Salvatore Scibona - The End

Canada was right over there, across the canyon. If he squinted, Canadians could be seen moving along a Canadian street in midday Canadian summer sunshine.

The titanic physical dimensions of this place gave to the movement of any small thing, any merely human-life-sized thing, an illusion of supernatural slowness. The Canadian cars on the opposite lip of the canyon seemed at best to be creeping. Any splash, any arbitrarily chosen patch of water you followed into the cloud below, appeared not to fall (since what could take so long falling?) but to drift leisurely down the face of the cataract. A few clouds overhead and these other clouds, what a shock, drifting up into the sky. And down by the base of the falls the clouds were so thick as to obscure completely his view of where the falling water made impact with the river itself, giving him the impression that the water wasn’t descending into the river at all but into a befogged chasm, where it was swallowed up and annihilated. Raw senses were not to be believed in this place. And he had to ask himself if the unchanging physical rules that governed small things in fact changed radically in the face of a really big thing. As in, if he dropped a newspaper into the river up here it might turn into a flamingo by the time it got to the bottom of the falls. Next to him the river was clean, green, fat, and fast. Down there, postfall, it was blue and teemed with hills of brown scum. A knee-high sycamore sapling, very still, only one leaf ashiver, grew not six inches from a current that could have thrown a truck over the cliff ’s edge. Somehow, a little upstream of the falls, these brave, industrious people had managed to build a bridge over this arm of the river, had managed to sink the pylons into the rapids, and couples were walking hand in hand in yellow rubber rain slicks over the bridge toward Goat Island, which split the Niagara River into two arms, one falling over the Horseshoe Falls, the other over the American. A mile off to his right, downriver of the falls, another, far longer bridge spanned the gulf, hundreds of feet above the water, connecting the second- and fourth-largest nations in the world. He put a nickel in a binocular telescope and aimed it at the bridge and saw a kid throw — was it popcorn? — into the wind and hang his head over the rail to watch it fall.

Why was she not once in her rotten, betrayed life to be taken by her spouse to see Niagara Falls? Loveypants had lamented. She made the preposterous allegation, so it seemed, that you could board the six o’clock train and arrive there by lunchtime. Rocco invented a tune, a chipper five-note sort of birdsong to sing at her, the words to which— I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you —sent her into a fit of catlike violence. There was the spitting, and there were the fingernails attacking his eyes, and the threats to smother his children, until, sorrowfully but with no more delicate tools at his disposal, he leveled one clean, close-fisted blow at her nose to settle her down. Truth be told, he would’ve loved to have come here, he still owned at the present day several picture postcards of the place, which postcards a cousin had sent his mother when he was a boy; but how was he supposed to keep his offspring in a row if they didn’t fear him, and how were they going to learn to fear him if he demonstrated, by giving in to their mother, that persistent mutiny paid off in the long run?

This cousin, Tata (his mother’s niece and goddaughter), had been shipped away by her father to marry a corn miller in Buffalo. She sent the twice-a-year letter or postcard home to Sicily, and young, literate Rocco was made to read it aloud for the diversion of anyone who stopped in — a shameful chore, since it was clear to him even as a seven-year-old that his mother had been Tata’s confessor and that the letters were intended only for her and, out of necessity, for whomever she could find to read them to her. His mother didn’t care, she was a traitor. They had in Buffalo a house of their own with plumbing indoors, Tata reported, and meat was easy to come by. But she had many babies, eleven at the final count, three of whom died, and her husband, on whom she had not laid eyes before the men involved concluded their agreement through the mails and she was packed like a white slave, alone at sixteen, onto a steamer to Genoa and then to New York, was middle-aged and clubfooted; bathed rarely; had more than once taken their older boys with him to bordellos. The uncle or the neighbor to whom Rocco was reading shrugged and said, “Well, so it is,” and then made him reread the cheerfuller parts concerning the occasional trips to see Niagara Falls and the tulip gardens in the boulevards. When he was fourteen the letters stopped. Two years later a note arrived from one of her daughters relating that Tata had died in childbirth. It was with one of Tata’s sons who’d moved to Omaha that Rocco went to live when he was eighteen. And when, six years later, he’d moved to Ohio with a cousin’s cousin’s guarantee of a steel-mill job, which was never to materialize, he’d promised himself this single luxury, once two or three years of careful saving had passed: to go to Niagara Falls. To see this celebrated place. But he got sidetracked.

A sense like revelation here, that the worry and the useless chaos he experienced in his little coffin world, in his pomade-smearing-the-window, mildew-on-the-bathroom-tile, fungus-in-the-toenails world — that all the mess surrounding him was a delusion brought about by the accident of being a small man with small eyes in a small room, and that all he’d needed all along was to get to Niagara Falls and view an immense thing from an immense distance and the delusion would be dispelled. He would see the sublime order with which the Lord had composed his work. Up close, up here on the lip of the canyon, he saw a tree branch rush down the river and slip over the crest. But when he tried to follow it down the curtain of water, it vanished. The particular mess was lost in the grand design. A sense of significance in all things that he could feel only once he felt the insignificance of any one thing.

One night, after cards, D’Agostino had spread on Rocco’s kitchen floor a map of the earth and pointed out that Norway was shaped suspiciously like Sweden, and Sweden like Finland. Was this an accident? Ohio was shaped suspiciously like the United States, with Port Clinton sticking up there into the lake like a stunted Michigan, and Ashtabula pointing up toward the northeast like a little Maine, and a wart growing out of the bottom in the middle, by Ironton, like a Texas. When D’Agostino flipped Australia upside down, it, too, resembled a little USA, with a swayback and a gulf in the underside. And, look at it, the upside-down Australia bore a remarkable resemblance to Red China. Repeated shapes, order, the existence of an afterlife, were all obvious to anybody who looked for them from a frontier. The way so often he saw Europe in the clouds.

As a boy he’d understood this instinctively. As a man, somehow he’d forgotten. And now it was coming back to him.

Distinctly he recalled the white alb and the black felt hat he wore when he was a boy of nine pulling with thousands of other boys and men the ropes that bore, up Via Etnea, a massive carriage that harbored the undecayed remains of Saint Agatha, the patroness of his hometown. The ropes spanned seven city blocks. He was supposed to be pulling them, but with so many of the devoted participating, he was lucky to get a hand on one of the ropes. Nowhere could he see actual pulling taking place, and yet the carriage was impelled up the street. And as they passed into Piazza Stesicoro, he saw the most incredible thing: From the parapet of a fourth-story balcony, a brick, with no visible cause, fell, just fell off the front of the building and smashed to the street.