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priest had got it down. When Miksa offered to put it back up, he thought it best not to mention that he had been the one to remove it. Nowadays, he did not volunteer any more information than was absolutely necessary.
    At its base, the steeple was about five feet wide for the first fifty feet, and Miksa had placed the nails in an upward spiral, each two and a half feet up and over from the previous one, leaving anail in each corner and one in between. When he was on the corner he was relatively safe—it was easier to hold on and to switch his feet on the nail—but when he was on the middle nail, he had to stretch his arms out all the way, barely able to wrap his fingertips around each corner of the steeple. The wood occasionally splintered into his hands, but he dared not wear gloves for fear of losing his grip. There would be a brief moment at each nail when he had to switch feet, and here he was most vulnerable. Very quickly, using all the strength in his thickly skinned fingers to clutch the edges of the spire, he would pull his body up, just slightly, lifting one foot off the nail and replacing it with the other.
    As Miksa ascended in this manner, he discovered something he was not prepared for. The last time he had climbed the steeple, it had been early in the morning, before the sun had risen. Now, however, in the heat of the afternoon sun, the wood of the steeple had been heated to a temperature that made holding on to it much more difficult. He could feel its heat on his cheek, which he’d pressed roughly against the siding, and his fingers protested vehemently, though he was sure they weren’t actually burning. At any rate, it was not their decision whether to hold on or not, so he kept climbing. He wound his way around the spire, rising five feet on each side, making two and a half full revolutions. He reached the top of the square section, fifty feet from the roof of the church, pulled himself over the lip of an eight-inch ledge, and there Miksa Ursari rested.
    To the people below it appeared as though Miksa was able to stick to the side of the steeple like a fly to a wall, although there were some who guessed that there were nails. Salvo didn’t need to figure the nails out; he had known about them all along. His father had sworn him to secrecy, a secret that Salvo would keep if it cost him his very life. As he watched his father climb the spire thatstretched towards the sky like a holy finger, Salvo’s heart swelled with joy, and a little envy.
    His father rested on the edge of the upper part of the towering steeple for several minutes before continuing. The final thirty-foot portion was triangular in shape, so instead of circling the structure as he had done in the lower section, Salvo’s father shimmied straight up. As the steeple narrowed he was able to move faster, and to Salvo it didn’t feel like very long at all until his father had reached the top. From where he sat in the crook of the dead tree, Salvo thought his father seemed a long way off, almost in another world. Salvo wondered what it must feel like to be up there, where no one else had been able to go, and as he saw the jealous faces of the
gadje
in the crowd, he was glad that Miksa Ursari was his father.
    Miksa did not look down to see the admiration on his son’s face. Though he had never told anyone, he was slightly afraid of heights. Sometimes it bothered him and sometimes it did not, and that day it did. He continued, drawing in a sharp breath and digging his fingertips into the hot wood. His face was slick with sweat, and his heart was beating so loudly that for a moment he wondered if the people below could hear it. He glanced down to confirm his suspicion, and the ground swayed and twisted, and he felt his chest tighten up and his stomach flip, but still he made himself keep looking. Face it, and you will either fall or you will get past it, he told himself. So he kept focusing on the ground, and just when he thought he might not be