How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  When Nella was done, she stood and surveyed her work. The new pane was cleaner than the others. Through it she saw the garden where Tony’s son had stood, a blade of young grass among her brother’s weeds.

  “Go on then,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

  Vincenzo shook his head. “Not sure what you keep me around for,” he said. He knelt before the door, pressed his palm against the glass in the glare of the sun. The sparse strands of his white hair swept back off his high forehead. Time had creased his face like a crumpled paper bag. Still she saw in him the shape of that young soldier who came for her and Salvatore in Syracuse. The one her brother was sure the saint had sent to guide their path to a new life.

  But she was old now, too. Sometimes, she forgot that. Sometimes, she looked at herself in the mirror and wondered what strange old woman this was, staring back at her.

  “Tony’s boy was here again,” she said.

  Vincenzo’s shoulders stiffened. “He knows he shouldn’t be here. His father and I agreed. This place, it isn’t good for him. I’ll talk to Tony.”

  “He’s just a boy,” Nella said. The words felt familiar on her tongue. She’d said them to Vincenzo so many years before about Tony. “Let me handle it.”

  “He’s curious, the way David was curious.” There was a tremor in Vincenzo’s voice, the slightest crack. But he swallowed back the moment, took control of himself again. He dusted off her work with a rag. “Maybe next time it’s not just a window that breaks. Maybe he gets hurt. Maybe he hurts someone by mistake.”

  Sunlight filtered through the pane. She saw their reflections in the window, and in the window the faint morning star-always brightest in the twilight hours before dawn-the star that never set.

  “I miss them,” Nella said.

  Vincenzo nodded his chin at her.

  Nella went home, leaving Vincenzo at her brother’s house to clean up after her. She dressed for church-a peach sweater set and matching paisley skirt down to her ankles with a brown knitted lace shawl-and walked to the rectory. She carried a pan of ricotta cake for the church auction. Every year she baked a cake or a tray of cookies to help raise money for the church, and no one but Vincenzo ever bid, no one wanting to risk the taste of her family’s curse. He sat in the front row, away from the tables under the tent. His liver-spotted hand, the only hand that ever shot up at the cry of the auctioneer. Twenty dollars, no more. Every year. Still, she made something special for the feast. She helped Saint Sebastian Church in some small way, and that was all that mattered.

  She left the cake with Don Salafia. He took the pan and thanked her and closed the door. He was in a hurry to prepare for the eleven o’clock Mass. She stood for a time on the veranda, looking at the empty rides, the deserted game booths and food tents, and she thought of Tony’s boy. She wondered if after she was gone-the last of the Vassallos-if the rancor would end, the curse lifted, or if they would all continue paying for broken stone, even in death.

  After the Mass held in honor of Saint Sebastian, Nella stood at the top of the church steps and watched the faithful pour down the street-a deluge of some three hundred men, women, and children. She caught a glimpse of her husband among them, pumping the air with his fists full of flowers. For a moment, she thought she saw Salvatore beside him, the hair gray and receding from his widow’s peak, the nose large and aquiline, and the tight, fierce line of his jaw. It was the profile of a hardheaded man, a man who treasured away in his heart the hardened lessons of his youth. The kind of man who held his fist on high, a violent gesture but for the bouquet choking in his grip.

  The runners flooded the front of the church, chanting and crying for their saint. When the bearers carried the statue out, the Nuri cheered and followed the procession around the block. The church bells pealed. The parking lot came alive as the festival began. Music blared from carnival rides and game booths. The air smelled of smoky grilled sausages and fried sugared dough.

  She let the crowds carry her. They moved down the stairs, past the Tilt-A-Whirl and bumper cars, the Ferris wheel and carousel. Squeals of delight from children drowned out the music from the calliope as it played. She’d ridden the carousel once with David-after he’d eaten cotton candy and candied apples-and he’d thrown up on her shoes. She’d sat on the curb with him, rubbed his back while he drank club soda to calm his stomach. And then he’d begged her to let him ride one more time.

  A lump caught in her throat like she’d swallowed a stone. She turned away. Heavy clouds moved in from the north, but they held their rain. She shook off the multitude and walked alone. She left the festival by the side of the main stage, coming out along the block of Pearl Street closed to traffic. It was not yet time for the auction.

  At the corner stood an elm on the rectory lawn, where she stopped and listened to the old men gathered on the veranda telling stories to their grandchildren. She recognized them-all the faces of the families from Melilli she had known. Cardella. Santangelo. Morello. The other bearers of the statue. Even after all these years, just the sight of Rocco Morello made the scars on her arm ache. His grandson-Tony’s boy-sat at his feet, picking white paint chips from the floorboard with his thumbnail.

  The men talked over one another in loud, graveled voices. They didn’t see her behind the tree, listening.

  “The Magnano boy was the first from Melilli to settle in Middletown,” Constantino Cardella said. “He ran off with pirates-”

  “No, he stowed away on a freighter,” Rocco said. “Everyone knows that.” He lit a cigarette and extinguished the match with a wave of his crooked-fingered hand. “A fireman’s family took the boy in,” he said. “They raised him up and he became a fireman. But when he started to think of the pain he had caused his parents by running away, after all they’d done for him, a roof over his head and food on the table, he felt ashamed. He went to the priest, confessed his sins, and asked for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and you know what the priest said? The priest said, ‘Write your parents, tell them what you told me, and then save your wages and bring them here.’ So Magnano worked hard and saved. He brought his parents over. They came and brought their cousins over, and that’s how all of us got here.”

  “Tell us about the statue,” Tony’s boy said.

  “Yeah,” the pear-shaped Santangelo boy agreed. He wiped his pizza mouth with his T-shirt. “Tell us that one.”

  And so Rocco told the children the story of how the statue came to Melilli and how, at the end of the Second World War, bandits broke into the church and blew the statue to pieces with dynamite. Behind the tree, Nella twisted the picot edge of her shawl. She felt a long-cooled fire rising in her throat.

  “Were you there? Did you see it?” Tony’s boy asked. He rocked back on his knees, looking up at his grandfather.

  Rocco nodded his head yes. “I saw it,” he said. He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled a ribbon of curling smoke at the porch ceiling. “I saw the criminals, too, running away into the mountains.” He watched the smoke through squinted eyes. “I will never forget the dirty faces of those two men.”

  “Why’d they do it?” Tony’s boy asked.

  “Boh,” Rocco said. “Why? Who knows why?”

  Nella moved without thinking. She stepped into the open, pressing her back into the bark of the elm. “You know that’s not true,” she said.

  Everyone turned to stare at her. The old men, their fat faces quivering into frowns, made the mano di cornuto-the horned hand gesture of protection against the malocchio. The children, their mouths hanging open, sat gorgonized by her presence among them.

  She pushed the shawl and sleeve of her sweater down. The flesh of her upper arm wobbled, the skin knotted and gnarled with red scar tissue. She fixed her gaze on Rocco.

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the yellow glass of the standing ashtray. The smoky veil curled around his bent fingers. He cleared phlegm from his throat and hid his disfigured hands in the pockets of his suit jacket.

  “That’s eno
ugh,” Don Salafia said. He stood behind the screen door in his black priest’s frock and asked Rocco to fetch more folding chairs from the basement. Then he shooed the old men away, saying, “You gossip like women in your old age.” And they rose from their seats like a flush of birds from shrubbery, collected their grandchildren, and shuffled into the festival crowd, chastened by age and the weight of secrets.

  Tony’s boy-wide-eyed and curious-approached Nella. He looked at the old burn marks on her arm. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” Nella said. Then she knelt in the grass so she was his size, looking up at him slightly. His hard face made her think of Sicily. All the boys in Melilli had such grim faces when she was a little girl. But this boy, he had been born here, like his father. He should look more American, she thought. He should grow tall and handsome. He should go to college, find a good-paying job and a nice girl to marry. He should settle down, make a good life. “Why do you keep coming to my brother’s house?” she asked him. “What do you want?”

  “Will you tell me the real story?”

  “And if I told you,” she said, “no more sneaking around the house, breaking windows?”

  “That was an accident,” he said. “Please don’t tell my dad.”

  She pushed herself up to standing and covered her arm with her sweater and shawl. “If I tell you all my secrets,” she said, “you have to tell someone yours. It should be your papà, no?” Then she held out her hand for him, and he took it. His hand, warm and small in hers, reminded her of David’s. David had asked her for the same thing—the real story—and she had given him only a dusty shoebox of secrets. But maybe it was time, and maybe there was finally a chance, for a new Melilli here.

  Together, Nella and Tony’s boy walked to Vincenzo’s café and sat down at one of the umbrellaed tables. Vincenzo had the new overhead doors open, and Nella saw him through the sheer curtain pulled over the length of the opening. He was busy, tending to a rush of customers. She patted the boy’s arm. Aspetta. Then she slipped inside, steamed milk for hot cocoa, and returned with two steaming cups and a plate of almond cookies. She took a seat. Clouds hung low in sun-hazed furrows. The curtain billowed in a damp breeze. The boy hunched at the table with his chin on his hands and watched Nella. She held the cup. It warmed her. “I had three brothers,” she began.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is a work of fiction inspired by the stories my father told me as a child—unrelated until this book wove an imagined version of them together. Where I altered facts and geography to suit the needs of the fiction, I did so with the utmost respect and admiration for the people of Melilli and their experiences.

  During the Allied invasion of Sicily in the Second World War, my father hid with his siblings and parents and neighbors in the many caves on the outskirts of their village. Surviving that difficult time is one of the many miracles they ascribe to their patron saint, Sebastian. My father often spoke of how the statue of Saint Sebastian came to Melilli, how it was borne—and has always been borne—by all the people of the village. The four families who live at the heart of that myth in this novel do not exist in the real myth of the statue. Similarly, the identity of the conspirator who broke into the church after the war and destroyed the statue remains unknown except in my version of events. Finally, among the many stories my father told me, the one of his cousins who perished while playing with an unexploded shell has never left me. Their story is sacrosanct and is not portrayed in this work.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For her unwavering faith, love, and support, I am indebted to Camellia Phillips, who read every draft of this novel and never stopped believing in it or me. She showed me the way out of labyrinths of my own making. Without her wisdom and insight, I would be forever lost, this book unfinished.

  For the exceptional teachers and mentors in my life who helped me find my way through the earliest versions of this novel, I am forever thankful to Alexander Chee, Frederic Tuten, Stephen Wright, David Gates, Dani Shapiro, Helen Schulman, Dale Peck, Laura Ress, and Susan Letzler Cole.

  For their astute readings and insights, I thank Randall Lotowycz, Kathy Pories, Porochista Khakpour, Reinhardt Suarez, Darla Bruno, John Reed, Nancy Hightower, Leah Umansky, Scott Larner, Lee Matthew Goldberg, Dani Grammerstorf French, Elizabeth Castoria, Nicole Audrey Spector, Yew Leong Lee, Jason Napoli Brooks, Jim Freed, Scott Geiger, Gary Ford, Greg Sanders, Nick Burd, Christine Condon, Meredith Franco Meyers, Connor Coyne, Amanda Miller, Angela Starita, Stéphanie Abou, Laura Tisdel, Andrea Boudin, Josephine Ishmon, Elizabeth Wine, and John Bennett.

  I am humbled and grateful for the friendship and support I’ve received over the years from Victoria Redel, Brando Skyhorse, Luis Jaramillo, Sam J. Miller, Christopher Phillips, Daydre Phillips, Stephen Tolkin, Dan Videtto, Jeff Romano, Shay Hamilton, Michael Arafeh, Eric Sanders, Frank Giordano, Francis Shanoff, Brian Targonsky, James Schafer, Michael Patnaude, Nick Villarama, Graham Thompson, Edward Pichulo, David Marshall, Matthew Martin, Jennifer Martin, Jennifer Tobits, Anthony LaPila, Todd Pierce, Clint Paseos, Chris Flood, David Flood, Emily Marye, Giuseppe Salvitti, Ellen Sleight, Ronna Wineburg, Danielle Ofri, Joel Allegretti, Julia Phillips, Melissa Rivero, Sara Faring, Gina Marie Guadagnino, and the many wonderful authors who have read at the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series and shared their words and wisdom.

  Thank you to Hafizah Geter, my brilliant editor, and everyone at Little A, and to Mark Gottlieb, my agent, of Trident Media Group.

  Thank you to my parents, my brother and sister, my grandparents, and to my many aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  Special thanks to George Trakas for the use of his home in Amherst, where I wrote parts of this novel, and for the tremendous dinners—clams and oysters—he prepared there and here in New York City. Also to Jason Everman and David Parke, for their military expertise and friendship.

  I am also grateful to Brian Fender and Barbara Temos—your words of encouragement in support of me and this novel during graduate school and beyond kept me going. I miss you both very much.

  And for their fellowship, I thank Jameson Proctor, Michael Heilemann, Susie Lim, David Natter, Nada O’Neal, Andy Farrell, James Skinner, Kimber VanRy, Michael Davey, and Michael Demko.

  Finally, my eternal gratitude to Professor Gaetano Cipolla for his generous assistance and for all he does to promote and preserve Sicilian language and culture. Thanks also to the Scuola Italiana del Greenwich Village, and to the faculty and students of The New School’s MFA program.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2018 Jeffrey Mosier Photography

  Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American, novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in fiction from The New School and is a cocurator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Fires End is his debut novel. For more information, visit www.marcorafala.com.