How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  I peeked out the slats of the shuttered window.

  “There’s the criminal,” cried old Longu. “Knocked me down running away. You saw what he did, Rocco. Tell them.”

  “It’s true,” Rocco said. He pushed his way to the front of the mob. “It was Salvatore Vassallo. He blew up our statue.”

  The howls of men demented answered Rocco’s accusation. A fat man pounded on the door-Nunzio, the baker who bought our almonds for his pastries. “Come out!” he yelled and threw his weight against the wood. The hinges creaked. Other men joined him, calling for my surrender, calling me coward and murderer, as if a man can murder a piece of stone. It was my family that had brought the sickness of death to their lost animals, my family that had brought the mysterious fires. And now-I had taken their patron saint.

  Don Fiorilla hurried up the road from the church, out of breath and waving his arms in the air, shouting for everyone to stop this madness. He paused under a fig tree and fanned himself with his saturno. “Please,” he said. He was winded and had trouble speaking. “Let Turiddu go. It’s not right, what you are doing. He is only a boy.”

  Some of the men stepped back. They sided with the priest. They wondered aloud in sheepish voices how a family could have done the things they accused us of, even as troubled a family as mine-maybe the people who saw the ghost-fires had too much to drink, maybe they saw only what the wine made them see, and hadn’t they all lived and seen enough of this cruel life to know that animals sometimes got sick and some seasons were better than others? And this terrible business at the church, didn’t it make more sense that a band of outlaws had been responsible for destroying the statue than a mere child?

  “Let us send for the carabinieri,” Don Fiorilla said. “If the boy is guilty, let them arrest him.” The priest stepped forward, a man of reason, but a stampede of donkeys always tramples reasonable men.

  When the mob broke in and dragged me out by my armpits with legs kicking, the expression on Rocco’s face-I would never forget-like the chiseled stonework of the martyr.

  “What is the meaning of this?” my father’s voice called out. He and my mother stood at a distance beneath the curling pods of an old carob tree. In his hands, he carried the pillow he’d brought down to the orchard and a bushel basket of almonds stored from the last harvest. His hunting rifle hung by a strap from his shoulder. He was alive, my father was alive, and even as I struggled against the men who held me captive, I thanked God that day for my father’s life.

  “Salvatore destroyed the statue,” Rocco said. “I saw it with my own eyes.” His voice, like a crack of thunder the saints could hear all the way up in heaven. The cries of men rose around me, echoing Rocco’s declaration.

  My father threw down the pillow and basket. The almonds spread out, wobbling around everyone’s feet. “Get off my land!” he shouted. He raised his rifle and trained it on random targets of men, staring each of them in turn down the long barrel.

  My mother fell to her knees and wept, and through her tears she cursed them all-all the men who laid a hand on her boy. “Thieves,” she said, “you want to take my only remaining son from me.” She spat in the dirt and shook her crossed middle and index fingers at them. “May your hands fall off.”

  Rocco dragged me across the rocky ground by my shirt collar to stand before my father. “Look at your son’s face,” he said.

  “Let him go,” my father said. He leveled the rifle at Rocco’s chest.

  The men closed around us, making the horns of the goat with their fists to deflect my mother’s curse.

  Rocco released me. “Look,” he said.

  My father turned to me and searched my face, and he asked me, “You did this thing?” And my face gave away my guilt. The rifle sagged in his arms, the barrel dipped and pointed at the earth. In that moment, Cardella and Nunzio rushed my father. They grabbed for his gun. I panicked and ran. Behind me, the sounds of a struggle and then gunfire-two shots.

  This was what happened to people when they believed too much in stories. Those stories that we all loved, if we held the pages to the light, we’d see right through them. If we held them close enough, they’d burn.

  15

  Old women in their black mournful shawls stood in doorways crying at the smoke billowing from the church. Men pulled at their hair with both fists and shouted curses at the sky. I stopped in front of the schoolhouse and looked back to see if Rocco and the others had followed me, but I could not spot them through the commotion in the streets. A man rushed into the school, and I followed him to my sister’s classroom.

  “There’s been an attack,” he said. “Saint Sebastian Church is on fire.” Then he ran to the boys’ class across the hall. One of the girls screamed. The students jumped from their chairs and crowded around the windows.

  “Calm down,” the schoolteacher said. “Come away from the windows.”

  I told her our father wanted Nella to come home right away. The teacher said for us to be careful, and then I grabbed Nella’s hand and led her outside. We ran to the opposite end of the village and took a goat path that wound up the mountain slope.

  “Where are we going?” Nella asked when she saw that we were not going home.

  We stopped behind a crumbled wall with a swastika painted on it. The mayor had lived there. When the Germans came to our village, he welcomed them. He sat at their table, ate food stolen from our stores. After the war, the people turned against him. Someone killed him in the night. The authorities never caught the one who did it.

  “We’re not going home,” I said. “I’m supposed to take you somewhere safe.”

  “The cave,” she said. “There’s going to be another war, isn’t there?”

  “The cave isn’t safe anymore, Nella.”

  She tightened her grip on my hand. “Turiddu, you’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t let go.” I towed my sister behind me as I ran, bits of stone crunching under our feet and rolling down the slope.

  The craggy path went up, almost to the mountaintop. We hid behind some prickly pears, and I peeked over the edge. Our farmhouse looked deserted, but the more I looked, the more I made out two bodies sprawled on the ground, not moving. And the more I stared at those bodies, the more I wished I hadn’t ever seen them.

  Two goats walked up the path. They must have wandered from the flock belonging to Fortuna or Russo-any number of goatherds from the village. Their creamy-white coats dirtied with brambles stuck to the long fur. They looked at my sister and me as if they were trying to figure out what to make of us. Then one lowered its head, and I thought it was showing me its long corkscrew horns as a warning, but it was only grazing on the low weeds. The second goat did the same. They stood there, chewing and watching us, as if this were a normal day. As if the world below us weren’t going crazy with the shouts of men and the cries of women and that dark smoke rising above the church.

  Nella tugged on my arm. She pointed at a group of men in the piazza with guns. “What happened?” she asked me.

  There was something about those bodies in front of our farmhouse near the carob trees-the way they lay in the dirt and the way the dirt darkened around them. I did not want Nella to see. I grabbed her arm. “Come,” I said.

  We passed the way to the caves, following the goat path down and around the backside of the village. Someone shouted, “Check the caves.” And I saw a cloud of stone and dirt as several men scurried up the steep, terraced mountainside. They startled the goats. One of the animals lost its footing and tumbled over the side, breaking its horn at the skull. The other animal butted a man as he came up on the path.

  I turned away and said, “We have to keep moving.”

  And we did not stop to catch our breath until we were outside the village, crouching in the bushes by the highway. Rocco and Cardella stood on the road behind us. “What happened,” Cardella said with a hand on Rocco’s shoulder, “is no one’s fault but the boy’s.”

  “Who are they looking for?” Nella asked me.


  I put my fingers to my lips until they had gone out of sight, back toward the cemetery. “Listen,” I whispered. “There are men coming after us. We have to leave.”

  “But where are we going?”

  I looked at the highway, read the sign, and said, “Syracuse. Our parents are meeting up with us there.”

  Syracuse was twenty-three kilometers away-fourteen miles of rocky terrain in the early cold morning. It was a long day of following the highway and hiding behind limestone outcroppings from cars that drove by. We were hungry and tired. We stopped in an abandoned fort dug into the stone. Over the next terraced hill, an orange grove filled the valley. A farmhouse stood on the other side of the trees where two men loaded crates onto the back of a truck. I signaled to my sister to stay put, and then I snuck into the grove. I picked as many blood oranges as I could from the low-hanging branches, held the ends of my shirt out and filled it with fruit.

  When we had walked a good distance from the grove, we sat under a tall and slender cypress tree. They lined the dirt road ahead of us with their tapering cones, like flames growing out of the earth. I peeled the thin red skins off two oranges and separated them into wedges on my lap. I made sure that Nella ate most of the citrus. I learned something that day about the strength I had inside of me when I had someone to look after.

  16

  My brothers followed me from the orchard to the German bunker. They stayed with me until the morning under the dark cloud that split the sky. We made our way to the church together, their lips pressed against my ears, whispering, their fingers pointing to the statue.

  My brothers were there in our farmhouse when the men stood outside screaming. They were there when I ran, when the shots were fired. They followed Nella and me all our lives.

  Syracuse was framed by the sea on one side and the curving base of the Hyblaean mountain range on the other. Men waited in long lines every day looking for work-maybe two or three got lucky with some small job. Women walked the rubble-lined alleys after dark, selling themselves for food or a few coins. War orphans wandered the streets like ants without their queen. Some of the boys-the smart ones-worked in groups. They circled a man, tugging at his shirtsleeves, pleading with their dirty faces for a handout to fill their empty stomachs, while one boy picked his pockets clean. I watched the boys that first full day in Syracuse. I watched them work, and I learned from them.

  “Where are they?” Nella asked as we crossed a stone bridge to the island of Ortygia, the Old City, and walked by some crumbled walls and scattered columns.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They’ll be here soon. But we have to eat, so when we find the market, I want you to cry.”

  “How do I do that?” Nella said. “I can’t cry on command.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you have to make it look real. Tell the merchant you’ve lost your mother.”

  Nella stopped walking, took my arm, and said, “Don’t make me do that.”

  “You have to,” I said. “Who can ignore a little girl crying for her mother?”

  “You’re the Devil.”

  “Nella,” I said. “If you don’t do this, we’re going to starve.”

  We wandered the narrow streets, the winding alleyways, threading ourselves between pale stone buildings connected by gated arches, until we found a market tucked away on a side street. Vendors sang out their merchandise, fish fresh from the boats that morning, fruits and vegetables from the local farmers.

  As we walked through the crowded market, I slipped a loaf of still-warm bread from out of an old lady’s shoulder bag while she argued over the price of clams. I tucked the loaf under my arm as if it belonged to me all along, felt a rush of excitement, and whispered to Nella, “It pays to be small.”

  Nella crossed herself and asked for God’s forgiveness.

  “God won’t feed us,” I said. “But you see that merchant over there? He will.”

  “We have bread,” she said. “Let’s go. Don’t make me do this.”

  “I’m all you have,” I said. “Better pray you find me.” Then I slipped into the crowd and made my way to an alley on the other side of the street. I stood, pressed my back against the wall, and peeked around the corner.

  Nella called out my name, turning in circles and looking for me. Her voice grew louder. “Turiddu,” she cried. “Turiddu. Don’t leave me, please.”

  A woman stopped and wiped Nella’s face with a small cloth from her handbag. They spoke, but I couldn’t hear their conversation. Then the woman turned and asked the nearby vendor if he’d seen this girl’s brother. The merchant came around from his cart, got down on his knees, and cleared strands of hair from my sister’s forehead. He took her little hands in his bigger ones.

  I crossed the street. But before I reached the cart, a man had the same idea as me. He grabbed a basket of the merchant’s chestnuts and ran off with it.

  Nella saw him, stamped her feet, and pointed, saying, “You’re getting robbed. You’re getting robbed.”

  The man turned around, saw the thief taking the chestnuts, and chased after him. Several men in the crowd followed-all yelling and screaming curses-and in the chaos, I threw a quarter wheel of hard cheese and a salami roll into a basket of almonds. Then I grabbed the basket, looked at my sister, and said, “Run!”

  In a bombed-out building, I sat on a collapsed wooden beam, cracking almond shells with a stone. Nella stood at the window with her back to me and took a picture of the Virgin Mary down from the wall. She removed the broken glass, setting the shards on the windowsill. “The frame is still good,” she said. Then she blew the dust off, kissed the picture, and placed it back on the nail.

  “Come away from there,” I said. “Someone might see you.”

  She went through a cabinet and found some candles. Then she turned to face me and said, “Don’t ever do that again.”

  I split a shell open with my stone. “That was quick thinking, telling the vendor he was being robbed,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” she said. She arranged the candles on the floor at the foot of the picture.

  “Here,” I said. I cut a slice of cheese with my pocketknife. “Eat.”

  She stood up, took the slice, and ate it while admiring the little shrine she’d made. “Do you have matches?” she asked.

  I dug into my pocket for the matchbook. The design on the cover showed the fasces set in the center of the green, white, and red stripes of the Italian flag.

  Nella took the matches and lit the candles.

  I tore the heel from the bread loaf and saved it for her in my lap because I knew that was her favorite part. Then I took another piece for myself and said, “That’s not going to help you. It’s better if you learn that now.”

  “Look at this house,” she said. “Look how the whole second floor caved in.” She walked to the cracked wall behind me and touched the shadow where a picture once hung. “Everything came down,” she said. “Everything but the Virgin. Do you see?”

  I cut into the salami roll and said, “I think you see what you want to see.”

  Nella threw the matchbook at me. And I stared at the Fascist symbol, at the bundle of wood bound together with red bands around an axe. “Keep it,” I said.

  That night, we found wool blankets in a broken dresser and spread two on the floor. Then we huddled together with the rest of the blankets covering us, but Nella couldn’t sleep. She wanted to know what happened to our parents, why they were late meeting us, and why we ran away from home. I told her I’d tell her in the morning, that I was too tired. But the morning came and went and another one after that, and still she never stopped asking. Almost a week passed before I told my sister what I had done. All those days of stealing bread and fruit, of living on the streets, I knew that soon my luck would run out. Someone would catch me. And then what would happen to us? They’d send us to an orphanage, maybe split us up or something worse. Nella deserved the truth before that happened.

  So I took her to the
harbor one evening. She liked sitting on the pier and watching the moored boats swaying in the water. But the longer we sat there, the harder it became for me to tell her. What would she think of me? What would you, David? How would I explain it to you if I could? At the woodpile, I tried to show you how we break. How a family splinters. There was a time when I thought we had that strength again, the strength of the bundle. But we had already lost too much.

  Nella threw a pebble into the water. The water rippled out from where the stone sank. “They’re not coming,” she said. “And we can’t keep stealing from the markets. One of us is going to get caught.”

  “I know.” I blew into my cupped hands and rubbed my palms together. “Nella, I want-”

  She held her hand over my mouth and said, “I have something to say. I found a job washing dishes at a delicatessen near the market.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “You sleep late,” she said.

  “Nella, what did you tell them?”

  “I cried about how my father died in the war and how my sickly mother couldn’t work. The owner’s wife took me in and fed me. While I ate, she pressed her husband to give me the job. It doesn’t pay much, but at least we don’t have to steal anymore.”

  “You didn’t use Vassallo,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I used our street, Marconi.”

  I jumped to my feet and held out my hand for her. She took it and I pulled her up. “Let’s stay here tonight,” I said. I climbed into one of the small fishing boats, moored to the pier.

  “It’s better than the stone floor we’ve been sleeping on,” she said. “But it will be colder, and we’ll need to get up early so the fishermen don’t catch us.”

  I helped her into the boat. We bundled up in some coarse sacks and looked up at the night sky. I felt glad that she had interrupted me. And now that I didn’t have to steal anymore, maybe I didn’t have to tell her the truth.

  “What’s happened to us?” Nella said.