The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend (23 page)

“Here I am, Barto.”

And then he added, a moment later, in sudden panic, “Barto, Barto, what time do you think it is? What time has it become already?”

“Some time between eight and nine o'clock,” Vanzetti answered, speaking in Italian. “Not early enough to torture us too much with the waiting, but then again, neither is it late enough for us to give up hoping.”

“What do you hope for?” Sacco asked. “I have used up all my power to hope, Barto. This time I know it is the end and the finish, and I don't care any more. I don't want to hope. I only want it to be over.”

“Nicola, such a way to talk!” said Vanzetti, almost lightly. “Are our chances any worse than those of someone with a terrible illness? To tell you the truth, I think our chances are better. Our difficulty is to imagine what is happening outside. We begin to think that we are alone. Loneliness is our enemy. Instead of that, try to think of how it must be everywhere, how many hundreds of thousands of working people have our names upon their lips and will not allow us to die. I put my life in their hands, Nicola. That is why I am so calm. You can hear in my voice, can't you, how calm I am? That is the reason why. Millions stand around us and support us.”

“I can hear the calm in your voice,” Sacco agreed, “but I cannot understand it.”

“It is a very simple thing to understand,” Vanzetti said. “I have developed good eyes of my own, and they can see over the few pieces of stonework that this prison consists of. You know, Nicola, there will some day be a race of people on this earth who will look back upon this miserable, dirty jail as you and I look back on a straw hut that savages live in. I have eyes to see that plainly, and the knowledge with which to understand it. I tell you that, Nick—and I am not saying this just to pick up my courage and yours—I am better off now than when first I came to this country. Then my eyes were younger, and there were no prison walls around me, but I saw nothing. First I went to work as a dish washer in an exclusive men's, club in New York, where the rich came to spend the hours they had no other way of filling. Sixteen hours a day I worked in the heat and in the darkness, washing dishes, breathing in the filth and the steam and the lousy smells, and even when I raised up my eyes, they saw nothing. From that job to other jobs—dish washer, day laborer, pick and shovel and crowbar to turn the rocks over with—selling my body and my youth and my strength for two dollars a day, three dollars a day—yes, and once, Nick, once, believe me, for sixty cents a day and a rotten plate of stew! When I looked around me then, I saw nothing but hopelessness. There were walls everywhere, thicker and higher than the walls around this prison. But now, so help me, my eyes can see into the future. I, Bartolomeo Vanzetti—I could not live forever, no matter. Sooner or later I would die. But this way, I tell you, you and I, Nick, we live forever and our names will never be forgotten.”

In his cell, the thief listened, not understanding all of it, but picking up a thread here and there through the poor Portuguese and little Italian that he was able to speak and understand. And he cried out like a child,

“And where will I be, Bartolomeo? Where will I be in that future?”

“Poor man,” Vanzetti said. “Poor man.”

Madeiras came to the door of his cell, and now he pleaded in turn, “What is for me, Barto? In all my life I never before knew two people like you. You two are the first in my whole life who talk kindly to me, and decently, as if I were a human being and not an animal. But what sense does it make, Barto? From the very beginning I never had a chance.”

“That is right. From the very beginning you never had a chance.”

“I listen to Sacco. Sacco tells me how he had a garden, how he was up every morning at four to dig in his garden, and how each night after he had come back from the plant, he dug in the garden again until the sun set. I listen to Sacco and he makes a picture for me of a man with his arms full of newly harvested fruit which he gives to those who need it and who have no fruit of their own. But all I harvested, Barto, was the dry grass and the withered weeds.”

“A crop you never sowed,” Sacco said now. “Poor thief—a crop you never planted.”

“Then are you two my friends?” Madeiros asked.

“What a thing to ask!” Vanzetti replied. “Can't you see how it is here, Celestino? We are three of us bound together with everlasting ties. In a few hours we will walk out of here, and the whole world will say, Sacco and Vanzetti and a thief have perished. But here and there across the world, in their own hearts, men will know that three human beings were slain. We crawl one little step closer to an understanding of it.”

“But,” protested Madeiros, “I am guilty and you are innocent. If there is one man in the whole world who knows that you are innocent, it is I—I tell you, it is I, and I know it!”

Now he was carried away by his own emotion and passion, and now he beat with his fists against the door of his cell, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Innocent, innocent—do you hear me! Innocent! Here are two men who are innocent! I know! I am Madeiros, thief and murderer! I sat in the car that drove into South Braintree! I was a part of the crime and a part of the murder! I know the faces and the names of those who killed! You are murdering innocent men!”

“Easy, easy,” said Vanzetti. “Easy, poor lad. What good is it? Talk in a softer voice, and the whole world will hear you, I swear to you.”

“And gently, my son,” Sacco said. “Gently and softly like Barto tells you. Listen to Barto. He is a very wise man, the wisest man I ever knew in my whole life. He is right when he says that if you talk softly the whole world will hear you.”

Madeiros stopped screaming, but he still remained pressed to the door of his cell. His bitter weeping, his grief, his frustration and hopeless sorrow had a profound effect upon the two men who were in the cells alongside of his. Each of them felt like a father to this poor, hapless thief. Each of them was thinking in the same terms—of a lad who was born blind into the world and never opened his eyes. Their own paths were man-made, and as they looked back upon their lives, each of them could identify, step by step, the willful and thoughtful actions which had brought him finally to this conclusion. Yet they understood that Madeiros could not do this, that for Madeiros it was predestined and inevitable, a bitter, shrunken seed planted in soil someone else had plowed.

In response to Madeiros' screams, two guards came running, and with them, a prison hospital attendant; but Vanzetti told them that it would be all right, and that they should go away.

“Screaming like that—” one of the guards began to say.

“You too would scream,” Vanzetti interrupted him harshly, “if you could count the minutes and the seconds before you must die. Now leave us alone.”

Now both he and Sacco began to talk to Madeiros. For the next half-hour they talked to him, gently and wisely and with great concern. In a sense, Madeiros had given them a most precious gift indeed; for in their concern for him, they forgot for a moment their own awful fear. Sacco spoke to Madeiros of his home, of his wife and of his two children. He told little amusing anecdotes about very small things, as, for instance, the first time his son, Dante, had smiled, and how it feels to see a smile on the face of an infant only six or seven weeks old.

“It is like the soul breaking through,” he said to Madeiros. “It is there all the time, but suddenly, like a flower well-watered in a world of sunshine, its petals open.”

“You believe that men have souls?” Madeiros whispered.

Vanzetti answered him. Vanzetti was filled with wisdom and tenderness, and during the past few days he had lived for many hundreds of years. Whereupon, he pointed out to Madeiros how long men have been trying to answer this question.

“Is man a beast?” he asked softly. “My son, we must see this—that very often, those who talk most of God, treat their own fellow men as if God was an impossibility. The way they treat man, he has no soul, for their very treatment of him is proof of that. But just think of how the three of us here are bound together, and in what kind of a compact. Here we are, yourself, Madeiros, who grew up in all the bitter misery of the streets and the alleys of Providence. You were a thief and you killed men. And here alongside of you is Sacco, who is the best man I have ever known, a good shoemaker, a good worker. And I, Vanzetti, who tried to be a leader for my fellow workers. You would think that we are three very different people, but when you come down to it, depend upon it, we are as alike as three peas in a pod. We have a soul which joins us together and then joins itself with millions—and when we die, there will be a stab in the heart of all mankind, and such a spasm of pain that I weep to think of it. In that way, no one ever dies. Do you understand me, Celestino?”

“I cannot tell you how I am trying,” the thief answered. “In all my life I never tried so hard to understand anything.”

Now Sacco said, “Celestino, Celestino—I never asked you this before, but tell me now. When you made your confession of the crime at South Braintree, was it because you knew that you would die anyway for the other crimes you made, and therefore had nothing to lose, or was it because of us?”

“I can tell you the truth about that,” Madeiros answered. “First I read about you and Vanzetti in the newspapers, and you can't imagine how long I thought of it and tried to understand why they were so eager to kill you. Then one day your wife came to visit you, and I caught just a glimpse of her. Then I said to myself, I will do something so that Sacco doesn't die, and as for myself, I care nothing about what happens to me. That's the truth of it. Maybe in the whole world there is no one who would believe me, maybe not even my own mother if she was alive. Now I am telling the truth. If there is one time in a man's whole life that he tells the truth simply and plainly, it is at a time like this. So I tell you that I felt that maybe with a new trial, I would not be found guilty of murder. But I knew that once I made this confession to what happened at South Braintree, then it was all lost and I would have to die. I knew that, but still I had to make the confession, I had to tell what really happened.”

“Ah!” cried Vanzetti. “There you have something. See, my friend Nicola, see how that is. What is there more that a human being can do than to lay down his life for another? That is why we are perishing. We give our lives as hostages for the working class, but what of Madeiros? Look at poor Madeiros, and think how it is with him. He gave his life for us, just as simply as that. Celestino, tell me, why did you do it? Can you tell me that?”

“Do you know,” the thief said simply, “I have asked myself the same question a hundred times. I don't know how to speak the answer, but sometimes I feel the answer plainly.”

Chapter 16

A
T NINE O
'
CLOCK
the Priest came. By birth, all three of the men in the death house were Roman Catholics, but Sacco and Vanzetti had already made it plain that they neither desired nor were in need of this kind of help. Whereupon, the Priest came for Celestino Madeiros, thief and murderer, and the Warden brought him into the lonely, death-stilled chamber.

As the clock ticked away the final minutes and hours of August 22nd, and as the moment of execution approached, people who were connected with it in any way whatsoever reflected this change, this irrevocable shrinking of time. If it caused a grim stiffening in the strange conviction of the Governor of Massachusetts, then on the other hand it also caused a softening in the reserve of a Chinese mother whose husband was a sweeper in the streets of Peking—and her tears reflected the bitter shrinkage of time. If the President of the United States went to sleep quite easily, with nothing that one could count or calculate upon his conscience, then a copper miner in Chile ate his crust of bread somberly, tasted nothing of its nourishment, and knew only that his heart grew heavier and heavier. And in the Massachusetts State Prison too, the souls of men withered a little more each hour, and their faces became grayer.

“I will walk in there with you,” said the Warden to the Priest. “But I tell you, Father, what I would not say to anyone else for all the world, that this little walk becomes my punishment, and I have no gratitude for the fate that made me warden of a prison.”

The Priest slowed his steps to the steps of the man who guided him. The Priest knew the various ways of death, the measured pace, the unique cadence, the strange, slow dance to mournful music. He had come close to death in many a place and on many an occasion, but out of this increasing knowledge came no increasing intimacy. The hooded one was not his friend, nor had his own fear been conquered at any point along the way. What he had learned in familiarity was balanced by the truer estimate he was able to make of this dark adversary; and as he now walked through the familiar and dreary corridors of the State Prison, he went over in his own mind the possibilities which presented themselves to him on this unenviable mission of conversion.

It had been put to him that there was joy in far off places for the triumph of a soul saved; but marching here in these tunnels of stone, he could not quite visualize the joy in radiant halls if he should succeed in the conversion of Sacco and Vanzetti or of a poor, damned thief. He rehearsed in his mind fragments of conversation which he speculated upon having now with Sacco and Vanzetti. But each time, the Priest retreated from this possibility which he himself had erected; and out of his debate with himself, he came to a decision not to venture where angels feared to tread and attempt to scale the heights separating him from the two lonely radicals, but rather to concentrate his fire where there would be less resistance—in the direction of the soul of the thief and murderer, Celestino Madeiros.

Guilts would not plague him for this choice, for was it not plainly evident that the sin of Sacco and Vanzetti was perhaps venal beyond forgiveness or reclamation? These two men were the point of the long tongue of the red dragon, the peculiar monster of this priest's time, the beast—as he now saw it—which lapped with a gaping and fanged maw at all the sweetness and succulence of Europe.