Ascension (36 page)

When news of the arrest reached the Ursaris, Salvo didn’t know what to do. Although he had never really thought that Etel had started the fire, he knew that there had always been doubts in his mind. For a long time he could not even bring himself to look at Etel, and finally he felt he had no choice but to confront her. András suspected he might do this, however, and so he intercepted him.

“What are you going to say to her?” he asked.

“I will tell her I am sorry. That I never should have doubted her.”

“How will that help her? She knows nothing of these accusations. Finding out now will only hurt her.”

“I think she knows,” Salvo said.

“Are you certain?”

Salvo considered this. “No.”

“Well, unless you are certain, you should say nothing.”

“I owe her an apology. And so do you.”

“No. An apology is a selfish thing sometimes, Salvo. If we tell her, we will feel better, but she may feel worse. We owe to her that our shame be kept to ourselves.”

Salvo nodded. András is right, he thought. I will say nothing. Time will take care of our transgression.

T
IME HAD DONE LITTLE
to ease the mind of Etel. Twenty-four years had not made the day of the fire any less vivid in her memory, and the smell of smoke or the sight of flame still bothered her. It never occurred to her that this might have as much to do with her experience as a baby as it did the F-F fire. After Carter’s arrest, however, the thing that bothered her even more than the fire was how good it had made her feel to see the guilt in her brothers’ faces when
they had realized they had grossly misjudged her. She thought she had long ago forgiven them for their doubts, but when she felt her heart leap at their misery, she knew it was not so. Etel resolved to try harder to forgive them, exasperated when she found that if you have to work at forgiveness it will not come. Many days she was sure it never would.

S
ALVO’S DECISION TO RETURN TO THE WIRE
was not made as easily as it had been at other times. This time he would be alone, and though Anna had said she would support him in his endeavour, he knew that she did it only because there was no other way, and that her heart was not behind it. If there had been any alternative, Salvo would have stayed on the ground.

He made a deal with himself. In 1975, six years’ time, he would be sixty-five years old. That was the age that people in North America retired, and that would be the age that he would give up the wire for good. Before, he had always assumed that he would walk indefinitely, and he thought that maybe this had led him to be callous about his time on the wire. He hoped that a realization that his walking days were finite would lead him to a place where he could stop, where he could step off the wire and know it was the last time and feel good about it. To honour this pledge was his resolution.

Salvo selected, from among many offers, a walk over the playing field between doubleheader Montreal Expos games. Although he had never actually seen a baseball game and didn’t even think he would much enjoy watching one, he had liked Montreal on the one occasion he had visited the city. He also thought it might be nice to hear people speak in a language other than English.

He was nervous as the ninth inning of the first game began, not sure if he had done the right thing, not sure if he really wanted to
walk for an audience again. As he prepared to climb to the wire he looked back at Anna, and for the first time since she had known him, her husband’s eyes did not shine with the anticipation of walking; she saw fear, and only fear. “Don’t worry,” she said.

Salvo pulled himself together, for Anna’s sake. “I am not worried. I will not fall.”

“I know. If you were to fall, the world would fall with you, and I know the world will not fall.”

Salvo smiled at these familiar words, then kissed Anna on the cheek. He climbed up to the platform, and when the third out came to end the ninth inning, he stepped onto the wire.

Immediately everything receded. All his fears, all his memories, all he loved and all he loathed. His daughters had not fallen; they had never existed. His life was only beginning, and it would end on the other end of the wire, and then it would begin again the next time he stepped out. Salvo smiled, breathed in hard and took another step.

S
ix million years ago the Colorado River began to carve out what would eventually be named the Grand Canyon. Often forgotten is the fact that had this river not travelled through desert, there would have been no canyon. Rainfall would have washed away the canyon’s steep slopes, preventing the feat of nature from forming. This was Salvo’s favourite thing about the canyon, the requirement of desolation for wonder.

It had come quickly: 1975. After six years of skywalks across stadiums, over rivers, between buildings, and nearly everything a wire could be strung from, his sixty-fifth birthday was nearly upon him, and the time of his retirement had arrived. He had chosen his final walk carefully, and even though there were things about this walk he did not like, it was too good to pass up. Second to crossing between the Canadian and American sides of Niagara Falls, this was the most spectacular walk he could envision.

At this point the canyon was a quarter of a mile wide and one thousand feet deep. It had been difficult to secure an ungreased piece of cable long enough to stretch across the gorge. Because of the distance, the longest he had ever walked, the wire had to be unusually strong to support its own weight. It had taken crews a week to put the wire into place.

Salvo was hired to do the walk by a soft-drink company, on the condition that he stop in the middle and drink a bottle of their soda, and allow this picture to be used in advertisements. Salvo did not like this concession, but there was no other way for him to have the chance to walk the Grand Canyon, so he had agreed. He had waited for the day of the walk with growing impatience.

Anna viewed the day with more trepidation than Salvo. She was eager for him to retire, hoping against hope that he would finally be able to leave the wire on his own terms, and that their life would be returned to the ground for good this time. Mainly, though, she worried about him falling. Anyone could see that Salvo Ursari was not a young man.

Two years earlier András Ursari had died after an eighteen-month battle with cancer. His death had been a relief to his family; his final days contained more pain than his entire life had up to that point. There had been much debate as to how to conduct his funeral. András was most decidedly not a Christian, but on the other hand it could not be said that he did not believe in a God that resembled the Christian one in many ways. In the end they held a memorial service, then buried his cremated remains. Etel had not wanted to cremate him, but she remembered that he had once said that cremation was his wish, so she deferred to András’s words. To her, it seemed sad that he had escaped so many fires in life only to willingly go to one once dead. When her time came, she wanted anything but the flame. Sometimes she daydreamed about burial at sea.

It was at this memorial service that Anna had noticed that none of them was young any more. She noticed for the first time the wrinkles on Salvo’s face, the grey in his hair, the loose skin of his neck, and then she looked to Etel and saw the same. Examining her own hands she saw the hands of a woman far older than herself, and then she knew that somehow her life had gone
into its retreat without her realizing it. For no good reason it instantly seemed colder out.

Since his accident, the feelings of invincibility János once entertained had evaporated. He had been working on the Ursari farm with far more success than Salvo had ever attained. Salvo had all but abandoned farm work since returning to the wire, and as he was now retiring he had no intention of returning to it. Following András’s death, Etel and János sold their house and moved back into Salvo and Anna’s home. It was clear to everyone that the farm would someday be János’s. He was after all the only one who had ever grown anything on it.

Before leaving for this walk, Etel had confronted Salvo about the fire. “I forgive you,” she told him, and he didn’t have to ask to know what she was talking about.

“I am sorry,” he said, clutching her shoulders.

“I know. It is forgiven.”

“It was a horrible thing to think.”

“Yes. But the past is the past. We are through it.”

Salvo had embraced his sister, and he felt thirty years of guilt and shame peel off his back.

Though they never knew it, Daniel Ursari had seen Salvo walk on more than one occasion since he ran away from his adoptive family. He lived in Detroit, working as a parking-meter repair man, a job at which he excelled. Whenever he saw an advertisement for a walk of Salvo’s, he would attempt to get the time off of work and travel the country to see Salvo perform. He was always careful to stay out of the way of anyone who might recognize him. He would arrive as the walk started and leave as soon as Salvo’s foot hit the far platform. There was no point in hanging around any longer than necessary; he still had seizures, though he rarely had more than one a year.

Daniel was in the audience for the Grand Canyon walk, and though it never occurred to Salvo to look, if he had it is possible that he would have seen the boy whom he had pulled from the fire, sitting in the bottom row of bleachers constructed specifically for the walk. Salvo’s mind was preoccupied anyway; this was a difficult walk, and his full attention was required to pull it off.

He checked his watch and, seeing that he would begin in only moments, took it off and gave it to Anna. She smiled and put it in her pocket.

“This is a long one,” he said.

“This will be your last walk. Make sure to enjoy it.” She did not say this with malice. It was a fact both of them knew, and she genuinely did want him to enjoy the walk, though she worried for his safety. These skywalks had been getting progressively dangerous, and she knew that this was by far the most perilous yet.

She did not know that only hours before, he had been asked to perform a skywalk between the towers of two of the world’s tallest buildings. Because he was retiring, he saw no point in telling her what would only worry her further. He would turn them down when he returned home.

“I think I will enjoy it,” he said. “It is a nice day.” It was indeed a day to behold, the weather ideal for such a walk. It was sunny but uncharacteristically cool, and there was no wind to speak of.

It was time for him to begin. He picked up his balancing pole and checked to make sure that the bottle of soda was secure in its pouch hanging from his neck. “Wish me luck,” he said.

“You don’t need luck.”

Salvo smiled and turned to the wire.

“I never hated you,” Anna called to him.

He paused for a moment before looking at her. “I know.”

He stepped onto the wire and it was all gone. He thought only of his feet moving forward, his hands on the balancing pole. For nearly three hundred steps he moved forward slowly, steadily, inexorably. He was not aware of the people who watched from the safety of solid ground. Then a thought began to form in his mind. It was small at first, almost a whisper of a whisper, but it grew louder and stronger until it was all there was.

This is your last walk.

It was plain, it was simple, and it would not go away. Salvo tried to clear his mind, knowing that a thought on the wire, even a simple one, was a very bad thing. Still it would not leave him.

He pushed on, head pounding, barely aware of himself. Finally he reached the centre of the wire, marked with a piece of red electrician’s tape. It was here that he was to sit on the wire and drink the soda that was suspended from his neck. He sighed, thinking this a bad thing to do on the wire. Then, out of the corner of his eye, something floated into view, and his heart stopped dead.

The butterfly was blue and yellow and orange, quite large, and it fluttered past him, in no special hurry. For a moment it hesitated, then came to rest on the tip of Salvo’s balancing pole.

Salvo clenched his teeth, waiting for panic to set in, but a strange thing happened: the fear that he expected never came. The butterfly sat, unmoving, and Salvo was not afraid. His balancing pole was weightless. He was calm as he watched the motionless insect for a long minute, and then it took flight, soon disappearing in the distance.

A smile wound its way onto Salvo’s lips. Still standing, he took the bottle of soda from its cradle and dropped it, watching it fall until, like the butterfly, it was too small to see. He lowered his pole to the wire and raised his feet into the air. He held this handstand
until his face turned hot with blood. Returning his feet to the wire, he reverted to a standing position.

All around him he saw the desert, a million shades of brown with points of green and red, and he felt warm air rising from below and smelled nothing but himself and open space. His bones were strong and his mouth was wet, and his eyes were clear as ever they had been.

Retirement receded from his mind as an idea that had never existed. He stood on the wire, and he knew that as long as he was standing, he would live forever.