Brother Odd

accidental whack."
        "Never offed no one accidental either."
        "All right then."
        Brother Knuckles, formerly Salvatore Giancomo, had been well-paid muscle for the mob before God turned his life around.
        "Busted faces, broke some legs, but I never chilled no one."
        When he was forty, Knuckles had begun to have second thoughts about his career path. He felt "empty, driftin', like a row-boat out on the sea and nobody in it."
        During this crisis of confidence, because of death threats to his boss-Tony "the Eggbeater" Martinelli-Knuckles and some other guys like him were sleeping-over at the boss's home. It wasn't a pajamas-and-s'mores kind of sleepover, but the kind of sleepover where everyone brings his two favorite automatic weapons. Anyway, one evening, Knuckles found himself reading a story to the Eggbeater's six-year-old daughter.
        The tale was about a toy, a china-rabbit doll, that was proud of his appearance and thoroughly self-satisfied. Then the rabbit endured a series of terrible misfortunes that humbled him, and with humility came empathy for the suffering of others.
        The girl fell asleep with half the story still to be read. Knuckles needed in the worst way to know what happened to the rabbit, but he didn't want his fellow face-busters to think that he was really interested in a kid's book.
        A few days later, when the threat to the Eggbeater had passed, Knuckles went to a bookstore and bought a copy of the rabbit's tale. He started from the beginning, and by the time he reached the end, when the china rabbit found its way back to the little girl who had loved him, Knuckles broke down and wept.
        Never before had he shed tears. That afternoon, in the kitchen of his row house, where he lived alone, he sobbed like a child.
        In those days, no one who knew Salvatore "Knuckles" Giancomo, not even his mother, would have said he was an introspective kind of guy, but he nevertheless realized that he was not crying only about the china rabbit's return home. He was crying about the rabbit, all right, but also about something else.
        For a while, he could not imagine what that something else might be. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, eating stacks of his mother's pizzelles, repeatedly recovering his composure, only to break down and weep again.
        Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.
        This realization left him conflicted. He still wanted to be tough, took pride in being strong and stoic. Yet it seemed that he had become weak and emotional.
        Over the next month, he read and reread the rabbit's story. He began to understand that when Edward, the rabbit, discovered humility and learned to sympathize with other people's losses, he did not grow weak but in fact became stronger.
        Knuckles bought another book by the same author. This one concerned an outcast big-eared mouse who saved a princess.
        The mouse had less impact on him than the bunny did, but, oh, he loved the mouse, too. He loved the mouse for its courage and for its willingness to sacrifice itself for love.
        Three months after he first read the story of the china rabbit, Knuckles arranged a meeting with the FBI. He offered to turn state's evidence against his boss and a slew of other mugs.
        He ratted them out in part to redeem himself but no less because he wanted to save the little girl to whom he had read part of the rabbit's story. He hoped to spare her from the cold and crippling life of a crime boss's daughter that daily would harden around her, as imprisoning as concrete.
        Thereafter, Knuckles had been placed in Vermont, in the Witness Protection Program. His new name was Bob Loudermilk.
        Vermont proved to be too much culture shock. Birkenstocks, flannel shirts, and fifty-year-old men with ponytails annoyed him.
        He tried to resist the worst temptations of the world with a growing library of kids' books. He discovered that some book writers seemed subtly to approve of the kind of behavior and the values that he had once embraced, and they scared him. He couldn't find enough thoughtful china rabbits and courageous big-eared mice.
        Having dinner in a mediocre Italian restaurant, yearning for Jersey, he suddenly got the calling