Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in)

by James McBride

  “What’s he saying, Hector?” Bishop asked.

  Hector’s face creased into a puzzled frown. “I don’t know. He’s a little cracked, I think.”

  Stamps said, “Ask him can we sleep in the church.”

  Before Hector could speak, the man stopped pacing. His face suddenly contorted into a mask of outrage, and he poured forth a barrage of words at Hector, pointing over the ridge. Hector blinked nervously at the fury of it.

  Stamps could make out “tedesco”—the Italian word for “German.” That was all.

  “Well?” Bishop asked.

  Hector shrugged, his face troubled and bewildered. “Something’s wrong with him.”

  “What’s the gist of it?”

  “Dunno.”

  “I thought you spoke Italian.”

  “I do but . . . He said something about divine truth and the miracle of a female chicken.”

  The man pointed over the ridge again, and once again the four soldiers looked down at the sloping landscape. The hill ended at a patch of pasture about a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. They could see now, in the last glimmers of dusk’s light, that the pasture was not a pasture at all. It was freshly dug earth. Several crosses and flowers lay atop it.

  “Let’s take the tall timber outta here,” Bishop said. “The Germans done come and gone.”

  Train silently agreed.

  Hector gave it one last try.

  “Tedeschi? Tedeschi?” he said, pointing at the pasture below.

  Suddenly, the church bell behind them began to toll in loud, deafening gongs, and the man, who had turned away from them, wheeled and faced them with such rage in his face that the four of them, armed, backed away, blinking. He opened his mouth and roared, and what with the church bell booming behind him and his screaming fury, his voice had the power of a ship’s blasting bullhorn.

  They turned and ran, through the stinking church square, past the statue of St. Anna, past the church, past the graveyard, across the curving road, over the precipice, and down the muddy path that led to the town below, the man’s voice ringing in their ears like a ghost’s battle cry.

  8

  A SIGN

  In a tiny house just beneath the church of St. Anna, in the town of Bornacchi—a town that had sat there for nineteen hundred years before a Negro ever set foot in it—a poor old man named Ludovico Salducchi heard the ringing of the bell at St. Anna’s and ignored it. It was just one of the sisters at the convent behind the church giving the all-clear, the signal that there were no Germans around. Ludovico didn’t care about any Germans, anyway. He had a bigger problem. He had been cursed by a witch, and tonight he was going to get rid of that curse once and for all. He had made up his mind.

  He sat on a tiny wooden chair at a table in his living room with several villagers standing around him. They were watching Ettora the witch, the woman who had cursed him, who was also seated at the table. Across from Ettora was Ludovico’s daughter, Renata, dressed in the clothing of a man. She wore trousers and a wool jacket, her long black hair stuffed beneath a man’s cap. Renata’s husband had been missing from the Italian army for five months, and she’d taken to wearing his clothing as a sign of grief. The priest at Bornacchi said it was sacrilegious for a woman to walk around in a man’s clothing, but Renata ignored him. Like everything else here, Ludovico thought bitterly, everything, even the respect of the young has been ruined by the war.

  He watched Renata clasp her hands nervously as Ettora set a plate of water on the table. Then, from a small bottle, Ettora carefully poured a large drop of olive oil onto the water. Renata’s eyes followed the drop closely as it floated across the surface. Ettora said the oil would tell them if Renata’s husband was coming back. If the drop moved one way, he was coming back. If it moved the other, he wasn’t.

  The room stared in silence as the oil slid to one side of the water. There was a gasp. Then it slid back to the other side. The room gasped again.

  “Ludovico, don’t tip the table,” Ettora snapped.

  Ludovico removed his foot from underneath the table, ignoring his daughter’s glare.

  Ettora never took her eyes from the shimmering drop on the plate. “Hmm,” she said. She shifted in her chair and squinted. “My eyes are not what they once were,” she said. She was a tiny woman in a frayed red dress with bracelets that rattled like old bones on her arms, and delicate features on a pretty, slender face. Her sharp, cutting eyes were marvelous in their beauty. Ludovico couldn’t stand her. He’d known her all his sixty-seven years—known her parents, her grandparents even, and she his.

  The fact is, he had loved Ettora at one time. When she was a girl, those daring eyes that were now going blind had seemed to hold a deeper knowledge. She had been a leader among the girls, her beauty having made her the pride of the village, and as a young boy, he had watched her frolic about in bright dresses and lead the other girls past the village walls to gather the purple and white-tipped lilies that abounded in the fields outside Bornacchi. Her beauty had attracted young suitors from other villages, and, like them, Ludovico had been drawn to the secrets behind those dancing, sly eyes, whose quick slanting glances seemed to undress to the world. He had been young and handsome then, restless. His legs had been full of vigor, his chest full and strong, his hair thick and black, his laugh hearty, and his mind full of dreams that he shared with everyone. At sixteen he had wooed her; he’d led her to the woods behind the village’s olive oil pressing plant, where they’d lain in the grass by the river, she telling him all her dreams, he touching her and making her stir from the secret places inside herself. But she was too free in her mind for him. She had thoughts and ideas that were unbecoming to a woman. She wanted to learn to read. What did books have to do with them? She wanted to study the forest, different kinds of trees and flowers. For what? She wanted to know why fire produced heat and steam, why cold water froze to become ice, why chestnut trees bore fruit that could be made into flour while orange trees did not. Useless thoughts, he believed. He wanted a woman who would wash his clothes as his mother did, who went to mass every morning, who looked the other way when he exercised his little indiscretions. But Ettora’s beauty was so great he held his tongue, for he was afraid he would never find another as beautiful as she. Only after several weeks of lying in the grass by the river behind the olive oil pressing plant, after she let him poke his finger into her sly hole, did he broach the idea with Ettora that women should not think, that they should wash clothing and cook wild boar for their husbands, and not waste time dreaming about books and silly plants.

  Ettora had found his opinion distasteful. Everyone should think, she scoffed. There is so much to learn. Her response had made him fearful—that and the secrets behind her eyes—and he’d backed away, even though her willingness to allow him to touch her had been a tacit admission of her desire to marry him—and his tacit agreement to ask—which he never did. They drifted apart, and as the years passed, the group of young maidens who followed Ettora outside Bornacchi to pick the beautiful white-tipped lilies and other plants had gradually been winnowed down to a few, then none, as they were married off to men in the village—he marrying one of them, Anna, who, though dry and witless, had been a dutiful wife who had washed his clothes, mended his socks, ignored his indiscretions—of which, unhappily, there had been few—and, before she died of fever, had borne him the one true gift he’d ever gotten from this cursed and difficult life, his daughter, Renata, who was now suffering in this obscene war like everyone else and who, like everyone else, had turned to Ettora for advice.

  Ettora, for her part, had taken his rejection in stride. Her beauty had attracted several young men from nearby villages, but none had found her suitable. Her fire, her intellect, her thirst for knowledge, and the secrets behind her eyes scared them, and they backed off. By age twenty, her marriage prospects were dim. By thirty-five, they were hopeless. She seemed nonplussed, however, and as the years passed and she continued to wander deeper into the woods
to learn the secrets of plants and flowers, the young maidens who had followed her into the fields to gather the white-tipped lilies fattened and slowed under the weight of children and demanding husbands, their skin wrinkling in the sun after years of olive harvests, their hands thickening from splitting the tough skin of chestnuts. They began to send their children to follow her into the fields, and also to consult her about matters: Which plant will make my ears stop hurting? Which one will make my little boy’s fever disappear? Which will make my husband more virile? for by then it was clear to everyone, including Ettora, that she was destined to become the village witch.

  No one ridiculed her for becoming a witch. No one thought badly of her. It was, they decided collectively, a good fate for everyone. There were, after all, good witches and bad witches, and Ettora was a good one, a healer, though it was quickly understood that to rile her or bring about her wrath was to invite trouble indeed. A young man named Umberto, knowing that Ettora lived alone, had made the terrible mistake of stealing some of her gardening tools and a short time later was so badly stricken with shingles that he could not rise from his bed for two months. He’d returned the items with the deepest apologies, offering some of his own tools as a token of goodwill, but Ettora had declined them with a tight smile, saying, You can keep them now because you have paid for them and will pay for them in full three times over. The effect of this smile—and the further bad fortune that had befallen the young thief, whose face was later disfigured in a hunting accident—had a chilling effect on everyone in the village, and it only made Ettora’s power seem greater.

  Ludovico had watched Ettora evolve with no small amount of regret as the years passed, because while the other women had fattened and slowed under the weight of children and demanding husbands, her beauty remained intact. He did not believe in Ettora’s power. He had known her when they were young. He had touched her in all the secret places. He had felt her wet down there, moaning with pleasure, so passionate that she had kissed his eyelids with those thin, beautiful lips. Her beautiful black eyes had pierced him, drowned him in the truest of affections, promising him with their needle-like intensity that she would marry him if only he would ask. And although it had been forty years since that time and he sometimes regretted not taking her hand in marriage, Ludovico had lived with the smug knowledge that he had known her intimates and thus she had no power over him. But now he knew he was wrong. She had not forgotten any of those things he had done to her, touching her in her secret places and making her empty promises. She had cursed him. He was sure of it. That could be the only explanation for why his rabbits had mysteriously multiplied.

  He could not account for it in any other way. He’d had twenty-four rabbits before the war began, but when the Germans came, they marched into Bornacchi and quickly demanded them. He had explained that he was a Fascist and that Mussolini would not approve, but the Germans didn’t listen. They kicked their way into his rabbit pen, blasting away with their rifles, and in ten minutes the twenty-four rabbits that he’d taken six years to breed were gone. He’d walked through the rabbit pen weeks after the soldiers left, kicking at the shattered wood in disgust, when lo and behold, a lone rabbit popped out. Ludovico had never seen her before. She was spotted white and brown, with eyes the color of birch wood. He named her Isabella and stowed her in the cool earth underneath the floorboards of his bedroom. He grew to love her. She was a smart rabbit, more like a dog actually, and he told no one about her, not even his daughter, Renata, because as the weeks passed the war escalated and food, already scarce before the fighting, began to dwindle. The Germans marched in and out of the village with impunity and stole Aldo Penna’s last pig. They took Adriano Franchi’s mules, raided his wife’s garden, then raped his daughter. Donini Folliati was nearly beaten to death when he protested against a soldier who’d taken chestnut bread from his house. Food was at a premium. Life was cheap. There was no law. The carabinieri, the military police, came from nearby Barga when they felt like it and disappeared when the shelling started. So Ludovico kept quiet and crossed himself each morning, thanking the Virgin Mary for blessing him with his single, solitary rabbit that would one day be his meal—if the rabbit was lucky enough to live that long before disease wiped her out or someone stole her.

  Several weeks passed, the war continued to escalate, and Isabella the rabbit was still living in a hole beneath Ludovico’s bedroom floor without sun and eating hay, which was, mercifully, still plentiful. Her eyes bulged, her fur had fallen out, but otherwise she was fine.

  And then one day Ludovico kicked the boards aside in his bedroom floor and found two rabbits.

  It was a miracle, he was sure, and normally he would have summoned Ettora so that she could explain it to him, because she knew about these things. But a rabbit was like gold. Its fur alone could be traded for two canaries, a pound of chestnuts, some olive oil, or perhaps even a cup of salt, which was worth more than money. So he kept quiet, thanking God for his little miracle.

  When he peeked beneath the boards of his bedroom floor a month later and found four rabbits, he began to pray each day. When the number of rabbits reached six, he began to go to mass every morning. At eleven, he officially rejoined the Church after having wandered away twenty-two years before. At twelve, he became the church sexton. Three times a day, every day, while tending his parched olive fields, he laid down his tools and trudged up the long hill with his broom to sweep the barren aisles of St. Anna’s church, light prayer candles, and pray to God on his knees. His brother thought he was nuts, his daughter, Renata, thought he was senile. But Ludovico had witnessed his very own miracle. God had given him back everything the Germans had taken.

  When he found thirteen rabbits, Ludovico began to worry. His situation was getting dangerous. Starvation was becoming a problem. He had too much. The Germans had camped up at Mt. Cavallo, and they came through periodically, hungry and desperate. He began hearing story after story of atrocities and crimes. The partisan movement was growing fiercer. The Germans were striking back with ferocious determination. He blacked them out of his mind. If the Germans found out about his rabbits, he was cooked. He began to pray to God to stop the rabbits, but a fourteenth, then a fifteenth appeared, so in desperation, he had summoned Ettora to his house, ostensibly because of an earache. He was sure she’d cursed him, and he wanted to feel her out, perhaps even confess that he was sorry for what had happened between them years ago. He had held his tongue as she heated olive oil and tossed it down his ear. When she was done and was preparing to leave, she said, “You have something to tell me?”

  “Not a thing,” he answered.

  She shrugged and smiled. “I am working on a spell that will keep the Germans out forever,” she said.

  “Work in a bit of bread for me, too, while you’re at it,” Ludovico said. Bread was like owls, heard about but never seen.

  Ettora smiled. “Why are you so pessimistic?”

  She was looking at him with her piercing eyes. Even after forty years, she knew him. She was looking clear through him. It made Ludovico mad. He decided not to tell her anything. He shrugged.

  Ettora gazed at him for a long moment and her smile faded. “Enrico’s son hasn’t had milk in four weeks,” she said. “His family has nothing to eat. Nor do the Salvos, or the Romitis. Everyone in this village has to share more.”

  “I share what I have.”

  Ettora’s stare tightened and her smile vanished completely now. She was sitting at his kitchen table, not ten feet from where his rabbits were buried in his bedroom. She was going blind, everyone knew it, but Ludovico’s heart skipped several beats when she took a long look at his bedroom floor. Then she shrugged and got up to leave. “A sign is going to come to you,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  “I don’t need a sign. I need the war to end.”

  “That will happen, too,” she said.

  He couldn’t stand it when she got so cool. He remembered when she was just a young helpless thing, moaning in the
grass, his hand over her privates. Now she was an old fox. Well, so am I, he thought bitterly. He watched as she gathered up her things.

  Ettora was almost out the door when she stopped and took a long look around. She said, “And there will be more rabbits.”

  “Everyone knows I don’t have any rabbits left,” Ludovico said quickly. He was standing ten feet away from at least seventeen. That was how many he’d managed to count that morning. There were two brand-new ones.

  Ettora had turned and closed the door of the house behind her, saying nothing, and now Ludovico was caught in a lie. What’s more, his rabbits had continued to multiply. He had twenty-five at last count, and was running out of space to hide them and hay to feed them. The hole beneath his bedroom floor had grown to the size of a small cavern, held up by boards. It looked like the entrance to the Mt. Aracia mine. It stretched almost to the living room, and the hollow space made his floor sound like the bells of Bologna when shoes struck it. The whole house smelled. To make matters worse, he began to catch everything he fished or hunted. Trout, eels, deer, even wild boar. And his garden was growing. While everyone else’s trees and vegetable gardens, destroyed by bombs and looted by the Germans, had remained barren, his olive trees bore harvest. His chestnut trees grew like wildflowers. His vegetables sprouted like weeds. It was horrible for him. In a village compelled by war to divide its resources or starve, Ludovico was forced to share and share alike. The entire village would wait for him to hunt, and when he returned after a day of hiking through the dark woods, miraculously avoiding mines and Germans and wolves and bandits, there would be ten people waiting at his door. He ended up feeding nearly the entire village almost every week. He was exhausted from hunting. His feet hurt. And now, just last week, the final straw had fallen. His electricity had mysteriously returned. Before the war, he’d been the only one in town who had it. It had disappeared after the war began, and now it was back inexplicably, for every bandit and German to see. Someone would surely tell, and the Germans would come to ask questions and search his house, and what would they find? Twenty-five big, fat, tasty rabbits that he was supposed to turn over to them for the war effort. The Germans had grown desperate now, some were starving. The partisans were hurting them badly, and the Germans’ response was ruthless and terrifying. He was a marked man. He couldn’t stand it anymore. It was all her fault.