Soderini’s pale green Chevrolet rolled to a stop under the line of ash trees, gave a final roar, and pitched forward dead in a cloud of blue exhaust. When he entered the house, he found Patsy and his son Lee on their knees laying brick in the living room fireplace. The crew of carpenters was tapping away on the roof, felting and shingling it.
‘Esiste Dio, Libero?’ Soderini shouted.
Lee looked up and laughed. As long as he could remember Reb’s father had greeted him that same way. Never hello but always ‘Does God exist?’ And when they were kids there had been a nickel for the right answer. ‘Naw,’ Lee said.
‘Atta boy,’ Emilio said. Patsy said, ‘Wey, Emilio.’
‘How you going, Patsy?’ Soderini said.
Patsy said nothing but thrust his jaw at the work.
Soderini gave the fireplace a dutiful glance, took a folded newspaper out of his jacket pocket, and touched it with a finger. ‘Have you seen this?’
It was L’Adunata, their anarchist fortnightly from New York.
Patsy’s trowel went down into the mortar tray as if spearing a fish. He stood, hitched his pants, and studied the lines under Soderini’s finger.
‘And you know what Proudhon said? Dio e l’Umanità sono due nemici irreconciliabili.’ Soderini bent over Lee, who was still on his knees. ‘You know what that means, Libero?’
‘No,’ Lee said.
‘God and Humanity. Two enemies. Irreconcilable.’
Lee gave an uncertain nod and quickly scraped up a trowelful of mortar. In the upper level of the house, half hidden behind a forest of studding, Teo paced the bedrooms. Vinnie shuttled in with a pail of mortar.
‘What the hell are him and Patsy talking about today?’ he said.
‘Don’t you understand Italian?’ Lee said. ‘Not that fancy stuff you guys talk.’
‘You Abruzzesi. They’re discussing religion.’ Vinnie listened. ‘You mean against religion. Christ, it was the same thing when he was here Monday.’
‘No it wasn’t. Monday it was politics.’
‘Be-eautiful,’ Dom said. ‘Religion. Politics. When them guys get together it ends up the same thing.’ He stood there, sent down from the roof to reinforce. ‘And you know something else?’ he added. ‘They always act like they never seen each other for three months.’
‘Dio rappresenta l’idea antinaturale della immutabilità,’ Soderini read from the newspaper.
‘See, Emilio, that’s the same as what I say,’ Patsy said. ‘The idea of God is against Nature. In Nature everything changes. Not him. Not God. He’s never changing.’
‘If I was a writer,’ Soderini said. ‘If I was young.’
‘What the hell’s he talking about now?’ Dom said.
Soderini shook a finger up over his shoulder. ‘Atheism,’ he bellowed.
‘Atheism,’ Lee said.
‘Oh, be-eautiful,’ Dom said, wearing his big sheepish grin. ‘With all you frigging atheists around I don’t stand a chance of getting into heaven. None at all.’
Soderini began his tour of the house, moving silently from room to room in his shined shoes and green Stetson worn without a dent in the crown, squatting and peering and squinting, sighting along the walls first with one eye then with the other. ‘Ateo, over here.’ Emilio stared at the outside walls where two windows came together with only the corner post separating them. ‘Reinforce.’
‘But the inspector already.’
‘Reinforce.’
‘Come look, Pa. He stamped the permit.’
‘Course he stamps it. But his stamp isn’t our stamp.’
‘I’ll take care of it.’
‘Now. Right now. And the same goes for over there.’ Soderini wagged an arm at a point beyond the studs of three or four partitions and sent Teo’s eyes and Dom’s to another bedroom where windows crowded the corner.
‘All right, all right,’ Teo said. ‘But what the hell did we give Bowles the box of cigars for? That’s five bucks.’
‘He’s hungry, that’s why,’ Soderini replied. ‘So we feed him. And just the same we reinforce.’ The old man’s voice was without a trace of hardness. A power saw screeched under Teo’s hand.
Dom nailed pieces of two by four to the doubtful corners. When he finished Teo led him into the second bedroom. Again the saw wailed and screeched. Teo looked around. His father was gone and his brother was there.
‘Where’d he go?’ Teo said.
‘He’ll be back. He’s up on the roof,’ Reb said.
‘The roof. What’s he doing up there?’
‘I sent him.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘For a look around.’
‘Christ,’ Teo said. ‘I thought we made him retire so he could stay off places like that.’
Through the opening in the living room wall where a picture window would go, the brothers saw the polished shoes descending a ladder. Soderini’s feet came together on each rung the way a child’s do coming down stairs. Reb smiled, not at that but at a memory of Emilio’s stubbornness two years before when they first suggested he think about retirement. Pay me without working? That’s charity. Eat without working? That’s capitalist. It took a summer but in the end their pleading won. Soderini stood planted by the stairwell looking the lefthand wall up and down. ‘Ateo, over here.’ The old man’s eyes were lifted while a finger pointed at the spot by his side where he wanted his son to stand. ‘All those pieces up there. Looks like it was done with the hatchet.’
‘It’s good enough, Pa,’ Teo said. ‘It’s strong and the lathing and two coats of plaster will cover it up. No one at all will know. No one.’
‘Except me.’ Soderini gave his chest a couple of audible taps. ‘And down there you didn’t reinforce. There, there. That needs a column.’
Dom did a fidgety dance at Reb’s elbow.
‘I asked Bowles about that, Pa,’ Teo said. ‘You know, he’s not just an inspector. He’s an engineer too.’
For Reb that did it, that word. He told Dom to get hopping and bring one of the extra columns in from the garage, and stepping forward, his hammer raised, Reb began ripping into the mass of odd two by fours. Smash, smash, smash. Only when he stopped to catch his breath did he notice that Teo was nowhere around. Splinters of wood and twisted nails strewed the floor and stairs. Reb fished into his overalls for his watch. It read four thirty.
Soderini had been standing behind him, quiet, his face at peace, watching his son work.
‘Ribelle,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you a little later at home.’