Salvatore Scibona: The End

With Roosevelt came relief, and Rocco was nearly ruined. Bread they gave for free to anybody willing to wait in line. Cotton wool, he should say. Soap foam. Fermented for only an hour and a half (he asked one of the miserable scabs employed to bake it) and cooked in a lukewarm gas-fired oven. Now the bread that issued from Rocco’s oven on a Wednesday morning was the fulfillment of dough he’d started Sunday night. Look at the blistery, barklike surface of the thing he made. Put it in your mouth and press it with your tongue. He asked the Lord what had become of shame. Meantime, agents of the federal government were buying piglets and sows and incinerating them in a starving nation because they were not expensive enough. In the winter, to save on coal, Rocco and the boys and Loveypants slept in cots in the bakery kitchen. The last boy got scurvy. Briefly, Loveypants believed that she was pregnant again, but malnutrition had merely made her monthly irregular. Then her mother, living in the New Jersey now and widowed, wrote on a postcard that through the intercession of a certain Alfred, stepbrother of the deceased father, Loveypants could obtain full-time employment there in a union candy bar factory. This uncle offered as well a bed in his home — there, in the New Jersey — that could sleep two in one direction and perhaps a third crosswise at the foot, if this third, the postcard concluded, was shorter than four feet tall.

This is the tale of the man whose bucket leaked on his way home from the well.

Here is what they did. She took the first and last with her and the middle stayed with Rocco. Once the store prospered again they would regroup themselves.

Mimmo, the middle one, Mimmino, now the baron unchallenged of all the parlor, was no longer called upon to share the water in his bath. When a chicken could be found, both drumsticks were his, and the fat gleamed on his great teeth. Within a year he overgrew his father. He undressed himself while standing on the furnace grate, a suit of white flesh, immaculate, grown from Rocco’s meager seed, and Rocco pulled the bed down from the wall and threw the blankets on the boy, and doused the light. He could not bake or add or sew or read and would not learn. Mornings, five hours after Rocco had left him midsleep in the house, he stumbled into the bakery for his breakfast. He sat and ate an egg and ate a roll. Rocco dripped some oil upon his comb and pulled it through the boy’s unruly, nigrous hair.

It had long been claimed by Mimmo that bearded spirits visited him, and not in nighttime merely. He could be seen to follow them with his gaze at supper and attend to their conversations — they did not speak with him but with each other, in a language that he did not understand. But he did not fear them anymore, he said, they were older than before and frail, and he now believed that they were on his side.

Rocco had not known that they had been against him. “You should have told me,” he said, extending his hand toward the boy and with the backs of his fingers tapping Mimmo’s chest, three times, mirthfully, on the buttons. “I would have driven them off for you.”

“But they’re on my side now,” repeated his one remaining.

“Whose were they on in days gone by?”

“Yours,” he said.

Early evening. October. Mimmo slouched, boneless, on his stool. The first and last and Loveypants had decamped sixteen months and five days before. The bold and simple pennant flag of Ohio hung from curtain rings in the doorway between the front of the store and the kitchen and billowed with the heat convecting from the oven in the rear. The numbers sixteen, five, twenty-four, stitched by Rocco into the central stripe of the flag, attested to the date of the initiation of his streak. The dough in his grip, leavened by a colony of yeasts he’d founded and daily fed and daily taxed so as to save on brewer’s yeast, was folded by him, rolled, thrust, folded, rolled, swung through the air behind him, thrashed against the surface of the worktable, rolled again, all at terrific speed (he was not ungifted at this) until it was as tight as a mattress and wondrous to touch, even this late in the day its charms unlost on him. “Strike it with your open hand, Mimmino,” he murmured, hoisting it under the melting boy’s unsubmitting eyes. “Spank it. Look, I am a little god. I make flesh out of dust and water.

Look, it weighs more than you. Why, it feels more like your ass than your ass does.” His voice was soft, rasping, tired, a soft bass voice, the soft voice of a hardened man. “Give it a roundhouse punch, it won’t mind.” He sniffled, as did the boy. The Buddha wore a forlorn look today. His posture made Rocco worry he wasn’t feeding him enough cheese. “Go on, close your fist and give it what you have,” he said. “Feel how silky and warm like your skin it is. Sit up and touch it, why don’t you, talk to it, stick your nose in it and take it in.”

That was when the boy asked, if it was all the same to him, and if room could be found on the floor, maybe, if he could go live with his mother. He had the merest beginnings of yellow-orange whiskers at the corners of his mouth.

Rocco put him on the train and watched him go.

The bucket leaked. The water dripped on his shoes. And yet he didn’t run home but continued walking at the same pace.

She didn’t come back. She stayed there. Even when he had a little money and wrote postcards saying, Now is the time; Steak for breakfast; I will take you dancing; I will close the store on Sundays; What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder. And the boys stayed with her. They visited their wanting father seldom, then less, then not anymore. One married. One enrolled in a taxicab-driving class. One volunteered to fight the nation’s enemies in the Far East.

Like anyone else, he struggled to keep the commandments and to be steadfast in his faith. He confessed on Saturday afternoons that, notwithstanding the threat of the scriptures, he had as yet failed to turn the hearts of his children to their father. He took a break from work at six thirty Sunday mornings to hustle up the street and receive Communion and made it back in time to open the store at the wonted hour. Regarding his neglect of the day of rest, he recalled that the Lord had once asked, If you had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you lay hold of it and lift it out?

His streak endured.

He desired for himself solitude, which was to say the company of his own.

Late afternoon. August 14. Yesterday. Seventeen years unwifed. Dog days. The days the Dog Star rose with the sun. Attempting to nap on the Murphy bed in his work pants. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Drip, said the ice in the icebox on the pan. Something to slow his heart down, gin maybe, of which there was alas not a spoonful in the house. Ice cubes in a dishrag on his eyes.

When they knocked on his door he thought it was time already for D’Agostino and the Friday card game. Why, hello. Brush kitty from the door with the foot. They were wearing impractical woolen outfits but were unsweating and tucked their hats under their arms as they entered, and then they made their outlandish pronouncement.

Pursuant to the terms of the recent armistice, all United Nations prisoners of war in North Korea were to be let go, Mimmo among them. (Rocco read the news, thank you, he was aware, he had awaited the day.) However, Mimmo, they declared to him, in words that really did not allow air to get in between, had contracted tuberculosis and, by the date of the exchange of prisoners, had died. This was only last week that this had happened. The navy was soon to return the body to the New Jersey, where Loveypants intended to bury it. The secretary of defense wished to express the regret of a grateful nation.