They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 14
Chapter 14-Write My Name Back In
I opened it in front of the old man..
One sheet of heavy paper. A woman’s handwriting. Elegant. Unhurried.”
Commander Marchetti,
My father is old, stupid, and now in a Table cell, which is where sentimental men belong. I have no interest in owning
you. That was his century’s ambition. Not mine.
You should know two things.
One: yours was not the only bloodline that was hunted. Ask your Don what happened to the other one – the women who could tell a lie from a truth across a room. Ask him why there is no living record of them. Ask him gently. He was
there.
Two: there is a girl in Naples. She is nine years old. Last spring she began reciting her mother’s telephone conversations back to her, word for word, from six months earlier.
She is not a Marchetti. She has no five brothers. She has no Requiem, and no gray-eyed boy, and no army.
She has nine years.
What are you going to do with them, Commander?
–
– S. Ferraro
I read it twice and set it on the table.
Don Vittorio had gone absolutely white.
“Sir,” I said. “Is there a second bloodline?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“That,” he said, “is a conversation for a locked room.”
“Then lock one,” I said. “I’ll bring coffee.”
Here’s where I am now.
Nine days later, I’m standing in the west field of my family’s land, in a dress the color of a bruise, in front of two
hundred people from eleven families.
They threw the party.
Eleven months of planning, thirteen months late, and my mother did not cut one single item. Not the oxblood. Not the
black candles. Not the ridiculous menu of every dish I’ve ever cooked in that house.
Don Vittorio came as witness, exactly as they’d planned it a year ago when I was living in a chapel two hundred yards
from my mother’s window. He stood up in front of eleven families and formally acknowledged Siena Vittoria Marchetti,
daughter of the house, Unit Commander of the Requiem – and made it clear, in the way only that kind of old man can,
that whoever touches me touches the Table.
Salvatore Ferraro will die in a cell.
My five brothers got up one at a time and each told a story designed to kill me. Gabriel came on crutches to do the
phone one. “Hewwo. Marchetti house. Who you want?” Two hundred people laughed. I threw a bread roll at his bad
leg.
Then my father stood up with the Bible from Palermo and a pen, and opened it on the table in front of all of them, and
put my name back into my family in ink while two hundred people watched him do it.
His hand shook so badly that Dominic had to hold the page flat.
Then my mother stood up with a shoebox.
Eighteen notebooks. One for every year. Every color I ever said I liked, every song, every stupid opinion, in her
handwriting, starting the week I was born.
“I kept a list,” she said, to a field full of people who could all see her face. “A hundred and forty-one items. My daughter
has crossed off a hundred and forty of them herself, which is the most Siena thing that has ever happened.”
She looked at me.
“Item one,” she said. “She will never spend one day wondering whether she was wanted.”
Her voice went.
“I failed item one,” my mother said. “I failed it for three hundred and sixty-five days, and I am going to spend the rest of my life doing it over. Siena – you were wanted. You were wanted before you existed. Your brother asked God for a
sister the night before you came, and God said yes.”
Nobody in that field had a dry face. Including me, and I’ve been shot at.
I’m not going to tell you I forgave them in that moment.
I forgave them in pieces, over months, the way people actually forgive – badly, and backward, and mostly on Sundays
at a diner on Route 9 where my mother orders a salad and then eats half my fries.
