Free The Assassini by Thomas Gifford Page A

play poker on the grass out of sight of the house. But I’d once eaten an apple and found half a worm inside and the orchard and I had parted company about then.
    We used to have Fritz the gardener show us the exact tree from which the priest had hanged himself. We’d stare at it while Fritz showed us the precise limb and made a face with his tongue sticking out and his eyesrolled back, and then he would laugh and suggest that just possibly the orchard was haunted like the attic. I never even saw a newspaper article or photograph about the tragedy and the poor damned dead priest. I asked my mother about it and she’d brushed the question away, saying, “It was all a million years ago, it was just too terribly sad, Benjy,” and my father had said that it was just bad luck. “He could have picked anybody’s orchard, anybody’s tree. Bad luck he picked ours.”
    By then I’d begun to feel foolish standing out there in the falling snow remembering a suicidal priest of damn near fifty years earlier and wondering where the devil my sister was. She hadn’t been in the house; she hadn’t been in the chapel.
    I walked back and stood looking at the chapel, frosted with snow like something in a fairy tale. The wind had come up from out back, whistling across the creek, through the orchard.
    I climbed the slippery steps and swung the door open again, stared into the damp, cold stillness. The little candle had gone out. I left the door open for the pathetic bit of light it provided and felt along the wall for the light switches. I flipped the first one. The entry was enveloped in a dim grayness, antediluvian. I felt like a diver in the depths of a flooded ruin. I flipped the second switch and another set of dim lights came on in the chapel proper. I heard the leathery flutter of a bat or two overhead in the darkness.
    There were only ten pews divided by a center aisle. I took a few tentative steps, called her name. Never had a room been so empty. The single syllable,
Val
, ricocheted off the walls and the stained glass windows. I heard the steady drip of a couple of leaks, the roof and steeple needing repair yet again.
    Then in the gloom, between the first and second rows, I saw a flash of red. A red wool and blue leather sleeve, a bit of antique warmup jacket. I recognized it. It was my old letter jacket from St. Augustine. It would have the intertwined
SA
on the left breast. It didn’t belong on the floor of the chapel.
    In the catacomb of St. Callistus deep below the AppianWay there is the tomb from which Pope Paschal, in the ninth century, removed the body of St. Cecelia. He laid her to final rest in a sarcophagus of white marble under the altar of the Church of St. Cecelia in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. Years ago I visited the catacomb of Callistus and emerged from the darkened gallery into the pool of light where the body of a girl lay in what seemed to be a peaceful sleep. For an instant I felt as if I had intruded on her privacy. Then, of course, I recognized her as the work of the sculptor Maderna, the body of Cecelia as she had appeared to Cardinal Sfondrati in a dream. It was an extraordinarily realistic rendering, and as I looked down at the body of the woman in our chapel I felt as if I, too, like the cardinal of centuries before, were lost in a dream, as if I were confusing this woman with the martyred Cecelia.
    She lay crumpled sideways, fallen where she’d been kneeling in prayer. She lay still, like Maderna’s sculpture, peaceful, her head turned toward the floor, the one eye I could see closed. I touched her hand, the rosary clutched in the cold fingers. She’d worn my old warmup jacket to make the walk from the house to the chapel. The wool was damp. I held her hand. The fingers were stiff.
    My sister Val, always the brave little soldier, full of the courage I lacked, was dead.
    I don’t know how long I knelt there. Then I reached out to touch her face, so empty of her spirit, and I was seeing her as