Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 24

WHEN SHE CAME TO, she was in her bed. No Harry, no Arturo, no Joe, no Angela. Only her mother sitting by her side, silently crying. Her mother and Salvo!

“Salvo?” Gina was so happy for a moment. She raised her hand to reach for him.

“Why doesn’t anybody ever listen to me?” Mimoo said, sobbing into her rosary beads. Her arthritis and tears prevented her from counting them properly. She kept rolling them around between her barely mobile fingers.

“How are you feeling, sorella?” Salvo said, the hat in his hands twitching.

“Where’s Harry?” Gina reached down to touch her stomach. “Is he all right? What’s happened?”

Salvo got up and left the bedroom before Mimoo could speak.

Mimoo shook her head. “He’s not all right,” she said. “Things are as bad as can be, child. Harry, Arturo, Joe have all been arrested. Along with dozens of others.” She sobbed in a prayer. “They’re about to be charged with murder.”

“Murder? What murder? Harry too?”

Mimoo cried louder. “Our precious angel, Angela. Your cousin. Like your sister. Gone. Struck down. Stray bullet. Right to the heart. Oh!”

Santa Maria, prega per noi peccattori.

Gina tried to stand up.

“Stop it, lie down,” Mimoo said. “You’re still bleeding, it’s not safe for you, you’re sick, lie down.”

She would not lie down. “Bleeding, why?”

Her mother wouldn’t answer her.

“Mimoo? Salvo!”

“Don’t call him. He can’t speak to you.”

“Salvo!”

“You lost your baby, Gia, my child. Nessuna sofferenza, ma la vita eterna.”

Now Gina didn’t want to speak to anyone. Clutching her stomach, she turned away. Where is Harry, she whispered, but no one heard. I need my husband.

Salvo was so upset, he couldn’t come back into the room to comfort her. Mumbling a few indecipherables from the door, he left, ran.

No one knew what had happened. In the commotion, shots ringing out, Angela was dragged inside a shop, everyone thought for safety. The police opened fire, fearing they had been fired upon. Perhaps she had already been shot before she was pulled inside the grocery store. No one could say for certain, but when the crowd had dispersed, Angela’s blood flowed in the streets and Arturo and Joe had been arrested. They had been nowhere near Essex Street, nowhere near Angela. But because they were Wobblies, they were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot—in other words with a felony that resulted in a woman’s death. That was murder. If convicted they faced execution.

No one saw Angela get hit or fall. No one heard the shot that pierced her heart. There were dozens of injured people on the ground, but only one of them lay dead, shot through the chest. Angela was twenty-eight years old, though all the papers later said Annie LoPizo was thirty, not knowing that Angela Tartaro had long ago lied about her age when she first came to America from Sicily so she could get the job that eventually claimed her life.

Angela’s life wasn’t the only one claimed. For days blood seeped out onto the starched white sheets of Gina’s bed.

Bill kept the strike going as long as he could, but a few weeks after Angela’s death, it ended. It took sixty-three days, fifty thousand women, one dead woman and one lost baby. American Woolen agreed to all the demands, and the women returned to work without a contract in mid-March.

Everybody but Angela.