21
THE STAND
The shelling was all around them now, and they fled through the deep, slippery snow up the road, following the Italians toward the square and the church. They'd left the mules they bought from Ludovico in the alley behind Ludovico's houseâthey were useless now, Bishop said. Renata knew of a cavern near the church where everyone could hide.
Train saw no hiding anywhere. It had all seemed too confusing to him, a big mystery, the shouting captain, grabbing the man by the neck, the boy. All he wanted was a bath and some sleep and to get home. He had the vague notion that his grandma would take the boy, but he had no idea how to get him home. He'd thought he would hide himâhe was small enoughâin his pack and get him on the boat and maybe nobody would tell; or maybe he would pay Bishop back his money and Bishop would help him; and then when they got home he'd show him Old Man Parson's field where his dog was buried and you could hear him still barking at night. There were all sorts of things that fathers did with their sons. That's how it was done, wasn't it? He wasn't sure.
Train was sorry the captain was dead. The man had tried to wrong him, but he wasn't worse than anyone else, people who took his money, ordered him around. He had wanted a simple thing. Now it was all gone bad.
The few Italians in front of them splintered off into the woods and disappeared, but the soldiers, Ludovico, and Renata pressed on, led by Stamps. They followed the twisting road around the ridges and up to the church again. The screaming man, crazy Eugenio, was gone. In his place was the angry swishing of shells, which sounded like a windstorm. The shells whipped past them, hitting rocks and sending boulders careening down the mountainside. Every so often, one of them leaped to the side to let a boulder pass, and tree branches landed in the snow around them with loud cracking noises. Train was amazed at how beautiful everything was. Every time he felt invisibility coming, it made things beautiful. He felt it coming now. He wanted the boy to become invisible with him today, that was his goal. If he could've closed his eyes, he would've closed them and wished it for the boy, but he had to follow the rest, so instead he wished it with his eyes opened, and he squeezed his hands like he was squeezing his eyes tight, and in doing so, he squeezed Angelo so hard the boy cried out and then looked at him and said, “You're squeezing me too hard.”
“I'm sorry, feller.”
“You tired? Is that why you're squeezing?”
“Awful tired.”
It didn't occur to Train until he had climbed over the next boulder and set of ridges that he'd understood every word the boy had said.
“Good Lord, is you . . . ?”
“Where's your invisible castle?”
“I . . . What you say, boy?”
“Is heaven a place where the houses are made of candy and you can break off a piece and eat all you want?”
“Why, I guess so, boy.”
“And if you want it to rain in heaven, it'll rain, but not on other people, just on you. Is that right?”
Bishop was four feet off. Train caught up with him. “He's talking to me, Bishop! He knows everything. He can talk good now! Can it rain on two people in heaven, Bishop? At the same time? Can it?”
Bishop turned to him angrily and said, “I just 'bout had enough of you, man. G'wan. Git out away from me. Fuckin' idiot.”
“I jus' wanna know. Can it rain on two people at once in heaven? What do the Bible say on it?”
“Ask me on the boat going home, nigger. I just wanna tell you, you don't owe me no more money. Don't do nuthin' for me. Just keep off me, y'hear?”
“What'd I do, Bishop? I'm jus' telling you, the kid spoke to me. He speaks English. Look!”
He looked down at the little boy just as he felt a pop. The boy gave a shudder, and suddenly was pasty-faced and still. Train shook him.
“Good God, Bishop! Bishop!”
Bishop walked on, following the others to a small ridge adjacent to the church. As the giant placed the boy down, a German machine-gun emplacement began chewing up the piazza from a nearby ridge. Train set the boy on the ground in the open piazza in front of the church, fully exposed to the machine-gun fire that raked the square.
From across the piazza, the three retreating soldiers looked back and saw the giant kneeling over the boy as artillery shells and shrapnel flew about him and machine-gun rounds ricocheted off the church bell, making a ghastly
ping-pong
sound. Chips of the church façade whooshed past him, rocks and debris were falling on him, but the giant colored man appeared oblivious, unfazed, as if he were in a Sunday park reaching down to touch a flower. He gingerly reached a large hand down and gently shook the child, then removed his helmet and leaned in closer to talk to him. Finally, he placed the boy over his shoulder, the child's lifeless arm slung across the giant's forearm like a white stripe. The giant continued to stroke the child's head and talk to him gently, as if the tender words and gestures would awaken the boy and make the whole nightmare disappear.
Bishop, standing on a ridge above the piazza, leaped down and ran back toward Train. Stamps yelled, “Let 'im go! He's made up his mind already.” Bishop ignored Stamps and dashed toward the piazza, ducking behind trees and rocks as he ran.
Bishop was five feet from Train, debris and fire ringing off every rock and tree, when he saw Train get hit. The giant looked up in surprise, then leaned over on one knee. He placed one hand on the ground and gently lowered the boy, placing his body between the machine-gun fire and the boy. He yanked the statue's head out of its netting and cradled it in his arm as rounds hit him again, this time square in the chest, and knocked him five feet from the kid and onto his back in the center of the piazza. “You can't touch me,” he screamed. “I'm invisible!” Bishop saw Train's face then, and in that moment, the moment between Train's dying and his own imminent sweet release from life, he realized everything he had missed in his own scurrilous life, the opportunities lost, the friendships destroyed, the blown chances, his opportunism, all couched behind the granite wall of distrust and hate that he'd built between himself and others, because of the white man's ignorance, because of his own lies, and most of all because he'd given up on God so long ago. As Train raised his head in agony, Bishop heard the words, “You made my mother die!” and he wondered how Train knew it, knew the true reason for his lack of godliness, and it was several moments before he realized that it was he who had uttered those words and not Train, who lay on his side ten yards away from Bishop and five feet from the boy. The machine-gun fire ripping up the piazza walked back over to Train and hit him again. The giant, incredibly, turned on his back and breathed in gasps, still alive.
Bishop saw Stamps cross the far side of the piazza and open up on the machine-gun emplacement, which was inside the ground-floor window of a nearby stone house. He saw Hector run around to the side of the house, fall behind some debris, then get up and rip a hand grenade from his belt and toss it inside the window. He heard a boom, then the machine gun spit again. Hector had missed. Stamps ran up and fired dead into the machine-gun emplacement even as slugs hit him and cut him practically in half. Bishop saw Stamps fall nearly inside the window, his hand ripping a live grenade from his belt and dropping it over the sill of the window as he almost fell inside it. The force of the explosion lifted Stamps into the air and slammed him against a tree. His face, Bishop saw, was a mangled mass of flesh. The fire from the second machine gun, also in the house, ripped across the piazza past Train's back a third time as Hector crawled around the side of the window and from beneath it tossed a grenade inside before rolling away. The explosion blew, and the machine gun quit. Bishop ducked behind a large tree that shielded him from the fire and headed toward Train in the center of the plaza in a crouch. He was just three feet away from Train now, shielded behind a large piece of concrete debris. He could hear him coughing.
“Stay there a minute,” Bishop said.
Train lay on his side, staring at Bishop, his eyes wide. “I's all right. I's all right. I'mma pay you back. Every cent.”
“Be quiet.”
“Lord. I can't breathe. I can't turn my head. Is the boy livin'?”
Bishop glanced over Train's shoulder. “He's living,” Bishop lied. “Hector got him.” He suddenly felt ashamed, ashamed that lying had always come so easy to him.
“Tha's good. Tell Hector he's got to take him home. You can't take him with you, Bishop, all that gambling and stuff you does.”
“Why, Train, did I ever tell you the story about Shine and the signifying monkey?”
“Forget that. You gonna do like I said? My grandma'll pay you ever cent you is owed. You makes Hector promise to take him home.”
“I'll do it. Now shut the fuck up.”
“Lord, Bishop! I see the dog at Old Man Parson's place! He's buried in the field out back. I knew he was there! I hear him barking! And there's Uncle Charlie, fiddlin' . . .”
Bishop reached out and grabbed Train, trying to pull him behind the piece of concrete. He finally managed it after the third try.
The giant's gaze was blank.
Bishop didn't know why he did it, but he had to. He sprinted across the open piazza and swept the lifeless child into his arms. The machine-gun rounds pinged all around him, heavy shells were falling now from the American bombers, which had finally arrived. He sprinted across the piazza again to the cover of the church doorway. He ducked under the doorway, right under the bust of St. Anna, and in the shadow of the charred, blasted-out doorway, quickly examined the child.
Bishop couldn't see where the boy was hit, but he was clearly dead. Probably shrapnel of some kind. Dime-sized shrapnel would take anybody out. He turned to run inside the darkened, burned-out church, and it was at that moment, as he turned to run, that he felt himself get hit in the back. The bullet didn't feel hot, as they said it would. Rather, it felt cool. But the force of it was strong and made him kneel.
The love.
He got up to run again and felt himself get hit in the back again, and he knelt again.
The Love.
He felt cool air blowing in his throat, then felt himself, rising, flying high into the church rafters, high, across the pulpit, over the broken and charred pews, then around, still holding the boy, until he was face-to-face with the statue of St. Anna. And as he stared at her, he understood what Train had understood. She was breathing, she was crying, she was real, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. He understood it all then, who God was, why the mountains were formed, why rivers ran from north to south, why water was blue and not green, the secrets of plants, and his own purpose in running up the ridge after Train. He had found his lost innocence, found it in the giant's belief in love, the giant's belief in miracles, the giant's love of a boy who was one of God's miracles. Bishop felt himself floating down, and he placed the boy on the ground, grasped his tiny head, took a deep breath, and as two more bullets passed through his chest and into his liver and lungs, snapping the veins like twigs and he felt his life draining from his feet, he pressed his lips to the boy's lips and softly breathed two big puffs of air into the boy's mouth and felt him twitch. He gently laid the boy's head down. He saw the bust of St. Anna above him smile, then he rolled onto his back and closed his eyes forever. Deep and comforting silence descended on everything he had known and would ever know.
Â
The boy, lying beneath the bust of St. Anna, opened his eyes. The giant was gone. It seemed silent. He looked up and saw Arturo standing over him. “We have to go,” Arturo said.
“Am I going to heaven?” he asked.
“No. You're going to Forte dei Marmi.”
“Where's that?”
“I'll show you.”
“Who's there?”
“Your father.”
“Is my father the giant?”
“No, your father's Ettore. Remember him?”
And suddenly, the boy did. He remembered it all. He remembered everything. And it suddenly came to him that he was not going to be allowed to remember any of this, that all of the life forces in the world made it so that some things needed forgetting in order for life to continue; he understood that there are some things that demand forgetting; he realized that the innocence that God reserves for children had been conferred upon him and would soon leave him, and that the intolerable tragedy of war would be forever etched in the memory of others but not in his. He understood at that moment that St. Anna di Stazzema would become merely a memory, a dry fig in the wind tunnel of history, the place forgotten, a museum perhaps, the 560 victims never truly revealed to the world, lost even to the Italians who would take up residence in the village just months after the war. He realized that the Negroes were merely vessels to lift him from his past memory of pain to his present of future happiness, that St. Anna would not let him remember such pain, their pain, his pain, any pain. He would forget it all. He knew it instantly the moment he touched Arturo's hand, whom he also realized he would forget, for God would not allow him, the sole survivor of that singular church massacre in a war filled with massacres, to linger in such pain. It would be gone, they would all be gone, and he was glad.
But it was going to be hard, he thought as he grabbed Arturo's hand and began to run down the road, past the Germans who were now fleeing, past the lone American survivor, Hector, who lay hiding at the window of an adjacent house, past Renata, who lay riddled with bullets, and the sobbing old man Ludovico, who stood over the body of his only, beloved daughter, to forget the man who was chocolate, the chocolate giant who wept tears of soda pop and made it his birthday just by turning his head, who taught him how to be invisible.