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hand-lettered in blue fountain-pen ink, lots of flourishes and curlicues. “I can read his name,” I said. “What does the rest say?”
    “Let’s see. It says, ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from . . .” Umile? Umile? Humble! . . . ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ ”
    I had to smile. “He had a pretty good idea of himself, didn’t he?”
    Her eyes brimmed with tears. “He was a wonderful man, Dominick.”

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    WALLY LAMB
    “Yeah, right. As long as you ate your eggs. And your cigarettes.”
    Ma stroked the small, coverless dictionary. “I’ve been meaning to give you this stuff for a long time, honey,” she said. “You take it with you when you go. It’s for Thomas, too, if he ever wants to look at it, but I wanted to give it to you, especially, because you were the one who always used to ask about Papa.”
    “I was?”
    She nodded. “When you were little. See this dictionary? This is the one he used right after he came over from the Old Country—the one he learned his English from.”
    I opened the tattered book. Its onionskin pages were stained with grease from his fingers. On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures—old, repeated stories.
    I took my mother into the kitchen and showed her the pencil marks written onto the joist. “Yup, that’s his writing!” she said. “I’ll be a son of a gun. Look at that! It almost brings him right back again.”
    I reached out and rubbed her shoulder, the cloth of her bathrobe, the skin and bone. “You know what I think?” I said. “I think you should translate that story of his.”
    Ma shook her head. “Oh, honey, I can’t. I told you, I’ve forgotten more Italian than I remember. I never learned it that good to begin with. It was confusing. Sometimes he’d speak the Italian he’d learned in school—up in the North—and sometimes he’d speak Sicilian. I used to get them mixed up. . . . And anyway, it’s like I said. I just don’t think he wanted me to read it. Whenever I’d go out into the yard to hang the clothes or bring him a cold drink, he’d get so mad at me.
    Shout at me, shoo me away. ‘Stay out of my business!’ he’d say. I’m telling you, he was a regular J. Edgar Hoover about that project of his.”
    “But, Ma, he’s dead, ” I reminded her. “He’s been dead for almost forty years.”
    She stopped, was quiet. She seemed lost in thought.
    “What?” I said. “What are you thinking about?”
    “Oh, nothing, really. I was just remembering the day he died. He I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 29
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    was all alone out there, all by himself when he had that stroke.” She drew her Kleenex from her sleeve. Wiped her eyes. “That same morning, while he was eating his breakfast, he told me he was almost done with it. It took me back a little—him giving me a progress report like that—because up until then, he had never said one word to me about it. Not directly, I mean. . . . And so I asked him, I said, ‘What are you going to do with it, Papa, once you’re finished?’ I thought he was going to start writing away to some publishers back in Italy. Try to get it made into a book like he’d said. But you know what he told me? He said maybe he’d just throw it into the ash barrel and put a match to it.
    Burn the whole thing up once he was finished writing it. It just wasn’t the answer I was expecting. After all that trouble he’d gone to to get it down. . . . I heard him sobbing up there a couple of times that last morning—really wailing one time. It was terrible. And I wanted to go up to him, Dominick, but I thought it would have made him mad if I did. Made things worse. He’d been so private about it.
    “And then, later on, when I went out there with his lunch, there he was.