Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
The boy turned his face away. The woman hovering over him was confusing him, and the smell of soup made him nauseous. He closed his eyes and waited, and after a few long moments Arturo appeared. Today he was wearing a green bomber pilot’s cap and a green Army jacket that came down to his knees. He stood behind Renata, hopping on one foot.
“Why do you take so long to come now?” the boy asked.
Arturo shrugged.
“What does she want?” the boy asked.
“Shh!” Arturo circled around to the side of the boy’s bed as Ettora the witch entered the room, feeling her way along the walls. “She is very smart,” he said. “Do not tell her too much.” The two women stood above the boy, talking in hushed tones to each other, while Arturo watched from the far side of the bed.
“What are they saying?” the boy asked.
Arturo leaned close and cupped his hand over the boy’s ear. “Do not pay attention,” he whispered. “They want you to eat a slippery fish soup that is bitter and makes your tongue stick to the top of your mouth.”
The two spoke in whispers.
“Where is the chocolate giant?” the boy hissed.
“He went back to his invisible castle,” Arturo said.
“He has a castle?”
“I’ve seen it,” Arturo declared, stepping back to hop on his foot again.
“What’s it like?”
Arturo’s eyes sparkled. For the first time, the boy noticed how odd Arturo’s coloring was. He was neither black nor white, but a shade of gray, and everything about him was gray as well, even the green uniform cap and jacket he wore. For a moment, the boy thought he was going blind.
Arturo danced back a moment, hopping around in a circle on one foot, then switching to the other foot. He hopped over to the boy’s bed to lean in and whisper. “It’s huge. It’s made of candy, and when you break off a piece to eat, it grows back. And the road to his castle is a strip of chewing gum. His pillow is a fluffy cake.”
The boy smiled. “What else?”
“There are big statues outside made of sugar candy. The hard kind that lasts forever when you lick it. His bed is made of soft sugar dried in sweet milk. The trees outside are chocolate. The twigs are licorice sticks, and the leaves . . . the leaves are green jelly beans!”
“Green jelly beans!”
“All you can eat.”
The boy felt as if warm water were splashing over his insides. He smiled again, weakly this time, then sighed. His chest hurt and he felt sleepy again. “Let’s go there together,” he said wistfully.
Arturo held out his hand. “Why should I go with a friend who does not share his chocolate?”
“I saved the last piece I have for you,” the boy said.
Ettora and Renata stared in disbelief as the boy, sweating and feverish, breath rattling in and out of his lungs, stopped his lethargic mumbling, turned on his side, fished a piece of chocolate from beneath the blanket, held it in the air, gulped it down, then closed his eyes.
“Go to sleep now,” Arturo said.
“Wait!” the boy cried, but Arturo disappeared as Ludovico entered the room again.
“He’s bewitched,” Ettora said.
Ludovico rolled his eyes, and Ettora turned and felt her way to the kitchen. Ludovico’s house was small, and the kitchen, separated from the bedroom by a doorway, was only a few feet away. Ludovico followed Ettora and watched her bang pots and pans, busying herself, preparing something at the stove. He waited for her to mention his rabbits, but she didn’t. “Did you give him the powder they left?” he asked.
“Ahh.” Ettora waved her hand. “He won’t eat. It is not as good as my medicine, anyway.” She motioned with her head to the table, on which she had placed a little cloth sack full of crushed olive leaves. “I need some salt. It will make the devil go away. You have any?”
Ludovico laughed bitterly. It was a joke. They hadn’t seen salt in months. “Who is he?” he asked.
“He’s got a lot of devil in him, whoever he is. I’ll get it out of him.”
Renata entered the kitchen. “He’s beautiful,” she said. “He’s a beautiful sign.”
“He’s no sign,” Ludovico said. He was tired of signs. He saw the way Renata gazed at the boy. Renata was barren. None of Ettora’s pregnancy potions had worked on her. Now she would start believing the boy was a gift from God. “He can’t stay,” Ludovico said. “Can’t you hear in the distance? That’s German shelling. They’ll be back in another day. Then maybe we have to explain to them who he is. And,” he nodded at the window, toward Eugenio’s house, where the Negroes were quartered, “who they are.”
“Explain to who?”
“To the Germans. Maybe they’ll think he is the child of a partisan. Or worse, Peppi’s child. He’s the one they want.”
“Peppi would not leave a child in the woods. No partisan around here would do that.”
Ludovico looked at his daughter in alarm. “How do you know so much about Peppi and the partisans around here?”
Renata ignored that, trying to let it slide. The less said about the partisans, the better. She knew an awful lot about them, too much to say. She spoke to Ettora. “I thought you said a sign was coming.”
Ettora looked down at some chestnut flour she had poured onto a wooden plate. “Things happen when they happen. He is a sign for sure.”
“And the Americans?”
Ettora shrugged.
Ludovico huffed. “I heard them trying to talk on their radio last night.”
“What did they say?” Renata asked.
“How should I know? There was a lot of scratching on it. They talked on it, but no one talked back. There are no Americans around here for miles, none between here and Vagli; none on Mt. Forato. I bet they’re deserters. Sister Caprona at the convent said she scared the Jesus out of them when she rang the bell last night. Maybe they’re not Americans. Maybe they’re imposters. Maybe they’re Gurkhas posing as Americans. They’re dark, too, the Gurkhas.”
There was silence. The thought was a frightening one. The Gurkhas were bloodthirsty and terrifying. They fought with the British. They wore turbans and long robes, ate raw chickens, and ran around with knives in their mouths and unsheathed swords, raping men and killing women. They seemed lawless. The rumor was the British let them out of cages during the day to fight, then put them back in at night. Even the Germans were afraid of them.
Ludovico continued, “How many Negroes are there in America, anyway? I thought they were all slaves and died. I think these men are Gurkhas who killed this boy’s parents.”
That thought seemed to press the oxygen out of the room. Anything was possible. The woods outside Bornacchi were full of bandits, redshirts, partisans, bandits posing as partisans, communists, Brazilian soldiers, even the occasional Gurkha. Nothing was safe.
Ludovico nodded at the boy, who lay mute, his eyes still closed. “He’s got to go.”
Renata’s face tightened. “Where?”
“With the American imposters. Or whatever they are.”
“The boy stays.”
“It’s my house.”
“I have a house, too,” Renata said grimly. She turned to Ettora. “What do you think?”
Ettora shrugged. “The devil is in him. He is possessed.”
Renata said, “There is a priest at Gallicano who will look at him. I’ll take him there myself.”
“There is no priest at Gallicano, remember? He ran off.”
“Maybe he has come back.”
Ettora stared at Renata in amazement. There was a time, before the war, when the young respected their elders. They respected the old ways. Ettora would spin coins on a table and Renata would scream in delight. She took Renata’s worms away by drawing a cross on her tummy and forehead with a silver coin and kissing her on the forehead. She would let Renata taste a little vin di nugoli made from the chestnut tree’s fruit and watch her dance with joy. But now they didn’t believe in the old ways. They liked the radio. And
“Do what you want,” Ettora said, clapping her hands in frustration as Renata, realizing her mistake, scurried about the room, busily warming the soup again. Ettora rummaged about among the items near the stove, rattling through the pots and pans till she found a spoon. She poured some chestnut flour onto the wooden plate, then grabbed the long spoon to beat the flour into finer bits. As she raised the spoon to beat the flour, her arm was frozen in midair by a loud banging on the door.
“C’mon, signora! Open up, baby!”
Ettora put down the spoon, and Renata opened the door. The three Italians backed into the living room to let the four Americans in. The giant one strode directly to the boy, who lay with his eyes closed. He leaned over him, his chin strap dangling down. He felt the boy’s head and said something to the Spanish-speaking one. The Spanish-speaking one spoke to them.
“He’s hot. You give him the medicine?”
Ettora grimaced. “He won’t take it. The powder you gave is not as good as my medicine, anyway.”
The Spanish-speaking one translated, and the giant said something that Renata could not hear to the others. The three Italians, gathered in the living room, watched as a hushed argument ensued among the Americans who stood in the bedroom over the sleeping boy. Ludovico panicked, watching the floor creak and sag beneath the four men with his twenty-two rabbits underneath it. Renata glanced at him in disgust, saying nothing.
The argument lasted several minutes, the giant shaking his head while the lieutenant spoke to him. Finally, the four emerged from the bedroom and the Spanish-speaking one said, “We have to take him with us down the mountain to a hospital. Who knows the way?”
The three Italians were silent.
“I know the way,” Renata said.
Ludovico’s face crinkled in alarm. “You must be losing your mind. There are Germans and mines everywhere. Besides, you won’t get far in that.” He pointed out the window to the pouring rain. He didn’t mention that the idea of his lovely daughter walking through the woods with four foreigners, American Negro foreigners or whatever kind of imposters they were, was unthinkable.
Renata ignored him. She spoke to Hector in Italian. “There might be a priest in Gallicano who can help him. That’s not far.”
“He needs a doctor, not a priest,” Hector said.
“He’s bewitched, and a priest can take the devil out of him.”
Hector laughed. Stamps, watching the exchange, demanded to know what was going on. Hector explained, and as he did, the giant Negro, who had come over to join them, peeled off and strode into the bedroom again. He hunched over the boy’s bed. He shook the boy gently.
The three Italians watched in awe as the little boy awakened and opened his eyes wide in recognition. The giant held the boy’s head gently and placed the sulfa powder on his tongue, then motioned with one of his huge paws for water. Renata handed him a flask. The boy drank, then vomited a little, then drank again.
“He would not eat,” Renata said helplessly.
“I wouldn’t eat, either, if I lived here,” Bishop said. “Smells like cowbutt up in here.”
The giant one ignored them. Renata watched as he spoke softly to the boy. He had a voice that sounded like crushed gravel gently scraping across a cool dirt road. He rose, and with one hand, picked up the boy and laid him across his shoulder, the tiny boy settling against his bandoleer and rifle like a rag doll. The giant knelt and with one huge hand grasped a blanket off the bed and placed it tenderly over the boy’s back. He crouched through the bedroom door and approached Stamps. “I’m ready to go, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Go where?” Stamps asked. “They say there ain’t nowhere to go.”
“Then we got to go back the way we come,” Train said. He wanted it done now. He had slept ten hours. The boy was his responsibility, till he got rid of him. “He got to have parents someplace. Maybe they at division looking for ’im. Maybe division is looking for us.”
Bishop said, “Shit, they ain’t looking for us. What the hell makes you think Nokes is looking for us? Hector tried the radio all night. Ain’t nobody on it.”
Train strode from the room back into the tiny bedroom, placed the boy carefully on the bed, and sat down on the floor next to it. The room smelled funny, reminding him of something from home, but he couldn’t remember what. With one long foot, he reached over and slowly, silently, nudged the door, closing it with his huge boot. He needed to think. He heard the others talking outside the door and shut them out of his mind. The boy had fallen asleep again. Train had never seen someone sleep so much.
Outside the door, the three soldiers and three Italians turned to Stamps, who again was undecided. He said to Hector, “Ask the old man if there’s another way outta here where there’s no Germans. Even if it’s the wrong way. Maybe we can reach the Tenth Division. They’re over in Ferrara, I think.”
Hector didn’t like it. The Italians were scared dumb, and the best thing to do would be to lay low with them. They’d survived this long, he thought, but he complied and asked Ludovico if he could help them find another way out. The old man shook his head in response.
Stamps said, “Tell him we’ll pay ’em. We got plenty of the funny money they use here.”
Ludovico continued to shake his head.
Hector sat and waited impatiently for Stamps to decide what to do next. Ettora poured the remaining chestnut flour into a bowl. Seeing the flour made Hector hungry. He decided there was no sense starving while Stamps cut his teeth on being a lieutenant. He produced a can of Spam. He had two left.
The Italians stared hungrily as Hector opened the can and the pungent smell of hash filled the room. Stamps saw Ettora watching. “Want some?”
She motioned to a pot of boiling water, and Hector dumped the hash into it.
From the next room, they heard singing. The sound of Train’s voice made all of them stop. “That’s beautiful,” Renata said.
Bishop rolled his eyes. It amazed him that someone as dense as Train could impress anyone, though he had to admit Train had a pretty singing voice. “That nigger could put Bessie Smith out of business,” he snorted. He tried the bedroom door. It was locked. He knocked on it. “Train,” he shouted to the door, “when you gets signed up for a big contract, remember my fourteen hundred yards of large, that’s what you owe me. Fourteen hundred bucks. Not a penny less. Won’t mean nothing to a rich man like you then.”
Train ignored Bishop and continued singing softly, his deep baritone voice rising.
Sitting at the table, Stamps sighed. “All right. We wait till tomorrow.” He spoke to Hector. “Tell the old man we wait till tomorrow and we need to eat. We can trade.”
Ludovico shook his head. “You should leave tonight,” he said. “There are Germans in the mountains behind here, between us and the Americans. If you go at night through the mountains, it’s safer.”
Hector saw where it was going. The old man wanted them out of his hair. He didn’t give a damn. Hector didn’t need to translate his response for Stamps. “We don’t know these mountains,” he said. “We need somebody to show us the way.”
“I don’t know the way,” Ludovico said quickly.
Before Hector could translate, Renata spoke up again, in Italian. “I know the way.”
Ludovico stared at her, shocked. She looked at him, her eyes dull and hard. “I know the way through,” she repeated. Hector noted the tension between them. There was a game here, he decided. Something going on between father and daughter. He wanted to know nothing about it. Couldn’t Stamps see that this woman was trying to make her daddy mad? And for what? To lead some coloreds through the woods? Who was she, Little Red Riding Hood? What was in it for her, anyway? Maybe she was a partisan. Or a Fascist. There were women Fascists, too. Maybe it was all a trap, a ploy to lead them to the German commanders outside the village. Hector would kill her then, if she did that, Stamps or no Stamps. He could see she liked Stamps, could see it fro
He saw the room watching him and translated for Stamps. “She says she knows the way through and will take us.” He said it twice, to make sure Stamps understood.
Stamps looked at the slim beauty dressed in men’s clothing staring at him. His heart began to pound. He couldn’t help himself. She was beautiful, and brave, too. By God, he’d take it around the neck for that one, swing high from an oak tree just to have one night of setting his heavy soul against the soft caress of this woman. But to take her out into the open forest, in a furious rainstorm, and possibly have her death on his hands . . . He shook his head.
“We’re going to lay low back at that dotty fella’s house again and try this radio twenty-four hours more. Tomorrow, before daybreak, we’ll try to get out.” He stood up. “Let’s go.”
Stamps, Hector, and Bishop left, but Train stayed inside the bedroom. Ludovico closed the door behind them and watched their backs through the window until they had turned the corner. Then he turned to his daughter. She sat at the table, saying nothing. He motioned with his head to the bedroom. “If that big monster sleeps in my bed, I am sleeping in your house,” he said angrily. She shrugged.
In the next room, the boy lay in bed, his eyes closed, resting peacefully as the giant’s deep singing voice washed over him. He felt like he was floating on clouds. He opened his eyes. There was no one in the room except the two of them.
“Where is your invisible castle?” the boy asked.