by Marco Rafalà
In the morning, before the funeral Mass, Rocco and his father helped us load the coffins and the two flat stones, a shovel and a bucket of water, into a donkey-drawn cart. They walked with us to the church and carried the coffins inside, and then went home to wash up for the service. I knelt with my father in front of the twins to pray. He made the sign of the cross and clasped his hands together. He bowed his head, resting it on his knuckles. I thought his head would roll off his neck and onto the floor if it weren’t for the support of his praying hands, balled together into one giant fist. I looked up over his head at the statue of Saint Sebastian at the side altar and shrine, and I wanted to ask him what it felt like to be pierced with arrows like that. It must’ve happened so fast-Roman guards tied him to a tree, archers bent their bows, arrows shot through the air and into him-and I wanted to know how he survived. Why did God save Sebastian, only to have him later stoned to death and thrown into a sewer? Maybe God didn’t save him at all. And maybe the martyr never had the power to keep us safe. If it was just a lie, then the statue came to us for no other reason than the storm. The rest was made up, a story. It was all just make-believe.
8
Outside the church, my father took the shovel and my brothers’ stones from the cart, and he said, “We walk,” and I followed him to the cemetery with the bucket of water and a dented tin cup. While he dug the graves in the hot sun, I sat in the shade with my back against the stone wall. It was cool and rough, and I pressed my back against it. I tapped on the bucket and watched the cup bob inside. My father stopped and looked at me-the sole of his right boot on the end of the shovel blade, a white-knuckled grip on the handle.
“Get me some more water,” he said, and he drove the shovel into the ground. It made a lonely sound, tearing into the earth that way. He took off his T-shirt and tossed it at the wall.
I walked between the rows of graves to hand him the cup. He drank some of the water, poured the rest over his head, and handed me the empty tin.
“Now go back to the shade, out of the sun,” he said. “It’s too hot.”
During the service at the cemetery, I stared at the two wooden coffins suspended by ropes over the holes. The statue-bearers had carried the coffins down from the church in procession after Mass, and the rest of us followed behind. Near the marked gravesites, the men hesitated.
“Which one goes where?” Morello whispered.
“Ask the priest,” Cardella said.
My father shut his eyes.
After the service, Don Fiorilla shook my father’s hand and told him to be strong. Then he told my mother how sorry he was for her loss, and that she must find comfort in the knowledge that God had called her boys back to heaven. I asked him why, and the priest got down on one knee, and gripped my arms as if to shake the Devil out of me.
“Ours is not to question God’s plan,” he said. “These are the paths laid out for us. The best you can do is to remember your brothers.” As he stood up to leave, he laid his hand on the top of my sister’s head and said, “Look after your brother now.”
My mother squeezed Nella’s shoulders while my father went to work, lowering the coffins, shoveling dirt over the graves, stopping to wipe his brow with a handkerchief from his back pocket and to gather strength for one more shovelful, for the last. His job wasn’t finished until he’d filled their graves. My father measured his care for his children in hard work.
When everyone had gone, my father sat down on the ground beside my brothers’ graves. He smoothed over each fresh mound with his hand, patting them down. He looked at my mother, and then turned away. I waited for him to cry or to say something. I looked to him for a clue for how I should be acting. My mother cleared dirt from the flat markers. Nella whispered to me that the flat stones were like pillows at the heads of their new beds. I took my sister’s hand in mine and we stayed that way, watching our parents. We dared not move until they stood up and brushed themselves off.
That night in my dreams, my brothers erupted into a fireball. I felt the blast of hot wind and the wet hail of torn-away body parts-so fast and hot in the air that the fire and my brothers became one. The force hit me, pushed me down, and my brothers entered me. We were all together again.
I knew that to dream of the dead was a bad omen, a sign that someone in my family would die soon. But I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even Don Fiorilla after Sunday Mass or in the confessional. I prayed that morning. I balled my hands together into a tight fist, and I prayed to God that it was just a dream, that this omen was just more make-believe.
9
For a week after the funeral, the shaving mirror stayed covered and Concetta came in the mornings, long after my father had left for the orchard. She did the housework and opened the shutters my mother had closed, and sprinkled salt around the house to ward away the contamination of death. My mother was not well. She did not rise until noon, and then only to make her daily pilgrimage to the cemetery with a bucket and a washcloth. She poured hot soapy water over the twins’ markers. Steam rose from the earth as she scrubbed the stones. She scrubbed around the letters of their names and around the dates, used the wet cloth over her finger to clear dirt from the engravings, the way she used to wash the fleshy curves of their ears.
Even after Concetta stopped coming, my mother did not get better. In the mornings, she hid away in bed while my sister and I had a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and biscuits or a slice of bread with butter and jam. My father let his black coffee get cold, listening to the news broadcaster’s voice over the hand-crank radio. He wanted to know what had happened since the king ousted Mussolini from power, but the crackling voice talked about food and water rationing, the Allied invasion of Italy that September, and the Italian surrender a few days later. The war had passed over us like a hurricane, and now we were in its eye.
All afternoon, my mother stayed down in the cemetery, and my brothers suffered her wailing-the sound that came from her throat like the keening of a wounded dog. It filled the streets and made people uneasy. They feared for the souls of my brothers, that my brothers would hear their mother’s cry and never leave. But more than that, they were angry at how she reminded them every day of the people they, too, had lost.
Evenings, on my father’s way up from the orchard, he took her home, and she closed the shutters and picked at the simple meal I had made for us with Nella’s help. She ate like a bird and told stories about the twins. I left the house because I could not listen-when you talk of the dead you risk summoning them back.
I sat in the orchard at night and pressed my back against the bark of one of my father’s almond trees to force myself not to slouch. I looked at where it happened-where I knew the star-shaped crater was, with a ring of burnt grass around it-and I was glad that the dark swallowed up that spot. I tried imagining our family before the war came to Sicily, when the fighting was just something we heard about from the radio. We had listened at dinner to the newscasts about what was happening in Europe and in Africa, and our father nodded and said, “Remember what I told you about planting. You have to care for the seeds in good soil for them to grow. And if you take good care of them, they will take care of your family.”
The earth did take care of my brothers. But I could no longer picture them as they were before the war. I could only see the twins buried in the cemetery with the dirt around their coffins, cradling them like they were babies again. And each night when I closed my eyes, I saw the accident in my mind. I saw the unexploded shell on the ground between them, and I tried saving them. But I knew that I wasn’t fast enough to reach them in time, and even if I could, I wasn’t strong enough to carry them. So even in my imagination I could not save them.
“Go home,” my father would say when he came to get me. “Your mother is worried.” But I wouldn’t move. I couldn’t pull myself away from that place or out of that moment. I wanted him to talk with me about what had happened. I wanted to know if he blamed me. I thought he did.
He pulled me t
o my feet and I went home, and he stayed behind. “Don’t worry your mother” is all he said to me then.
10
Life went on in the land-in the planting, in the watering, in the spreading of the piles of manure. Life was in the almond and carob and fig harvests of those last years of war. Those last years of living in Melilli. Soon, families began rebuilding their homes, but we did not. We stayed in the little farmhouse, the charred foundation and rubble of our home on Via Marconi left fallow. The school reopened. It was Nella’s first year, and in the mornings and afternoons, I walked her to and from class. While she attended school, I worked the land with our father.
One morning, in April 1945, my father cranked the radio at the kitchen table with his head low to the speaker while my mother left with her bucket and washcloth. When the news came that partisans had captured and executed Mussolini-his body on display in Milan, hung by his feet from the girder of a gas station-my father’s hands shook and he held on to the table edge to steady them. It was the same spot, the man on the radio said, where Fascists had killed fifteen civilians one year ago.
“Take your sister to school,” my father said to me.
Then he got up and went out to his garden. He knelt down next to the tomato plants and wiped dirt from their leaves. He spoke tenderly to them, and I knew-even then, I understood-that these were now my father’s sons, back from playing hard in some field, hands and faces dirty. He washed them up, his green boys.
When I left Nella at school, I went to the church before working in the orchard, and I stood at the altar of the statue of our patron saint-the ancient stone face, cracked and pitted and scarred like one of the elaborate tombstones from the cemetery, marking the grave of a man dead for centuries whose name on the stone had been erased by time.
Behind me, the doors opened. Rocco walked up the center aisle, hands in a fist held at his waist. He took a seat in the first row of pews. “Turiddu,” he said. With a wave of his arm, he beckoned me to join him.
I sat down beside him, but I could not take my eyes off the statue.
“My mother,” he said, “she’s borne six children and lost five, and I asked her, How? How can you be so strong after losing so much? And she says to me, You are the miracle. The others, I gave them to God.”
“But they got sick,” I said. “There was nothing you could’ve done.”
“We prayed, didn’t we, Turiddu? Your family sat with mine, and we prayed together in this spot. You are like my little brother now, and Nella, she is a little sister to me.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t be too angry with the saint. He protects us, he does, in ways we cannot always understand. You will see. I promise.”
“Do not talk to me of promises,” I said. “What I see is nothing but stone and childish stories.”
Rocco crossed himself. “You don’t mean that. Don’t let anyone hear you say that. People are already starting to talk.”
“What people say is not my concern.”
The war ended. Men again left on ships bound for America. They left for Middletown, but we knew of it as Little Melilli. Families from our village had been going there since before the First World War. We even heard that they had built a church over there and that someone had carved a statue of our saint from memory. They left Melilli, chasing the promise of good-paying jobs and a better life. They left to forget war, forget poverty, forget hunger, and forget the bodies of the loved ones they lost. But they would not forget their saint.
In time, my mother resumed caring for us, cooking the meals and doing the housework. Still, she spent her afternoons at the cemetery, cleaning the stones-her wailing faded to feeble whimpers-and she spoke of the twins and nothing else. And there was never another May Feast of Saint Sebastian for my family. Rocco Morello, the eldest son among the four families, held my father’s place as one of the bearers. My father, he never carried the statue again.
11
By 1946 the whole village was talking behind our backs like a drove of braying donkeys. They blamed us for their own misfortunes and later for strange fires that no one ever witnessed save for those who reported seeing them. In the three years since the twins died, Santangelo’s olive trees produced less and less fruit, Morello’s blue-and-white fishing boat went missing-disappeared from the locked stone boat shed down by the shore-and a pack of wild dogs started killing Cardella’s sheep. Then, this past season, all the chickens in the village fell ill and died, and crop yields were low except for our crops. We were lucky. Our harvests were bountiful. Strange, after everything, we were lucky in this.
The spontaneous fires began in September. First reported by Cardella—he claimed flames leapt out from a hole in the ground and almost cooked his legs, and he held up his burnt pant legs as proof of what he saw. The story passed from person to person like influenza until everyone in the village had a similar story of narrowly averting catastrophe from a burning hole that opened up under their feet, and they went to the priest and demanded he take action.
I’d heard it said many times how our family brought this evil to Melilli. Our mother wasn’t right in the head, they said. She had a sickness in the brain. Our father, too. So it was only a matter of time before Don Fiorilla paid us a visit on an evening in December near the end of that year.
When Nella stood up from the dinner table to answer the door, our father stopped her with a stern look. She sat back down in her chair. He opened the door.
“Good evening,” Don Fiorilla said. The priest took off his saturno, held it by the wide circular brim. He asked us to pardon him for the interruption, but he wondered when my father would return as a bearer in the festival. “It isn’t good,” he said. “Your family, they need the saint’s strength now more than ever.”
“Please, leave us in peace,” my father said.
“Raphael,” Don Fiorilla said. And his voice grew softer. “I hear you are sleeping in the orchard. In the spot where the boys-”
“Where I sleep is my business,” my father said. “Good evening, Don Fiorilla.”
My father shut the door and sat back down at the table without a word. He pushed his fork around his plate of spaghetti with runny tomato sauce. He had made the sauce over the summer with onions and basil and stored it in lidless jars in the sun to dry. He stirred the sauce over three days while it thickened and reduced to a paste. Then he sealed the jars and stored them in the farmhouse closet. Later, with oil and water, we’d dilute the thick paste back into sauce.
The tines scraped the dish.
“What’s this?” he said. “This is water. You ruined my sauce.”
“Then don’t eat,” my mother said.
She took his plate and upended it over the garbage. He pushed himself away from the table. The chair legs scraped against the floor.
“Turiddu,” my mother said. “I can see the war on your face.”
I had finished eating, but I held on to my plate.
She tugged it, but I did not let go. “It’s in your eyes,” she said. “You have a hard face for a boy.” She pulled the plate from my hands. “Last night I dreamed a knock at the door, and I knew it was my Emanuele and my Leonello.” And I asked her, “How?” And she said, “Because a mother, she knows these things.”
My father got up and went into the other room, the one we all shared as a bedroom. My mother stood at the sink, washing dishes. “I could pick your brothers’ voices out from among the other children playing outside,” she said. She scrubbed hard at the plates, at stains that were not there. “Such good boys, always coming when their mother called. Why didn’t they come? The years would’ve given them sweet, deep instruments. All the men in our family have nice baritones, but none of them had those eyes. They shared my eyes, my very long eyelashes, so long that people mistook them for girls when they were infants. This made your father mad.”
Emanuele and Leonello were good-looking boys. Not like me. I had a nose as large as a man’s, a Roman nose, and a scowl. Back then people always thought
I was angry. They asked me what was wrong. Years later, and they still asked me. I kept this boy’s face even as creases in my forehead and around my eyes and mouth all pulled my frown off the bone.
My father walked out of the bedroom carrying a pillow and a hunting rifle. “Get your jacket,” he said to me.
12
In Melilli, almond trees bloomed white in February. In December they were green, getting ready to bloom again, and they had to be shaken by a pole to free them of mummies, leftover nuts that bred disease. In the orchard, my father took two poles from the shed and handed the shorter one to me, and we knocked the mummy nuts to the ground.
“Look here,” my father said. “Look. See how the seal of the shell is bad?” He held one in his free hand. “They’ll rot the whole tree. So do a good job while there’s still some light left.”
I whacked the tree limbs hard. The mummies pelted me.
“Easy,” my father said. “You’ll break the pole.”
In half an hour, it was dark, and my father walked with me along the dirt road leading from the orchard. I watched the dust kicked up by my shoes and my father’s larger ones. A full moon crested. And through the shadowed bars of the cemetery gate, the dust settled into the moonlight.
“There’s a light in the window of a mausoleum,” I said. “What do they need a light for?”
My father told me it was nothing but the moon, then took me by the arm and pulled me down the road.
“It’s not the moon,” I said, and I struggled in his grip.
When we reached the edge of the village, my father said, “Go home.” And then he turned back toward the orchard.