The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 30
After they rounded the Carvers’ corner, I went back in the house. The coroner and the funeral man had set Jules on a litter and were ready to move him.
I pulled the blanket aside so that one of Jules’s hands was exposed. “Girls,” I said, and I let them come hold his hand and say goodbye. “Oh, Uncle,” Maria said. Elena said nothing, just squeezed his hand. Then I sent them back to the kitchen.
“May I have a minute?” I asked the coroner and the funeral man.
“Of course,” they said, and stepped outside.
The room was quiet. I took Jules’s cold hand. Such heaviness in my arms—sorrow for Jules, dead on a litter in my living room. My living room. My house. My daughters. Oh, how proud he was of the life I had made, of the woman I had become. It meant everything to him, having me safe and settled, as my girls’ health and happiness will mean everything to me.
Still, I was saddened by the time we had lost. The years apart, the secret we had borne the way these two men would bear Jules’s dead body. The invention after Mother died, when Jules urged me to leave Mullan, saying I could pass for Italian because of Mother’s coloring, move somewhere and start over, not the daughter of an Indian tramp and a Tunisian Gypsy but a good Catholic girl. I took the name Gemma from a neighbor in Mullan. Jules liked it, said it meant precious. Jewels and Gems, the two of us.
Jules found a woman in Spokane to take me in, and she brought me to Mass and taught me enough Italian to be my finishing teacher. Her neighbor had a nephew who had lost his first wife in childbirth, this bull of a man whose family, Tursi, was Tuscan. That was how I met Domenico. I liked the look of him the minute he came calling. Secure and sturdy. He asked for my hand after just three weeks. I hadn’t even spent half my boarding money. Except for missing Jules, I was never unhappy with my decision, especially when Elena was born.
Uncle Jules was my idea, and Aunt Agnella, whom I invented by splitting my mother in two—kindly sister Agitta and shrewish Agnella. At first Jules fought it, said it was better if he just drifted away and allowed me to live this new life. But I insisted, and eventually he was glad for it. Especially in the last few years, with the girls, and Dom agreeable to his visits, Jules became part of our family. I think we both had a sense of peace, of landing safely on some other shore.
Jules and I were never anything but uncle and niece after that—even when it was just the two of us. I even began to believe we could separate Mother from her angry half—separate the pretty young girl who ran away from a brutal father from the common-law wife who harangued Jules for not supporting us better. Sometimes it bothered me that my daughters wouldn’t know Jules was their grandfather and that they were part Indian—but what was life if not one invention after another?
Out the window I saw the coroner and the funeral man walking back toward the house.
I bent down to the old man’s ear, and I said goodbye in his language, the one I had promised never to use—the one he’d feared would get me a beating or land me in a reservation boarding school. My mother hated the old tongue, “like someone choking on a bone,” she said, but I always thought of it as music. Jules only taught me a few phrases, but I sometimes hummed them to myself, and I sang the words now that I knew best, for I used to say them every time he walked away in the spring—kw hin x̣menč, mestm̓—their sweet click on my tongue.
13
Rye couldn’t tell if Mrs. Ricci was crying or yelling or both. “Piccolo brutto!” She cupped his face, hugged him, then slapped him. “Pensavo fossi morto!”
“Sorry I didn’t rake the leaves before I went to jail,” Rye said.
Then Rye’s lawyer proved his value yet again; Latin wasn’t his only trick. “Mi dispiace, signora. Sono il suo avvocato, Fred Moore. Ryan era in prigione—ma non era colpa sua.”
“Prigione!”
“Si, ma non ha fatto nulla di sbagliato. Anche suo fratello, Gregory. La polizia era molto brutale! Ryan era trionfante in tribunal. Molto trionfante!”
Mrs. Ricci cupped Rye’s face again. “Oh, Marco! Oh, mio povero Geno!”
She went to the kitchen to make him some food, and Rye showed his lawyer around back, to the porch where he and Gig slept. Mr. Moore looked at the cots, bindles shoved under them, and the few belongings they’d managed to squirrel away—on Rye’s side, a pair of summer pants, a set of utensils he may or may not have stolen from a café in Pullman, a baseball he’d found in the grass, and the only thing he’d brought from Montana—a small pencil drawing his father had done of two horses. Mr. Moore looked at the picture of the horses, then turned to Gig’s side of the room, extra clothing, a hairbrush, a poster advertising that bill of depravity at the Comique Theater—Ursula the Great’s name across the top.
The lawyer ran his hand along Ursula’s name and then reached down for Gig’s prized possession, Volumes I and III of War and Peace, published in America in 1903 by Scribner’s Sons in a five-volume set, as part of the larger Complete Works of Count Tolstoy.
“Those are Gig’s books,” Rye said. “He says it’s two fifths of the finest novel ever written. He’s on the lookout for the rest.”
The lawyer turned the volume over in