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and he destroyed buildings by day and made wine in his backyard with a cast-iron press by night. He took off for work out of town for months at a time, leaving Rosari to care for the children and the invalid father, who wheezed and barely moved. He wandered and found work and came back with money, rarely telling Rosari what he was about. Whenever he could, he took the oldest boys out of school to clear piles of rubble, but Rosari put her foot down with the youngest. She kept little Joe in class because she knew he had a gift.
    The family moved to a house on the Southern Pacific tracks in the East Bay, and Giuseppe planted a garden and bought chickens, rabbits, and a goat. He bought property for fifty dollars at countyauctions, worthless swamp that some attorney on the East Coast didn’t bother paying the tax on, and his family went without groceries for a month. In Italy, only the wealthy land barons could own property, but in America, Giuseppe was no longer a peasant. With the help of his literate children, he signed ownership contracts, magical documents stamped with gold seals.
    The tales of his strength grew among family and neighbors. Giuseppe would break walnuts on his biceps and bend dimes with his teeth. He broke the bones of three men who tried to steal his money in Oakland. There was nothing on earth he couldn’t move when he was angry. A family in Richmond, hearing a ferocious noise of growling and shrieking, stepped outside to witness an entire house moving down the street. Giuseppe had jacked it onto skids and was pushing it to a vacant lot.
    By the time America went to war again with Italy, Giuseppe’s sons had made a business of building instead of wrecking, and he found himself wandering more and more in the hills of San Francisco, drinking with old Italians and listening to God. He often felt directed by God to visit certain places or do certain things, and this was how, somewhere in midcentury, his private thoughts took on strange biblical proportions.
    When Giuseppe was seventy-nine years old he decided to marry Maria Guadalupe Diego, a seventeen-year-old prostitute from the Latino barrio of the Mission District. He stepped out of Molinari’s on Columbus, a little tipsy, and stood on the steps of the church overlooking Washington Square. This was when he first got the notion that God wanted him to remarry, as he stood on the stepsand watched the pigeons circle the spires and fluted alcoves overhead. And even though Giuseppe was currently married, God told him it was time to do it again.
    Maria was working North Beach when she spotted Giuseppe shuffling across the park in a forty-year-old, three-piece, pin-striped suit. Two months pregnant by God only knew which salesman from Tulsa or sailor from San Diego, she heard the child speak to her and express its desire to live. This was three days before Mañuel and one of his girls were supposed to take her for the abortion. She lay on the grass in Washington Square watching a cloud the shape of a woman’s face while two men played a flute and a clarinet, and the child said,
I want this
from her stomach.
Hijo,
she thought, I need a husband. Some rich old geezer who will leave me alone.
    When she approached Giuseppe on the church steps three pigeons hovered inches above his hat and shoulders. Maria began to ask for directions, but laughed unavoidably when the birds landed on the old-timer’s hat and shoulders. He shook his head and arms, then found himself laughing, too. A few minutes later they were speaking a mixture of Spanish, Italian, and pidgin English, punctuated by Giuseppe’s extreme chivalry.
    My wife has passed away, he lied in Italian because this was what God probably wanted him to say. As he brushed a tear from his eye, his gold-plated wristwatch flashed.
    I am so very sorry for you, she lied in Spanish. She wore a white dress and leather sandals. A blue rebozo draped her head and shoulders. The consoling touch of her small hand on his was no