A Harvest of Secrets(73)

“I have to stop once,” he said, when they’d gone along quietly for a few minutes. “It’s Saturday. I have to stop at the church in Gracciano.”

“To say our sins?” Rico asked. His voice wobbled. He’d stopped singing and had intertwined the fingers of his left hand with the fingers of his sister’s right.

“My sins,” Paolo told him. “You don’t have sins anymore. After the brave thing you did, you won’t have any sins for the rest of your life.”

Paolo pushed Ottavio a bit, listening intently for the sound of a truck or jeep behind them, fingertips of nervousness running up and down his spine. He realized he hadn’t asked Vittoria’s permission to stop at the church, but she hadn’t objected, hadn’t said a word. From time to time, she turned and looked over her shoulder, but no one was following them. Not yet. It seemed to Paolo that, after telling him they should go to the house on the lake, and after gathering herself enough to pack the supplies, she’d once again lost the ability to speak, and no longer realized she was the Signorina, and he the lowly contadino. She sat beside him, working a loop of rosary beads in her free hand, holding to Rico with the other, occasionally swiveling around, but as silent as the earth.

They made it to Gracciano without incident. His insides twisting and leaping, Paolo tied the wagon in front of the church, asked Rico to join him, asked Vittoria to wait outside. She nodded silently. She’d become another person now, and so had he.

“Rico,” he said, before they went through the door, “you go up to the altar like last time. Pray as loud as you want. Make sure God hears you, okay?”

“I’ll pray for my father, Paolo. He’s on a travel. I’ll pray for him.”

“Loud, okay?”

“Sì, Paolo. Sì.”

Paolo found Father Costantino in his small back room, a Bible open upon his knees. The priest looked up, startled at first, as if he’d never expected to see Paolo again, but then the smile appeared. “Old Paolo,” he said, “you have trouble painted on your face.”

“No, Father. No trouble. Only a need to take from my soul a heavy weight. It’s Saturday. Please confess me.”

“You couldn’t wait until this afternoon, the usual time?”

“We’re making a delivery, Rico and me. We’ll be gone.”

“I can hear him praying.”

“Kindly confess me, Father.”

Father Costantino closed the Bible and placed the purple stole around his neck with such reverence that, for a moment, Paolo was brushed by a breath of doubt. It passed, and the other Paolo, last week’s Paolo, yesterday’s Paolo, this morning’s Paolo, disappeared into the church’s shadowed corners. He followed his priest to the confessional and knelt there, only thin wooden boards and a metal screen separating them. His stomach swirled, but there was almost no doubt now, almost none. He unbuttoned the middle of his shirt and took the handle of the pistol into his palm. Immediately, his hand began to shake. All of who he was, everything he thought himself to be, had fallen behind him, like rusty old tools falling from the bed of a bouncing wagon. Strangely, so strangely, he felt something like what he’d felt those times with Celeste in the darkness of the grassy field many years ago, as if the quiet, obedient peasant had floated away and a full man had emerged in his place. The feeling was so powerful then that he hadn’t been able to speak. And he couldn’t speak now.

Father Costantino coughed, waited. At the front of the church Enrico was shouting. “GOD! GOD! WATCH MY FATHER! WATCH HIM, GOD!”

“Paolo, did you destroy the train tracks?”

“No, Father. The car broke down. Antonio said we’ll try again once he gets it repaired. I’m not here for that, though, Father. I’m here as a sinner.”

“Fine then,” the priest said in a flat voice. “Make your confession, will you? I have business to attend to.”

“Yes, Father, but first—”

“Speak your sins, Old Paolo, please!”

“I’m worried about the deserters, Father. Are they all right? Do you have any word about them? Any news?”

Two seconds of a thumping heart, Rico’s loud prayers, Paolo pointing the barrel of the pistol forward, away from him, at the height of his chest, just below the screen. And then Father Costantino said, “As a matter of fact, I do. I just heard from a fellow priest in the North. The three deserters made it safely to Switzerland, crossed the border last night, very late. The Lord will bless you for helping them.”

Paolo took one deep breath, raised the pistol to the middle of the screen, and squeezed the trigger three times. The sounds echoed around him, three pops banging against his ears. He dropped the gun there. Stripped by the war of his old skin, filled to bursting with sinfulness, and yet, somehow, feeling as if he had done what needed to be done, what the horrors of war had required of him, Old Paolo hurried up the side aisle, quieted Rico, and told him it was time to go.





Forty-Six

Carlo awoke in darkness, but, after lying still for a few minutes, he could begin to sense the first faint gray light in the eastern sky. He drank from the river, washed his face there, found a shallow place where it was easy to cross, then, worried he’d already slept too long and there would be too much light, made his way warily uphill through the DellaMonicas’ hazelnut trees, hyperalert. At the top of the hill he rested, but there was a stretch of woods ahead of him, downhill now, and there was little chance of encountering anyone there. Beyond that, he’d be on SanAntonio property, at last.