by Marco Rafalà
VINCENZO
1
Salvatore came to see me at the café the day he lost David. It was in the afternoon, the heat wave hadn’t let up, and I had no customers. I turned from the sink when he entered. His shadow cut across the floor and tables, and crept up the opposite wall-a long, dark line that grew and snaked around the room as he walked. He sat at the bar but couldn’t get the words out. His head fell like a stone into the circle of his arms on the counter.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
When he finally spoke, he spoke into the Formica, a low rumble from his throat in the thick dialect of his village.
My hand shot up, cupping my mouth. I stumbled back into the metal sink.
Salvatore raised his head into an oblong of sunlight that stretched from the storefront window and over the wall to the bar. In this light, his gray hair thinned, and I could see the dry scalp. The crown of his head.
“Have you eaten? Let me make you something. You have to eat.”
I made a simple meal of dandelion greens and pasta. But Salvatore couldn’t hold down the food. When he ran to the bathroom, I followed and stayed with him, my hand on his back, his head over the toilet.
He wiped his mouth with a hand towel and said, “He was a good boy, my David, wasn’t he?”
“The best,” I said.
“He was smart, too,” Salvatore said. “The best in school.”
“The very best,” I said. “He was one of our own.”
I closed the café for the remainder of that week. I stayed with Salvatore, slept on the living room sofa, checked in on Nella. I was there that Thursday afternoon when Salvatore and Nella received the news that the coroner had ruled David’s death an accidental drowning. He had struck his head and fallen into the river. Maybe he had slipped, leaning over the railing. The policeman stood on the front porch, sweating in his uniform in the heat. Salvatore still would not let him come inside. The officer asked if David had been depressed, if he had been acting out or was upset about something at home or in school. The man didn’t say the word suicide, but we all knew what he was trying to tell us, and in our answers, we saw the pattern in the weave. David had never learned to swim-why else would he have been alone down there at that time of night? Maybe he had wanted to fall.
Salvatore had heard enough. He went out back, left the officer standing on the porch. His sister, close behind, called out to him. “Turiddu,” she said, and he said, “Let me work, Nella.” Little brown blotches from a lifetime of hard work under the sun covered his arms and the backs of his hands-calloused hands, dirty and cracked. He filled an empty bucket with water from the hose. He carried the bucket to the garden, set the bucket down, hard. Water sloshed over the plastic rim onto his boots. “I’m his papà,” he said. He wet his hand and wiped the leaves of the peas. He called out to his sister and she spun around, and they looked at each other from across the yard. “The work,” he said, “it’s good for me.”
It was a long, hot summer. Salvatore’s face and arms became even more tan and leathery from hours under that sun. His garden grew so many tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers and zucchini, he kept coming to the café with overflowing boxes of produce. When I told him No more, I can’t eat them fast enough, they go bad, he took them across the street to the church. Father Salafia accepted all the vegetables and herbs Salvatore grew, and what the priest didn’t keep for the rectory, he donated to the soup kitchen on Main Street, in the North End.
That August, Sam came by the café one last time, two girls with him-friends who knew David-and told me he and his mother were moving back to Stony Creek. The girls, Em and Jamie, they had come to the service at the D’Angelo Funeral Home. They were strange-looking girls who sat quietly in the back, the one with the tall blue hair comforting the delicate, raven-haired one. I never knew David had such good friends as these.
It was late in the day, the day they came to visit, and I brought them chilled Orangina and cannoli and we sat in the corner booth-David’s favorite spot. They stayed a half hour and we spoke of David only once. Sam brought him up, and Jamie held his hand to give him courage. “I should’ve been there,” Sam said. “I could’ve . . . David tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen. Why didn’t I listen?”
“Put that out of your mind,” I told him. “What happened, it was not your fault. No one is to blame.”
That fall, after school started back up and Sal’s last butternut had been harvested, that was when I first noticed the Morello boy, Rocco’s son, Tony, sitting on the church steps night after night. I watched him while I cleaned the café. Sometimes he stared out at nothing. Sometimes he studied a slip of paper in his hand for hours on end. Then he’d look at the café with dread and longing, the same way a man might look up at the stars, feeling small and alone.
Even when the first snow of the season fell, three inches in the second week of November, Tony still loitered on those steps. It was a Tuesday, early evening but already dark. The snow had eased a little, gusts of it swirling powdery white under the streetlamps. Tony had cleared a spot on the steps with his shoe, and sat shivering, his red leather jacket too thin, made for show more than warmth.
Business had been slow all day, and my last customer had cleared out over an hour ago. On the church steps, Tony blew on his bare hands. “That stronzo,” I said to myself, “he will catch pneumonia out there.”
I put on my sheepskin-lined overcoat, gray with a fat charcoal fur collar that was warm against my neck, and crossed the street. I had picked it up at the military surplus store just over the Connecticut River. I’d gone with David. What a pair we made marching out of that store, David in the peacoat I bought for him and me in this. The clerk told me it was genuine Soviet issue, as if that sort of thing mattered to me. I just wanted something that would keep me warm. Quality material, he said. They knew how to stay warm, those Russians.
“What are you doing out here?” I shouted, throwing my arms wide.
“None of your business,” Tony said. His thick black curls stuck out wild from his head, shaggy and dusted with snow.
“You just made it my business.” I motioned for him to follow and started back toward the street. When I didn’t hear him behind me, I turned around and said, “Don’t make me drag you.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Tony said. “I’d tell my father.”
“If you think I’m afraid of your father, then you’ve learned nothing. So go ahead, bring him down here. Maybe he can tell me what the hell you’re doing every night on these steps, watching my café.”
Tony hugged himself, rubbing his arms. “Please, don’t.”
I recognized the desperation in his voice, the need to find a way out of a hole he’d dug for himself. He was asking me to pull him up out of that hole but was too stupid to know it, or too proud.
“You’ll get sick if you stay out here dressed like that,” I said. “Come inside. I won’t ask again.”
This time, he followed me back to the café. We tracked snow on the tile floor I had just mopped. “Before you leave,” I said, “you’re cleaning that up.”
Tony slunk into the front corner booth.
Behind the counter, I poured a glass of wine for myself and ladled the last of my fish stew from the pot on the hot plate for Tony. I cut a lemon in half and picked out the seeds with the tip of my paring knife.
“This will warm you up.” I squeezed both lemon halves into the bowl and sat down across from Tony. He slurped a shallow spoonful of broth. He looked thinner than he had the day he and David had fought. “David always sat there,” I said, “in the spot you’re in now.”
Tony dropped the spoon and it clattered on the tabletop. Flecks of parsley mixed with olive oil and lemon juice splattered his jacket, but he didn’t wipe them off. His skin turned ashen except for his nose and ears, still red from the cold. The boy needed me to push him.
“You gave David such a hard time,” I said. “You never left him alone, never let him breathe.”
; Tony took a slip of paper from his jacket pocket and held it in his lap. “It was an accident,” he said. He slid the paper across the table. “That night. I was there. I tried to help him. I did. I swear. You have to believe me.”
I made Tony repeat what happened that night at Harbor Park. And then I made him tell me again. By the third time his eyes were red and his nose snotty and he couldn’t get to the end for all his blubbering. Somewhere, during it all, I’d crumpled David’s note in my fist so tight that the knuckles bulged white and the blue veins on the back of my hand stood out like routes on a map.
“You’re sure he said Vassallo?” I asked him. What I meant, what I couldn’t say, was Are you sure he was there because of us? But I already knew the answer. It had been there all along, in the shoebox and the pictures and the slap that I couldn’t stop or undo. In that moment and all the mistakes that led up to it. Those mistakes weren’t Salvatore’s alone. Not even Rocco’s. It had begun with me.
“I’m sure,” Tony said. His voice was scratchy.
“And I’m the only one you’ve told all this to?”
Tony wiped his nose with a napkin and nodded yes.
“Good,” I said. “The mop is in the back.”
“You were serious about that?”
I knew this kid, better than he knew himself. Better than even his own father knew him. That man was hard on him, but hard in a mindless way. A boot on the neck must be a guiding force. “If I have to get up-” I said. I bit the side of my hand, a wordless threat that warned, If I catch you, I will ruin you with my hands.
Tony cleaned the floor. Outside, fat snowflakes fell as slow as turtles. Snowdrifts curled into the corners of the windows. Veins of ice crept across the glass. I poured more wine. David’s crinkled note sat on the table in front of me. A torn piece of blue-lined notebook paper. His tight letters bled at the sweat-stained edges. My promise to Salvatore and Nella to guard our secrets, my word-my currency-it made me a poor man in the end.
2
In this life, you were both the boot on the neck, and the neck. This was the essence of discipline and war. The boot promised purpose and direction. It demanded obedience, provided order. I was a man with a talent for killing other men. This was the one thing in life I was ever good at. Lift the pressure on the neck even a little and you set a man like that adrift. This family, they never stood a chance. Not with a man like me in their life. David’s death sentence was set the moment I found his father as a boy in the scope of my rifle.
It started on that day in Melilli, late July 1943. I ended up there by chance, falling in with three German soldiers after escaping Noto. We were not much of a fighting force, more like ragged dolls some child had outgrown and tossed aside.
I took the sniper’s position at the second-story window of an abandoned farmhouse above the village. I swung my rifle scope around the panorama of houses with hand-chiseled walls of dry stone enclosing each parcel of rocky land where groves of prickly pear and pistachio and fig trees grew. A boy of eight or nine years old squatted behind the flat spiny lobes of prickly pears with his pants down around his ankles. He saw the Germans-Lieutenant Krause and his two men-drag the corpse of an American soldier outside and drop it in the dirt by a dry well. A paratrooper by the look of his uniform, scattered far from his unit like a leaf in the wind. The boy pulled his pants back up in a hurry. He shielded his eyes from the sunlight glinting off the lens of my scope. I placed my finger to my lips and motioned for him to stay down.
Lieutenant Krause signaled up at me that he was taking his men to the bunker we’d spotted by the shore on our first sweep of the village. When the Germans were out of sight, I waved the boy inside, but he shook his head no. I leaned my rifle against the wall and went out to him. Filthy clothes hung like rags off his thin frame. He wore a hard look on his face, dark eyebrows drawn together and lips pursed tight. I pinched my nose and said, “Who made that stink? Was it you?”
The boy didn’t crack a smile. I licked my thumb and tried wiping dirt from the boy’s cheek, but he turned his head away from me. And I saw in the set of his scraped chin, in the way his fists clenched at his sides, the lines of boys from my own childhood standing at attention at the parade grounds of the Fascist youth brigade-the Balilla-in Rome. That same combination of pride and courage and determination.
“Where are your parents?” I asked him.
When he didn’t answer, I took a chocolate bar from my jacket pocket and waved it in the air. The boy reached for it, but I pulled it back from his grasp and repeated my question.
“The cave,” he said.
I gave him the chocolate. He tore into the wrapper. Then I held out my hand for him and said, “Come. It’s not safe here.”
The boy led me up an ancient footpath, bordered by terraced rows of dull-green olive trees, the trunks knotted and gnarled, the branches twisted into monstrous shapes. They looked like sculptures coiling from the rugged earth. Caves dotted the mountainside path. Music drifted down from one of those caves, a cheerless guitar and the low, throaty voice of a fisherman. He sang of an invasion at the marina and lamented his broken shoes, worn out from fleeing the invaders. Women gathered clothes off clotheslines strung between the trees. Men smoked cigarettes and stood doleful watch over their unfurrowed fields in the low-lying land beneath the village.
“Salvatore.” A man stepped out from behind the trunk of a centuries-old olive tree. He had a rigid, pockmarked face, black hair, and a bulbous nose.
Beside me, the boy ducked his head. The man, his father, grabbed him by the neck of his torn shirt. “What are you doing out here?” He held his son’s face, turned it left and right, examining the chocolate stains around the boy’s mouth. Then the man looked up at me, took me in-my ragged uniform, my haggard face, and the pistol holstered at my hip. “Get inside,” he snapped at his son. “And wash up.”
Salvatore took two steps into the cave that was, up until now, obscured by the enormous tree, and then stopped. He stood in the darkness, one shoulder pressed against jagged limestone, and watched me.
The man introduced himself as Raphael. He thanked me for seeing his son back to him.
Artillery shells thundered in the distance, a tragic percussion for the old folk song, a warning in the melody. “Soon it won’t be safe,” I said, “not even in these caves.”
Raphael waved my concern away. “Soldiers came to our village last week,” he said. “We prayed for help, and you know what happened?” Raphael gave a crooked-toothed grin and said with admiration, “An American fell from the sky, pulled out of the clouds by the saint. He was one man against half a dozen men.”
“The American is dead,” I said.
Raphael nodded yes. “But we are still here. You understand?” Then he ushered me inside the cave. We sat on wooden crates by a stone fire pit. He shared a meal with me of almonds and stale bread and good red wine from a tray on a crate set between us. His children gathered from the dark corners of the cave. Raphael broke crusts of bread from the hard loaf and handed them out. Then he retold the tale of their patron saint. The little ones like wild-growing olive shoots around the feet of their father.
The twins each tugged on one of their father’s pant legs and begged him to tell it again. Nella and Salvatore agreed with their siblings. They never tired of hearing about their saint, as I had never tired of my father’s stories from Greek and Roman mythology.
Raphael laughed and said, “Another time. Another time.” Then he led me through a narrow, bending passage. Salvatore followed at my heels. I stooped into a low-ceilinged chamber where candle drippings crusted the stone floor. Raphael held his lantern aloft. It threw a flickering light on a prehistoric painting of a stick-figure man on the far wall. The washed-out oval head listed to one side. The forearms were missing. The figure stood on spindly legs the width of one pigmented finger stroke. Lines drew outward like the rays of the sun from the figure’s chest.
Salvatore took my arm and pulled me toward the cave art. “See
the arrows?” he said. “That’s Saint Sebastian.”
Stories possessed an uncontested power over the young. I knew this well from my own life at that age-recognized the wide eyes, the jaw hanging open. How that story must have played in his mind like some film spooling off a reel in a dark cinema.
3
Outside, the music had stopped. The guitar player now sat in an old chair in the shade of an olive tree, legs crossed. He held his instrument close, bent his ear to the strings while working to adjust them back into tune. An older man stood over him and implored the young musician to please play something else. The same song, all day, every day, since the American died, it was too much. It was driving him mad. “Pasqualino,” he said. “Why don’t you play something upbeat for a change? Something, I don’t know, happy.”
“Something happy? Nino, what is there to be happy about, eh?”
Raphael stood-resolute and surefooted-at the mouth of his cave. He lit a half-smoked cigarette and watched the two men argue. Over his shoulder, the shadows of his family wavered in firelight. A barrage of distant gunfire echoed throughout the mountain village.
“Take this,” I said. I unholstered my pistol and offered it to him.
“You think I don’t know what’s coming.” Raphael exhaled cigarette smoke out of his nostrils. “I know, more than you think.” He took a thick book from the satchel that hung at his waist. The leather binding was old and torn, the stitches loose. He had painted the cover in white folk sigils. These old symbols of protection he redrew each year to renew their power. “My father gave me this book,” he said, opening it with great care. The pages curved in waves, rough like the wicked sea that had carried me here with hundreds of soldiers just like me. “His father gave it to him, who got it from his father. It has always been so, so it has always been.” In the book, he showed me an image of an ancient banner, the reds and yellows fading. “This is Sicily,” he said. “My father called it the star with three points.” He touched the three legs bent at the knees and joined in the center by the head of Medusa. “The jewel of the Mediterranean, beautiful and cursed.” Soil was caked under his fingernails and around the cracked cuticles. His head bowed under the weight his eyes held for the precious stone that bore him up, his island. “And this,” he said. He turned the page to a picture of their patron saint and kissed it. “This is Melilli.”