The Good Left Undone(92)

Antica methodically stuffed the explosives in a shell hole dug out of the wall by a fellow quarrier, who had cut the nesting holes from the bottom to the top of the quarry wall.

The crew overhead watched in horror as the explosives blew before Antica had a chance to light it. The blast took two fingers off his right hand. He temporarily lost hearing in both ears. Antica never found out why the explosive went off before he lit it. He surmised it might have been a piece of ash from a cigarette from the workers on the ledge overhead, where the men were planing marble. Or, it was a dangerous methane level in the quarry that triggered spontaneous combustion. He would never know.

Antica’s mother had been waiting for him when he returned home. Attempting to lift his spirits, she said, “Be grateful to God. You still have three fingers. They will remind you of the Holy Trinity.” Antica would understand when he became a father that his mother’s reaction, which hurt him at the time, was for his own good. She did not want her son to wallow in self-pity for all he had lost. When his mother died, he found out she had wept about the accident every night for the rest of her life.

Antica had believed that no woman would ever love him, damaged as he was. Later he found great love in the arms of Angela Palermo, who couldn’t have cared less about the injury and agreed to marry him. They had six children—five daughters and one son—who gratefully had gone to America to work with his cousin and avoided the roundup. The thought of his children made him smile. He was slipping his right hand into his pocket when the strangest sensation occurred. He felt the phantom fingers and their touch return. His hand felt whole as it had when he was young, before the accident.

Antica understood explosives. A torpedo was a steel version of the dynamite tube he created to blast the rock in the quarry. He could only guess the power of the military bomb, but he was certain the torpedo that hit the ship would sink it.

Antica calculated that the Arandora had a few minutes left before it sank into the ocean. He was not the only man on board with that notion, as the prisoners jockeyed to jump now that the lifeboats were filled. A few prisoners who had not made it to the upper decks were scrambling around him, desperately looking for a way off the ship. At his age, Antica could not help them. The burden of the decision to jump was not to be made by an old man, but by the men who had something to live for.

It was odd to surrender when he had done nothing but fight his whole life. Antica would never see his family again. He would never see Scotland again. He would never take that last trip home to Bardi. How strange to know that those long-held dreams would, for certain, never come true. Soon Antica felt emancipated from the craving for something he could never have. The struggles of life were no longer his problems. Antica observed the grand finale of the horrible attack, as the young men dove off the side of the ship one by one, like acrobats into the water. A teenage boy did a swan dive, which in itself was a work of art as he broke the surface of the water without creating a ripple. A white ring of foam appeared, followed by his head through it, as though it had been a stunt, the curtain call of a seaside circus act. The boy opened his mouth wide and gulped air. Antica whispered, “Breathe.”

Antica looked up at the morning sky. Free of the barbed wire walls, he could take in the expanse of it. He did not see a single cloud. The sky was an odd color, the patina of slate. The sky did not appear bright as in a Bellini or Tiepolo painting but fractured like a mosaic, made of tesserae, shards of glass, pieces of ceramics, and smashed bits of stone, shattered elements that find beauty anew even in their broken state. He wondered if this particular sky was the blue portal of purgatory. He closed his eyes and recited the Hail Mary. He made the sign of the cross slowly. His mother had said in times of trouble, pray to the Blessed Lady; like any mother, she would hear your plea. The men who had saved themselves by diving into the ocean and the men who had found a seat on the lifeboats called for their mothers as they jumped. So, what his mother had told Antica as a boy was true. He whispered to his mother to meet him in the sky when his moment came.

“Come on, old man.” A sentry, his face covered in the oil from the boiler, carried a spare life jacket covered in sludge in his hand and attempted to put Antica into it. “She’s going under,” he said matter-of-factly, as though ships of this grandeur sank every day.

“I’m all right.” Antica wriggled his arm loose. “They need you.” He pointed overhead to the second tier. The sentry left the life jacket with Antica and climbed the stairs.

An Italian boy ran past Antica to take the stairs. He stopped. “Andiamo!”

Antica smiled. He handed the boy the life jacket the sentry had given to him.

“Put it on,” Antica suggested.

The boy slipped on the life jacket. “Come with me,” the boy said. “I will help you!”

“You go!” Antica pointed to the hole in the barbed wire. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll meet you in the water.” The boy jumped into the sea.

Antica looked over the railing. The boy bobbed in the water. He had made it! He had his whole life before him.

Antica searched the surface of the sea for his friends. There were so many men in the water, he could not discern faces. A man was only as lucky as the friends he had made. Their fate, your fate. In this regard, Antica, even in the hour of his death, felt blessed. He had not been chained or beaten as a prisoner. He had not starved to death. The ice cream peddler had gone to sleep the night before having enjoyed a meat pie followed by a shot of whiskey with his friends. Antica had even managed the rare feat of grown men and made a new friend in Savattini. Even the burden of his salvation had been lifted. Don Fracassi had given him absolution. His soul was as pristine as an altar cloth of white linen.