A sense like revelation here, that the worry and the useless chaos he experienced in his little coffin world, in his pomade-smearing-the-window, mildew-on-the-bathroom-tile, fungus-in-the-toenails world — that all the mess surrounding him was a delusion brought about by the accident of being a small man with small eyes in a small room, and that all he’d needed all along was to get to Niagara Falls and view an immense thing from an immense distance and the delusion would be dispelled. He would see the sublime order with which the Lord had composed his work. Up close, up here on the lip of the canyon, he saw a tree branch rush down the river and slip over the crest. But when he tried to follow it down the curtain of water, it vanished. The particular mess was lost in the grand design. A sense of significance in all things that he could feel only once he felt the insignificance of any one thing.
One night, after cards, D’Agostino had spread on Rocco’s kitchen floor a map of the earth and pointed out that Norway was shaped suspiciously like Sweden, and Sweden like Finland. Was this an accident? Ohio was shaped suspiciously like the United States, with Port Clinton sticking up there into the lake like a stunted Michigan, and Ashtabula pointing up toward the northeast like a little Maine, and a wart growing out of the bottom in the middle, by Ironton, like a Texas. When D’Agostino flipped Australia upside down, it, too, resembled a little USA, with a swayback and a gulf in the underside. And, look at it, the upside-down Australia bore a remarkable resemblance to Red China. Repeated shapes, order, the existence of an afterlife, were all obvious to anybody who looked for them from a frontier. The way so often he saw Europe in the clouds.
As a boy he’d understood this instinctively. As a man, somehow he’d forgotten. And now it was coming back to him.
Distinctly he recalled the white alb and the black felt hat he wore when he was a boy of nine pulling with thousands of other boys and men the ropes that bore, up Via Etnea, a massive carriage that harbored the undecayed remains of Saint Agatha, the patroness of his hometown. The ropes spanned seven city blocks. He was supposed to be pulling them, but with so many of the devoted participating, he was lucky to get a hand on one of the ropes. Nowhere could he see actual pulling taking place, and yet the carriage was impelled up the street. And as they passed into Piazza Stesicoro, he saw the most incredible thing: From the parapet of a fourth-story balcony, a brick, with no visible cause, fell, just fell off the front of the building and smashed to the street.
And young Rocco thought, If I could understand one moment I would understand all moments.
The Canadian side, the Horseshoe Falls, was supposed to be larger and more majestic, but he could see only a corner of it from here. If he crossed the bridge over the gorge to the Canadian side, he’d heard, the view was unobstructed except by mist. And that required leaving the country, an act that represented, yes, the terminus of the path along which Providence had been leading him. He had entered the United States one morning forty years before and had yet to leave. The pattern of these last two days, the instruction he was receiving, was to take the long view, and longer. The next step, yes, was to get out of the country altogether and turn around and see it for what it was.
What a pleasure, how strangely reassuring, to listen to the tinkle of the keys on his key chain, as he bounced them in his hand, and to the roar of the water.
The music of his keys and the unlikely sycamore sapling sending down its baby roots into the earth at this suicidal proximity to the crashing river (it was Liechtenstein clinging to the side of Switzerland, hoping Germany wouldn’t notice) and these flimsy-looking tour boats down in the gorge, stuffed with raincoats, speeding toward the base of the falls, all served to reassure and reassure him that his middle one had not finished becoming only at last to turn into a nothingness. That Loveypants and Bobo and Jimmy would be swayed and return to their rightful places.
Because there is no such thing as a nothingness, said the falls.
He knew what D’Agostino and those devils at the newspaper wanted, and the crone across his alley and her sidekick and the faithless feast crowd — they all wanted him to deny three times that he knew his own boy, and then the cock would crow. They wanted him to declare submitfully that this thing had been destroyed while he wasn’t looking. They had the height, they had the serial number and the dog tags, they had the full faith and credit of the United States Marine Corps. But those were vanities. Those were nothing compared with the authority of Niagara Falls and of one man’s faith. I have only changed his shape, said the falls. The voice of the roaring river told him to cast his bread upon the water, for he would find it after many days. The branch was lost to the viewer in the curtain of water going down, but it wasn’t lost to the falls.
He was full of the fear of God, and happy.
Here was the bridge, saying, as all bridges say, Cross me. Beseeching. And a leftward-heading white arrow on a green metal sign that made the remarkable claim Canada This Way.
Go ahead, Rocco, cross the bridge, it’s pretty over there, they have a little Union Jack in the corner of their flag, and a wax museum.
He searched his clothing for cigarettes and, finding them in his left hip pocket, said, “There you are, little friends!” And he mounted the bridge.
He could see at the far end a customhouse and men in red uniforms, not, alas, wearing bearskin hats. The head of state was a twenty-seven-year-old woman — a truck driver and skilled mechanic when she was a teenager, during the war — whose coronation was just two months ago, and who, perversely, lived in a different country.
He could almost see the Horseshoe now. The river was blue and rushing beneath him. A sign approaching on the bridge sidewalk came into focus; it said International Boundary Line. And under that: Now Entering the Dominion of Canada. He paused and threw his cigarette butt over the rail and the wind tossed it under the bridge before he could see it hit the water, and with significant twisting of the body to shield the match from the wind, he lit another.
He’d forgotten to leave kitty sufficient Chow Chow Bits for his absence, but she’d survive, he assured himself, she was an intrepid little monster.
Go ahead, Rocco, cross the border. What’s this shilly-shallying?
Foreboding, an itch in the brain.
Across the sidewalk ran a stripe of paint, which yet another sign alleged was the actual location of the border, although it was, he now was, the bridge was, according to the sign, two hundred feet above the surface of the river. Evidently, absurdly, an unseen wall reached into the sky. How far into outer space was Canada supposed to extend?