The Immigrants Read Online Free PDF Page B

food and building materials as well to the city.
    A soot-grimed, weary fisherman pointed down the wharf, “There’s the Lavette boat.”
    “He’s alive?”
    “He’s dead,” the fisherman said. “The kid’s alive.”
    “God be praised,” Cassala whispered. “God be praised.”
    He ran down the length of the wharf, and there was Lavette’s thirty-two-foot powerboat, tied up, secure and safe, and in the cargo well, sprawled out and sound asleep, Daniel Lavette. Cassala climbed down into the boat, so moved by the sight of young Lavette, asleep and sound with three days of beard on his face and no sign of hurt or injury, that he could have em braced him and kissed him as he would his own son. It was the sleep of total fatigue, and the boy had not even bothered to take off his heavy boots or his jacket. Cas sala recognized this; on the other hand, this was no place for an exhausted, grief-stricken boy to sleep, here on his boat and alone. And for all Cassala knew, he had not eaten during the three days since the earthquake.
    Cassala shook him. “Danny, Danny, wake up.”
    “You won’t wake him easy, Tony,” a voice said. Cas sala turned around, and there on the wharf was Mark Levy, the chandler whose store was at the end of the wharf, and looking down the wharf, past where Levy stood, Cassala saw that his shop had survived,
     
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    scorched at one corner and tilting somewhat, but otherwise whole and undamaged. Levy was only twenty-six years old, skinny and long-nosed, an easygoing and competent young man who had taken over the chandler shop five years before when his father died.
    To Cassala, who had come into this place again and again to buy small gifts for the Lavettes, the Levy store was a veritable wonderland, selling every conceivable item a boatman or fish erman might need, nets and rope and lanterns and compasses and sails and oars, a tangled, jumbled gen eral store of the sea.
    Now Levy looked at Cassala curiously, the general question that was being asked everywhere in the city left unspoken.
    “Not harmed,” Cassala said. “The fire don’t reach us, no harm, thank God. But poor Lavette and Anna, they are dead, no?”
    “That’s what the kid said. He said he woke up about four-thirty, maybe a little earlier, and went down the hill to make the boat ready. He left them both asleep. He was at the boat when the quake came, and then he ran back but the house was in flames. He went a little crazy, and Jeff Peters, who was with him, said he had to hold him down on the ground to keep him out of the house. My wife, Sarah, found him sitting in the boat a few hours later, just sitting there crying like a kid. Do you know what he’s been doing for the past three days? Ferrying people to Oakland. They just poured into the boat and shoved their money at him. This is the first time he’s slept in three days.”
    “We wake him up, and I take him home with me,” Cassala said.
    “He can’t sleep here. It’s no good. He got to eat. He got to be with his people.”
    It was like waking a drugged man, but the two of them got Dan Lavette on his feet, where he stood sway ing, his eyes half-closed, his long-limbed, six-foot-two-inch body looming over them, staring at Mark Levy and at Anthony Cassala without recognition.
    Softly, in Italian, Cassala said, “It’s me; Danny, Tony, and I know
     
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    about your grief. Your father was like a brother to me, and you will be like a son. Now, come home with me.”
    “My boat,” the boy said, clinging to the only part of his life that remained. “I can’t leave my boat.”
    “I’ll take care of the boat, Danny,” Levy said. “Go with him now.”
    All the way back to the Cassala house, Dan Lavette remained silent, and wisely enough Anthony did not urge him to speak or to share his grief. Only when he was seated at the kitchen table in the Cassala house, with a dozen people welcoming him back from the dead, with the