The Shoemaker's Wife(26)

Enza would hold the image of her baby sister in her heart like the curl of Stella’s hair that she had clipped and placed in a locket before the priest allowed the mourners into the church. Enza began to list all the things Stella had accomplished during her short life. Stella was learning to read. She knew the alphabet. She could recite her prayers, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the Our Father. She knew the song “Ninna Nanna” and could dance the bergamasca. She was learning about nature; she could identify the poisonous red berries of the sagrada plant as well as the edible plumberries that grew wild on the cliffs. She knew the difference between alpine deer and wild elk from drawings in Papa’s book.

Stella knew about heaven, but it had been presented like a land of make-believe, a castle in the clouds where angels lived. Enza wondered if Stella understood what was happening as she lay dying. It was too cruel to imagine Stella’s last thoughts.

Life, Enza decided, is not about what you get, but what is taken from you. It’s in the things we lose that we discover what we most treasure. Enza’s most profound wish was that she might have kept Stella safe, that she had not failed her baby sister, that they would not have to face the years ahead without her.

Enza vowed never to forget Stella, not for a day.

The priest struck a long match and ignited the incense in the gold urn until streams of gray smoke curled from the open squares of the brass cup. He gently lowered the cap and lifted the urn on its rope chain, swinging it gently as he walked around the casket, anointing it, until puffs of smoke obscured the tiny casket, which now resembled a small golden ship sailing through clouds. The family encircled the casket as they had Stella’s bed.

The priest looked all around the church, unable to figure out a way to move the vast crowd through the cathedral so each mourner might pass the casket and pay their final respects. Ciro quickly grasped the problem. He nudged two young men and motioned for them to join him.

Ciro walked up the aisle with the boys, and, slipping behind the altar to the far side of the church, he motioned for the two young men to do the same on the other side of the church. They unbolted the side doors, top and bottom, letting in the fresh mountain air and beams of sunlight that immediately dispelled the gloom. The mourners formed a line and began to process past the casket and out from either side. The priest nodded his approval to Ciro.

Ciro observed the eldest daughter rise from her kneeling position to stand behind her grieving mother, placing her hands on her shoulders to comfort her. He looked away; to see such deep connection between mother and child awoke a particular grief of his own. He slipped out the side door through the crowd. Once outdoors, he took in the cool, fresh air. He figured it would take most of the afternoon to move the mourners through the cemetery after the final benediction. It would be hours before he could begin to dig the grave, and nightfall before he would return to Vilminore.

Hearing a dog whimper, Ciro looked up and saw his stray running around the side of the church toward him. He leaned down, and the dog nuzzled his hand.

“Hey, Spruzzo,” he whispered, happy for the company.

Ciro reached back into his knapsack and broke off a bit of salami for the dog as the mourners filed out of the church and into the streets of Schilpario in waves of black and gray, like low storm clouds off the cliffs.

A group of children left the church together. Ciro immediately recognized them as orphans. They were led by a nun whose hands were folded into her billowing black sleeves, her head bowed as she went. The sight of the children, moving quickly as if to ward off attention as they followed the nun, tore at his heart. He missed his own mother. Ciro had learned that the pain of her abandonment was only lying dormant; suddenly, when he was most unaware, the sight of a child around the age he was when Caterina left him at the convent would open the old wound again, piercing his fragile soul.

Ciro imagined his mother in a gold carriage, led by a team of black horses, stopping in front of the convent on a winter morning. Caterina would be wearing her best coat, of the deepest midnight blue velvet. She would reach down and extend her hands to her sons, beckoning them to join her. In this dream, Ciro and Eduardo were young boys again. This time, she wouldn’t leave them behind; instead, she would scoop them up and place them on the seat of the carriage. The driver would turn to them: their father, Carlo, smiling with the contentment of a happy man with a clear conscience, who needs nothing in this world but a woman who loves him and the family they have made together.





Chapter 6

A BLUE ANGEL

Un Angelo Azzurro

A silver mist settled over the cemetery of Sant’Antonio da Padova as the sun sank behind the mountain. The wrought-iron gates of the cemetery were propped open, revealing a flat field cluttered with headstones and surrounded along the periphery by a series of crypts.

Prominent families had built ornate marble and granite mausoleums that featured outdoor altars, open porticoes, and hand-painted frescoes. There were also simple, spare structures in the Roman style, with columns offsetting crypts inlaid with gold lettering.

Ciro knew that grave-digging in Schilpario would be difficult. Barite and iron mines lay beneath the village, which meant that the ground was loaded with shale. Even as his shovel struck rock again and again, he persisted, excavating white limestone hunks that looked like oversize pearls and stacked them by the grave.

Stella’s casket rested nearby on the marble floor of a mausoleum entrance. It was covered in a blessed cloth, ready to be placed in the grave when Ciro’s work was done.