How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  I called out into the hallway in English. “Have you seen David?”

  Tony stepped back into view, wearing jeans and a loose-fitting sleeveless shirt. He cradled his cast with his good arm. “I haven’t seen him since confirmation yesterday,” he said.

  “You better not lie to me,” I said. I showed him the back of my hand, but the boy’s mother, watching from the kitchen, made me feel ashamed, and I lowered my arm and fell quiet.

  “My son answered your question, Sal. Now, you leave him alone.”

  I stepped back from the doorsill and Rocco slammed the door shut. One of the concrete pylons of the Arrigoni stood a few feet from the little porch, and I craned my neck at the steel and cement underbelly of the bridge. The dull highway noise, the thunk and grind of vehicles overhead, all our days spun out like worn tire treads kicking up dirt on the asphalt.

  At the car, Nella put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me call the police,” she said. I opened the door for her. She sat down in the passenger seat. “The police can help us.”

  I leaned into the car. “No,” I said. “David is fine. David will come home. I know he will. Maybe he is home right now, getting ready for school.”

  “Sal, look.” She pointed back at the house.

  Rocco had come outside onto the porch. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips. The strong Morello build in him, buried under the flab of soft years spent working for the rectory.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. He tapped the ash from his cigarette. “I hope you find him, but you brought this on yourself, Turiddu.”

  3

  The house felt different, like it had changed overnight. It felt bigger somehow, and somehow smaller. In the kitchen, I fixed a pot of espresso with the Bialetti Vincenzo had left here years ago, right after you were born. Forgetting to take it home with him—that was his way of giving your mother and me a gift.

  Outside, I sat bent over my knees on the back-porch steps. I blew steam from the little cup in my hands. You wouldn’t like it. One taste and you’d make a face and complain it was too bitter. But you would grow to like espresso. The taste for it, that comes with age.

  Dio mio, you were growing up fast. You did a good job pulling dandelions with me after the festival. You worked hard that day. I think that was the first time you joined me in my garden without my asking. We made a good dinner together from those greens, didn’t we? The food you grow and care for, it has a better taste than what you buy in the store. I told you that while we sat at the table and ate the simple meal we had cajoled from the earth with our own hands.

  I kept that time spent with you and my plants all for myself, let myself hope that maybe there would be more time like that for us.

  The doorbell rang. Two police officers stood on my front porch. They took off their hats and held them at their sides. Across the street, Nella stepped out of her house. Her skirt billowed around her ankles. She stood with her hands palm to palm, covering her mouth.

  “Mr. Marconi,” one of the officers said. “May we come in?”

  “No,” I said and shut the door.

  He knocked. “Mr. Marconi,” he said, “we understand your son is missing.”

  I went out the back door and uncoiled the garden hose. I brought the pistol end to my garden and adjusted the spray to a mist. The two men walked up the driveway.

  “Mr. Marconi,” the officer started again. “My name is Milardo.” He placed his hand over his heart. “Angelo Milardo. I helped your boy, David, when he got into that fight at the festival. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but-”

  I sprayed them. “Get off my land,” I said.

  They raised their arms to protect their faces, and then turned away. I let go of the nozzle’s trigger. They left a trail of footprints down the driveway from the wet soles of their shoes. I turned the hose on my garden. My plants were thirsty. They needed me. At the curb, Nella stood with the police. They helped her into the patrol car after they told her what I could not hear. I studied one of the pole peas, how it divided into thinner stems, becoming spidery as it grew around the wood. I wet my hand with the hose, wiped the leaves and the thick stems, careful not to unravel the twining smaller ones.

  The police car pulled away from the curb. I wiped sweat from my brow with my shirtsleeve. I felt light-headed. I sagged to my knees. They pressed into the damp loam. My fingers like the roots of some old tree drawing water from the earth. The wet soil soaked through the canvas of my pants, the knees stained with dirt.

  Oh, Dio mio, figlio mio-when you were just a child, before your mother got sick, you followed me while I worked the garden, asking question after question. You wanted to know the names of the plants and how they grew. You wanted to know what they ate and drank, if they felt pain when I pruned or picked them. You spoke English mostly, your mother’s influence, with a Sicilian word woven in here and there. Always mispronounced.

  “They are for eating,” I told you. “Now watch where you step.”

  “But they’re alive,” you said.

  “Beh, sure they’re alive,” I said. And then, because I thought your questions would never end, and because I was tired from a full day of working at the factory, I lost my patience. I raised my voice. I said, “You want to learn or you want to make up stories about the basil?”

  And you cried for your mother.

  I remember how you cried, so many nights after your mother was gone, cried and never let me sleep. So many nights I sat with you to keep the bad dreams away.

  Still, I could not protect you.

  4

  On the evening of your mother’s death, I gripped the steering wheel and watched moths spiraling around the lights in the hospital parking lot. I didn’t know how long I’d been there until a guard tapped on my window with a flashlight and shined it on me. I covered my eyes with one hand, started the car with the other, and the radio came on, playing some American pop song. It started to drizzle. The guard walked back to his booth. I love this song, your mother had said. I turned up the volume, but I could not bring myself to look at the passenger seat.

  In the kitchen, I had a beer. Nella washed the dishes and pans that I had left piled up in the sink. I put my head down on the table.

  “David’s in his room,” she said.

  “You brought him here? Why?”

  “He wants to see you,” she said.

  I walked upstairs and looked in on you, your face and palms against the windowpane. “Get away from there,” I said from the doorway of your bedroom. “The window’s dirty.”

  “I’m trying to see the sky,” you said.

  I knelt beside you, and you spoke to my reflection in the glass. You said, “Where’s Mommy? Is she coming home soon?”

  “If you turn off the light,” I said, “you can see outside better.”

  You turned off the light, and we sat in your room in the dark.

  “I still can’t see,” you said. “Where did the stars go?”

  “Behind the clouds,” I said.

  “Make the clouds go away.”

  “I can’t, David. Only God can do it.”

  “When will Mommy come home?”

  “Your mother is gone.”

  “Where did Mommy go?”

  “God wanted your mother in heaven.”

  “Can we go see her?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Come downstairs with me. Your zia, she is waiting.”

  You followed me downstairs and ran into Nella’s arms. She kissed your cheeks and hugged you tight. “He’s just a baby,” she said in Sicilian, “he doesn’t understand what he’s lost.” Her eyes reddened and watered. Then she held you at arm’s length for a good look. She brushed your hair from your forehead and planted a kiss there, and you made a shy face and tugged on my pant leg and asked me if you could sit outside on the porch.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Your zia will be right out.” Then I turned the outdoor light on for you, but you asked me to turn it off.

  You
perched on the top back step. You held your head in your hands and peered up at the clouds.

  “I need him to stay with you for a while longer,” I said.

  Nella cupped her hand over her mouth and began to cry.

  “It’s better this way,” I said.

  Maybe I should’ve let you see your mother in the hospital. Maybe I was wrong keeping that from you-keeping you from her. But I didn’t want you to see her like that, and I was used to keeping secrets anyway. I cleared the house of all your mother’s belongings so that you wouldn’t see her everywhere. You were so young, younger than me the day my brothers died-what that did to me and my parents, the way we let them haunt us, I never wanted that for you.

  5

  Summer came early the year you left, a heat wave the second of June. In the evening, maybe there would be thunder, a storm to cool things off. Several hours of this heat and already I missed winter. At least then I could put more layers on, more shirts, a sweater, a long warm coat. Summer in America, it wasn’t like the dry climate of home with the breeze that blew off the Mediterranean and cooled the coast. It wasn’t the warm, dry summer of Sicily. In America-mannaggia l’America-the heat made clothes stick, sometimes as early as the second of June, and then all the layers got peeled away, down to the bones.

  6

  It was August 1943 when the Allies captured Sicily. Men and women-children, too-all applauded defeat, all gave thanks to God and to the saints. In Melilli, we danced and cheered and cried, tired of hiding in caves, glad to be rid of German and Italian soldiers. I was a boy then, nine years old. I had come from the cave with my family to celebrate in the piazza. A man ran down the steps of Saint Sebastian Church shouting, “He’s safe! Our saint is safe!” The crowd cheered for the statue and for the four descendants of the original bearers. “Bring him out,” they chanted. “Vassallo, Morello, Cardella, Santangelo, bring him out!” My father, along with these three men, went into the church to answer the call.

  My mother hugged my sister and then me. She went to hug my brothers, but British jeeps rumbled by, and we all turned to look and clap. When the convoy was gone, she shouted for Emanuele and Leonello, but the twins were lost in the crowd. She took us each by the wrist and dragged us along the cobblestones, through stomping legs and feet. She called for her sons while looking out from the top of the church steps. My father came to the door and asked what was wrong, and she yanked at my arm and said, “Salvatore didn’t keep an eye on the twins, and they’ve run off.”

  My father mussed my hair and said, “Turiddu, find your younger brothers.” The men inside the church called to him. “Raphael,” they said, “hurry up.” And he winked at me before going back in. I heard their voices, “One, two, three!” And then a groan, and the people roared as my father came out again, shouldering the statue with the other bearers. They clamored down the steps and parted the revelers as if it were the Feast of Saint Sebastian, when they dressed in white and wore red sashes and marched through the streets chanting, “He is one of our own! First God, and then Saint Sebastian!” They went around the rubble at the corner of Via Marconi, where our house once stood. There were no more homes there after the Allied invasion. Only foundations. Family plots filled with stone.

  So I ran from the celebration and found my brothers in our father’s almond orchard. The twins sat facing each other in a clearing among the trees. They banged rocks on an unexploded shell set between them. “Emanuele!” I yelled, turning off the dirt road and running into the orchard. “Leonello, what are you doing? Get away from there!” They turned and smiled-that’s all I have of them before the flash and crack like the brightest lightning and loudest thunder, before the tinny ringing in my ears, before the shock that came through the ground, up my legs, and into my chest, before the force of it knocked me down and drove the wind out of me.

  All these years later, and I still smell that day in my sweat-a smell so thick it is in my throat. The choking stench of rotten eggs and smoke, a dry smell like something overcooked. It still turns my stomach.

  When I opened my eyes, the clouds looked like the bowls of curd my father made from milk and lemon juice. Everything moved around me except for the ground flat against my back. There was a low throbbing in my head, and a ringing in my ears like the handheld Sanctus bells that the altar boy rings at the consecration during Mass. I threw up.

  “Emanuele?” I said. “Leonello?”

  I looked at where my brothers had been and couldn’t understand what was wrong with what I saw-an arm by a patch of dandelions. Then I looked at my hands and saw the blood there, and I knew what was wrong-that arm in the grass was bent at the elbow the wrong way. And I wasn’t sure I understood how it got that way.

  I rubbed at the corners of my eyes, feeling dirt caught there, but the feeling would not go away. I kept on rubbing-it was all I could do to stop thinking about what was in my eyes and about the fumes and what they’d carried into my lungs.

  I don’t know how long I sat in the orchard before I saw my father. He had been on the dirt road from the cemetery when it happened. He left the men and the statue, and the rest of them redistributed the weight of it on their shoulders. He approached, slowly, and then dropped to his knees at the edge of his land, mouth agape. No sound came from his throat. He was only an image of a scream. A crowd gathered as my mother rushed by and stood in the orchard. She swayed, turning in circles, her dress billowing around her like an umbrella spinning in the storm of dandelion seeds set free by the explosion. She knelt among the naked dandelion stalks to pick up a hand, cradled the bloody palm against her cheek, and began to wail. I wondered which twin the hand belonged to, and if a mother could tell the difference.

  7

  We had two pieces of property, one above the village and the other in the valley below-that was the almond orchard. In the rocky land above, we cultivated carob trees and figs and prickly pears, and we had a small farmhouse and a well for fresh water. This is where we lived after Sicily was captured, after the bombardment destroyed our house in the village. I loved the view from the fig trees up by the farmhouse. You could see the whole world from there. Rows of red-tiled rooftops staggered down to the cemetery, almost at the base of the mountain. Farther out, the concrete German bunker stood sentinel over the waters of Megara Bay. And above it all, Mount Etna in the north, trailing gray smoke from its mouth. That volcano was always smoking.

  But the view I missed most of all was the view into our cemetery. It was a little walled city with an iron gate. Inside, mausoleums housing long-forgotten families and headstones topped with angels lined narrow cobblestone roads. All the newer plots had flat markers like the ones my father engraved for my brothers the night of their wake.

  Everyone in the village came to our home to pay their respects that night. They brought us food, generous in those lean times. The Morellos, fishermen by trade, made a fish stew from that day’s catch, with crusts of stale bread soaking in the salty tomato broth. The Cardellas, a family of shepherds who had lived in these mountains long before Melilli even had a name, carried a casserole of roasted lamb and potatoes. The Santangelos, who tended the mountainside olive grove that hid the entrances to the caves from prying eyes, baked lemon olive oil cakes, sweetened with the last of their rationed sugar. Everyone gave what they could-some families came with a jug of wine and a little basket of figs, a plate of salami and cheese-and they offered their condolences and prayers and they sat with us, eating and talking in lowered voices.

  Palms and flowers and little statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Sebastian surrounded the small coffins opposite the fireplace. A silver crucifix hung from a nail on the wall above them. My mother kept closing the shutters as people opened them-she did not want the souls of her children to find their way out of the house. She did not want them to leave her.

  When the Morellos arrived with their fish stew, Concetta-Rocco’s mother-covered the mirror my father used for shaving with a black cloth, and then opened the shutters of the window
with the view of the water. My mother rose to close them, but Concetta placed a hand on her forearm. “Giuseppina,” she said, “leave at least one open.”

  My mother collapsed, wailing, into Concetta’s arms. Concetta guided her to the chair beside Nella, sat her down, and then knelt before them both. She took my mother’s hands in her own, speaking soft words of comfort. Nella wept and buried her face in my mother’s skirt. Concetta’s eyes welled with tears.

  I stood in the doorway, because I could not bear to stay inside-my mother’s wailing cries filled that small stone house-and I could not bear to go outside where my father worked on the flat marble and my mother’s cries echoed through the mountain, more terrifying than the nights of heavy gunfire during the worst of the fighting.

  The men stood around him, smoking cigarettes, keeping silent company. Rocco made coffee and brought it out to my father and the others, and then he joined me. He leaned into the doorframe. Rocco was two years older than me, a head taller, and shared his father’s curly, dark hair and round Greek face. He held out a palm-sized paper tube. “American candies from a British soldier,” he said. “I saved them for you, Turiddu.”

  “We can share,” I said.

  My mother’s sobs quieted. Concetta sat beside her now, an arm across her shoulder. Rocco’s father squatted and brushed stone shavings from Emanuele’s name while my father began carving Leonello’s.

  Rocco thumbed open the cardboard lid and poured candy-coated chocolate pellets into my hand, and I called Nella to me and split my candy with her.

  The Santangelos were the first to leave that night, and like the others who would soon follow, they did not go home right away. They took their time on a long, winding path around the village so as not to bring death into their house. We watched them go, and when they were out of sight beyond the rows of prickly pears and past the snaking stacked stones that marked this lot of arid land as my father’s, Rocco said, “Don’t worry, my father and I will be here through the night.”