Chapter 7

The town puts the Madonna del Cavatore on a truck on the last Sunday of the feast and drives her from the church of San Michele down the Via Cavour and back up around the fountain, and the whole valley comes in for it, in good coats, with their children scrubbed.

The drizzle had held off, which the old women took as a good sign.

Silvia dressed her children in the good coats. She brushed Bianca's hair and did not hurry. She made Nino a piece of bread and jam he did not eat. Then she took the canvas satchel and put it over her shoulder, and in her left hand she carried the pliers, and in her pocket, in a twist of newspaper, she carried the fuse stub and the crushed brass ferrule.

"Where are we going?" Bianca said.

"To the procession."

"Aren't we going to see Nonno?"

"Not at the fountain," Silvia said. "He's coming to the procession."

They came into the piazza at half past three. The crowd was already thick along the Via Cavour - the Ferretti workers and their wives, the Camera del Lavoro men with their badges in their jackets, the quarrymen from Carchio and Fantiscritti and Colonnata, the shopkeepers, the priest and two altar boys, the Carabinieri standing in the shade of the station wall with their caps on. Marco Ferretti was on the church steps with the feast committee and a gold chain of office over his coat, and the vein was not showing at his temple yet.

Orfeo was on the second step below the door, in his earth-brown jacket, sitting the way he sat every day of his life, with his back against the church.

He had been brought. Silvia had sent Nino up the road with a message and Osvaldo Berti had walked up to the shed with a flask of coffee and walked him down, and nobody in Marbolina had seen the two of them come in through the lower street, and now they were seeing them, and the crowd's noise began to change register the way water changes before it boils.

Father Ivo came down the church steps with the censer going.

The procession started. The truck with the Madonna rolled and the band played and the people turned to watch it, and Silvia walked her two children straight through the middle of the crowd and up onto the steps, and the crowd turned back because a woman was doing something in the wrong direction, and Marco looked down and saw her and started to come down the steps, and by then it was too late, which was the only way to do it.

She put the satchel down at Father Ivo's feet.

She put the pliers down beside it.

She unwrapped the newspaper and put the fuse stub and the crushed ferrule in the middle of the two of them and stood up with her hands empty.

"Father," she said, in a voice she used on the polisher when the wheel was running, because she needed it to carry. "This is a three-inch fuse stub and a crimped ferrule, cut and crimped the night before the Carchio blast by the man who set that shot. The crimp was made with these pliers. You can put the ferrule back in the putty mark yourself, in front of these people, and you will see the same chip in the same jaw."

The band had stopped playing. It stopped because the band was made of men from the yard and they had all turned around.

"Nine years ago the whole town was told that Orfeo Baldini, master blaster, cut that fuse, and that he confessed, and that he ran. Orfeo Baldini did not cut that fuse. Orfeo Baldini refused to fire that shot because he said the charge was set short, and he was dismissed that night for saying it, and the fuse was cut the next morning by Vitale Ferretti, who was in a hurry and said so out loud in front of the water truck."

"Shut your mouth," Marco said.

"The man who cut the fuse was Vitale Ferretti. Two days later he had a notary in the office at the yard, and he sat my father at that desk and had him sign an admission of fault, and my father signed it, and the payment for it was me. My flat. My job. My children's name in this town."

She stopped. In the silence the quarry truck ground its gears somewhere up on the Canalone road and the noise came down the hill into the piazza like an interruption.

Then Marco came down three steps and grabbed the pliers off the ground and threw them, hard, down and out over the heads of the crowd into the slurry channel at the edge of the yard road, where the white water ran its runnel down to the grate.

Somebody went in after them.

Piero the polisher - forty years at the felt wheel, bad knees, nobody's hero - stepped off the curb into the channel up to his thigh, went down on both hands in the white mud, and came up holding the pliers over his head like a man holding up a fish, and walked them straight across the road to the Carabinieri and put them in Maresciallo Cozzi's hands and said, loud enough for the front row, "That's Vitale's. Everyone here knows that's Vitale's."

Father Ivo bent down and picked up the fusee and the stub and held them on the flat of his palm, and did not say anything, and did not give them to Marco.

Silvia turned and put her hand out and Orfeo took it and stood up. It took him a long time. He stood on the second step in front of the whole town, upright, his ruined thumb out and open, and the entire piazza looked at him.

"Bianca," Silvia said. "Give Nonno your hand."

Bianca went up the step and put her small hand around the ruined thumb, the way she had a hundred times, without looking, and said something to him that nobody in the crowd could hear.

"He is my father," Silvia said. "His name is Orfeo Baldini, he is alive, and he has been living in a shed on company land for eight years because my mother-in-law paid for it and my father kept his mouth shut so that my children would have a roof."

Somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Nunzia Ferretti stood in her black coat with her rosary in her hand, and did not look away, and did not speak, until the Camera del Lavoro men started to make a noise, and then she said, in her ordinary voice, to the people on either side of her, "I have paid for that shed for eight years."

That was the sentence that took the piazza apart.

The province opened the Carchio file that same afternoon.