by Marco Rafalà
That was the first time I noticed, but when I thought back on it I recognized the small way he carried himself in the world when he thought no one was watching. If there would ever be a moment when I could talk with Tony, this was that moment. All I had to do was step out from the boys’ bathroom doorway and say something, anything, and the questions about our fathers and who they were to each other would follow. But when I played out that scenario in my head, it always ended badly for me. Who was I kidding?
The clack of a teacher’s heels sounded from around the corner, and Tony hustled my way. I slipped into the bathroom and hid in a locked stall, feet pulled up on the toilet seat, until the period bell rang.
If my father wanted to tell me what my zia showed me, he would have told me long ago. He would have sat me down in the kitchen, the shoebox on the card table between us. His fingers tracing the wrinkles on the concave lid, drawing lines in the dust. The wrinkles in his forehead deepening like old cart ruts in the dirt from a donkey-drawn cart. The wooden cart carved and painted with scenes from his past, bright colors faded under hot sun. The whining bray of the donkey showing me the pictures he’d pulled behind him all his life, and what each one did to him.
That Friday was Good Friday and the start of Easter break. My father took the day off work and dragged me early in the morning to Loreto’s Garden Nursery for newly sprouted tomato plants. We turned off a two-lane road on the outskirts of town, into a gravel parking lot. “Closed” signs banged against the padlocked doors of two wood-framed greenhouses made of silvered wood and corrugated plastic. Those signs weren’t meant for us. Vincenzo had called ahead.
Loreto, the owner, lived in a rusted trailer behind the greenhouses, on the other side of a narrow, fenced-in garden. My father stood at the chain-link gate and shouted to him. Loreto ambled out from the tree line near the trailer, zipping up his fly. Beneath his bushy mustache, a lit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He waved. “Salvatore,” he said. A fat ring of keys jangled from his belt loop. He sounded like Christmas. “That your boy? They grow so fast.”
“Like a weed,” my father said. “Pretty soon he’ll be taller than me.” But he closed his fist and raised his pinkie as a way to say I didn’t have enough meat on my bones.
Loreto opened the gate for us. “I have some nice tomatoes this year,” he said. “Come, see for yourself.”
My father pushed himself forward, clomping down a cobbled path between flower beds of yellow and pink daffodils. The path curved around a bathtub shrine of the Virgin Mary. Loreto paused by the upended bathtub, half buried with its inside painted blue, and ushered us into one of his greenhouses.
“You smell that?” my father said to me. The air was warm and moist, rich with mulch and fertilizer. “Things are growing.”
He stopped to sniff potted soil and little plants-an animal searching for signs of weakness or strength-nodding his head and frowning, which was my father’s way of saying: Pretty good, not too bad, this one. In this way, he chose his little Romas.
At home we set them in the back hall by the row of sunlit windows where my father had hung the palm-leaf cross from a nail. He never took me to church, but he always wanted me in his garden. He knelt there among the rows of his plants and cared for them. I’d never seen him pray before, scooted forward on the pew with knees on the padded kneeler. Stooped low in his garden, he was that peasant boy again, the boy who had long ago transformed himself into a donkey.
As the weather warmed, he would make me help him move the pots onto the porch and haul them back in before night, letting them stay out longer each day.
“They need to be hardened,” he told me, “before transplanting them outside after the last frost.”
Easter Sunday, my father went to Midnight Mass with Vincenzo. It was something they always did together. Vincenzo went for the candlelight. He liked the way it softened the stones. My father never talked about the Mass. He showered and shaved and combed his hair back from his widow’s peak—once charcoal black, now lightened by so many strands of gray. He put on the same suit he wore to my mother’s funeral and without a word stepped into the night.
He came home long after I fell asleep but was up with the dawn and working in his garden for hours before I even dragged myself out of bed and into my new three-piece suit. My confirmation was still two months away but my zia wanted me to wear the suit for Easter. I had grown out of my old black church clothes, and she said it was for the best because they made me look like an undertaker.
That morning she took me to Mass with Ziu Frank. We sat in the last pew, the red velvet curtain of the confessional behind us. We knelt when we were supposed to kneel and stood when we were supposed to stand. In the front-row pew, Tony and Chris-pious little angels in their pinstriped suits-sat and knelt and stood with their parents. The priest read from the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians. Paul urged the Colossians to shake off the worldly, to think about what was above, not what was on Earth. Rocco nodded his head in agreement. He made his son sit up straight, bade him pay attention. The epistle was an exhortation to shed the old self for a new self, renewed. The priest ended the reading at the part that said if any man had a quarrel with another man, even as Christ forgave him, so must he also forgive.
After the service, I removed my clip-on tie and unbuttoned my shirt collar and my two-button, single-breasted navy-blue jacket, and we went to my house for lunch. Vincenzo and my father waited at the card table in the kitchen, playing Scopa—they only knew Italian card games. They listened to music on the local Italian program on the radio, an empty bottle of wine holding the light between them.
Vincenzo threw down his brightly colored cards as we filed in through the back door. He stood up, favoring his bad leg. “There he is. There’s our boy. Let me get a good look at you.” He admired me in my new suit. “The secret to the two-button jacket,” he said, “is to leave the bottom one open.” He buttoned the top button of my jacket, stepped back and smiled. “You’ll break a lot of girls’ hearts.”
“No,” my zia said as she set the table. “He will mend them. He will go to school to be a doctor.”
On the radio, a bleating accordion wailed, and an earnest man’s voice lamented his dead donkey. My father clapped and stomped his sandaled feet. He brayed like the man in the song brayed, aping the lost animal that had pulled his cart. To the man, and my father, even the voice of his beloved donkey was beautiful music.
Vincenzo winked at me, then picked up the empty bottle of wine and danced with it for a dance partner. He swayed around the room, and his limp became more pronounced the more he danced, until his knee gave out. My father helped him to a chair, and Zia Nella held a handful of ice in a washcloth over his knee. Vincenzo sucked in air through gritted teeth. There were beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Stop making a fuss,” Vincenzo said. He shooed Zia Nella and my father away. “I’m fine.” But they doted on him as if they were his children. They might as well have been. The war made them orphans. He came back for them, protected them, brought them to America—to their new selves.
“Look, the man is fine,” Ziu Frank said, his mouth full of sliced capocollo from the antipasto plate.
“Does it hurt all the time?” I asked Vincenzo about his knee.
He shrugged with raised bushy eyebrows and an exaggerated frown. He took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his face. His eyes lit up at some thought that came to him before he spoke. “Sometimes, I can tell when it’s going to rain.”
“It’s always going to rain, the way you talk,” Zia Nella said. At the stove, she cracked the oven door open to check the lasagna. The way her skirt billowed reminded me of Gretel from the fairy tale, leaning into the fire to test its heat at the witch’s prodding. “How many men does it take to burn lasagna?” she said. She took the baking dish from the oven and set it down on the stovetop. Then she breaded chicken cutlets and fried them golden brown and reheated the loaf of potato and sausage scacciata she’d mad
e fresh that morning.
When lunch was ready, we sat around the card table, talking loudly and eating. Zia Nella and my father admonished Vincenzo to take it easy-he wasn’t a young man anymore. Vincenzo boasted that he could still take on three men with one hand tied behind his back.
“Still?” Ziu Frank said. “That’s not how I remember it.” The tone in his voice was playful, familiar.
“Your memory isn’t what it used to be,” Vincenzo said. “Neither is your waistline.”
Ziu Frank patted his quivering belly. It bulged out over the belt on his suit pants. “I eat well,” he said. “It’s true. But there’s nothing wrong with my memory. There were two men and-”
Zia Nella silenced my ziu with a hand on his arm.
“There were three,” my father said. He stabbed his fork into his lasagna. The tines scraping the plate sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. “And you didn’t take them on. I did.”
“That’s enough,” Zia Nella said. There was a warning in her eyes-a fierceness I’d never seen before.
The men eyed one another in the serious quiet that followed. No one dared speak until my father raised his wineglass and said, “Buona Pasqua.” Their glasses clinked and they echoed my father’s words, “Happy Easter.” And just like that, they shoved the past back into the dusty shoebox in the closet. But of all of them, my father should’ve known better. Each fall he preserved seeds from his best plants, drying and protecting them from the winter, until he could plant them again in the spring. The past wasn’t something you just shoved away—it grew roots.
For dessert, we had a box of pastries stuffed with ricotta and honey and covered with candied fruits. Zia Nella cut slices of her braided Easter bread ring. Each slice of the golden bread held a dyed-blue hard-boiled egg. Standing at the stove, my father made espresso. He asked if we’d heard the joke about the newlywed couple who could not afford a honeymoon.
“David,” Zia Nella said, “cover your ears.” She held her hands up over her ears.
But I’d heard this one before. It was my father’s favorite dirty joke.
“They spend their wedding night at the bride’s mother’s house,” he said in Sicilian. “The husband, he takes off his shirt, and the bride, she runs upstairs. ‘Mamma, Mamma,’ she cries, ‘he has hair all over his chest.’ And the mother tells the daughter, ‘That’s okay, go downstairs and do what comes natural.’”
My father poured espresso into little white cups. “So she goes back downstairs,” he said, passing the cups to the adults around the table. “She sees her husband take off his pants and runs to her mother crying that he has hair all over his legs, and the mother says, ‘That’s okay, that’s okay, go downstairs and do what comes natural.’ Then the husband takes off his socks, and the bride, she sees he has only two toes on one of his feet. She runs to her mother and says, ‘Mamma, Mamma, he’s got a foot and a half.’ ‘You stay here,’ the mother says, ‘I’ll go downstairs.’”
The men erupted with laughter. Zia Nella slapped her brother’s shoulder while she covered her mouth with a napkin to hide her giggle. They pulled apart pastries with sticky hands, cracked and peeled their blue eggs. They shouted over one another, laughing and licking powdered sugar from their fingers. Sunlight shone through the bay windows and threw their shadows on the wall—small shadows cast by their smaller, younger selves. The selves they left behind when they came here, carrying the ghosts of the people they could have been.
12
The week of Easter break, my peach fuzz got thicker and darker as the hair grew back in a swirl around the cowlick in the front. The familiar boy in the mirror again-a lost fish, struggling against the fisherman’s hook, fooled by the flickering lure. Sam spent the week at his father’s house in Stony Creek. The one time we talked on the phone, we talked about Halley’s Comet, made plans to see it together.
I spent that time as I always did, alone in my room reading paperback novels that I’d bought in the science-fiction section of the used bookstore downtown, or in the high-ceilinged silence of the Russell Library, at a table in the old wing-an Episcopal church built from dark stone with stained-glass-topped windows and exposed serpentine ductwork overhead. The drop ceiling hid stone-ribbed, vaulted arches, the rib bones of an ancient dragon sheltering me in its nest among rows of books, the dragon’s hoard, each printed work like captured light from long-dead stars. Tony never came in here-trolls didn’t have much use for books.
My first Monday back in school, there was a new note in my locker. A stick figure in a hangman’s noose. In the halls between classes, as locker doors clanked and slammed shut, and a river of students shouted over each other’s heads, Tony crashed around me-a scoured boulder in his white-water rapids, now pitted and worn down to the size of a pebble. He made short, sudden lunges like he was going to hit me but then jerked his arm back. I cringed away from him. The smug expression on that troll’s face said, Made you flinch. When I was alone at my locker, he snuck up behind me and pushed the back of my knee with his foot and laughed as I lost my balance and crumpled to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Erosion changed the landscape. It wore down even the largest mountain. Small consolation. I started hauling all my textbooks with me in my backpack so I wouldn’t have to go to my locker between classes, and if I saw Tony in the hall, I’d go the other way, the long way around. I’d sprint down near-empty halls with the warning bell signaling one minute before the next period, sliding into my seat just as the tardy bell rang. The threat of detention-for running in the halls or being late three times-was easily outweighed by Tony Morello grinding me down.
I used his note as a bookmark in the book I was reading on loan from the library, a hardback copy of The Martian Chronicles. I read and reread every chapter—at home, in study hall when I should’ve been studying, on the bus while Tony and Chris taunted me—and never grew tired of its Rocket Summer, its Silent Towns, its Million-Year Picnic. In the last chapter, the last story, a family fled to Mars, their home on Earth burning to a cinder behind them in one long, terrible war. That was the story I reread more than any other, until the words sunk in, like starlight finally reaching Earth. On Mars, the father burned the documents of their old lives in a campfire, and together the family looked at their reflections in the canal and saw their new Martian selves.
Friday, April 11, Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to Earth. Mr. Clark called it an apparition when he talked about our slim chances of seeing it because we were too far north. After school, I returned The Martian Chronicles to the library and ran straight home. My father walked along his garden path between rows of peas with a red plastic bucket. He dipped his hand into the bucket and splashed water around the soil of each little shoot, brushing the leaves with his damp hand.
“Can I go over to Sam’s house to watch for Halley’s Comet tonight?” I said. I stood in the driveway at the end of the row of potted tomato seedlings.
He stooped to pull a weed, careful to get at its root, and tossed it beyond the edge of his garden. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You can’t look at the sky in your own yard? You need your friend now to tell you how to look at stars?” He spread the soil around with his fingers, patting it down, where the weed had been.
“It’s a comet, Dad. It won’t come back for another seventy-six years.”
“Life is here, David.” He scooped a handful of dirt and held it out to me. “Not up there. Here, there is soil, good soil under your feet, and trees for shade right here in your own backyard.” The dirt crumbled through his fingers and he wiped his palms clean. “You can do nothing about the sky.”
“It’s for school, for science class.”
“Bah, scola.” He took his hose, coiled on the lawn, and set the nozzle to a fine mist. He held it at an angle toward the sky to let the water fall as if it were rain on the long raised beds. “When you are born a donkey—” His fuzzy caterpillar unibrow crawled up his forehead, crinkled with worry or doubt. He sho
ok his head and scrutinized me as if my face held the answer to the unspoken question—How could you be mine? “Wake up, David. I wait for that day when you wake up. Life is this,” he said with his hand balled into a raised fist. “The sky won’t help you.”
He released the nozzle and motioned for me to shut off the water. Then my father coiled the hose around his arm and placed it on the hanger he’d made from scrap lumber. We moved the tomato seedlings inside and set them in the back hall on the wooden shelves, stained with dark circles from the potted plants.
My father took the brittle palm-leaf cross down from the wall above the seedlings, the cross I had brought home from Palm Sunday Mass. He fingered the ragged, crisp edges. “I catch you lying about where you’re supposed to be or—” He rubbed my buzz cut.
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Where does this boy live?”
“Five minutes from here, near the university.”
“Go,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “Go, David. What do you think you find up there?”
Then he went outside to bury the brittle palm leaf in his garden, as he did every year, believing it blessed his crops.
In the basement, I pulled Tony’s note from my pocket. I didn’t want my father to see it. I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle it on my own. At the wood-burning stove, I lit a match and held the crinkled note above the yellow tooth of fire. The edge of the paper blackened and then blazed. I passed my hand through the flame. It didn’t hurt, but it left a line of soot on my palm, where the heat had been. I dropped the note into the empty stove. It curled and flaked away into nothing.