The End by Salvatore Scibona Page B

sapling, very still, only one leaf ashiver, grew not six inches from a current that could have thrown a truck over the cliff ’s edge. Somehow, a little upstream of the falls, these brave, industrious people had managed to build a bridge over this arm of the river, had managed to sink the pylons into the rapids, and couples were walking hand in hand in yellow rubber rain slicks over the bridge toward Goat Island, which split the Niagara River into two arms, one falling over the Horseshoe Falls, the other over the American. A mile off to his right, downriver of the falls, another, far longer bridge spanned the gulf, hundreds of feet above the water, connecting the second- and fourth-largest nations in the world. He put a nickel in a binocular telescope and aimed it at the bridge and saw a kid throw—was it popcorn?—into the wind and hang his head over the rail to watch it fall.
    Why was she not once in her rotten, betrayed life to be taken by her spouse to see Niagara Falls? Loveypants had lamented. She made the preposterous allegation, so it seemed, that you could board the six o’clock train and arrive there by lunchtime. Rocco invented a tune, a chipper five-note sort of birdsong to sing at her, the words to which— I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you —sent her into a fit of catlike violence. There was the spitting, and there were the fingernails attacking his eyes, and the threats to smother his children, until, sorrowfully but with no more delicate tools at his disposal, he leveled one clean, close-fisted blow at her nose to settle her down. Truth be told, he would’ve loved to have come here, he still owned at the present day several picture postcards of the place, which postcards a cousin had sent his mother when he was a boy; but how was he supposed to keep his offspring in a row if they didn’t fear him, and how were they going to learn to fear him if he demonstrated, by giving in to their mother, that persistent mutiny paid off in the long run?
    This cousin, Tata (his mother’s niece and goddaughter), had been shipped away by her father to marry a corn miller in Buffalo. She sent the twice-a-year letter or postcard home to Sicily, and young, literate Rocco was made to read it aloud for the diversion of anyone who stopped in—a shameful chore, since it was clear to him even as a seven-year-old that his mother had been Tata’s confessor and that the letters were intended only for her and, out of necessity, for whomever she could find to read them to her. His mother didn’t care, she was a traitor. They had in Buffalo a house of their own with plumbing indoors, Tata reported, and meat was easy to come by. But she had many babies, eleven at the final count, three of whom died, and her husband, on whom she had not laid eyes before the men involved concluded their agreement through the mails and she was packed like a white slave, alone at sixteen, onto a steamer to Genoa and then to New York, was middle-aged and clubfooted; bathed rarely; had more than once taken their older boys with him to bordellos. The uncle or the neighbor to whom Rocco was reading shrugged and said, “Well, so it is,” and then made him reread the cheerfuller parts concerning the occasional trips to see Niagara Falls and the tulip gardens in the boulevards. When he was fourteen the letters stopped. Two years later a note arrived from one of her daughters relating that Tata had died in childbirth. It was with one of Tata’s sons who’d moved to Omaha that Rocco went to live when he was eighteen. And when, six years later, he’d moved to Ohio with a cousin’s cousin’s guarantee of a steel-mill job, which was never to materialize, he’d promised himself this single luxury, once two or three years of careful saving had passed: to go to Niagara Falls. To see this celebrated place. But he got sidetracked.
    A sense like revelation here, that the worry and the useless chaos he experienced in his little