Salvatore Scibona - The End

He was the father of three sons. He loved them so, as the Lord required. Mrs. Loveypants, their mother, also called Luigina, was beloved of him, too, but collaterally, as the vessel by which his boys had blessed him.

They were boys, and therefore their souls were unfinished and their habits impressible. The first discovered the eating of salt with watermelon, and the middle and last took the habit up shamelessly, imitating also the first’s wincing and puckering, and shot the seeds off their tongues like savages at passing dogs. They ran away from home and yet came back. They were innocent of resolve. They were as vulnerable to their surroundings as mold. For this he might have congratulated them: They were Americans after all, who felt nerves where older nations felt fear, and a million possible nervous selves crowded around them, clamoring to be chosen, and his eager boys looked perpetually in all directions for the one they most desired to be, always in a state of becoming. He himself, on the other hand, had long since finished becoming and therefore faced fewer, more concentrated, and infinitely more terrifying uncertainties — the hour of his death, the resilience of his faith in the Lord. He might have congratulated them if only he could have assured himself that all of their becoming would at some point in early adulthood conclude and they would experience the benefits of having become: the ease of physical comportment, the directness of gaze and speech, the freedom from the desire to seem, also the ability to pray without requesting something for oneself. His own father had a word that described this, and here was Rocco’s hope, the thing he wouldn’t have told you because it wasn’t yours and he didn’t want to dishonor it by explaining. It was something he wanted for his boys, whom he loved as himself — he hoped that the boys, once men, would harden. Think of a brick in a kiln. His father had achieved this, his grandfather more so, and it was evinced by the rain-cloud pouches about their eyes. “Don’t associate with people who touch their faces while they talk to you,” said his father. “That’s not what the hands are for.”

Now, take his boys. He did not understand why they must always be smiling! They were taught in the schools to shake hands with strangers while widely showing the teeth, as if they were horses offered for inspection. They were not horses! They were Christian persons, but they laughed at what wasn’t funny because they desired above all things not to become hard but to become liked, and it made Rocco’s blood boil because they were putting themselves up for sale. And in his eyes, as in the eyes of the Lord, they were beyond price.

Three boys, one two three, and him their father, and Loveypants.

One of his cousins had had a cousin he wanted Rocco to meet, and that was Loveypants (although yet to acquire the name), and they had gotten married. All right, it was marginally more complicated than that. This was in the city of Omaha, in the Nebraska, where he had immigrated at first and found work goading steers onto and off the trains. Woodrow Wilson had just had his stroke, and Rocco was in grief on account of Edith, the young bride who had rescued Wilson from his widowerhood. Furthermore, as the Spanish flu plagued the wider world, where was Rocco’s place of work but a rail yard, among trains that had come from far-off infected ports in the east, south, and west. It was like the heat of a furnace, this dread, like the hot breath of the Lord blowing on him, saying, Harden. So he said to Loveypants, with whom he’d been sharing insufficiently reserved boxcar liaisons, “I guess we’d better get married.” To which she responded, “We agree.” And due to his already having shamed her, he received no dowry, which was not unjust.

Loveypants, Luigina, drove a spear through the heart of the Rocco of becoming and watched it beat its last. Once he was hardened, his father had prophesied, the things of his softness would look shameful to him, and so they did. And he abandoned saloon ing, urinating from high windows, weekly letters home to Mother in Catania, and finally the Nebraska itself, and bought two train tickets eastward and two sets of new underclothes. What remained of the life of the Rocco of becoming was little else but Loveypants, who herself had hardened admirably, and to whom the name Loveypants (her boxcar name, her own invention, which she preferred) did not apply anymore in the same degree, but a word is a harder thing to spear and kill than a person.

In December 1919, Loveypants and Rocco reached their destination and disembarked from the train. Her hair was in tangles. Snow caught in the fuzz of her limp cloth coat. The tin reinforcing cups on the corners of her trunk hissed on the ice as she dragged it by a belt tied to its handle, while the other baggage she carried in a tarpaulin bundle on her back. Down the Ohio road she pulled her things, pregnant, singing to him.

Four and a half years later, which would be three years into his apprenticeship under the baker Modiano, the old man, anticipating retirement, offered to lease the bakery to Rocco until he had the cash to buy it outright. How was he to raise the money? For a day, he considered, and then, in a flash, his plan came to him: He would simply open the store every day. Without exception. The Sabbath be damned, and Christmas and Pentecost. Loveypants was not the only one to express skepticism about this plan, but he proceeded in the teeth of doubting Thomases and Tomasinas.

Therefore his streak began, and his fidelity to it was absolute down the many years, and labor coursed continually over his willing shoulders as though he had determined to build his house under a waterfall.

“But now begins a journey in my head, to work my mind, when body’s work’s expired,” recited the green-eyed first one, standing atop the downfolded Murphy bed in the parlor while Loveypants prompted him from a school reader; and Rocco, despite his own best efforts, saw his focus go slack, and splayed himself on the rug, the bag-of-bones last one that would not eat his father’s bread tucked inside Rocco’s night coat, the middle one, the Buddha, his legs crossed, watching from his accustomed perch within the armoire. From Rocco consciousness began to take its nightly four-hour leave. What he would give to forswear sleep! If God was good, on the other side he’d give Rocco back such hours that sleeping took, postsupper in the parlor, the spit of the papoose on his sleeve.

Loveypants applauded. The armoire hinges complained as the middle one shut himself inside. And Rocco slept.

And trouble came.

No sooner had he finally bought the old man out, after fifty-two months of leasing, than the store began to sink. It was the beginning of the panic. Free enterprise was bunk after all. For example: A child needs milk for his bones but his father can’t afford any; a certain Swede of the father’s acquaintance, a dairy farmer on the South Side, dumps fifty gallons daily of whole cow’s milk that nobody can afford to buy into the swill for his hogs. There is supply, there is demand, but there is no money. And yet money doesn’t exist, really; it’s more a theory; and so the root cause of so much waste was the lack of something that did not exist. For example: The loaf that Rocco slides from his peel onto the cooling rack has a splendidly chewy crumb, holes of many sizes and shapes, a light crust that shatters against the teeth. It has, at the moment he opens his store, just reached room temperature and is at its peak of texture and taste. In comes his clutch of clients who neglect entirely this living object of his art for yesterday’s dead leavings, available to them at half price. Today’s will sell tomorrow. God bless us.

He had no debts but his boys weren’t fed so his streak endured.