John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Paul huddled against his Mom, the still-damp hairs at his neck tickling along her collar. “I can’t,” the boy was saying, “I can’t really say it’s ah, a-about God. What hap, what ha-happens with me…”

The priest waved a soft hand, eyes closed, quieting them both. He appeared to have come out of his fervor, his bare feet whispering against the marble floors as he shuffled back from the table. Jay closed the distance between them again, glaring, taking hold of the man’s skinny arm. But Cesare kept his eyes shut, shaking his head as if the Jaybird weren’t there. Quietly he declared that his worst sinning, “the very blackest mark” against him, concerned the boy.

“What?” Jay asked. “You sinned against Paul?”

Barb put an arm around her boy, getting set to haul him out of the room.

“The worst I did,” Cesare went on, “was to hurt this consecrated brood.”

“Hey. How many times do I have to say it?”

“Now Cesare, please.” The old woman leaned over velveteen legs, her hands between her knees. “This isn’t the man I fell in love with.”

“Just, I mean, speak English. Hey? Plain English.”

“I fell in love,” Aurora said, “with a beautiful Black Irishman who used to say the Holy Spirit dwelt in our desires. ‘Dwelt,’ oh my Chez-ah-ray. The only proof of God you could take seriously, you used to say, was the sheer variety of human yearning.”

Jay remained at the man’s arm, frowning. For the first time in a while Barbara noticed that her husband was wearing a uniform too: his hospital whites.

“Oh my Cesare,” Aurora repeated, then at a glance from her son fell silent. Her doctored looks hardened.

“You and Mom,” Jay said, “that’s your business. But what’s this about Paul?”

Cesare had fallen so still that Barb could spot a wet streak along his jaw-line, a mark left by her child. The boy himself was worming in closer, under her arm, and so when the old man began to speak, to murmur, a priest at confession, at first she could only pick out the words in Italian. Or was it Neapolitan, that drawl, those dying final syllables? Even when Cesare said a word she knew well, clandestini , Barbara couldn’t be sure she’d heard him right till he put it together with another one she recognized: scippatori .

She shifted her grip on Paul, blocking his body if they shared a car seat and were skidding towards a collision. “Mother of God,” she said.

Jay let go of the priest and gave her a look. He asked something she didn’t catch. Aurora too faced around, pant-legs flopping, looking glad for the distraction. Meanwhile Cesare continued his explanations, the murmur of troubling thoughts, and Barbara began to regret how easily she understood them. She regretted everything she’d learned during this last clue-spattered month. For her there could be no mistaking this old man, her lone Vomero friend, with whom she’d spent hours in a church otherwise deserted — except, that is, for a couple of fugitives in the basement. And those two, there could be no mistaking, had been something more than lost sheep.

“It’s the scippatori ,“ she said at the priest’s first decent pause “Our scippatori , that’s what you’re saying. The two you’ve been hiding are the guys who hit Jay.”

Cesare may have raised his eyes, Barb couldn’t be sure. His back was to the balcony doors, and in the shadows, his face was another map of disease. In any case he hardly had a chance to nod before Jay erupted. The wife didn’t catch every word, as she studied the new plague-map above her, but she knew what her husband was saying. Hey, how long, how could you — what is this? The former lineman took hold of Cesare’s arm again. He shook the old priest and looked about to do worse before, good Papa, he shot a glance at Paul. Not that this made him any less threatening. The Jaybird went for a height advantage, firing questions with his heels off the ground.

“You had the guys? In your church, you had them? You had both those guys, and I mean. You just sat there.”

You could see kitchen grease under Jay’s fingernails. And for all the priest’s experience with unhappy wives, he didn’t know what to do about a husband. He flinched and responded in single syllables.

“How could you?” Jay asked. “How can a man just sit there?”

Barbara might’ve seen Cesare on his deathbed, but she’d never seen him so at loose ends, the fractured Jesuit Dominican. He stuttered as he tried to get into details. The two clandestini had showed up at his door the night of the mugging. Scrawny, in cheap jeans and T’s, and one of them bruised deeply under his eye, both clandestini nonetheless brimmed with a naive certainty that the Church could wash them clean. At each word they spoke, Cesare had heard the echo of his own emptiness. He’d heard how his soul had become a husk, pitted by years of neglect and baked in the Mezzogirno . After that it had taken the priest a couple of days, talking further with these two, before he was convinced that they had in fact…they had, in fact…

“Hey,” Jay said. “Don’t stop now, buster. What’d they tell you?”

“Quite,” said Cesare. “They told me, yes, that’s it, quite.”

Scowling, Jay once more seized the old man’s arm.

“They told me,” the priest repeated. “It was confession.”

The Jaybird rocked back, hands at his sides. He and Barbara got it at once, how deeply the sacrament mattered to Cesare, fractured and in need of a splint. Confession must’ve been the man’s primary mode of communication with the two refugees, and now when his faith was still trembling from the effort of resurrection, the sanctity of his priestly rituals meant everything. How could he violate the clandestini ‘s trust? Cesare bit his tongue, making a show of it, so that even with the shadow you couldn’t miss the wet red muscle bulging between his teeth. Barbara didn’t see why he had to do that, especially not staring down at Paul the way he was, but she admired the man’s backbone. Aurora too grinned a bit, something more than polite.

“Come on.” Jay reined in his tone. “Cesare, all due respect. I mean.”

Then there was the eleven-year-old, all eyes, drawing his knees to his chin as he stared at the priest’s tongue.

“Hey, Mr. Paul,” said Jay. “Hey guy. You know. What you did was good.”

The priest startled and turned, dropping his face into his hands.

“Everything else, it’s mixed up. It’s for grownups, it’s mixed up. But Mr. Paul, big guy, what you did — you know. That was good.”

The next breath of out Cesare sounded choked, a sob. At that, Aurora spoke up. “Cesare,” she said, “honestly. You must realize that the only person in this room who was ever interested in your soul, absolutely and truly interested, was myself”

Barbara looked up from Paul, then on second thought let the woman talk.

“Your Aura was the only one who cared,” she went on. “I did, absolutely. ‘To live to err, to fall, to triumph’—that’s Stephen Dedalus, as I’m sure you know. And had anyone asked, I’d have said old Stephen was talking about you and me.”

Jay and Paul had turned to the old woman as well.

“Now, honestly, Cesare. In the name of my caring, quite genuine while it lasted, I have to ask whether there isn’t something you can do.”

The priest, his fingers slipping beneath his eyes, gave the beginning of a nod.

PAUL had the heightened sympathy levels; he began nodding too, waving a hand at the old man. “He, the priest, he, it w-wasn’t so bad, what he, he did. Help, helping those guys, h-hiding them. It wasn’t so bad, because if, if h-he, he, if he helped them, he, he knew, then w-we weren’t in a-any danger. The family.”