The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (182 page)

“Oh,
si, padre,
of course you can sit with him!” the old
signora
answered for me. “Sit! Sit and rest yourself! I hope you brought your appetite.”

“Talk about what?” I asked. “If it’s a baby’s
battesimo
you want to talk about, then save your breath.”

The priest shook his head. “I want to talk about masonry,” he said.

“Masonry? What about masonry?”

He asked the
signora
if we might have a word or two alone. She poured our coffee, put plates before us, then hurried out of the room. Guglielmo and I said nothing more until she left.

I had guessed he was talking in priestly metaphor—that he would now begin a big speech about
battesimo
, how each “brick” in place was a stairway to God. But he surprised me. He spoke of
real
bricks,
real
mortar. St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church would soon break ground for a new parochial school, he said. A parish school had long been his dream, but Monsignor McNulty had consistently opposed the idea as too costly and too much of a headache. The Catholic schoolchildren of Three Rivers had always, by necessity, had to board in New London and separate from their families during the week. Now the archbishop had listened to Guglielmo’s plan and approved it. An architect and builder from Hartford had been hired. But the archbishop had warned the little priest of the trouble he would call on himself if the project failed or became too costly for the church.

What he needed, Guglielmo said, was a knowledgeable and thrifty parishioner to supervise the construction and represent the interests of the parish. “I have no knowledge in these areas myself,” he said. “And the school, successful or not, will stand as testimony to my stewardship. If my pastorate is to be permanent, Domenico, then the new school must be sound, inside and out. I come to ask your help.”

I took a bite of
frittata
, chewed and chewed it. Took another bite. “How much does this job pay?” I asked.

Pays nothing, he told me. I would have to donate my time and talent. But the school would open in two years, maybe three—in plenty of time for my little daughter to attend. “That’s all I can offer for compensation, Domenico,” he said. “I appeal to the father in you, not the businessman.”

“Fathers are breadwinners,” I said. “Working for nothing puts nothing on the table.”

“And yet,” he said, “we have the miracle of the loaves and fishes to guide us.” He told me he asked no more of me than an hour or so each day. Perhaps I could inspect the building site in the morning on my way home from the mill, or in the late afternoon when I had risen from my sleep. He just needed someone to keep an eye on the daily progress of things. “As Jesus is steward of us all, I seek a steward for this school where children will be taught
His holy word,” he told me.

For some crazy reason, his talk about the loaves and fishes made me think of Prosperine’s story: how the witch had made two rabbits from one and killed off the schoolteacher. My head was mixed up with magic and miracles.

I finished my breakfast and stood. “Too busy,” I told him.

“Too busy or too angry, still?”

I looked at his face, then looked away. He asked me to sit back down again, to give him just a minute more of my time. So I sat.

“The day your brother fell from the roof was a terrible day for us all,” he said. “For you. For me. For the monsignor, too. From his deathbed, he spoke with regret about that day and prayed to God for forgiveness for having mocked your poor brother. I, too, have regretted my weakness on that day—my failure to intervene, to act as God would have wanted me to. . . . Look at me, please, Domenico. Let my eyes see your eyes.”

It was hard to look, but I looked.

“Here in this kitchen, I hold out the olive branch. It is long overdue, but it is offered in good faith. Let bygones be bygones. Let anger be buried in the ground. Forgive me, Domenico. I appeal to you as a brother would appeal.”

His mention of brothers made me look away again. “I have no brothers,” I said. “The police shot one and a monsignor’s curse pushed the other off the roof. And as for your school, there are plenty of other bricklayers in the parish. There’s Riccordino or Di Prima. There’s that Polack who lives on—”

He placed his hand on my hand to stop me. “You once told me,” he said, “that you had to leave a life of priestly study and learn the trade of masonry because of family obligation.”

“
Si,
” I said. “I left my books, left the seminary school in Rome, to clean up my brother Vincenzo’s mess. There was no choice. It was what my father ordered.”

“Everything that happens is a part of God’s plan,” Guglielmo said. “Your beautiful home on Hollyhock Avenue would not stand
today if you had no knowledge of brick. Why not let a religious school become the bridge between your early spiritual training and the masonry you learned in obedience to your father?”

When I closed my eyes against tears, I saw Papa and Sicily and my life as it had been. . . . Saw again the eyes of the Weeping
Vergine
who had, long ago, beckoned me to be a priest and save souls. Among all the children of Italy, it was
I
to whom the Holy Mother had revealed her sadness. . . . And now . . . and now I lived an ocean away and dyed wool instead of saving souls. Now I practiced a priest’s celibacy in my own home and walked to Bickel Road to fuck a skinny whore because a baby inside my wife would kill her. Sitting in that kitchen across from Guglielmo, I saw how far my life had strayed from the life I had meant to live, and I wiped away the water in my eyes.

“I
could
ask Di Prima or Riccordino to help me, Domenico,” Guglielmo continued. “I
will
ask one of them if you refuse. But it is
you
I have chosen to come to first. It is
you
whose guidance I seek.”

We talked for over an hour that morning—never once about the girl’s baptism, but only about buildings and bricks. We ate more of the
signora
’s cooking and drank more of her coffee, then cleared the table and had a look at the blueprints Guglielmo had brought along. By the time we left that kitchen, I had agreed to help him. Passing through the parlor on my way out the front door of the boardinghouse, Guglielmo and I took all of
Signora
Siragusa’s hugs and kisses and God-blessings; she had been sitting and praying her rosary all the time we were in the other room. Praying for
me,
she said—the son she always wished was her own, even though she had four sons already.

Guglielmo was right to trust my guidance the most—and lucky to have me. Di Prima laid brick crooked—what help would he have been? And Riccordino was
pazzu.
Without Domenico Tempesta watching, those Yankee builders from Hartford would have robbed the church blind and built a school that the wind would knock over. As for that poor priest, he didn’t know what a joist was for or which
part of a trowel scooped the cement! But
I
knew, all right. Those Yankee builders would do the job right and they would not overcharge the church for a single nail as long as Domenico Onofrio Tempesta was watching.

My supervision of the construction meant daily inspections and then a visit to the rectory or the building site with Guglielmo. One afternoon, a Saturday, he took out his pocket watch during our meeting and said he had to go next door to hear confessions. Did I, perhaps, wish to join him there?

I shook my head. “I’m beyond all that,” I said.

“Beyond absolution, Domenico? No, no—never beyond God’s forgiveness. Jesus loves all His flock, even the lamb that strays.” He said he often prayed that peace would come to my home—that he hoped his prayers would someday light a candle in my heart.

I told him to save his prayers and candles for lambs whose houses had not been cursed by an unholy
monsignore.

“But your home can be a peaceful one,” he said. “The key to serenity is forgiveness.”

I stood and watched him walk toward that church where sinners waited for him, but I did not follow him there. He knew nothing of women—murderous or otherwise. He knew as little about my home as he did about building a brick schoolhouse.

But all that next week—at home, at American Woolen, even in the upstairs room on Bickel Road—I thought about what that priest had said—that he had prayed for peace to come to 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue. That peace was possible.

I was the first one inside the church the following Saturday. I got there early, hoping to go in quickly and leave. I didn’t want to make confession—none of that. Too busy. I wanted only to ask Guglielmo a question or two, the kind of questions I could not ask from across his desk at the rectory, or walking along the periphery of the new school’s foundation. Like pebbles inside my shoe, these questions plagued me. The further I went, the more they let me know they were there.

Guglielmo was late getting to the church that afternoon. Someone else came in—DiGangi, it was, I remember. Street sweeper. Then another man and his wife, a group of schoolgirls. The door creaked open again and again. We all sat in the pews and waited.

Father Guglielmo came in through the back of the church and lit the lights. He cleared his throat as he passed me but did not look or say hello. He went inside the confessional and closed the door. The others stood and formed a line. Not me. Let this line of sinners pour out their guts to him, I told myself. I’m not here to confess. I’m here only to ask my two questions.

For hours, sinners came and went. A few I recognized. Many I did not. I had stayed away from that church for six years. By four o’clock, the church was empty again, except for Guglielmo and me. He sat in his box, waiting. I sat in the pew, telling myself to stand, to walk in there, kneel, and ask Guglielmo my questions. But finally, when I did stand, I turned and walked the other way, slowly at first and then faster, up the aisle and out through the vestibule. I pushed open the heavy wooden doors—escaped into the cool air. I was out of breath, even though I had wasted the afternoon just sitting.

That next week, all through our meetings about the school, I waited for Guglielmo to bring up my presence inside the church the Saturday before—to ask me why I had gone to confession but not confessed. No doubt he would have known my voice, would have been waiting to hear what sins the supervisor of his beloved school had on his soul. I had my answers ready for him—I was busy, he had been late. I didn’t want to confess anything, anyway—what was on my soul was
my
business. But he did not mention my being there. Maybe he hadn’t seen me after all. I kept my mouth shut and so did Guglielmo.

At work one night, Nabby Drinkwater—that goddamned Indian who worked for me—kept dropping the bolts of wool. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “My arm’s numb.”

Then his eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he dropped dead. Died just like that—answering my question one minute, dead the next.

I had never had much use for Drinkwater. He was lazy, sneaky—his mischief with the bottle had cost my brother Pasquale his job at the mill. But he had worked under me, now, for over ten years. On the nights when he
felt
like working, that skinny Indian could do his share and more. He was forty-two and I was forty-two. Right to his knees, he had dropped, right in front of my eyes. I caught him before he fell, before his face hit the concrete floor. I did that much for the son of a bitch.

There was just a small turnout for his funeral—half a dozen workers from the mill (none of the bosses) and a couple of men I didn’t know. He had a colored wife and four half-colored children—two sons, two daughters. Drinkwater had never talked much about family. I was pallbearer. The wife had asked the mill agent to ask me. What could I say—no? . . . There was no man of God at the grave, only someone in a shabby suit who did the talking. I didn’t know if Indians could go to Heaven, but if they could, I was pretty sure Drinkwater hadn’t gotten there. For one thing, he broke continually the ninth and tenth commandments (coveting wives and goods). He’d been a drinker, in trouble with the police from time to time. He had known his way to Bickel Road. He had bragged about it sometimes on dinner break—to the other men, never to me. Me, he respected. . . . He’d never been the best worker at the mill, but never the worst, either. One of the
owner’s sons or sons-in-law—one of those sons of bitches—could have come to his funeral, shown him a little respect at the end. A little thanks for all those nights that he’d done his work. But as soon as a man keeled over, American Woolen and Textile forgot he had ever lived and breathed.

The next Saturday afternoon, I went back to the church—this time not at the beginning of confession but near the end. I waited
until it was just Guglielmo and me. But before I could get myself off the pew, he turned off his little light and came out of the confessional.

“Oh, Domenico,” he whispered. “I thought everyone had gone. Have you come to make confession?”

“No
confessione,
” I said. “I came to ask two questions.”

“About the school?”

I looked away. “Not the school,” I said. “No.”

He waited but I said no more. “All right, then. Better come in.” He went back inside the confessional and closed the door. Lit his light again.

Inside the box, I knelt facing his shadow behind the screen. My hands trembled in front of my face. Guglielmo said nothing. I said nothing. Finally, he told me that since we were inside the confessional, maybe I should ask my questions within the context of the traditional confession. That would signal God to listen, he said, and ensure the sanctity of whatever it was that I had to say. “All right?” he asked me.

“All right,” I said. Then I said nothing.

He began for me. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . .”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated. “But never as much as I have been sinned against!”

The shadow put a finger to its lip. “To prepare yourself for the Eucharist, Domenico—to be truly penitent—you must examine only your own soul. Leave other sinners to examine theirs. You must try to practice humility.”