Chapter 3 - The Ghost of the North End
By nightfall, the bakery had gone cold. Thomas had gone up the narrow stairs to the loft above the ovens, leaving Enzo by the woodstove with a kerosene lamp that flickered every time the wind hit the loose shingles on the roof.
Enzo didn't go upstairs. He rolled the chair back into the small alcove where the flour sacks were stacked, out of the draft from the front door. He took the yellowed envelope from his coat and held it near the glass chimney of the lamp.
Enzo,
If you're reading this, I didn't make it to the car. That's alright. My legs haven't belonged to me since the winter of ninety-eight, anyway. You always thought I was just an old driver who knew which roads had potholes. You didn't know why I stayed in Boston when my mother's people were right here in the creek.
In nineteen-sixty-four, your uncle Marco came through this town with three men and a black Packard. He wasn't your uncle then—he was just your father's brother, and your father hadn't yet put his name on the bank doors downtown.
There was a man here named Arthur Pike. Thomas’s father. He had the mill then. He wouldn't sign the papers to give the timber rights over to the syndicate your family was building. He said the mountain belonged to the men who cleared it, not the ones who bought the ink.
Marco didn't argue with him. He didn't break his legs, either. He just waited until the snow came down hard enough to close the pass, and then he let the company men into the mill with five cans of kerosene while the family was sleeping upstairs.
I was driving the car, Enzo. I sat out on the road with the lights off while the roof went up.
Thomas was twelve. He pulled his sister out of the second-story window before the floor gave way. I saw his face in the light of the rafters when he hit the snow. I never forgot it. When your father took me in a year later, I thought I was escaping the mud. But you can't escape mud, Enzo. It just dries on your boots until you don't notice the weight anymore until you try to run.
Find Thomas. Tell him the driver is done.
Enzo read the lines twice. Then he folded the paper, laid it across the top of the kerosene lamp until the edge began to curl and brown, and dropped it into the small tin tray where the wick snuffed out.
The room went black, except for the red glow coming through the iron door of the stove where the last oak knots were turning to ash.
He sat in the dark for a long time, thinking about Marco. He thought about the way his uncle sat at the head of the mahogany table in the North End, pouring Scotch from a crystal decanter with hands that never shook, talking about family the way a butcher talks about cattle—not with cruelty, exactly, but with the flat, professional certainty of someone who knew exactly how much meat came off a rib.
May you like
In this family, we don't love anyone. We only keep them.
Enzo touched his left knee. It didn't hurt anymore; it had gone numb six hours ago from the damp.
