Miracle at St. Anna

by James McBride

  Unfortunately, none of those rumors was true. Peppi the Black Butterfly never went to America. He never even left Tuscany. In fact, Peppi the Black Butterfly had never met a Negro before December 1944. But it was that meeting, a confrontation in the town of Bornacchi, at the foot of the Mountain of the Sleeping Man, that would forever cement his reputation as a man who never forgets his friends, who punishes his enemies dearly, and who kills you with his love.

  10

  PEPPI

  From high atop his perch on Mt. Caula, overlooking the town of Bornacchi, not more than five hundred feet above the tiny house where the four Negroes had spent the night, a lone twelve-year-old Italian boy sat below a shelf of rock that covered him from the driving rain and watched the four soldiers emerge from the house into the daylight. It was dawn, and the rain would not stop. It fell in endless sheets, pattering and splashing, raking across the horizon and swelling the creek that ran in front of Ludovico’s house, splashing heavily against the rocky shore.

  The boy leaned forward to see more clearly as the Negroes sleepily approached the swollen creek, dipped their faces in it, stood up, took a wary glance at the ridges around them without seeing him, then knocked on the door of Ludovico’s house. The boy whistled softly, and the trees and bushes behind him gave way to three moving figures that emerged from the thick forest’s trees and rocks like shadows. The four partisans, Italian Resistance fighters, the oldest no more than twenty-six, armed with carbine rifles and bandoleers, gathered at his shoulder and observed the four Americans in silence. They watched as Ludovico opened the door, glanced hurriedly at the ridges above the house, then let the four men in, closing the door swiftly behind them.

  “Old Man Ludovico’s got protection now,” one of the partisans quipped.

  “He’s got a lot to protect, all those rabbits,” another mused.

  “That tall one, that’s the biggest Negro I’ve ever seen. Maybe he’s Louis Armstrong, eh, Peppi?”

  A short, thin, prematurely balding man with a small forehead and piercing black eyes stood apart from the three and watched in silence. He knelt down on the ridge and made a small circle in the mud, drawing with a stick, ignoring the fascinating phenomenon of the Negroes below. Peppi, the Black Butterfly, looked nothing like the force he was believed to be. He was frail compared with the others, with a lightness to his frame that seemed ill-suited to the ruggedness the mountains demanded. He had turned twenty-six that morning. He’d written a poem about it the previous night. The poem was about the silences that lived inside of him, the yawning valleys where he’d left himself when the war began, before the bottomless rage inside him had grown into the silent, furious butterfly. He’d wanted to read his poem to the others when he arose but saw no use. There was no time for that anymore. He’d been promoted to lieutenant now, still a member of the infamous Valenga band, which had grown from the original twenty men to nearly two thousand, an unmanageable size, far too large for his taste. There were too many spies, too many political opinions, too many errors, and debacles abounded. To make matters worse, the Germans had offered ten thousand lire to any Italian who could kill or capture him, and as he grew more effective the offer had grown to fifty thousand lire, then to a hundred thousand lire, now a hundred thousand lire and a bag of salt, the last of which had finally closed the circle around him, buying traitors until the Black Butterfly had no one left to trust save these three—and one of them, Ettalo, was only twelve. Every morning Peppi woke up and crossed himself, thanking the Virgin Mary for letting him see another sunrise in a world where a bag of salt was worth more than a man’s life. Twenty-six years God had let him live. It seemed like twenty-six lifetimes. He looked down at Ludovico’s house and shoved the poem he had written deeper into his pocket.

  “The Americans are not who we need to see,” he said. “Our business is with Ludovico. We wait till they leave.”

  “In this weather?”

  “The Germans can’t move, either. Neither can our traitor.”

  “Whoever led the Germans here is gone, Peppi.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But Ludovico has a mule, electricity, and new rabbits. At least fourteen rabbits. That’s a lot of rabbits. He will show himself alone at some point, and when he does, we will ask him how he got those things.”

  Rodolfo, a short, stout youth with big ears, sidled up next to Peppi, set his rifle down, and blew into his hands. He was twenty-four, just two years younger than Peppi. He’d studied English in Rome. He’d been an artist before the war. Had Colonel Driscoll seen him, he would have recognized the young man as the shabby priest who had been in camp to warn the Americans about the pending German attack.

  “I say we get Ludovico before the rest of the Americans come,” Rodolfo said. “I told them the Germans are coming. They won’t be long. Once they come, we’ll have to explain everything to them. They’ll take over, and they’ll answer to no one. Our chance will be lost.”

  “No. We will wait,” Peppi said. “Whoever has shown himself to Ludovico may come back to claim another prize. We’ll see. Maybe Ludovico is not the one.”

  He hoped he was right. Peppi liked Ludovico. Like all of them, he’d known the old man all his life. Before the war, Ludovico had been the town blacksmith, who gave them free horseshoes and taught them to fish for eels and play soccer. He was the first in the village to get electricity, which he’d shared with everyone. He’d walked all the way to Forte dei Marmi to get it, twenty-five miles, paying two power company men five hundred lire apiece to run poles all the way from Forte dei Marmi to Bornacchi, which, Peppi had to admit, showed great foresight. But Ludovico had changed after his wife died. He’d become bitter and aloof, retiring to his house and olive fields, obsessed with his daughter and her marriage, removing himself from village life and paying Ettora the witch enormous sums so that his daughter would get pregnant—a waste of money. Most important, he was a Fascist, and while he claimed impartiality to everyone he knew, no one could be impartial now. No decision was a decision. To not take sides was to take sides. Peppi’s own brother was a Fascist who had been drafted into the Italian army and sent to Russia and hadn’t been heard from for months. Peppi hoped he wouldn’t come back soon, because now nothing was promised and nothing was forgiven. Rodolfo’s brother Marco was a Fascist whom they’d killed in the Ruosina Pass in a firefight two months before. Marco’s body fell from a ridge and was caught on a ledge of jagged rock that no one could reach. He stayed there two days before Peppi’s pleas made both sides stop fighting long enough so that Rodolfo could climb up the precipice and bring his brother’s body down. Fascists and partisans alike buried Marco in his beloved mountainside and stood side by side at his grave. Rodolfo wept and wondered aloud how to tell his mother. “Marco wanted to be mayor of Bornacchi,” he said. “Don’t you remember? He taught us to mix drinks and hunt wild boar so that we would vote for him when he grew up.” The partisans and the Fascists had wept together, refusing to look at one another, but after the prayers were said and the hugs were delivered, they departed and the next day fought each other with even greater animosity.

  Peppi dug his stick into the thick mud until it was buried up to his fingers. “The Negroes change nothing,” he said firmly. The three partisans watched him in silence, expecting he would say more. But he said nothing more. Even if the Negroes had the entire American army behind them, he thought bitterly, that would not make the problem of the church go away.

  Even to think of the church made his stomach hurt, and the sorrow that drowned his heart made him weak and dizzy. It was a nightmare that had begun horribly. Six weeks before, he and his little band—the sons of farmers, olive growers, and grape pickers who had taken up arms and fled into the mountains when they could no longer stand watching the humiliation and suffering of their starving families—caught two SS soldiers on patrol near an olive grove outside the nearby town of St. Anna di Stazzema, less than a mile up the mountain from Bornacchi, where they sat. They had caught them by accident, while o
ne of them was pissing, and wiped them out. It was a sloppy operation, not the kind Peppi liked, full of mad screaming and terror. They had tried to capture the Germans, but one had yelled trying to alert his nearby comrades, and the other had almost escaped, then begged for his life, dying in a gurgling of blood from Rodolfo’s clumsy knife wounds. Rodolfo in particular had behaved terribly and viciously, but there had been no time for admonitions. They finished the job quickly, then fled into the caves of Mt. Paladonia and split up, during which time Peppi escaped by the skin of his teeth thanks to an old farmer who routed him around a waiting German patrol while the rest were on their own. He hid in terror as two companies from the 16th Panzer SS Division rolled through the mountain with mules, dogs, artillery, and five hundred men, wiping out everyone and everything in their path as they turned over every rock, tree, and boulder trying to find him and his band. The four made a prearranged rendezvous in another village several kilometers away two days later, where a terrible fight broke out among them, which was further exacerbated by the surprise arrival of a German patrol, which forced them into the mountains again. They hid in caves and underground caverns that had been formed by nature hundreds of years before, at times forced to separate, each unsure of the location of the others, trembling as the dogs sniffed and the German soldiers chatted just feet away. They starved that way for ten days, sometimes together, sometimes apart, eating olive twigs and chestnuts, totally dependent on a woman farmer who was brave enough to supply them with a bit of bread. When they finally met up and emerged from the foothills at the woman’s farm, exhausted and starving, the woman farmer had a pasty look of shock on her face. She blurted, “They killed everyone at St. Anna.”

  “Who?” the partisans asked.

  “The SS. They put everyone in the square and shot them and burned them.”

  “How many?”

  “Hundreds. Maybe three hundred.” She collapsed in tears.

  Peppi wandered away, stunned, as his shaken men surrounded her, pumping her for more information. Was my sister there? Did you hear any of any Encinos, or Tognarellis, or Cragnottis, were they there?

  Peppi, for his part, felt inside himself a deep sickness that would remain for the rest of his life. He waited, apart from the others, sitting at the foot of a tree with his chin resting on the palms of his hands, as she told what had happened: The SS had arrived at St. Anna di Stazzema furious about the killing of two of their own and had posted a sign at St. Anna’s church saying that the villagers had to leave; they were suspicious that the village was supporting the partisans. Someone—no one knew who—tore that sign down and posted another, saying “Don’t leave. Resist the SS passively. This is our town. The partisans will protect you.” In response, 150 men from the 16th Panzer SS Division gathered up 560 people from the surrounding villages, set houses ablaze, shot every living creature—chickens, animals, dogs—and took the people to the church of St. Anna, and shot them in the piazza. Babies were bayoneted. Young women were raped, tortured, and piled behind the church nude and then set ablaze.

  Peppi knew of no partisan—or any Italian, for that matter—in his right mind who would post that sign. The partisans knew the SS rule: For every soldier killed, the Germans would kill sixteen civilians. To post a sign rousing villagers with slogans and empty promises of protection, to flaunt that kind of reckless arrogance in the face of the SS, who were ruthless and increasingly desperate, was not something any partisan would do.

  Peppi waited the entire night until the weeping of his men subsided, and only then did he address them.

  “No partisan can guarantee the safety of any village. You know this. Maybe the Germans posted the sign themselves.”

  “No,” said Rodolfo. “The woman said the town was empty all night. There were no Germans in the village.”

  “Then whoever posted that sign is a traitor, and we will find him.”

  Rodolfo had volunteered to make the dangerous journey south over the mountains to Viareggio disguised as a priest, to tell the approaching Americans of the atrocity, in the hope that the mighty American army would push north through the mountains faster. Meanwhile, Peppi and the others hatched a plan. By the time Rodolfo returned, a day later, to report that the Americans would not be coming for several days, he and the others had already checked out several of the inhabitants of the surrounding towns, men and women who could possibly be traitors. Niccolò the baker, whose son was missing in the Italian army, Fuchini the barber, who was rumored to be a communist, Marsina, the chairmaker’s wife, who was said to favor the German composer Wagner, even Ettora the witch. None had checked out. The only one who was a known Fascist was Ludovico. Plus, he had new rabbits, a lot of them, and also electricity.

  The partisans had arrived at Ludovico’s house just before dawn and were waiting for the chance to corner and question him and decide for themselves whether the old man would pay for St. Anna with his life.

  Peppi stood by the ridge and watched as Ludovico, followed by the Negro soldiers, emerged from his house holding one end of an electric cord. The soldiers stood outside in the rain as the old Italian waded into the shallow creek in front of his house holding his electric cord high, then suddenly plunged the cord into the water. After a few seconds, he stood up in a babble of splashing and struggling holding an eel. He held it up high, and the Negroes laughed.

  Peppi stared down silently, rubbing his fingers gently against his face.

  “We will not bother with the Americans,” he said. “Maybe they are here to protect Ludovico, maybe not. But it is Ludovico we want to talk to. We’ll wait for our chance.”

  The four settled back into their hiding places amid the trees and bushes, and the twelve-year-old took his post again.

  11

  INVISIBLE CASTLE

  The boy lay in Ludovico’s bed and dreamed, images swirling around him like misty figurines. He dreamed of houses made of peppermint, of dancing wizards with canes; he dreamed of roosters laying chocolate eggs, and elves in wooly caps who sang loud songs and drank sweet honey-colored water; he dreamed of a giant ogre sitting in an apple orchard, his face hovering above the treetops, plucking apples with fingers so big the apples looked like peas, dropping them to the ground, where they landed in the soft earth and sprouted into beautiful flowers as tall as trees, their buds the size of soccer balls. He dreamed of trees with faces, and bats made of chestnuts, but most of all he dreamed of rabbits, hundred and hundreds of rabbits, white ones, pink ones, brown ones, orange ones, bounding through the air, cascading across his face like rainbows, stopping in midair as they leaped past, their tails erect, their ears stiff as poles, one line going this way, the other going that way. He tried to reach up and grab a rabbit as it leaped in an arc above his face, but it flew out of reach, landed on the floor, and hopped into a corner of the room while he watched, fascinated.

  “You are very silly,” the boy said, laughing. He tried to get up from the bed to catch the rabbit, but realized then he was awake and too tired to move. He lay back as the door opened and an old man entered the room, spotted the creature with great alarm, and made several futile attempts to grab it before finally snatching it into his arms. The door opened again and Renata walked in, holding a bowl of soup. She regarded a sheepish Ludovico with a grimace.

  “You are fooling yourself,” she said airily, “if you don’t think half the valley doesn’t know about your rabbits.”

  “What’s one silly rabbit?” Ludovico shrugged. He pushed the floorboards aside, and a putrid, animal smell filled the room. He tossed the rabbit into the hole and pushed the floorboard back into place.

  “Is it one rabbit or twenty-one? I’m starving, too.”

  “Eat what you want,” the old man muttered. “Two died. Ettora cursed the rest. Twenty-two in all.”

  Renata stared at him angrily. “You are a disgrace,” she said.

  Ludovico made a motion with his hands as if to say, “What can I do?”

  Renata glared. “If it wasn’t for Ett
ora, you’d be dead for holding out. She’s telling everyone the rabbits are bewitched and they’ll get sick if they eat them.”

  “I told you she cursed them!”

  “She’s saving your life.”

  “Ahhh!” Ludovico waved his hands.

  “Keep your foolish creatures,” Renata said. “But him,” she said, walking over to the boy, “he needs more than chestnut soup and olive oil.” She touched the boy gently. She was glad he was awake. She had watched him all night. He had lain there for ten hours—since he’d arrived with the Negroes—and had barely moved, shivering, muttering softly, not eating. He was white-hot with fever, and she was afraid he would not live through the day. She held the soup over him as he stared at her, the breath wheezing out of him in ripples.

  “You will eat chocolate but no food,” she scolded. “You will starve that way.”

  The boy did not hear her. He had slipped again to that quiet place where there were no voices or sounds. Renata carefully spooned out a small bit of soup again, holding it high as she spoke to the boy. “When your big American friend comes back and wants to eat your soup, what will you do then?” she asked. “There’s only enough for one person.”