“It’s Philippus!” I cried, as the bay danced along sidewise like a skittish crab.
“Whoever he is, he ought to give that beast more work and less corn!” Patsy flicked the dust the bay had kicked up from his sleeve.
“No matter about the dust; he’s alive! We shall all be dust soon enough.”
Patsy left us at the gate.
Although there was a nip in the air, we found old Count Q. in the garden.
“Babbo sits out whenever he can,” said Rosalia, oldest of the Count’s seven remaining daughters. “Since the earthquake he knows no peace within.”
When I told them J. was going to Messina, the Count’s drawn face changed; he began to sob pitifully. Rosalia, a faded beauty with tragic eyes (she had lain beneath the ruins of their house at Messina for twenty-four hours), put a finger to her lips.
“Speak not of Sicily, I pray!” she whispered, “though in truth he thinks of nothing else. He dreams each night the house is falling.”
The Count is seventy years old, and paralyzed. His house was destroyed with his oldest son’s next door. For days he heard his son’s voice and his little grandchildren’s calling for help. They were buried so deep that when help came it was too late. One of the granddaughters was the girl of the emerald scarab ring Bonanno told us of.
“How goes on the sewing?” I asked Rosalia.