Bell for Adano, A - John Hersey [65]
“That is true,” Tomasino said with a puckered face. Tina said: “I just do not wish to go.”
Tomasino turned on her: “Girl, by the same reasoning which made your mother force me to go to the Mister Major against my will, I now order you to go to him also.”
Tina lowered her head and said: “Well, if you order me...” Agnello said afterwards that he thought by the way she said this, she really wanted to go all along.
Tomasino said: “I want you to tell him that we are glad to be able to go fishing...”
“And that we are thankful to him for making it possible,” Agnello said.
“And that we are very grateful for the new rigging,” Merendino said.
“Also if he has had anything to do with sending so many fish into our nets, we thank him,” Sconzo said. Tomasino said: “Tell him those things but don’t make a fool of yourself, daughter.”
She said with more vehemence than was necessary: “Don’t worry, I won’t:”
Tina went to see the Mister Major at eight o’clock the next morning. When Zito led her to Major Joppolo’s desk, she said defiantly: “You said that if I had business with you, I should come to your office. I have come.”
Major Joppolo had the discretion to wave Zito out of the room before he said: “I am sorry I said that. I have been miserable about it ever since.”
Tina said: “Have you?” That much she said softly, then she added harshly: “You ought to have been. You were very rude.”
The Major said: “I know I was. I’m really very sorry. I have been trying to find out the thing you wanted to know.”
Tina was all softness now: “Do you mean about my Giorgio? Have you found out? Is he a prisoner?”
“I don’t know yet. But I may have some word for you on all the prisoners in a few days.”
“You may? Good word, Mister Major?” “Good word, Tina
“Oh, Mister Major, I thank you, I thank you and I kiss your hand.”
Major Joppolo hardly had time to think vaguely that he wouldn’t mind kissing Tina’s hand before she had run out.
She ran all the way home and when Tomasino asked her if she had said what the fishermen had told her, she said that she had, oh yes, she had, and she threw her arms around her father’s neck and kissed him on both cheeks, and he put his arms around her and pressed her a little and said glumly: “My little Tina, I think you are crazy.”
Chapter 21
THE TROUBLE with Errante Gaetano was that he couldn’t keep his mind on anything. Or to put it the other way around: whatever had his mind at the moment seized it so wholly that he couldn’t think about anything else. It made no difference what his mind ought to be on; whatever it was on, it was really on.
After General Marvin ordered his good mule shot, Errante got another. This one was not as amiable as the first, and was more stubborn in its mind. But it was a mule, and it gave Errante both pleasure and work.
One afternoon Errante was driving this new mule through the town. It was late in the afternoon, the hour when most of the children of the town got out on the Via Umberto the First and shouted for caramels. American military traffic seemed to be particularly heavy at that hour each evening.
As he thought back on it later (and he had plenty of time to think it over in jail), it seemed to Errante that a great number of things happened very quickly. Actually it was just that quite a few things flashed across his mind in fairly rapid succession, giving him an illusion of great activity.
First he looked ahead down the Via Umberto the First and he saw the bridge over the Rosso River, and he shied, like a sensitive horse seeing a place where it has hurt itself once before. Errante shuddered every time he saw that bridge, because it made him think of the rude awakening he had had there and of the shooting of his mule.
Next he saw a row of amphibious trucks come toward him across the bridge. These amphibious trucks fascinated Errante. He had recently spent one entire day sitting on a knoll near the beach about five miles west of Adano watching these fat creatures waddle out across the sand, let themselves gingerly down into