Salvatore Scibona - The End

But he’s watching her now. He can’t not. And while he watches her, he is turning her back into an idea, so he must act fast. She has already begun to disappear.

Mrs. Marini proposed to make Lina an apprentice in her business. Lina decided she would do it so long as Enzo didn’t disapprove. He did disapprove, however. He believed it would curse their children, it being unclear only to him that they could never have any children. He was rather innocent. He had even believed that Mrs. Marini still made her living off the interest from her husband’s shoes. Still, he was within his rights, and Lina turned her down. They might have been rich. Instead she was stuck with her drapes.

That was in November of the year 1936. It was the winter Pierangellini, the madman, was found at the dump in a crypt of newspapers. The coroner’s determination of the cause of death was celebrated: He had eaten the head of a broom.

“You wonder if he cooked it first,” Enzo said two days after Christmas, knotting his boot strings on the kitchen floor while Lina hastily fried their breakfast eggs.

“No, the papers would have caught fire,” she said authoritatively.

They had slept through the alarm. They ate out of the skillet, standing over the stove and haphazardly pulling on their clothes. They rushed out. At the trolley stop, before Enzo got on the inbound, he reproached her for underdressing.

Lina took a bus to the warehouse in Fort Saint Clair, where she delivered a week of her work wrapped in brown parcel paper and was paid $7.45. The woman who gave her the material for the next job surely didn’t sew herself; she had allowed her nails to grow down over the tips of her fingers.

Because Lina had been late, she had no choice of jobs and was saddled for the ride home with fourteen yards of damask and heavy chenille fabric, which she carried away in a big, awkward, burlap vegetable bag.

Decades of insomnia have taught him that when he’s tired — and he was up reading past two o’clock this morning, he is terribly tired — the best palliative is to be precise in his appearance. The cowl makes the monk. He shaves along and then against the grain. With tweezers he picks the stray hairs from his coat. He shines his Sunday shoes and threads new laces through the eyelets. He strides soundlessly on the thick carpet of the red stairs, holding the rail firmly while he goes to enforce in his mind this sense of private formality, and he feels the consummateness of one who stands erect although no one sees him. His spirit is a pure, cold gas.

At the breakfast table, his sister pours out his tea. The dining room is suspended in kerosene light and damp heat. It is a redoubt of civilization carved from the barrens of a northern Ohio midwinter morning, hours before sunrise. They live in the house where they were born, on the West Side, on the lakeshore. Great rough-cut, whitewashed stone, four chimneys. He had a gang of Poles in last year to wire it for electric lights, but they haven’t caught the habit of using them. Their father is dead, their mother, too.

The date is December 27, 1936. He is fifty-four. His sister is fifty-five. Neither married. They are homely people, and reserved. He still runs the jewelry store downtown that his grandfather opened in 1886; meantime, his sister tends the house. She was created, he has come to believe, to sustain things; he was created, it appears, for something else.

They keep collections in their respective fields of interest. Hers is buried behind the house, a life’s accumulation of tulip bulbs, many of them quite valuable. His, on the other hand, occupies a single desk drawer and is materially worthless: a little more than two reams of yellow foolscap, each page covered on one side in the same handwriting. They represent the letters home of the Sixty-fourth Confederate Tennessee Infantry, Company K, wiped out, to a man, on September 20, 1863, at Chickamauga, and all of the letters, regrettably, are copies. Even the eight written by his own maternal grandfather are transcriptions he made long ago in secret in his uncle’s cabin in Kentucky while his uncle was out baiting his traps.

Used to be he’d offer to buy the letters themselves once he tracked their owners down, but nobody would part with them, and at last he gave up. You’d think it would be the subject matter they’d want to keep for themselves, but, no, it’s the paper they want. And in his heart he understands. He wanted those old scraps from his uncle, but his uncle wouldn’t give them up, and eventually the cabin burned down with the originals inside. But by then the jeweler had begun the long campaign of reconciling himself to the idea that what he had, the words, the sense of the thing, was more important.

It isn’t so hard to get inside the houses. The offer of one dollar per copied page does all the work. And once he’s curled himself over the kitchen table, triple-checking every line, they believe he’s a scholar; hence the vertical marginalia in his collection denoting what else they had to say, by way of rounding out the personality of the dead, while he scribbled.

When he himself dies, his collection will go to the public library. In the meanwhile, he is assembling a book — the complete concordance of his collection, every word, every spelling, every occurrence — that he does not intend to finish. We are all terrible, and have sworn never to take safety again in the sweet crime that our nature has chosen to make dear to us, and so we give ourselves some work to do instead, and this is his. What does the scripture say? And further, by these, my son, be admonished: Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. What else does it say? Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for that is the whole duty of man. The conclusion of the whole matter — who doesn’t long for that? Who, reading a stranger’s letters, doesn’t finally wish to put the letters away and meet the living stranger himself?

The jeweler finishes his breakfast and drives his car into the frozen city — all deserted at this hour except for the hobos camped in the park. Icicles hang from the drooping trolley wires. The old, narrow mule-cart streets leading to his store are clouded with the steam that leaks from the sewer grates and the manhole covers as though a behemoth is asleep under the pavement.

He is so uncommonly spent this morning that it takes him half an hour to replace a single hairspring in a woman’s wristwatch.

At eight, he closes the office and unlocks the showroom. A passerby who happened in here, missing the sign outside, wouldn’t know immediately that it was a jewelry store. The walls are hung and the sofa and display cases are stacked with all the bric-a-brac he’s picked up in his research. Books, door knockers off dead houses, flintlock rifles in rusted disuse, a twenty-four-carat cocaine straw, an Arap aho headdress. Each of them excites his deep capacity for sentiment in its own way. Their service is not to be materially useful or to speak to him of the past, but to touch him with the past directly, to recall to him the boyhood mind that knew not what a thing was for, nor worth, nor called. They are toys, in the workplace; Father would not have stood for this, but Father is dead.

He seats himself under the bric-a-brac, behind the case of silent watches, and opens a slim red volume that he’s read many times before, a novel for young people, The Forest Runners, by Joseph A. Altsheler — its subject, dear to his heart, is the Ohio River valley of long ago — and reads:

Paul stopped in a little open space, and looked around all the circle of the forest. Everywhere it was the same — just the curving wall of red and brown, and beyond, the blue sky, flecked with tiny clouds of white. The wilderness was full of beauty, charged with the glory of peace and silence, and there was naught to indicate that man had ever come. The leaves rippled a little in the gentle west wind, and the crisping grass bowed before it; but Paul saw no living being, save himself, in the vast, empty world.