A Thread of Grace

She stands back from the worktable to consider the young couple outside, gauging appetites. A big strong boy, a slender girl. There’s enough, Adele decides, and enough is as good as a feast.

Don Leto stumps into the kitchen. “The table is beautiful, Signora Toselli!” He lifts the pot’s lid and breathes in the soup’s aroma. “Do you want some help in here? Hand me a knife— I’ll chop that onion.”

“Get off your foot,” Adele orders, reducing the onion to paper-thin disks. “Men don’t cook.”

“In France, the cooks are all men. Chefs, they’re called.”

“France. Put perfume on Germans. That’s your French.”

Don Leto pulls the window’s curtain aside. Santino’s carbine leans against the cemetery wall. Nearby, the two young people walk decorously. Santino’s hands are clasped chastely behind his back. Claudia’s are filled with flowers. “She looks like an angel, Signora Toselli. And Santino? Well, Santino is—”

“A good boy,” Adele says firmly. “Aren’t you glad I talked Tercilla Lovera into this?” she asks, making sure to get credit. “Baths, clean clothes, a civilized table! A nice young couple should have something special when they’re courting.”

She wipes her hands on her apron and joins Don Leto. For the boy, Adele borrowed a nephew’s suit. The coat won’t close across Santino’s chest and the trousers puddle over his shoes, but the corduroy’s so finely waled it feels like velvet, even though it wears like iron. The Cavaglion company has sold kilometers of that cloth to peasants in the districts around Cuneo. The family is Jewish, underground now, but after the war, they’ve promised there’ll be wedding dresses for the girls of any family that hides a refugee.

Someday Lidia and I will make a wedding dress for Claudia, Adele thinks. But for today, there’s a frock the color of sunflowers, from a bag of donated clothing. When Claudia stoops at the edge of the grave, the skirt fans over freshly turned earth, gold over gray.

“Thin as a broom straw, poor child, but still lovely,” Don Leto says. “If only her papa could see her.”

The inscription carved on the wooden cross reads simply ALBERTO FIORI 1894–1944. “But look,” Claudia says, pressing the dirt away. Low on the base, where the gravelly soil covered it, Santino sees a tiny six-pointed star. “Don Leto put it there, after the funeral.” She pushes the dirt back, to conceal the telltale sign.

Typhus, the padre told Santino. A bite from a flea or louse. City people were more vulnerable. Signor Blum had a weak heart, and the fever carried him off within two days. Santino rubs a palm against his trousers and offers it, to help Claudia stand. The shock of contact makes his breath catch, but she quickly pulls away.

“I’m sorry,” she says, embarrassed. She brushes the dirt from her callused hands and the hem of her dress. “The farmwork…”

Emboldened, he reaches for her hand and turns up the palm. “You should be proud,” he tells her earnestly, holding it next to his own. “Hands like these mean you’re honest, you work hard. No gangster or landlord has hands like mine. No prost— Good women have hands like yours.”

She touches his borrowed tie and jacket lightly, smiling at his scrubbed face and carefully combed hair. He has not changed, but she has. Claudette Blum was a silly, sulky girl who could still believe that hard times were a temporary a

“Would you like to sit down?” he asks.

There’s a stone bench surrounded by small-leafed lilacs and roses pregnant with buds, and embraced by a stone Virgin’s outstretched arms. Santino whisks dust and pollen from the cool, pitted surface and takes off the too tight jacket, laying it on the seat so Claudia won’t get her dress dirty.

He sits beside her. “Don Leto says you like the people you’re staying with.”

She looks toward the mountain across the river. “After Papa died, Zia Tercilla wanted to adopt me. Don Leto knows a lawyer who would do the papers for free. But I still have a mother. I’m not really an orphan.”

“Don Leto found me a job in Sant’Andrea.”

“Is that far from here?”

“It’s on the coast, near Genoa. There’s a train. So I could—” he swallows. “I could visit. You. Sometimes.”

“I’d like that,” she says, but she is looking at her father’s resting place. “When you visit a grave, you’re supposed to put a little stone on it. In a Jewish cemetery, if there are lots of little stones on a grave, it means this was a good person whose memory brings many visitors. I can’t do that while the Germans are around.” Tears well, but do not fall. “So I bring flowers, instead.”

Ready to cry himself, Santino wishes he could make it better somehow. But dead is dead. What can anyone do?

Just like that, the solution comes to him. He selects two pebbles from the garden walk and returns to the grave, squatting beside it. With a short, thick finger, he gouges a hole in the crumbly dirt and holds out one of the pebbles. “Yours first.”

Green eyes swimming, Claudia looks at him as though he is a miracle, a genius. She wipes her eyes, comes to his side, drops her pebble into the hole. He sends his own after it and covers them both, patting the dirt flat.

“That’s good,” he says, holding her as she weeps at last. “He was a good man. He deserves tears, and stones on his grave.”

Reaching into an unfamiliar pocket, he pulls out the clean handkerchief that Signora Toselli provided in anticipation of this very moment. Claudia wipes her eyes with it and blows her nose. “After the war,” he tells her, “there’ll be work for masons in cities, because of all the bombing. Everyone says a man with my skills could make a good living here. I might stay. Up here. In the north. If you would— We— I mean, I’d still like to visit my family back in Calabria, but—” He scowls at the grave, sorry for his presumption. “I meant to ask your father.”

She’s fifteen. She should be studying geometry and grammar and French literature. Memories of Belgium, paved streets, electric lights, and school have faded as dream fragments do, forgotten when the day begins. From her first week in Santa Chiara, she has worked side by side with the other women, harvesting grapes in September, chestnuts in October, olives in November. She knows how to choose unflawed ears of corn and tie them into bunches to hang in the soffitta. Her hands feel empty without a spindle to work while she sits. She has begun to think in dialect.

On the hillsides across the river, mountain orchards are dressed like brides, pink and white with blossom. Water slaps at the mill wheel’s plank blades, softening the eerie moan and creak of wooden gears. In a garden just beyond the cemetery wall, an old man sings as he works.

“Papa taught me a song when I was small,” she says. “Wo man singt, da setze ruhig nieder: Where one sings, take your place without fear.” Claudia lays her callused hand on Santino’s cheek, turning his face toward her. “We’ll live here,” she says simply, “but after the war, we’ll visit your family.”

“Really?” he says, amazed. “Really?” he asks again.

She nods, and his glorious gap-toothed grin appears, utterly transforming the homely face. To make a man so happy! she thinks. To make this man so beautiful… “Yes,” she says. “Really.”

Hand in hand, they sit like an old married couple with everything in their lives already decided, and all life’s sorrows but one behind them. Her hand tightens around his fingers. “Promise me something?”

“Anything,” he says, stu

“After the war, we’ll find my mother. We’ll bring her and my brothers here, and you’ll build a house for them.”

He squeezes her hand, then lets it go and approaches her father’s grave as though it is a judge’s table. Kneeling, he puts a hand over the secret place where the pebbles are buried. “I will find your wife and sons, signore,” he swears. “I’ll build them a house with stone floors, and thick walls, and a slate roof. The rafters will be chestnut, and the windows will have real glass. Four rooms. Two up, two down. I’ll teach your sons my trade, and when they marry, we’ll build houses for their wives to be proud of.” He looks across the river, seeing these structures in his mind: measuring out the foundations, estimating the loads. “Your sons and I will build houses so strong no bomb or war can touch the ones inside. Every stone we lay will be in your memory, signore. But the house I build for your daughter will be stronger and larger and more beautiful than any of them.”