Chapter 10

All Souls' Day in Marbolina is white. The town goes up to Castagnetola with chrysanthemums, and the mountain behind the graves is white, and the plaster of the columbarium walls is white, and the wind comes down off the scree and gets under coats and stays there.

They went up together, at ten, in borrowed coats.

The Ferretti stone stood in the third row by the wall. It was a good stone, the best marble in the valley, gray-veined and polished so smooth that the clouds moved in it. Two names were cut into the face.

DAVIDE FERRETTI 1989-2015 TEODORO RINALDI 1974-2015

And under them, in smaller letters, in the same font, cut by the same hand:

MAY GOD JUDGE THE MAN WHO CUT THIS FUSE

Silvia stood in front of it with a lump of white marble in her fist that she had polished herself on the felt wheel, one of the last pieces she had finished in that yard, and she did not throw it.

Father Ivo came along the row with his hands in his coat.

"I asked you a week ago," she said, "and I'm asking you in daylight. Take the line off."

"The parish didn't pay for the stone."

"No. The yard paid for it, and the yard took it out of the dead man's insurance, and my husband's name is on it and the man who killed him is under it in letters, and every year on this day I stand here and read a sentence that accuses my father in a place where he can't answer." She held the marble lump up. "I'll pay for the chiseling. I don't have the money today. I will have it."

Father Ivo looked at the stone for a while.

"Not today," he said. "It's All Souls'. There are four hundred people in this cemetery. Today, I'll say the Mass and I'll say his name - the living one, out loud, in the hall tonight, where the men who work that mountain can hear it. And I'll write to the Ferretti family this week and I'll tell them the parish will not bless that stone again as it stands, and that is a thing they will feel, signora, whether or not they admit it."

"That's not very much."

"No," he said. "It's what I have. I'm a priest, not a provincial surveyor."

The assembly was at five in the Camera del Lavoro hall by the railway, and the hall was full, and there were men standing at the back against the barometer that did not work, and a few of them were the men who had stopped greeting Silvia in the street the week before.

The priest read the names of the men the mountain had taken from that valley over forty years. He read them slowly, in the voice he used for the dead, and the hall was silent the way a hall is silent when every man in it knows at least two of the names.

Then he said, "Orfeo Baldini."

And then he said, "Living."

The hall made a noise. Somebody at the back said something that Silvia did not catch, and Osvaldo Berti stood up at the long table and said one sentence into it - "The union has filed for the wages of nine years, and the union will not withdraw the filing" - and then the whole thing came apart into talking, the ordinary, enormous, tireless talking of a working town, and nobody went home until after seven.

Orfeo had not gone into the hall.

He was outside on the platform by the railway line, sitting on the low wall with the satchel at his feet, because the satchel had come back from the Carabinieri that morning in a plastic bag with the lining still split, and he would not leave it anywhere, and Bianca was standing in front of him with her hands behind her back.

"Nonno," Silvia heard her say, from twenty meters away, in the dark, in the cold, over the noise of the men inside, "the mountain's going to cough."

He looked up at her. Nino had already climbed onto his knee and was asleep against his shoulder with his mouth open, and the flat cap and the canvas coat and the ruined thumb were all there in the light of the hall doorway.

"Hold my thumb," Bianca said.

He put his burnt hand out, and his granddaughter's small fingers closed around the missing joint, and held it, and held it, and the whole road heard what happened then - the men in the doorway, the woman coming down the steps with a paycheck she did not have yet, the boy on the scooter going by with the Tuesday bread a day early.

Orfeo Baldini wept in the open air, in front of the town, and did not hide his face, and did not stop.