How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  I emptied the bottle into his glass with the last of the sediment. He stretched his legs out in front of him, and I could see that the soles of his work boots had lost their tread long ago. I looked at how mine were new, a Christmas gift from Don Giovanni. They were the priest’s boots for working his soil.

  People had started gathering at the foot of the church steps, holding their white unlit candles. The soldier drank the wine and watched them. “A man will look for God his whole life and never find him,” he said. “Even when he thinks he has.”

  “Is that what you’re looking for, God?”

  “No,” he said with a frown. “Nothing like that.” He faced me. “You don’t remember, do you? Well, how could you? You were very young, and the men I was with, the soldiers, they were not good men. You took me to see your father in the cave.”

  He’d been filthy back then, during the war, but then again so had I. We all were. He had not had that limp, and I hadn’t destroyed the statue yet. I finished my wine in one bitter swallow and shot up from my seat on the steps, afraid that he had seen, in my face, the face of the martyr.

  “I found a journal in the bunker,” I said. “An Italian soldier’s. I wish to God I’d never found it. You were there, fighting. Do you know whose it was? Was it yours?”

  The soldier swirled the empty glass, stared at the long red tears staining the sides, like he was staring into the past. He shook his head no in long, slow movements, like a bell in a tower tolling out the notes at a funeral. “It wasn’t mine,” he said. He spun his finger around the inside of the glass and licked the wine off his finger. “It was chaos. I barely made it out alive. The journal, it could’ve belonged to anyone.”

  The last of the congregation disappeared into the unlit church, my sister among them. Don Giovanni stepped out of the rectory. His white vestments draped the ground. He moved slowly, floating like a spirit. He held the white Paschal candle, inscribed in red with the year, MCMLII, and the Greek letters alpha and omega. The deacon on the sidewalk got a fire going in a tin drum. The priest blessed the fire, and then he lit the candle from its flame. His lips moved as he uttered words I knew by heart but could not hear from this distance: Yesterday and today, the beginning and the ending. Inside, the congregation waited in the dark. He would bring the light to them, and they would light their candles from the one he carried, and from each other’s.

  The soldier rubbed the knee of his bad leg. “I told your father that it wasn’t safe to stay in Melilli, but he wouldn’t leave, and I—I should have stayed with all of you. His faith was as strong as stone. I should’ve listened to your father. If I had taken off the uniform and lived as you lived, life might be different for us both.”

  “I remember,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I wanted my father to take your pistol. I was afraid, and you were a soldier like our soldier-saint. But nothing could have saved them from what happened, from me.”

  “You were just a little one.” The soldier held his arm out four feet from the ground to show how small a boy I had been in the war. “You made a mistake.”

  “How can you know what I did?” I felt my brothers somewhere just out of my sight, like a headache coming on above my eyes. “You weren’t there when the twins died. When I—”

  “Don Fiorilla told me what happened to your family. That’s why I’ve come to see you. He asked me to take you and your sister to America.”

  “America,” I said. The name did not sound so foreign in my mouth, because it came from Italy. It came from Amerigo Vespucci, the best navigator in the whole world, an Italian so great they named two continents after him. In America they said a man could buy a house with a nice piece of land if he worked hard for it. But it couldn’t be just any land. It had to be home. There had to be a second chance for me in Middletown, in Little Melilli, and why not? They had their new church, their statue carved from an old man’s memory. I had my new family name. I could put down my roots, produce good fruit in that kind of soil. As long as there was a new Melilli to make a life in, a place where the statue had always been whole, then the boy-Salvatore Vassallo-that boy, he never had to exist.

  28

  We needed documents, passports. I asked Don Giovanni about this when I made arrangements for the soldier, Vincenzo, to stay the night. Don Giovanni told me that he knew a man who could make them for us. They had worked together helping young men escape the country before the war started. He looked at recent portraits of me and my sister on his desk. He took the frames apart. He said he had prayed for me since he found me in the cave, a prisoner in the Ear of Dionysius.

  “I would like to hear that story now,” I said.

  “The cave,” he said, “was so big and the echo so great that a man outside could hear even a whisper from someone inside. The tyrant Dionysius imprisoned men here and learned of plots against him from their amplified voices.”

  I laughed and said, “Who am I plotting against?”

  “I pray for you that someday you will learn to be free,” Don Giovanni said.

  I knocked on my sister’s door. She stood in the doorway in her nightgown, the Saint Sebastian medallion I gave her for Christmas a few years ago around her neck. At fifteen, she was beginning to remind me of our mother before the twins died. It was in the way Nella started putting most of her weight onto her right leg and keeping the other bent slightly at the knee. I told her that we were leaving in a few days.

  “Where were you?” she asked me. “I waited in the church and now you knock on my door and talk about leaving. Where are we going?”

  It was in her voice, too.

  “America,” I said.

  She snapped her fingers and said, “Just like that. Oh my brother, you are crazy in the head. Who put this idea in there?” And she knocked in a playful manner on the side of my head as if it were a door.

  “There is a man downstairs,” I said, “and I think the saint sent him to find us. I think you were right about the saint. He heard your prayers. He’s given us a chance at a new life.”

  “And you still can’t say his name,” she said, fingering the medallion. “Who is this man?”

  I wanted to. I wanted to speak the name of the saint out loud. But I couldn’t. I avoided it, like I avoided speaking about the past. Instead, I settled for silence.

  Outside, the night was calm, quiet except for insects calling one another from the darkness. I pulled at my sleeves and looked at the rectory’s wood trim. Some of it was rotten, and birds made nests in the hollowed spaces. Last summer, a sparrow had nudged its young from a nest in the trim boards. One of them fluttered to the ground, wings beating, and a black cat pounced. Many times over those hot months, I had fed that cat when it cried outside my window. I looked at where the nest had been. A few twigs still hung over the edge of the dark hole.

  Easter morning, Nella checked in on me. She sat on the edge of my bed, wiped the night and its dreams from my forehead with her hand. “I made coffee,” she said. “And I met Vincenzo.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows and asked, “What did you think of him?”

  She stood up and looked out the window. “He has an honest face,” she said. Then, turning around, she walked to the door. “It’s late for you to still be in bed. We have a lot to do.”

  Nella insisted on consulting the old strega-Serafina-before leaving. So we brought a ricotta cake covered with honey and candied fruits to the Fabrizis’ house, wished them a happy Easter, and said our goodbyes.

  Signore Fabrizi shook my hand while patting my shoulder and said, “America, eh? Good for you.”

  “Aldo can have my job at the rectory if he wants it,” I said.

  “You hear that, Aldo?” Signore Fabrizi yelled at his son through the closed bathroom door. He waited a minute, and then pounded on the door. “Hurry up,” he said. “Say goodbye to the man who just gave you a job.”

  His wife brought out a plate of pastries and said, “When he’s eighteen, the military will take him off our hands. T
hat will straighten the boy out. Have a cannolu,” she said.

  “No, thank you. We can’t stay,” I said. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I split one with my sister.

  When Aldo walked out, drying his hands on a towel, I told him that he was the new gardener at Saint Anthony’s. “Do a good job taking care of Don Giovanni’s vegetables,” I said.

  “I will,” he said. “Thank you.”

  At the door, Signore Fabrizi put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You turned out a fine young man,” he said. “What are you, eighteen?”

  “A few more weeks,” I said.

  He waved a half-limp hand in the air between us and said, “My goodness. A fine young man.”

  Nella kissed Signore Fabrizi’s wife on the cheek and we said our goodbyes again, and then we made our way to Serafina’s house in the Old City.

  Nella knocked on Serafina’s door. Giulia let us in and told us that we couldn’t stay long, that her grandmother was sick. The old woman sat in bed, supported by pillows. She coughed into a handkerchief and wiped the corners of her mouth.

  Nella took the seat at the table by the window. I stood with my hand on the backrest of her chair.

  “Ay, ay, ay,” Serafina said. “Come closer. Here.” She pointed at a bedside chair.

  When I sat down, her eyes grew wide. “Are they always with you?” she asked, pointing with a trembling, crooked finger. “This is what you saw the night you came to me.”

  I looked at where she pointed, but I saw nothing. “What?” I said. “Tell me, what do you see?”

  Then she grabbed my shirtsleeve and said, “They are like demons now. And they will haunt you for the rest of your life unless we rid you of this evil.”

  I pulled my arm away and asked, “How could they?”

  Serafina shrugged. “You wouldn’t let them go,” she said. She took out a pair of scissors from the bedside table drawer. “Spirits who stay too long in this world become envious of the living. You understand?” She recited a prayer to Saint Lucia and made the sign of the cross.

  Giulia set a bowl of water and a tin of oil down on the bedside table. Serafina poured three drops of oil into the water. When the droplets came together, she pierced it with the scissors and said, “I put out this malocchio. Go no further.” She leaned over and studied the bowl.

  “Is that it?” I asked. “Is it finished?”

  “Boh,” she said. “Who can say? Now you must do your part. You must let them go.”

  The call came Tuesday afternoon that our passports were ready. Don Giovanni picked them up, and then he walked us to the bus station. The sun had come out from behind some clouds. Women sat by opened windows and said, “Good day.” Vincenzo tipped his hat to them. Horses clip-clopped on the cobblestones, donkeys brayed. Car engines sputtered with grinding gears and honking horns. The air smelled damp like in the rectory garden. I took my sister’s hand in mine.

  “Thank you,” Nella said. “I know what you think of women like Serafina.”

  “You prayed for me,” I said. “And you asked the saint to pray for me. Look at the good that came of it. What I think of the strega doesn’t matter.”

  “Try,” she said. “Try to do what Serafina suggested.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  Before we boarded the bus for the airport, Don Giovanni recited a short prayer for a safe journey. Then he placed his hands on my shoulders and said, “Salvatore, you must understand, I wanted to make sure you were well looked after, so I made a phone call to Don Salafia, the parish priest in Middletown. If there is any trouble, anything at all, go to him. He can help you.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I said.

  “You have good jobs in construction waiting for you and Vincenzo,” Don Giovanni said. “And there is an apartment for all of you when you arrive, a two-bedroom.” Then he looked at Vincenzo and said, “One of you will have to take the sofa.”

  Vincenzo slapped my back and said, “I’ve slept on worse.”

  “Nella,” Don Giovanni said. “I’ve secured a place for you in Saint Sebastian School.” He put his hands up before she could speak and said, “I will wire the tuition money, but you must promise me one thing.”

  “Anything, Father,” Nella said.

  He wiped her tears away with the hem of his sleeve and said, “Write to me on occasion. I know your brother will not.”

  The plane moved fast down the runway. Nella shut her eyes and squeezed my hand as the land angled and then dropped away from the window. We dipped and turned low over the slope of Mount Etna. The plane carried us away from the citrus groves and the lobes of prickly pears at the base of the mountain, the flowering sapling vines growing up the slope through the terraces of black stone, and the rows of chestnut, pistachio, and almond trees. Old rivers of cooled lava cut through groves of oak and pine. Here and there a tree stood alone, thriving-its roots buried deep in the lava beds. Then we were alongside the smoking, snow-capped crater, moving out over Sicily to the sea sparkling in the sunlight. Never again would I see water as clear as the Mediterranean. Never again would I taste better fish than the fish from that sea.

  Nella crossed herself and prayed, and when Vincenzo laughed at her, she said, “It’s not natural, being in the sky. We’re not birds.”

  “We swim in the ocean,” he said. “Are we fish?”

  There was the mountain, so small now that I could crush it in my hands. And yet, I knew it was a lie. My ears popped. Small ice crystals formed on the window. I put my hand there. The glass felt cool. We were in the clouds-like a fog-then we broke through the clouds, above everything.

  I was as close to God as I’d ever get.

  29

  I should have told you everything.

  When we came to Middletown, we didn’t lose the feelings we had for our family or for the land we came from. We came from a long line of Sicilian farmers and bearers of the statue of Saint Sebastian. We were the best farmers, and the men in our family, they were the strongest men in our village, and our soil was the best soil in all the world. The land, she gave us everything: almonds in the orchard, grapes on the trellis in my father’s garden, with a few fig and carob trees, wild prickly pears, tomatoes, and onions between the trellis rows. I wished you could’ve seen it as I did. Felt it. We didn’t lose these things. We carried them with us like we carried the saint, deep in our bones and just as strong.

  I stood at your bedroom door, opened it. The air in your room was cooler than in the rest of the house. The white shades were down, the curtains drawn. Stress fractures spiderwebbed the blue plaster walls.

  On your desk were a stack of books written by men with foreign names-names like Sagan and Asimov. These were not Italian men. I found places for them on your double-stacked shelves. The particleboard sagged under the weight of volumes of astronomy and mythology hardcovers and paperbacks. I could feel then, in the heft of all these pages, how you had been looking for something.

  You should’ve heard it from me-that our family name was Vassallo. And that before I came along, there had always been a Vassallo in Melilli, a hardworking man who carried the statue for the feast and cultivated the almonds in the orchard-a servant of Saint Sebastian and God.

  That was in your bones, too.

  I opened the curtains and rolled up the shade. Clouds moved through the sky at a steady pace. I lifted the sash and it was like an oven door opening-the heat hit me, thick and stifling. I crawled out your bedroom window. The sun beat down. The shingles, hot. I dug my heels in, leaned against the window frame.

  I wished you could’ve seen the place where I grew up. The house on Via Marconi where I was born. I had wanted to name you after that place, after Guglielmo Marconi. Did you know about this man? Did they teach you in school that it was Italians like him who made the world? He was the father of radio. He won the Nobel Prize-the son of a Giuseppe and an Irish wife. I had wanted to name you Guglielmo, but your mother, she had her heart set on David.


  All I ever wanted from life was a nice piece of land with good soil to till, and a son to till it with me. That day in the garden with you, that day was the second-best day in my life-the first was when you were born. I was a lucky man. A lucky man.

  I should have told you everything. I should have been the pole and the support string when your little pea shoots reached out from the soil. You could have been like one of the great men, like Marconi or Vespucci. I was wrong. I wasn’t the vinedresser. I was an old pole in a discarded woodpile, and you, you were the sprig in the garden, and this, this was how a boy came to grow like a pea without a pole to climb on.

  30

  The pink, threadlike flowers of the weak-wooded mimosa tree were in full bloom. The trunk had split in the high winds of an ice storm years ago. The branches bent and swayed, but the tree, it did not break. Not completely. It had some strength left in it-strength enough to hold you when I could not.

  One day, rain might upturn that old mimosa. Or a hurricane would take it. One day, that tree would break. I should take it down soon before it damages the house, or worse. I should take care of that tree before someone gets hurt.

  Voices drifted up from the lawn. The hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck stood on end. Emanuele and Leonello watched me from my garden. They still had the eyes of boys, clear of the struggles of life, wide but not wide enough to take in the true color and light of the whole world. “I cannot help you,” I said, and I waved them off. I never could.

  There were the sounds of a car door shutting and delicate footsteps on the driveway, the car pulling away from the curb, and Nella crying, “Turiddu, Turiddu.” Her cries were the cries of a young girl, lost in a market in Syracuse.

  “Here,” I called out to my sister, and we looked at each other-her look saying what words could not say and my look saying, Are you sure? And she nodded yes, her hands in a fist over her heart, her long graying hair hiding her face from me, and I turned to my garden, but my brothers were gone.