I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “I don’t know,” he said. “My arm’s numb.”

  Then his eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he dropped dead. Died just like that—answering my question one minute, dead the next.

  I had never had much use for Drinkwater. He was lazy, sneaky—his mischief with the bottle had cost my brother Pasquale his job at the mill. But he had worked under me, now, for over ten years. On the nights when he felt like working, that skinny Indian could do his share and more. He was forty-two and I was forty-two. Right to his knees, he had dropped, right in front of my eyes. I caught him before he fell, before his face hit the concrete floor. I did that much for the son of a bitch.

  There was just a small turnout for his funeral—half a dozen workers from the mill (none of the bosses) and a couple of men I didn’t know. He had a colored wife and four half-colored children—two sons, two daughters. Drinkwater had never talked much about family. I was pallbearer. The wife had asked the mill agent to ask me. What could I say—no? . . . There was no man of God at the grave, only someone in a shabby suit who did the talking. I didn’t know if Indians could go to Heaven, but if they could, I was pretty sure Drinkwater hadn’t gotten there. For one thing, he broke continually the ninth and tenth commandments (coveting wives and goods). He’d been a drinker, in trouble with the police from time to time. He had known his way to Bickel Road. He had bragged about it sometimes on dinner break—to the other men, never to me. Me, he respected. . . . He’d never been the best worker at the mill, but never the worst, either. One of the owner’s sons or sons-in-law—one of those sons of bitches—could have come to his funeral, shown him a little respect at the end. A little thanks for all those nights that he’d done his work. But as soon as a man keeled over, American Woolen and Textile forgot he had ever lived and breathed.

  The next Saturday afternoon, I went back to the church—this time not at the beginning of confession but near the end. I waited until it was just Guglielmo and me. But before I could get myself off the pew, he turned off his little light and came out of the confessional.

  “Oh, Domenico,” he whispered. “I thought everyone had gone. Have you come to make confession?”

  “No confessione,” I said. “I came to ask two questions.”

  “About the school?”

  I looked away. “Not the school,” I said. “No.”

  He waited but I said no more. “All right, then. Better come in.” He went back inside the confessional and closed the door. Lit his light again.

  Inside the box, I knelt facing his shadow behind the screen. My hands trembled in front of my face. Guglielmo said nothing. I said nothing. Finally, he told me that since we were inside the confessional, maybe I should ask my questions within the context of the traditional confession. That would signal God to listen, he said, and ensure the sanctity of whatever it was that I had to say. “All right?” he asked me.

  “All right,” I said. Then I said nothing.

  He began for me. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . .”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated. “But never as much as I have been sinned against!”

  The shadow put a finger to its lip. “To prepare yourself for the Eucharist, Domenico—to be truly penitent—you must examine only your own soul. Leave other sinners to examine theirs. You must try to practice humility.”

  “Humility?” I said. “Believe me, Father, a man who lives with two murdering women learns to be humble in a thousand different ways.”

  “Murdering?” he said. “Why murdering?”

  “Never mind that,” I told him. “That’s the business of my home, not the church.”

  Silenzia. And then Guglielmo asked if I understood what he had said about the sanctity of the confessional. “Whatever you say or ask here is between you and the Almighty Father,” he whispered. “I am only acting as His representative.”

  “Scusa, Father,” I said. “Where do your people come from? In the Old Country?”

  “From Tivoli,” he said. “Not far from Rome.”

  “Ah, Roma,” I said. “I lived in Rome once. I saw how Romans live. In Rome, people say what’s on their minds—they shout their troubles from the steps of the Colosseum if they like and no one even takes notice. But I am siciliano. The code of silence runs through my veins. For your people it is different. Southerners—siciliani—honor the word of God and omertà equally.”

  “Why have you entered the confessional, Domenico, if not to confess?”

  “I told you already. I wish to have two questions answered—questions that rob me of my sleep. . . . And maybe I come to bring a little peace to my home—to undo the curse your boss left me.”

  “My ‘boss,’ Domenico, is the Lord Almighty.”

  “You know who I mean: that old fart of a monsignor.”

  Guglielmo began twice to say something and twice changed his mind and stopped. When he spoke the third time, he advised me that to form a covenant with God, I must break my covenant with omertà, the code of silence. “God is looking for a sign of your faith in Him above all else, Domenico,” he whispered. “Only after you have given it can you be set free of the shackles that you yourself have forged.”

  “That I have forged?” I said. I meant to whisper but forgot. “You were there that day he called a curse upon my home. ‘A house where priests are ordered to leave is damned from the peak to the foundation.’ His exact words stay in my ears. You were there—you heard! And fifteen minutes later, my brother fell to his death. A year after that, I marry a wife who whored with other men but with her lawful husband is as chaste as the good Sisters of Humility! That goddamned Irish priest was the blacksmith who forged my shackles. And if there’s justice, he burns in Hell for it!”

  Father Guglielmo’s shadow made the sign of the cross and asked me to speak more softly. “It does you no good, Domenico, to enter God’s house and malign one of His children,” he told me. “But for the moment, let us walk another path. You said certain questions keep you from sleeping. What questions? Tell me your doubts and let me try to help you.”

  I pushed aside the curtain and looked out into the church to make sure we were still alone. I wanted no big ears to hear my business.

  “I wonder . . .” I whispered. “I worry sometimes that I may have damned the souls of my brother . . . and my son.”

  “Damned them?” he said. “Damned them how?”

  I poked my head again outside the confessional. Still no one there.

  “Father, you remember that my brother Pasquale had a certain peculiar weakness.”

  “A weakness?” Guglielmo said. “Do you mean a physical weakness or a spiritual one?”

  “I mean . . .”

  “What is it, Domenico? Tell me.”

  “Padre, is it a terrible sin for a man to refuse a wife and take his pleasure from a monkey?”

  At first there was no response from the priest. And when he did speak again, he brought me back to the subject of damnation. “Why, exactly, do you worry that you’ve sent your brother’s soul to Hell, Domenico?”

  “You were there! I threw the cement! If I had not lost my temper, I would not have angered the old priest and he would not have cursed my house. Then Pasquale would not have fallen.” Here, my voice cracked a little, but I continued. “After my brother Vincenzo was shot by that policeman, you stood by his bed at the boarding-house and administered the sacraments to that rascal—prepared him for his journey beyond life. But poor Pasquale . . . I tried to interest him in a wife, padre. Believe me! In that respect, I am clearly blameless. But all Pasquale ever wanted was that hairy creature of his. The devil himself must have sent that monkey up from Hell or Madagascar! To others, I denied there was anything unnatural between them, but privately . . . the way those two would stare at each other . . . Who knows what went on down there in the signora’s cellar? Pompino! Ditalino! For all I know, that brother of mine got down on his knees and found a way to fit his thing inside her ‘coin of no value’!”
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  “Shhh,” Guglielmo said. “Shhh. Lower your voice, please, Domenico. And remember as you select your words that we are in God’s house.”

  “Scusa, padre,” I said. “Scusa, please. At the mill, bad words float in the air along with the woolen fibers. Sometimes I forget. Scusa, again, signore. Scusa, to you, too, God. Forgive me.”

  “Go on, please, Domenico,” he said. “Unburden yourself.”

  “In all other ways, my brother Pasquale was a decent man—nothing at all like that hooligan Vincenzo. Quiet and shy. Eager to help. Oh, he had a stubborn streak, all right; he sometimes drank a little more than he needed to. Even without alcoholic spirits, he was . . . he was never quite right—never all there. Even as a boy. He would laugh at the strangest times. Maybe it was his early work in the sulphur mines, who knows? He was my father’s caruso and Papa was all the time hitting him on the head for something. Maybe that’s what shook up his brains. . . . But he was never sneaky or mean-spirited, my brother Pasquale. Never perverso, either, until that she-devil of a goddamned monkey got ahold of his balls!”

  “Domenico.”

  “Scusa, padre, scusa. I beg your pardon. There I go again, ha ha. . . . I tried to stop what was going on—tried to arrange for a wife to distract Pasquale. Really, God cannot fault me on that score. . . . Oh, to have not one but two brothers who bring such shame down on a father’s name! What a heavy cross for an eldest son to bear! But at least Vincenzo did his funny business with humans. To share such a passione with a monkey and then to die without absolution. I’m not saying I’m blameless, padre. If only I had not thrown the cement. If only . . .”

  “Domenico, did you ever witness your brother and the monkey . . . perform these perverse acts?” Guglielmo whispered. “Did Pasquale ever boast or confide in you about them? Are you speculating about this or was there proof?”

  “Pasquale talked about almost nothing,” I said. “You could work with him for a whole day and hear nothing come out of him except a belch after dinner. He was a private man. . . . As for proof, one morning when I went down to the cellar to wake him up—that was my habit when we lived at the boardinghouse: to get him up for work when I came home to go to bed. One time I saw . . . I saw . . . Scusa, padre, but I have never spoken about what I saw that morning.”

  “Tell me, Domenico. What you say is between you and God, Who loves all sinners.”

  “Pasquale was asleep on his cot and smiling. That monkey was sitting on his belly and playing . . . playing with the buttons on his pants.”

  “But Domenico, if that is the only thing—”

  “Scusa, padre, let me finish.” This next part I whispered, I was so ashamed. “Pasquale had cazzu duro. The monkey was . . . exciting him.”

  Father Guglielmo cleared his throat. Once, twice. A third time. Then, for a minute or more, he was as silent as Pasquale himself. “And that was your only proof?” he asked.

  “That, and the whispers of every Italiano in Three Rivers, Connecticut. One day in the street, Colosanto the baker asked me if it was true my brother’s little monkey played the pipe for him!”

  “Gossip is the devil’s work, Domenico,” the priest said.

  “Si, padre, but when it came to my brother and that monkey, plenty of my countrymen are ready to help Satan with the job!”

  “But surely, Domenico, what you saw in the signora’s cellar is by itself no proof of sin. It is a natural thing for a man to become . . . aroused in his sleep.”

  “Si, padre, it is a natural thing.”

  “But, of course, less natural if it happens when a monkey plays with his buttons.”

  “Si, padre. Far less natural when that happens.”

  He was quiet for several seconds and in the silence, behind the screen that separated us, I could almost hear the moving gears in his brain. “Nevertheless, Domenico,” he sighed, “your brother, most likely, was entirely innocent of the immoral acts you put on his head. He may well have died without a trace of mortal sin on his soul. You yourself have said what a good man Pasquale was—how generous, how giving to a brother trying to reach his dream.”

  “Si, padre,” I whispered, “but what was he dreaming that morning while the monkey made the pipe in his pants? What was he giving to that filthy creature?”

  “You must remember, Domenico, that Pasquale was a child of God. Let that comfort you. Perhaps . . . perhaps he merely loved another of God’s creatures in the manner of St. Francis. To suggest otherwise, based only on what you saw, is—”

  “All over town they were laughing at him!” I interrupted. “At both of us! Crude jokes! Filthy talk about the two of them making a baby together. . . . Was St. Francis’s brother ever called ‘monkey’s uncle’ and laughed out of a barbershop?”

  “The things people said don’t make your brother—”

  “Even that goddamned monsignor accused him of it—that so-called man of God! Never mind cement—I should have thrown a rock at the head of that son of a bitch! If Pasquale is in Hell, then that priest must be in a worse place.”

  “Domenico!” Father Guglielmo said. “I remind you again that the late monsignor’s sins and his salvation are between God and him. Your brother’s, too. To wish damnation on one and assign damnation to the other is to presume yourself capable of doing God’s work for Him. Humble yourself, man! Pray for humility. If you seek absolution, you must put yourself in a state of grace.”

  “I seek answers to my two questions,” I reminded him. “My question about Pasquale and my question about the dead boy.”

  “Ask me your questions, then. Ask them directly.”

  “Did I damn my brother to Hell by throwing the cement?”

  “You did not, no, because you have no power to do so. Only God has the power to damn or save sinners. What is your other question?”

  “The child who died at birth when the girl was born? The boy born to my wife and me . . .” Here I had to stop.

  “What a day of conflict that must have been for you and Ignazia,” Guglielmo finally said. “Death and life—joy and sadness—together.”

  “No joy,” I said. “What joy is there in holding your dead son and watching your wife bear the fruit of her sins with another man? Where’s the joy in learning your wife is another man’s puttana?”

  “Such harsh words,” Guglielmo said. “Such serious accusations. To call your wife first a murderer and now a whore . . .”

  “That’s my business,” I reminded him. “My question is not about Ignazia. It is about the boy who died.”

  “Ask it, then, Domenico.”

  I told him the story of that terrible night: how Prosperine had come to get me at the mill and how I had refused to leave to fetch the dottore. Told how I had discovered the boy in the pantry while Ignazia was birthing the girl—how I, who had first ordered a priest off my property and forsaken the church, had then baptized my dead son with dirty dishwater and cooking oil. Later that day, I said, I had called God a monster.

  “What is the question you wish to ask, Domenico?”

  “I fear . . .” I whispered, “I fear that I have damned my son’s soul forever with sacrilegious baptism. That is the worry that robs me of sleep, even when exhaustion is deep inside my bones. Have I banished my own flesh and blood from Heaven by baptizing him with dishwater in my godless house?”

  Father Guglielmo leaned closer to the screen. His lips brushed against it as he whispered. “In what you did, you were acting as God’s agent, just as I act here today as His agent in the pardoning of your sins. The condition of your soul at the time you performed the baptism was not at issue. Do you see the distinction between serving God and assuming you can take over His work for Him?”

  I said nothing.

  “Let me answer your question directly,” he said. “You did not damn your son’s soul. Your action delivered the child from limbo and placed him into the arms of Jesus Christ, his Savior, Who will keep him safe for all eternity. The boy’s baptism was valid.”

  At these wo
rds, my breath caught and I leaned my head against the wall of the confessional.

  He asked me if I had ever told Ignazia about the baptism I had performed in the pantry that morning.

  “I told no one,” I said. “Until now. Until here.”

  “You must go home and let your wife know the child was baptized. It will comfort her to hear that her son is with God—that her dead child is safe with Jesus. Then you must bring the boy’s sister to—”

  I began to weep. I couldn’t help it, could not have stopped, even if the whole church had suddenly filled up with people watching me. The sobbing and bellowing that came out of me that late afternoon must have nearly shaken the holy statues off their pedestals. I had no pride that day, only shame.

  Father Guglielmo left the confession box and stood holding open the curtain for me. “Come out,” he said.

  He led me to a nearby pew where I sat and wailed into my own hands and into my coat sleeve, into my handkerchief, into Guglielmo’s handkerchief. The padre sat and waited, his hand clamped onto my shoulder.

  When I could speak again, I broke for good from Sicily—smashed omertà into a million pieces and let out my life. Fast and crazy I talked, with no order, no sense. “Slow down,” he kept telling me, but I could not slow down. My arms flew, my fists drummed against the wooden pew. I shouted one minute, whispered the next. I told him how the Weeping Vergine had revealed herself to me as a child and how my father had yanked me from my religious studies so that I could clean up my brother Vincenzo’s dirty business. “That’s what set me on a path of sin!” I shouted. “And now that young boy from Giuliana whom the Holy Mother once visited is a man who visits the whorehouse on Bickel Road.” I told how I had beaten Ignazia on our wedding night and how that goddamned magistrato in Giuliana had beaten me out of my father’s gold medaglia. I described the screams of my brother’s monkey when I threw it over the bridge and my mother’s screams on the day my brothers and I left her behind in Sicily. Was it a sin, I asked the priest, to have wanted a better life? Bad enough I had to carry two brothers on my back to America, but a mother, too? A mother who then turned around and took to her bed the very same man who had slandered me and sent my father to ruin? I told Guglielmo that the thought of suicide had tempted me during my journey to la ‘Merica and that my wife and her friend had murdered a stained-glass artiste back in the Old Country. I retold the Monkey’s crazy story about the witch Ciccolina and her blasphemous black art—the making of two rabbits from one. Was it not a sin, I asked him, to harbor murdering women? I told how that goddamned Prosperine had threatened to cut off my balls if I didn’t keep my hands off my wife. My own wife, whom I had married in good faith and given a home like a palace! My own wife!