Secretly, too, Jacob has wondered how much of Italo’s gruffness with him has its roots in the memory of Angelo’s sightless eyes, the mortal wound Jacob’s axe had opened in his neck. There are moments Jacob can barely believe he struck Angelo down; the act feels as distant as Austria, a scene from a dream he had long ago. Other times, though, the shock of the axe chopping meat and bone echoes up his hands and arms as if it’s just happened. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s the same for Italo.
Truth to tell, most of the time, Jacob’s presence appears barely to register on Italo. As the adage has it, the man has bigger fish to fry; despite what they went through the year before, Jacob can’t muster the courage to ask him about whatever’s in the skillet. As it turns out, he won’t need to. A couple of months after the Dort house and its surroundings have been reduced to a foundation and bare ground, there’s a morning Regina doesn’t rise from bed. Italo sends his oldest boy, Giovanni, for the doctor, but by the time the man arrives, she’s well on her way to her last breaths. Cancer, apparently of the uterus, which likely has spread to other places in her body, the doctor opines. Italo and the children sit with her as she completes the remainder of her journey out of this life. At the very end, Regina’s eyes flutter, her lips move as if she’s about to say something, utter a final instruction or bit of wisdom, but all she manages is, “The woman:” the rest is pulled down into death with her.
Everyone who knows them expects that, with Regina gone, Italo will collapse, crushed by the weight of his sorrow and the responsibility of so large a family. After work, Clara stops at their house to lend what assistance she can with the cooking and cleaning, as do Lottie and her sisters, but mother and daughters alike judge it only a matter of time before Helen and George’s children finish their long-delayed trip to the orphanage, and take Italo and Regina’s brood with them. While Italo hasn’t retreated into the glassy depths of a bottle of alcohol, or mummified himself in layers of grief, the façade he shows to his family, to the rest of the camp, is riven with cracks. To Clara and her girls’ surprise, however, Maria, the oldest of the adopted children, steps forward and seizes the reins of the situation. The general expectation is that she’ll be no match for it, that it’ll whipsaw her back and forth and fling her away broken. But the girl digs in her heels, braces her legs, and winds the reins around her arms and shoulders. It’s neither easy nor smooth, but over a course of months, she settles what’s become her family into a new kind of normal. Nobody leaves school; nobody loses their job — except for Maria, herself, who doesn’t return to school and quits the part-time position she’s had at the bakery. There’s some suspicion she’s angling to marry Italo, about which opinion is more divided than you might expect, but gradually, it becomes clear that Maria’s assumed the role of maiden aunt, rather than wife-in-waiting. She’ll maintain the position for the remainder of the family’s stay at the camp.
XXX
Three years pass. Jacob’s slow courtship of Lottie progresses to a long engagement, which leads to marriage right around the time the Reservoir’s west basin starts being filled. The previous summer’s been hot and dry, leaving the Esopus shrunken within its banks, and the water collects slowly in the great bowl — so much so there’s fear that the Reservoir’s been built too big, that it’ll never be full. Those fears are put to rest the following fall, when a succession of storms pours rain into it and lifts the water level within sight of where it’s supposed to be. Next spring — on June 19, 1914, to be exact — all the whistles in the camp will blow for a solid hour, announcing the completion of the majority of work on the Reservoir. Although it’ll be another two years after that until the project is officially finished, the roar of the whistles echoing up the Esopus valley, off the surrounding mountains, overlapping itself to form layers of a sound, a geology of sound, serves notice to those working at the camp that the end is drawing nigh. Already, most of the crews who cleared the valley have been handed their walking papers. Some of the stoneworkers have been let go, too. What’s next for them is a topic Rainer and Clara, Jacob and Lottie, have discussed, but after those whistles, there’s an element of urgency mixed into their conversations.
Italo departs the camp first. Within six months of the whistles blowing, he’s secured a position with a stonemason in Wiltwyck. The next year, Lottie and Jacob and their first child, Greta, will settle in Woodstock, so that Jacob can take up a job with a fellow who carves headstones. In order to continue their schooling, and to help with the baby, Lottie’s sisters, Gretchen and Christina, accompany them. Rainer and Clara will remain at the camp the longest, as its streets empty, its houses become vacant, its bakery and general store close. At the end of 1916, when the Reservoir is formally pronounced done, Rainer and Clara will be among the only residents of the camp that’s in the process of being taken down. Through the same talent for persuasion that brought him and his family to this place, Rainer succeeds in obtaining a position with the Water Authority that’s been established to oversee the functioning and maintenance of the Reservoir and the tunnels that funnel its water to New York’s thirsty taps. This is a time when the U.S. is on its way into the First World War, and you might not expect a fellow with a German accent to be hired to so sensitive a position. He convinces whoever needs it of his loyalty and his trustworthiness, and for the next decade, he travels up and down Ulster County, inspecting its portion of the Catskill Aqueduct — that’s the tunnel that runs south out of the Reservoir. He and Clara relocate to Woodstock, to a modest house a couple of doors down from Lottie and Jacob, whose family has expanded to include a son, also Jacob, and another daughter, Clara. Christina, Rainer and Clara’s youngest, has scandalized everyone by falling pregnant with the child of a much older man who has come north from Beacon to tend to his sick brother. After a hasty wedding, Christina and Tom head back down the Hudson to settle. Gretchen, the middle sister, attends the teachers’ college in Huguenot, and takes a position teaching in Rhinebeck. She’ll marry late, a railroad conductor with whom she develops a romance over the course of trips to Manhattan to visit the museums there.
Life goes on. That’s the remarkable thing, isn’t it? Not that everything the Schmidts and their companions had been through with the Fisherman wasn’t incredible, but that the world could have continued as it always has, anyway, seems astonishing. Once or twice a year, usually when summer’s at its height, Italo brings his family to visit. While Clara and Lottie fuss over how big the children have grown and listen to them report their latest activities, Rainer and Italo trade remarks about the weather and whatever news the headlines have been concerned with; while Jacob listens quietly, nodding every now and again to show he’s paying attention. He’s done quite well for himself, has Italo, buying out the stonemason who hired him, bringing on his son, Giovanni, to work with him. He has more business, he says, than he knows what to do with, but he’s lucky to have such problems. Clara tells him he should find a nice woman, but Italo insists he doesn’t have time for such things. Over the course of his visits, his hair whitens and thins, his skin takes on a gray pallor that Clara declares she does not care for. Italo poo-poos her worrying, but when word comes from Wiltwyck that he’s suffered a heart attack and been hospitalized, her fears are borne out. Rainer and she set off for the hospital, but by the time they arrive, Italo’s heart has failed, completely.