The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  My father’s heroism made him, after the village padre and the magistrato, the most respected man in our little village. As a young boy, I remember Papa leading parades and processions at holiday times and presiding with dignity at village festivals. At these times, he would take his medaglia from its keeping place and wear it proudly against his breast. I remember, too, that medal, with its likeness of the King on horseback and the magistrate’s big teeth marks embedded in the horse’s golden flank.

  When I was six, the Virgin Mary herself confirmed the suspicions of the village women that, amongst the children of Giuliana, I was speciale!

  Sent by my mother to deliver a new goose-down pillow to the padre, I looked for him inside the small limestone church and then out in the grotto made famous years earlier by the Statue of the Weeping Vergine. It was there that I—Domenico Onofrio Tempesta —witnessed a miracle! After a drought of seventy-seven years, tears were falling once again from the eyes of the statue! Of all the villagers—men, women, and children—it was I to whom the Weeping Vergine chose to reveal herself!

  The statue cried for a week. Its precious tears were collected and applied to the sores of the afflicted, the eyes of the blind, the legs of the lame. The miracle became the subject of many theories about past sin and predictions of coming doom. News of the Weeping Vergine had kept the village priest at his station by the grotto day and night, saying prayers for the faithful and listening to the emergency confessions of newly repentant siciliani! It was only after the statue’s eyes had dried and the number of pilgrims had dwindled that the padre was able to have a minute’s peace and to interpret the meaning of the miracle. The good priest visited our home the following Sunday and told Mama and Papa that my discovery of the Virgin’s tears had been a sign from Blessed Mary herself. I had been called to the priesthood, the padre said.

  Believing, as most siciliani believe, that it is dangerous business for a father to educate his sons beyond himself, my father at first resisted the idea of my priestly studies. Papa had already spoken many times of my eventual work in the sulphur mines, first as his caruso and later as a miner myself. Papa’s fellow miners shook their heads and warned him against allowing me to be sent away and taught to read and write. Yet my mother supported the priest’s campaign to make me a man of God. Her status in the village had already been elevated because she had given birth to the boy to whom the Vergine had revealed her tears. As the mother of a priest, her standing would be raised higher still.

  The padre wrote a letter to Rome concerning my religious calling and campaigned amongst the villagers to hand over their coins on behalf of the room, board, and travel expenses that would be required to turn me into a priest. When my father protested, my mother resumed once again her screaming fits on behalf of my education and circulated in the village the news of an ominous dream she had had. In the dream, God Almighty took the form of a black falcon and pecked out the eyes of my father for flouting His will. In the end, Papa surrendered.

  And so I was sent on my seventh birthday to the convent school in Nicosia, run by the good Sisters of Humility. There, over a period of six years, I learned first the rudiments and then the subtleties of the Italian language. I learned, too, the hard and bitter lessons of jealousy and snobbery which my fellow students were happy to teach to the school’s poorest but most gifted student, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta! The wealthy city boys would laugh at me as I scratched out my lessons on the cheap slate provided me. They, of course, had been handed the best supplies—quill pens, fine paper, and oceans of India ink with which to do their shoddy work! They, of course, had famiglia who paid the extra for confections on Saturday afternoon and musical shows and other distractions and ricreazioni while I had only my considerable native talents with which to entertain myself. But if I was the least well provided for amongst the boys at the convent school, I was the best loved by the good Sisters of Humility, who marveled at my intellectual gifts and only occasionally boxed my ears or yanked my nose for small acts of temper or venial sins of pride—petty transgressions at most. I was, in truth, the sisters’ favorite.

  Back at home, my younger brother Pasquale took my place in the mines and became my father’s caruso. It was Pasquale’s job to carry the excavated rock up from the shaft and the makeshift stairway to the kiln at the mouth of the mines. There, the rock was melted and the essenza di solforoso extracted. It is the caruso’s lot in life to do the miner’s dirty work—to work like a mule—and for that, my simple brother was well suited, just as I was well suited to the elevated and intellectual life of a boy destined for greater things.

  With Papa, Pasquale, and me away from home, my youngest brother, Vincenzo, grew wild. Mama could not make him obey or help her, no matter how many blows she visited on his head or his culo with her big wooden cooking spoon. Vincenzo’s theft of a lemon cake from the window of old Signora Migliaccio became a minor village scandal. “My firstborn serves God, my secondborn serves his father, and my youngest serves the devil!” Mama would lament.

  When he turned ten, Vincenzo was apprenticed to Uncle Nardo, a gumbare of Papa’s and a fat-bellied pig of a stonemason. May the carcass of that son of a bitch Nardo roast in the fires of Hell forever and ever and longer than that! On weekends, when our family reunited, my brother Pasquale was often bruised and swollen in the face because of accidents at the mine or because of his failings as Papa’s caruso. Papa’s stern hand often caught up with young Vincenzo on Sunday mornings after Uncle Nardo visited with his weekly report. Vincenzo was lazy, Nardo complained, and had fallen in with a band of young toughs who laughed and traveled together after work and committed acts of hooliganism. Sometimes my father beat both brothers, one after the other, Vincenzo for what he had done and Pasquale for what he had failed to do. My own behavior was beyond reproach, and I escaped my father’s blows and received only his praise. Sons of Italy, take notice! Industry and seriousness of purpose will assure your success. Work hard! Honor famiglia, and follow the virtuous path!

  More tomorrow if these goddamned hemorrhoids will let me sit and tell.

  10 July 1949

  At the age of sixteen, I was enrolled at the seminary school in Roma where I began my priestly studies. Meanwhile, at home in Giuliana, another scandal erupted that set my mother to screaming and caused my father such shame that he threatened to travel to the Mediterraneo and throw his gold medallion into the sea as an act of contrition for having sired such a delinquent son as Vincenzo!

  That season, Uncle Nardo had been hired by the magistrato to build an elaborate new courtyard and vineyard wall. One hot afternoon in the midst of this project, Nardo fell asleep in a shady spot after his noon meal. Vincenzo, unsupervised, seized his opportunity and scampered away from his afternoon work. The magistrato, who was entertaining a visiting monsignore from Calabria, had invited his guest to stroll the grounds of his estate. The two officials heard a strange groaning coming from the arbor and hurried to help whoever was hurt or wounded.

  Shamefully, the groans had come from Vincenzo. What the magistrato and the monsignore found that afternoon among the twisting grapevines was my youngest brother, standing with his pants at his ankles and involved in a lewd act with the magistrate’s spinster of a daughter who was twice my brother’s age! The visiting monsignor nearly fainted from the shocking sight of that lunatic woman’s head between my brother’s legs. The shouting and screaming emitting from the mouth of the magistrato awoke Uncle Nardo, who came stumbling onto the scene before Vincenzo could even calm himself and button his britches. Nardo was fired on the spot. The magistrato banished both the disgraced mason and his lascivious apprentice from his property, uttering the wish that he, the magistrato, hoped to drown in the molten spew of Mount Etna before he laid eyes on either of those two again!

  Uncle Nardo did not wait until Saturday to give Papa his weekly report about Vincenzo. Instead, he stormed the road that led from the village to the mines and shouted Papa’s name into the gorge. What happened next was told to
me by my brother Pasquale, who witnessed the whole thing.

  Nardo told my father that he, Giacomo Tempesta, was liable for the sum of money Nardo had lost on the big job at the home of the magistrato as a result of Vincenzo’s shameful behavior. Papa told Uncle Nardo that he could not hand over money he did not have. He promised, instead, that he would beat Vincenzo until the blood flowed and that Vincenzo would repent and reform. He would work so diligently from then on that the unfortunate incident would be bricked over by his youngest son’s industry.

  Uncle Fat-Belly shouted back that he had no use at all for a lazy billygoat with a frozen pipe in his pants. He demanded again the money he had lost. Again, my father assured Nardo that he could not pay such a sum as that to which Nardo laid claim.

  “I see that a fancy golden medaglia cannot by itself make a man honorable,” Nardo retorted. Those were his miserable words exactly. My brother Pasquale stood beside Papa and heard the slander himself!

  To my father—to any siciliano!—an accusation against one’s honor is more painful than a blow to those loins that sire sons. Yet what could Papa do—perform an act of magic and make money spill from the sky? Pay off Uncle Nardo with bolts of my mother’s lace?

  That weekend, Papa went to the home of the magistrato with a jug of his best Malaga and his precious golden medaglia. Signore Big Shot had already sunk his buck teeth once into my father’s medaglia; now Papa was going to allow him to gobble it up. By the time the wine jug was empty, my father’s prized possession had been handed over to the magistrato so that Nardo could be reinstated as the magistrato’s mason. But there was a problem, still. Nardo would not take Vincenzo back! The next week, against the howls of my mother and the protests of the village padre, I was plucked from my priestly studies and sent back to Giuliana to work alongside Uncle Nardo in the unfinished courtyard. There, reluctantly, I began my apprenticeship under that fat-bellied son of the devil whom I soon grew to despise. I had no choice but to obey and honor the arrangement my father had made.

  Young men of Sicily, remember this: a father’s command is a son’s law!

  Over the months that I transformed myself from scholar to laborer in service to my father’s honor, my hands coarsened and the muscles in my arms and chest grew strong from heavy lifting. With all my heart, I hated the trade of masonry and ached to be back among my books and words and religious icons, but that was not to be. With each stone I hoisted into place, with each tier of brick I laid, I honored my father’s good name and good word. And as for the magistrate’s filthy daughter, all her flirtations and lewd whisperings to me went unanswered. I upheld the good name of Tempesta and looked at stone and mortar and trowel, not at the hairy privates of that deranged pest of a puttana who kept lifting her skirts to entice me!

  12 July 1949

  In March of 1898, Mount Etna once again showed Sicily her wrath.

  For three days and nights, steam leaked from the cracked southern rim. Next day, quiet as la morte. Day after that, the earth itself trembled and broke the town apart. In the hills, the section of the sulphur mine where my father and brother were working shuddered and collapsed. Pasquale, who was at the kiln when the shaking began, was spared. But Papa and eleven other miners and carusi perished in the mine.

  Papa, Papa, I weep to remember your loving guidance! I curse the cruel earth that swallowed your life too soon!

  Can talk no more today.

  15 July 1949

  As my father’s eldest son, I was now the sostegno del famiglia. I took seriously my duties as both the family’s main provider and its chief disciplinarian. I did not spare either of my brothers the beatings for which their actions or inactions cried out. With Vincenzo, especially, I was firm. His shameful behavior had cost me my priestly studies and cost the Tempesta family its ownership of our father’s valuable gold medaglia. Though the medaglia had passed from my father to the magistrato, I, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, was still allowed to wear it at village celebrations and at Easter and vigilia di Natale. I sat on the platform with the padre and the magistrato during parades with that medallion resting close to my heart—not only as the eldest son of a village hero, but also as the man to whom the Weeping Vergine had once shown her tears. It is not exaggeration to say that I was, even as a humble laborer, the most distinguished young man in Giuliana.

  Sadly, as head of my famiglia, I sometimes was forced to raise a hand to my beloved mother. Mama had adjusted poorly to widowhood and to the reduced income and status my father’s death had pressed upon us. Sometimes, crazy with grief, she would awaken screaming in the night or threatening that she would follow her mother’s example and take poison rather than live this wretched life of toil and denial with three such terrible sons as Pasquale, Vincenzo, and me. She resumed her conversations with the moths. They comforted her, she said, and brought her news about her departed husband. Although I forbade these crazy, one-sided conversations of hers, she sometimes disobeyed me. The blows it was my sad duty to deliver for this and other reasons sometimes quieted Mama’s screaming fits and sometimes began them.

  In all things I learn quickly, and so my talents for masonry soon matched my talents for language and holy study. Within a matter of months, I had far surpassed that idiot Nardo in both artistry and industry and he knew it and was jealous. It is fair to say that I, Domenico Tempesta, carried most of Nardo’s business on my strong and capable back. When I made that simple observation one afternoon as we worked side by side, Uncle Pig-Face laughed and cursed me and spat on my boot.

  I reminded him that, in addition to being a superior mason, I was also the son of a hero and, unlike Nardo himself, an educated man. I demanded an apology.

  Fat-Face laughed and let fly, instead, sputa from his mouth that landed on my other boot. My honor thus insulted, I was forced to spit into his faccia di porco. He spat back into my faccia. Fisticuffs followed and I delivered to Uncle Nardo the worst end of that bargain—a blackened eye and a nose that spouted blood like the Fountain of Trevi! Ha! I would have given him even worse, too, if he had not reached for his trowel and sunk it into the back of my left hand. I wear the small scar to this day—the mark of that son of a bitch of a stonemason who was so threatened by my natural superiority that he sought my ruin.

  After that day, Nardo and I became bitter enemies and rivals. Giuliana offered little enough work for a mason and that goddamned Pig-Face spread slander about me and my craftsmanship. For the next two years, I watched work that should have been mine go, instead, to Nardo. To hell with those idiots who believed an old man’s lies! That’s what I say! They deserved the shoddy craftsmanship and heaving walls they no doubt received from that son of a bitch!

  Sons of Italy, it was at this time that I conceived my plan to seek my fortuna in America! More tomorrow. That rabbit-faced daughter of mine calls me to eat my lunch and I have to stop just to shut up her voice.

  16 July 1949

  I had read much about la ‘Merica—anything I could get my hands on, though in Giuliana, printed matter was rare and precious. America seemed a fitting place for me. I was, after all, the descendant of landowners. In that big country, I read, land went crying for ownership. America was the place for Great Men! In a land far away from earthquakes and slanderous old masons, I would fulfill my destiny!

  We had famiglia there already. Papa’s cousins, Vitaglio and Lena Buonano, had made the trip three years earlier and were rich already. My two brothers also wished to seek their destiny in the New World and to escape Mama’s crazy screaming, which grew worse and worse. I therefore agreed to carry the burden of the firstborn son across the sea and allow my brothers to accompany me. In July 1901, Domenico, Pasquale, and Vincenzo Tempesta signed on as steerage passengers aboard the SS Napolitano.

  Our dear Mama opposed our adventure, fearing that our departure would make of her a destitute beggarwoman. She conjured pitiable pictures of herself, an old white-haired hag, forced until her dying days to survive on crusts of bread and rinds of cheese—left with
only the moths to talk to. God would damn me, she warned, for forsaking my own mother. What would I have her do once we were gone? Roast rats for meat while her wicked sons bathed in honey and milk and counted their gold?

  Despite Mama’s protests, Pasquale, Vincenzo, and I sailed from Catania on the morning of 11 September 1901. Mama carried her objections all the way to the wagon that would transport us and our belongings from the village square to the seaport where the SS Napolitano was moored. As that rickety wagon rolled away, I looked back to see Mama raise her hands—one good, one scarred—and shout to God above, and to the sea on which we would travel, and to Italia itself that every mother’s son should shrivel in the womb rather than grow and thrive only to rip out the heart of the woman who had borne him. “I bleed from the knife my sons have stuck in me!” Mama shrieked, over and over again, as the wagon pulled away. Her bloodcurdling chant carried above the sound of horses’ hooves and the wagon’s squeaky wheels. “I bleed! I bleed!”

  That was the last I ever saw of my mother. Later, she married Uncle Pig-Face just to spite me—took to her bed the man who had made it necessary for my father to surrender his gold medaglia to that greedy, buck-toothed magistrato, the man who had spit on my boots and ruined me with his lies. Until Mama’s marriage to Nardo, I had dutifully sent her pretty postcards and, at Christmastime, gifts of money and sweets. These were never acknowledged. Ha, never returned either! After that marriage, however, I stopped wasting my money. She died in 1913, but left me the legacy of her screaming, which I still hear in my memory. “I bleed! I bleed! I bleed!” Sitting in this room, talking into this goddamned machine, I hear her still!