After Hal receives his divine calling, he seeks help from the one person whom he deems an authority: Rose. If he’s to build a sacred gazebo, he at least needs Rose’s permission, for starters. He also needs the tools from the locked shed. “Your boy had more tools than most grown men,” Hal reasons with her.
This strikes a nerve with Rose. I watch her lips thin in a taut line across her face. Rose says, “Hal, look into my eyes and tell me you’re not planning on pawning the tools. Are you drinking again?” Now both react. Both warp their mouths and eyebrows as if their faces are warming up for a literal face-off.
Hal says, “Damn it.”
Rose says, “Don’t!” And the one person who really shouldn’t be within earshot of this adult ugliness comes tiptoeing up: Lucky.
“Damn don’t damn don’t damn don’t damn …” Being three years old, Lucky is a parrot. Louder and louder with each “damn” and “don’t.” Bobby comes racing out of their trailer, calling Lucky’s name, which he loops into his parrot call. “Damn don’t Lucky damn don’t Lucky …”
The five of us stand off on the lawn between the bocce ball courts and the family barbecue pits, each of us competing to be heard, none of us listening.
“Camping season starts next week. If you can’t pull it together, Hal, so help me I’ll …” says Rose.
Bobby yells, “Christ on a crutch, he’s ten days sober, what else do you expect—”
Lucky yells, “I don’t feel so good …”
I yell, “Stop! We’re making Lucky fucking cry …”
Rose yells, “Lucky, not now.”
Bobby yells, “Don’t you dare raise your voice at my son.” Lucky yells, “Damn damn damn damn damn damn and fuck.” Bobby yells, “I told you not to teach him swears.”
And then Hal yells, “Don’t point no finger me. Only Our Lady of the Painting can judge me now.”
At this Rose cocks her head in one direction and her hip the other. The uneasy moment I was too stupid to consider has arrived. We each have different information. Lucky can hear Etta but only in his dreams or when he’s sick. Hal’s sort of seen Etta, his angel, but can’t hear her. Bobby has witnessed the ghostly Care Bear. Rose knows nothing. I know way too much. Since these conflicts always seem to happen over an uneven sharing of information, Rose and I are in direct opposition. I can feel the fight coming on. The tension changes the temperature of my skin.
“What did you say, Hal? About a painting?” She asks Hal, but she’s looking squarely at me. Without waiting for an answer, Rose lumbers toward the cabin. We all chase her. She halts at the door, just like she always does. We freeze a polite distance behind, except for Lucky, who sneaks around her legs and into the cabin. Rose does not turn to look at me, but I can tell by the sound of her voice that she is speaking through clenched teeth. “You take that … filthy painting and go. I don’t want to see you or it on my property again.”
Please, Etta, work your goblin fruit magic. Make things right. Listening for Etta to respond is like an ice cream headache between my eyes. I concentrate through the ache.
“Hello, lady,” Lucky points to the painting.
Hal edges closer. With an uncharacteristic grace, he places his hand on Rose’s back. “She’s come for you, Rose. Go talk to her.”
Rose literally launches herself away from Hal’s touch. He and Bobby both gasp. A second lunge puts Rose right on top of the cabin’s cot. She dances and yells, as if the mattress is hot coal under her feet. Lucky points at Etta’s flame. We can all see her burning contour in the left corner of the painting. Etta’s light brightens the cabin to a glare. Hal drops to his knees again, pulling Bobby down beside him. The alarm in Rose’s eyes is indescribable as she looks at us and back at the painting. Rose passes her hand in front of the glow, as if to disrupt a projector’s beam. She touches the light, then recoils. She tilts the painting away from the wall and peeks behind it. “It ain’t a trick, Rose,” says Hal.
Rose gently lifts the painting from its nail. Hal eases toward her, his hands tentatively stretched before him like he’s approaching a growling dog. He begins to say her name, and Rose hurls the painting at him. The wood hits the floor with an uncomfortable crack. “Trick! My son is gone. Is that a trick? Porco dio!”
“Now, slow down. Slow down and see the miracle.” Hal holds up the painting, turns in a circle with it, flips it over and over again. Ricky’s painting on one side and the Crystal Beach Amusement Park sign on the back. “You Must Be This Tall to Ride.” Etta’s little illuminated figure remains a constant in the lower left corner of the painting no matter which way Hal turns it.
She slips into my ear. Tell her Ricky says “Hi, Mom.”
I’m not telling her that.
Tell her Ricky is with Zio Eugenio, and they’re up in heaven turning wood bowls.
You don’t know what you’re talking about!
I have been around a lot longer than you, Dollface. You’ll be surprised what I know. I got the boy’s whole life story, and then some. Could she read his mind, like she reads mine? Put his memory to some use, tell his mama what she wants to hear.
“Uncle Ugo,” Lucky sings out. “Uncle Uggie.”
Stay out of his head. He’s just a little kid.
I hope Rose is not the type of Italian who thinks it’s bad luck to call the dead by name after the mourning period. If so, I’m about to screw up this divine moment, big time. “Uncle Eugene. The angel is in contact with Eugene, and with your son, Rose.”
“What?! You came into my house? You went through my things?” There’s little anger left, mostly exhaustion in her voice.
“No, Rose. I’d never do that.”
Sing her a verse from “Fa la Ninna.”
You think I know village lullabies?
You don’t need to know. I’m the brains, you’re the brawn. Now repeat after me. When Etta sings, it sounds like the hiss of an old radio being switched on. A dial garbles across a frequency until the lyrics become almost clear. The song is in a dialect very distant from my own bastardized third-generation Italo-Canadian. Maybe Sardinian or Corsican? I only recognize the words “baby,” “sleep,” “death,” “darkness,” and “mother.” Otherwise, I sing what I hear, trying to make meaning out of sound, to follow phonetically. It’s mondegreen and faux-harmony, but I keep singing.
Each nonsensical word that bursts from me is a pact I am making with Etta. I am agreeing to conspire with her. To comply. To serve that which I do not understand. To use this strange power and to let it use me. There is no turning back from this moment.
Rose’s hand clasp her chest. “Why, Ricky? Why?” she finally speaks in bewildered awe. She turns to me, grabs me by both arms as she collapses forward. “Why, him? My son.”
“Ricky has joined your brother, Eugene. That’s the message I’m getting,” I tell her. I place a benevolent hand on her shoulder, then wrap my arms around the flimsy seersucker fabric of her homemade housedress. Rose trembles in my embrace.
“Don’t cry, Rose. I can see into the spirit world where your son and your brother are woodworkers, Rose. Fine walnut bowls and goblets and boxes, like the set of goblets Eugene gave you for your wedding gift, or the box you keep Ricky’s baby ring in. An angel watches over them. She wants us to build something with wood too. Ricky would have wanted it. A shrine.” Everyone gasps at my awesome necromantic message.
You really ran those lines. Lay it on thicker, why don’t ya?
Rose’s crying is the true show-stopper. Rose’s crying is unlike anything I’ve seen in my twenty-three years of living. Sorrow that outdoes any angel or apparition. Sorrow that becomes its own might and magic. Sorrow that silences and bows each of us—even Etta, who becomes utterly silent, not even white noise. Each of us lays a tender hand on Rose’s slumped body. We are in awe at the otherworldly sorrow of her crying.
The majesty of uncensored grief lasts only a few minutes before Etta is back in my ear. Tell her we want a big shrine. Big, like a dance gazebo. How ’bout I let her name it after Ricky? So sentimental. That oughta get things started.