第10章 The Woman in the Wrong Ground

The removals began in October and ran through the winter, and for four months the yard behind 114 Verri Street was full of crates, and the whole four blocks could see over the fence what the family was doing, and the whole four blocks, in the way of that neighborhood, approved, because the dead were being moved by their own. A removal is not a burial run backward. A burial puts a whole thing into the ground and covers it. A removal goes down into a grave that has been settling for twenty or forty years and takes out what the ground has left, which is not always a body and not always a box, and the work of it belongs to the trade's least talked-about room. Some came up whole. Some came up as bones and a little of the wood. Some came up in the shape of a cross, because the ground had collapsed in the middle and the sides had held, and some did not come up at all except as a smell, and the men worked in the wet with the tags and the crates and a list, and Salvatore walked the rows of the parish ground every day with the priest's list in his pocket, checking the numbers off, and Filomena did the work of opening and re-boxing at the shed with Bastiano Vultaggio, who had driven the hearse for the family since the war and who could carry a crate on his shoulder up a ladder in a rainstorm, and who never asked a question about anything he saw in that shed, and who was, for that reason, trusted with the whole of it. The mistake happened in the last week, in February, in a hard rain. Two crates were moved out of the shed on the same evening, one for a woman named Assunta Milazzo, who had died in 1941 and whose family still lived on Verri Street and still came to the fish market, and one for a man named Rosario Trapani, who had died in 1934 and whose family had gone to the suburbs a decade since. The tags were brass, and the rain was heavy, and the tags were, for an hour that evening, in one man's coat pocket instead of on the crates, because Bastiano had taken them off to keep them dry. When they went back on, in the shed, under a single bulb, one of them went on the wrong crate. Nobody knew. They were buried in the new section at Sereno Fields in the spring, in the two plots the families had bought and paid for, the Milazzos under a stone that said Assunta Milazzo, the Tapanis under a stone that said Rosario Trapani, and the certificates went to the city office and were signed, and the whole thing was done and the sheds were cleared and the street went back to the ordinary business of dying one at a time. Salvatore learned of it in June, from a confession that was not a confession. Filomena came to him one evening in the front room and closed the door and stood over the table and said that there was a thing about the Milazzo removal that she could not put down. She had kept the shed lists, because she kept everything, and she had begun, in the spring, to put the job in order in her own hand, the way she did with everything, and the numbers did not agree. The number of crates that had gone out of that shed in February was one thing. The number of removals on the certificates was another. She had gone over it four times. She had gone out to the new section and stood at the two stones. And she could not prove it, and she was not going to say it to anyone but him, and he knew, she said, looking at him the way she looked at a face she was about to set, he knew what she was saying. He did know. He had known for a month, though not from the lists. He had known because the undertaker's apprentice from the Puleo house, who had a girl in the cemetery office, had come to him in May and told him, as a piece of gossip, that the new section was full of talk, that somebody had come across two certificates that did not match their plots, and that the city clerk, Natalino Cusumano, had been seen that week going over the burial files for 1963 with a lamp on his desk after hours. Salvatore had done nothing with that information, and had told no one, and had gone on arranging funerals and paying wages and carrying the debt of the house on his shoulders, and he had been waiting, in a way he would not have admitted even to himself, for the thing to come to him, so that he would not have to go to it. Now it had come, in the shape of his sister, standing over the table with the sheds' lists in her hand. The honest thing was to go to the Milazzos and the Tapanis and tell them, and to open the two graves and put the two right, and to pay for it, and to take the shame in the street, which would not have been the end of the house. The neighborhood had forgiven worse. It was a neighborhood built on the forgiveness of worse. The honest thing cost money that the house did not have, because the rotation of the contract money had gone into the new building that Salvatore had already bought on Ferrona Avenue against the day the city took 114, and because the Society's loan, which he had cleared in the book, was not cleared in fact, and there was no room anywhere in the arithmetic of that summer for a stone rolled back and another put down and two families asked to begin their grief in a new place. He sat down across from his sister and did not look away from her, and he made her a promise he did not believe, which was that he would put it right, that it needed doing slowly so that it did no harm, that the Milazzos had a wedding in the fall and the Tapanis had troubles of their own and there was a time for a thing like this and it was not now. He said it well. He had learned to say things well, from the room and the good chairs and the coffee, and he watched his own words go into his sister the way he had watched them go into a hundred grieving families, and he saw that she did not believe them, and that she was going to let him, for now, because the alternative was to carry the thing herself into the street. She stood there a moment longer with the lists in her hand. Then she put them on the table and left them there, and went back to the prep room, where there was a woman from the south end waiting to be finished, and she closed the door behind her, and she did the work, and it was, by all accounts, the best work she had ever done. Salvatore sat alone with the lists. Then he did the two things that would bring the past forward in time to find him. He wrote to Natalino Cusumano and asked him to supper. And when that was arranged, he took down the keeping book, the third volume with the red stripe, and he turned to the page where the Society's loan was written in his own hand, and in the column for the balance, in the careful pen he used for money, he wrote that the loan had been paid in full, in October, out of the removal contract, and he drew the two lines under the total the way his mother drew lines under the sums she was sure of, and the ink went into the paper and could not be got out again, and he closed the book and put it back on the shelf, and it was the first open lie the house had ever written down, and the whole family would have to answer for it, at the end, to somebody who was not them. ---