Miracle at St. Anna

by James McBride

  Meanwhile, the tempest around the statue began. The other three artists, Florentines who had been commissioned to sculpt the works Fall, Winter, and Summer, were furious about the attention the Frenchman received. This is Florence, they argued. We see no difference between his piece and ours. Cultural imperialism, they cried. French snobs! Several city councilmen from the newly formed city government, seeking favor with the populace and a rival duke, took up the cause, and a good old Italian brouhaha started. There is a saying in Florence that Florentines don’t agree on anything. They simply say no to everything and continue saying no again and again, deciding only many months or years later whether to agree, disagree, or stay out of it completely—and this only after several commissions have been formed, everything has been discussed, nothing has been decided, and the whole matter has been completely forgotten. Fourteen centuries of continually getting their asses kicked by successive rulers, dukes, counts, conquerors, Lucchesians, Pisans and Romans have, if nothing else, taught Florentines the value of silent virtue and cautious negativity. That virtue remains in Florence to this day.

  In the meantime, the tempest around the statues grew, with the populace taking sides, this side sponsoring tours with rival dukes and duchesses, the other side passing pronouncements declaring that a holiday be named for their favorite of the four statues, and so forth. During this time, the duchess took to her deathbed, and in the wake of sentimental fashion that accompanies the dead and dying, not to mention the duchess’s declared dying wishes that the statue be honored for the great art that it was, the value of the Primavera skyrocketed. The French ambassador to Florence, hearing of the controversy, took one look at the Primavera, hopped a ship to France to see King Louis IV of Mont St. Michel, and returned to Italy with an offer of two hundred thousand French florins for the Primavera, arguing coyly that if the Florentines could not agree as to the greatness of a French genius, why the French certainly could. This offer prompted a torrent of outcries from all Italian factions, who sent word to the French ambassador through the newly formed Florentine city council that while the duchess might be ill and dying, the statue was bought and paid for with Florentine money, labor, and blood, and with all due respect to the King of Mont St. Michel and the great nation of France, he could take his two hundred thousand French florins and stick them up his ass. The French ambassador took umbrage, and lawyers were summoned. Tempers mounted. Politicians drew up resolutions. More committees were formed. The French called in a lawyer from the nearby province of Liguria, who argued that there was no contract between France and Florence and that copies of Tranqueville’s commission must be produced in order for the Florentines to prove ownership. There was no copy to be found, as the duchess’s chambermaid, the lover of Tranqueville and the Duke of Barga, had taken note of the controversy and swiped the document in hope of cashing in on the whole bit later on. Now she was too frightened to reveal her deed and took to her bed, feigning illness. The Florentine city council, unable to produce the document, and by now thoroughly enraged, sent for Filippo Guiano, the marble worker who had lost an arm pulling the giant rock from the marble quarry at Carrara.

  When four soldiers on horseback in full knight’s regalia from the duchess’s court appeared at his door, Filippo the marble worker thought he was either dreaming or going to prison for stealing dozens of limestone slabs off the mountains at Carrara and using his toes and his remaining hand to carve them up into figurines, which he sold for a good price. He jumped through a back window and tried to run. The soldiers caught him, threw him on a horse, and took him to Florence, where city officials stuffed him full of olives and wine, gave him a set of new clothes and a mule, and placed him before the marble Primavera on the Santa Trinità Bridge, whereupon the poor man declared to all present, This is indeed the piece of marble that cost me my arm, and I would know it since it is my arm that lay crushed against it and fell down the mountain. Then, to the astonishment of all present, the drunken man cursed the Primavera from head to foot, calling the piece “a low, filthy whore of a statue and not worthy of the time of a great duke-in-waiting like myself, and certainly not worth my arm.”

  He was quickly hustled away—but the point, the Florentines argued, had been made. The Primavera was Florentine. It had been etched in Florentine blood. No Frenchman, be he a lowly ambassador or Louis IV, would touch it. The French ambassador backed down, withdrew the offer, and the squabbling among the Italians about the four statues began anew. It quieted down some after the duchess’s death, in 1602, died after the Romans conquered Florence in 1639, was revived again when Italy was united in 1861, then ceased again in 1914, after the First World War began. After the war, the bickering started up anew, as each of the four statues began to show its age and needed repair, and no one could agree as to how—and by whom—they would be repaired. That ended when Hitler’s army invaded Italy in 1943 and in 1944 blasted to pieces nearly every bridge in Florence, including the Santa Trinità, destroying every statue on it except the Primavera, which miraculously survived. She stood alone now on her corner post, a testament, her proponents murmured smugly beneath their breath, to God’s decision as to which was the greatest work after all, though by accident of default or irony, one of her arms was blown off and presumed to have fallen into the Arno River, and like Filippo the marble worker’s, that arm was never found. So the score of fate, it appeared, was even.

  The Primavera nearly survived the war, until November 1944, when a tired German artillery gunner named Max Faushavent received a message via his radio that Americans were marching dangerously close to Florence, and his regiment needed two artillery fires in Fiesole, four kilometers above the city. Faushavent was sleeping next to his battery when the order squawked over his radio, and he awoke in a panic, not hearing the exact coordinates. Faushavent had never seen a Negro before in his life, and when he scrambled to his feet and peered over the edge of the ridge where his battery was hidden and saw colored American soldiers marching beneath him along the Arno River near the destroyed Santa Trinità bridge, he thought he had died and gone to hell. Without thinking, he loaded up and fired two shots at them before his screaming compatriots told him he was firing backward—Fiesole was the other way—but too late. His shots fired wide and missed, scattering the Negroes. One shell landed in the Arno River and the other landed at the base of the Primavera, the lone statue remaining on the Santa Trinitá bridge, which had cost Filippo Guiano his arm, the artist Tranqueville his sanity, the duchess her stature, and the French their pride. The shot blew the statue off its base and sent the Primavera, now worth millions, hard to the concrete, where she landed with a thunk, severing her other arm, which flew into the Arno River, and also severing her lovely head, which rolled several feet away and landed in the gutter, where it was found by a Negro soldier from Mt. Gilead, North Carolina, named Sam Train, who could not unload it for fifty dollars and who was now rubbing it inside a deserted barn in Tuscany, three kilometers beneath the eye of the Mountain of the Sleeping Man, with a dying boy in his lap, trying to make himself invisible again.

  6

  THE POWER

  The three soldiers caught Train about a mile up the ridge, sitting in the loft of a deserted barn with its doors blown off. He sat with his back against the wall, rubbing the statue head, his pants caked with mud. The boy, in shock, was cradled between his legs, swaddled in Train’s field jacket. Outside, the sun was disappearing behind the clouds, and it had started to rain. Train’s gun lay near the open doorway, which faced the mountains. His pack lay on the floor next to him.

  Stamps was the first inside the barn and climbed up to the loft, furious, as the others waited below. His nerves were shot. They were at least two miles from American lines. He thought he saw the backs of at least two German patrols to the west as they’d climbed the ridge. He was in a state of near panic. “What’s the fuck’s wrong with you?” he said.

  Train shrugged and turned to the side, his body in a crouch. The boy in his lap did not move. He
held the boy up to Stamps as an offering. The kid’s arms draped back, lifeless.

  “Y’all can take him now.”

  Stamps didn’t want to touch the boy. “Hector, come here and take a look.” Hector, the radioman, was the only one trained as a medic.

  Hector dropped his radio, scrambled up the ladder, took one look at the kid, waved a hand across the kid’s face, and said, “He needs a hospital.”

  “I ain’t say put a spell on ’im. Look ’im over,” Stamps said.

  Hector didn’t want to touch the boy. He climbed down the ladder. “Wasn’t my idea to come here,” he said. He felt like he wanted to throw up, he was so scared. He was a draftee, a Puerto Rican. He had no part in this war. He was stuck between colored and white in the division. His cousin Felix had been drafted the same day as he had and had been sent with the all-white 65th Division to France. Felix had written him and told him he was frigging all the French girls he could find. And here he was stuck with these guys, following Diesel the dope, because he looked more colored than Felix. It had been bad luck from the first day. They tried to make him into an Italian translator at training camp because of his proficiency in Spanish. After completing the four-month course, he purposely flunked the final when he was told he would become an officer afterward. He hadn’t wanted to become an officer for this very reason, because he might find himself in shit like this, with somebody asking him what to do. He didn’t know what the fuck to do. The kid was hurt. They needed to get the fuck outta here. He felt like he was losing his grip.

  Stamps looked through the blasted barn’s doorway. He could hear renewed firing in the distance below them. He couldn’t tell whether the firing was moving away or coming closer because the sound reverberated in the mountains all around them, but somebody had gotten a second wind. He turned to Train. “We gotta book outta here now. Train, button him up and let’s go.”

  Train remained curled in a ball on the floor and didn’t move.

  Stamps stepped around to the front of Train and knelt, his rifle slung across his back and his ammo bandoleer packed so full it hung nearly to the floor. Tall, thin, with long arms, a lean, handsome face, and skin the color of chestnuts, he and a small squad had been sent into battle his first week in Italy without ammo and had barely survived an attack by a German patrol. Since that day, he carried enough ammo for two men.

  “You goin’ over the hill, Train?”

  “What hill?”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Lemme be.”

  “We spent three hours looking for you.”

  “Well, you can see I’m found. Now g’wan.”

  Stamps eyed the kid, who lay across Train’s shoulder now, his eyelids fluttering slightly, looking feverish and pale yellow.

  “We got to get this kid to a hospital.”

  “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no kid,” Train said. He held the boy up high again, the field jacket draped around him like a sacrificial blanket.

  Stamps turned and climbed down from the loft, to where Bishop waited below. “You talk to him while me and Hector take a look around,” he said disgustedly.

  “Why me?”

  “You the one made him lose his grip, man!” Stamps walked away, furious, stepping to the doorway of the barn to reconnoiter the outside, but seeing the forbidding hills and ridges around him, walked no farther than five feet before deciding to reconnoiter from the safety of the blasted-out doorway.

  Bishop dragged his heavy frame up the steps. He approached Train, who sat hunched in a ball in the corner, and stood in front of him, his hands on his hips. Train could see the far wall between Bishop’s legs. He noticed that Bishop’s brand-new boots, which he’d won off Trueheart Fogg in a poker game, were muddy and ruined.

  “Where you going, Sam Train?” Bishop said softly. Train rubbed his hands along his face, his big shoulders heaving slowly as he breathed. He turned to look up at Bishop, whose eyes stared at him like headlights. Even when he was angry, Bishop’s eyes seemed mirthful and sly, like there was a secret between them that only he knew.

  “I know you, Bish. You kin talk the horns off the devil’s head. I ain’t fixin’ to go back.”

  “I ain’t ask you that. Did I ask you that? I asked you where you was going.”

  Train sighed heavily. “Dunno where I’m going, Bish. I’m ain’t going here no more.”

  Bishop figured he could move this mountain. There was always a way to move a mountain. If he had the time, he could’ve made Sam Train stand up, throw the boy out the window, and carry him, Bishop, all the way down the mountain on his back, clear to division headquarters, all by talking. Talking was his magic. Talking was his balm. But they were in the middle of who knows where, and with Germans around. There wasn’t any time for any fuckin’ magic. Bishop just wanted his money. He took a more direct approach. “Well, we do got to go back,” he said softly.

  “I never felt so lonesome in my whole life, Bishop. I been dreaming a lot,” Train said.

  Bishop shot a look over his shoulder to make sure that the loft was empty, then leaned down to talk in a low voice, so the others wouldn’t hear. “Nigger, I ain’t interested in your dreams,” he hissed. “You got my money.”

  “I’ll pay you. I ain’t never gone bad on no debt. I knows how to turn invisible now. Want me to show you?”

  Bishop stood up. “Stop talking crazy! We got to go back so’s you can pay me.”

  “I can pay you right now. I got something worth more’n fourteen hundred dollars.”

  “What’s that?”

  Train held up the head of the statue, the priceless Primavera of Florence, the seventeenth-century prize created by the great Frenchman Pierre Tranqueville, which he’d found in the gutter next to the Arno and couldn’t unload for fifty dollars. In the dim light of the barn loft, the dirty piece of marble looked like a piece of whitened shit.

  Bishop stared at it. “Naw. That’s just a hunk of rock. I wants my cheddar in cash.”

  Train’s brown face wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand why I’m heah, Bishop. It’s a mistake. They got the wrong man. I’m staying right in this heah spot till it’s all over.”

  “You can’t do that, Train.”

  “Why not? Nothing the white man say counts out heah. You said that yourself many times.”

  “This little boy is white. You nearly died gettin’ him.”

  “No, I was getting my statue head back. You can have him. Heah. Please take him.” He held up the child, who now was stirred awake by all the jostling and tried to cling to him. Bishop reached for the child, who shrank back against Train.

  “He don’t wanna go,” Train said miserably. “Carry ’im, he’s little, Bishop.”

  “They gonna put you in jail, Train.”

  “I hope so. If I could pay ’em to do it, I would.”

  “You’ll pay me first, though.”

  “G’wan. I told you I would . . .”

  Bishop shrugged and climbed down from the loft. Stamps approached the ladder. “Well?” Stamps said.

  “I can’t do nuthin’ with him.”

  Stamps mounted the ladder again, his footsteps thundering as he climbed, shaking the loft. He stood in front of Train, hands on his hips. “Get up, Train, let’s go,” he said.

  “I got this child heah who won’t go.”

  “You’re using that child,” Stamps said.

  “The same way the white man is using me.”

  “Don’t start that mess. The boy ain’t got nothing to do with that.”

  “Everybody got something to do with everything.”

  “Goddammit, don’t double-talk me, soldier!”

  “He don’t wanna go back! G’wan. Take him! I don’t want him.”

  Stamps could feel his heart pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst through his mouth. He had a tremendous headache. His hemorrhoids were killing him. There were better ways to desert. Shoot yourself in the foot. Help a wounded soldier to the aid station a
nd take off. Get trench foot, a condition in which the mud and rain made your feet swell and develop such painful, debilitating sores that you couldn’t walk. Train could’ve deserted ten times before. In Pietrasanta, when they were hung up in a paper factory for four days by German fire, soldiers fleeing with their eyeballs rolled back in terror, Train could’ve shot himself in the foot ten times or punctured his leg with a knife and called it a shrapnel wound and no one would’ve said a word. Why now? He had no idea. The Negro draftees from the South like Train were a puzzle to Stamps. He could not understand their lack of pride, their standing low, accepting the punishment that whites doled out, never trying to take the extra step. Yet in battle they were often tenacious fighters, smart, fierce soldiers who reacted to stress with calm and deliberateness. Why didn’t they save a little of that fight for the white man back home? Instead, they walked around like idiots, superstitious of every damn thing, carrying cats’ bones and Bibles and wearing little black bags filled with potions around their necks, with names like Jeepers and Pig and Bobo, kowtowing to the white man at every step. He didn’t understand it and he didn’t want to. To him, they were everything he did not want to be: dumb niggers, spooks, moolies. He’d been a champion swimmer at his segregated high school back home in Arlington, Virginia, the only Negro good enough to make the all-white regional team that won the state championship. To celebrate their victory, the coach took the team out for ice cream. He bought vanilla ice cream for the other swimmers. For Stamps, he bought chocolate. Stamps refused to eat it. The coach was indignant and demanded an explanation, but Stamps refused to explain. Even as a kid, he had wanted to be treated equally, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could feel or think otherwise. He was exhausted by these country Negroes. He’d seen them all his life, at the bus stop, in his neighborhood, the women swabbing floors, shelling peas, sitting on porches, laughing and joking like they didn’t have a care in the world, the men drinking themselves to death, hollering to heaven every Sunday, calling each other Deacon this and Brother that while robbing each other blind over nickels and dimes, fighting over women, making babies they would later beat up and abuse, while Mr. Charlie was kicking their ass. Passive-aggressive Negroes. That’s what Huggs used to call them. He’d known Huggs for four years. They’d gone to officer candidate school together. He felt a bit of shame creep over him as he realized he was glad it was Huggs that got hit and not him. Train had been standing right next to Huggs in the canal, and Stamps suddenly thought that maybe that’s what had made Train snap. Watching Huggs get blown to spaghetti. That could send any man over the top.