Chapter 9 - The Salt on the Bread
By November, the Newport house had closed its eastern wing for the season.
The heavy holland-linen covers had been pinned over the yellow damask sofas in the great drawing room; the crystal chandeliers had been bagged in gray cambric that looked like hanging hornet nests; and the outdoor pool had been drained down to three feet of green, scummed rainwater that smelled of dead oak leaves and cold iron.
Emily walked along the stone coping where she had lost her shoe sixty days before.
The tile was dry now, gray with sea salt that the wind had carried up from the rocks. She was wearing her own coat—the brown one with the beaver collar that had arrived by parcel post from Pawtucket, smelling of mothballs and the tobacco her brother used to keep in his glove box.
The sound of rubber tires on wet flagstone came from behind her.
It was not the electric chair. It was the heavy wooden one. Santino Ferrara was pushing it himself, his hands moving with that slow, deliberate rhythm that had built two inches of new muscle across his forearms over the autumn weeks.
He stopped three feet from the edge.
"The tide is going out," he said.
Below them, beyond the twelve-foot granite retaining wall, the Atlantic was gray, flecked with white foam where the water dragged across the black mussels on the ledge. A small trawler—the Santa Maria, out of Point Judith—was rolling through the swells toward the harbor mouth, its single mast swinging against the low cloud like an iron pendulum.
"The Boston people called," Emily said, her hands deep in her coat pockets, her fingers closed around Leo’s key. "They want the renewal on the cold storage."
"Tell them no," Santino said.
Emily turned her head slightly. "Julian’s brother-in-law is the bank examiner."
"Julian’s brother-in-law," Santino said, his voice flat as the gray water below, "was indicted at ten o'clock this morning by the federal grand jury in Boston. For the timber fraud in Maine."
He reached into his pocket, took out a piece of hard, dry bread—the crust of an Italian loaf that Silvio had baked on Tuesday—and broke it into three pieces between his palms.
"How did you know?" she asked.
"I didn't know," Santino said, tossing a crust over the balustrade toward the gulls that were circling the rocks. "The clerk in the district attorney’s office has an uncle who owns a lobster boat in Galilee. He likes to know that his diesel fuel doesn't have water in the bottom of the drum."
He looked at her profile—the line of her nose, red from the wind, the damp slate hair tucked into the brown fur collar.
"You're leaving," he said.
It was not an accusation. It was an entry in a ledger.
"My mother’s hip is bad," Emily said. "The stairs above the bakery are too steep for her in the frost. I found a four-room flat on the ground floor on Benefit Street. It has a yard with a pear tree."
"The pear tree is dead," Santino said. "It hasn't had fruit since seventy-four."
"It has branches," she said. "You can hang a clothesline from it."
Santino Ferrara threw the second crust into the air. A large herring gull caught it four feet above the water, its wings snapping against the wind with a sound like a wet sheet.
"The Remington is yours," he said.
"I can't carry an electric typewriter on the bus to Providence."
"Silvio will put it in the back of the Dodge," he said. "Along with the desk from the butler’s room. It was built for a woman who has to keep her feet on the floor."
He turned the chair an inch toward the house.
The great limestone façade, with its forty windows shuttered against the hurricane season, looked like an empty fort that had been built to hold off an enemy that had already moved inland three miles.
"Mr. Ferrara?"
He stopped the chair with his left palm against the rim. "What?"
"Why didn't you shout?" she asked. "When you went in. That Saturday."
Santino looked down at the empty pool—at the drain in the center of the blue tile where the rain had left a circle of brown scum around the brass grating.
"If you shout," he said, his voice dropping into that hoarse, quiet register that she had heard when she dragged him onto the flagstones, "people think you expect them to help."
May you like
He reached into his pocket, took out the third piece of bread, and laid it on the flat stone of the coping, right where Emily’s bare foot had stood while the water was still running from her hair.
"And when nobody moves," he said, looking through her, toward the light that was dying over the Sakonnet lighthouse, "it takes a very long time to die."
