Chapter 9

November came in cold. The shed on the Carchio shelf had a stove and no wood that anybody had cut, and the first week they burned broken slab ends, which burn and do not heat.

There were five of them in two rooms now. Orfeo had the cot and Silvia had the mattress and Nino and Bianca slept head-to-toe on the camp bed from the flat, and they had a bucket, a lamp, a two-ring gas burner, and a view of the valley that was worth nothing to anybody but Nino, who liked the trucks.

The flat above the workshop was gone. Marco's lawyer had filed for possession on the first of the month, and the letter came up the mountain in the postbag of a boy on a scooter, and it said things about the tenancy and the arrears and the unlawful occupation of company premises, and it was three pages long and it had, on page two, a paragraph that called the man known as Orfeo Baldini the individual responsible for the Carchio incident of 2015.

Silvia read it standing in the doorway of the shed.

"You want me to sign it for you," Orfeo said from inside. He was sitting on the cot with his hands on his knees, and he had been watching her read it, and his voice was flat.

"I want you to eat something."

"Sign it and I'll say I wrote it."

"No."

"You're sleeping on a floor in November with two children because of a thing I did."

"You refused to fire a shot," Silvia said. "Then you signed a paper you didn't mean, and then you sat still for nine years so that I could have a job and a roof and a name. That's not a thing you did. That's a thing that was done to you."

"That letter calls me a murderer."

"Yes."

"Let me be one."

"No." She folded the three pages in half and put them in the stove and shut the door. "If a court says it, they can say it in front of me. They can say it in front of you. They can say it in front of the town. But I'm not going to stand up anywhere and say it myself just to make a lawyer's typing hurt less."

He looked at her for a long moment and then he put his hand over his eyes, and that was the only time that week he did that.

The workers started coming on the fourth day.

It was not organized. That was the point of it. Somebody's wife came up the Canalone road with a pot of ribollita and put it inside the door without knocking and went away again. A boy from the yard brought a sack of chestnuts and a can of diesel for the stove. Osvaldo Berti brought wood, twice, out of the union's own shed, and would not be thanked, and left a note saying the Camera del Lavoro would hold an assembly on All Souls' Day and that Silvia was to be in the hall.

Some houses in Marbolina stopped greeting her. Some started. The town had picked sides, and the sides did not run along the line anybody had expected - the yard men mostly came up the mountain and the shopkeepers mostly did not, and Maresciallo Cozzi's wife sent a blanket and asked that nobody be told.

On the sixth day the notary telephoned the shed, which was a thing the shed had never had happen to it, and asked to speak to Signora Ferretti, and told her that the children's trust was frozen and would stay frozen through the proceedings, that a guardian's accounting would be required, that she should expect a summons to a hearing in Massa, and that she should know, unofficially, that the drawing of the trust against yard payroll had one signature on it and it was not hers, and that the man who had told her he could have the money in her hand by Friday had never had the money at all.

She hung up and stood in the doorway of the shed and looked down the valley at the quarry trucks going along the coast road toward Marina di Marbolina, carrying blocks down to the port, because the mountain did not care about any of it.

"You want to know something," Orfeo said from the cot. "They'll still be cutting marble in fifty years."

"I know."

"It doesn't help."

"No," Silvia said. "It doesn't."

Bianca came up the path from the water tap with the jug in both hands and her tongue out of the side of her mouth with concentration, and Nino ran ahead of her the way he always ran, without looking, and Orfeo got up off the cot and went out and crouched down at the path and caught him and held him and stood up with the boy on his arm with a grunt, and Bianca arrived and put the jug down and looked up at her mother and did not say anything, which was the first time in three weeks that Bianca had not said anything.