Brackwater, with a good shovel on his shoulder and a wage that would not cover one coat, and he was as near to the roof of his own life as a man ever gets, which is to say he could not see the shape of it from where he stood, and would not, for a long time. He said the names of the old country out loud, once each, the way you count what you have before a crossing, and then he went down the path to the street because the wind had turned and the graveyard was no place to stand and be sentimental, a lesson he did not have to be taught twice. Behind him the cold came down on the fresh earth, and the sand began, quietly and without malice, to freeze shut again over the hole he had made, and by morning it would be half closed. He had not learned yet what this city would ask of a man who came to it with nothing, though he was going to, and the learning would take the whole length of his life and most of a good shovel. He was going to learn it with the handle in his hand. ---