The End by Salvatore Scibona Page A

and padded away across the bright grass.
    “I am a man of firm beliefs,” Rocco said. “Such as love of my country; the power of prayer; the belongingness of wife with husband, and children with their father.”
    “And now you’re corrupted. That’s the confession you feel compelled to make. Like as though it hasn’t ever occurred to anybody before to open their heart to the old man under the tree and pretend he is the dearly departed whatever-the-relation.”
    Rocco peered into the gaping mouth of the freezer, but he saw only what was promised—three tubs, brown, pink, and green, in a shallow, frosted box.
    “I am not corrupt,” Rocco said.
    “And yet you think corrupt thoughts.”
    “I’m very, very faithful, sir. What I’m trying to explain is, I have to know you. If you have the face of the person, that means you are the person.”
    The ice cream man closed the freezer hatches, turned aside, and made four neatly spaced and phlegmy sneezes into his handkerchief. Rocco blessed him.
    “Something in my face—thank you—evidently expresses, Please come over here and unfold your regrets,” he said wearily. The sneezes had taken something out of him, a reserve of spiritual force necessary to maintain the cocksure veneer. There was a suggestion of pleading-ness in the voice. Rocco felt certain now that he was faking.
    “And you know me. We know each other. If you give me a second.”
    “No . . . ,” the man said, trying to sound lackadaisical, making a grandly dismissive gesture in the air, a shoo-fly gesture in which the hand, at the top of the arc, snapped to one side as if only barely tied to the wrist, a move Rocco had no doubt he’d seen before.
    Unless the feeling of wanting very deeply to have no doubts could resemble the feeling of having no doubts itself.
    “At least once, we’ve seen one another. I think.”
    “Jesus Christ, this fucking ragweed over here.”
    “Unless our Lord has led me astray.”
    “They actually planted it, if you can believe that. It’s part of the landscaping, is what they told me, the park rangers, when I asked them why not mow it down.”
    In the moss beneath the hedges, the cat stood with its forepaws on the swallow’s neck and tail and bit into a bunch of feathers and ripped them off, while one of the wings methodically slapped its face.
    “You never lived in Ohio anywhere, or in the Nebraska?”
    “I’m going to sneak in here at night with a can of turpentine and a match, is what I’m going to do.”
    “Unless I’m deceived this whole time,” Rocco said.
    “All summer it’s the grass pollens, the windblown corn rusts.” He sneezed four times more, fluid leaking out of every opening in his face. “And the fungus spores.”
    “The things that I absorbed for so long,” Rocco sputtered, “for I don’t know why.” The sun was on his back, and a caddis fly alighted on his belly. Thumpety-thump went his heart.
     
    It didn’t matter what he had done or failed to do. He didn’t see what he saw. He was not where he was. He felt so hungry and light-headed and confused that he wasn’t hungry.
    And yet I have my pink scoop on top of my green scoop on top of my cone, he considered, licking them, as he crossed the grass and then the pavement again and stood at the rail on the lip of the gorge and watched again the falls falling, the shapeless mists rising up.
    His streak was over. He had no possessions worthy of note. His parents had long since gone to their long home.
    He was fifty-seven years old.

PART TWO
    All the Daughters of Musick Shall Be Brought Low 1928 - 1936

5
    F or thirteen years after the death of her husband, Costanza Marini had lived alone. She was now sixty-eight. Death beckoned. And that was really too bad, because, having been anxious in her youth, disappointed in maturity, and then desolate in middle age, she had recently made a conspicuous turn: In what she expected were her final years, she found herself in possession of powers she had