by Marco Rafalà
On the way home, large two-family houses with pitted and worn aluminum siding cast long shadows over us. Bare maple trees lined the cracked sidewalk, their roots pushing up whole blocks of the pavement. Zia Nella chose each step carefully. Her mouth twitched. The small, delicate movements of her gloved hands were like a conductor leading an orchestra through the softest passage in a piece of music as whole sections of the symphony tapered off and the bow of a lone violin swept the melody down. In her mind, she was still talking to the priest.
“What did you tell my father about Sam?” I asked.
She folded her hands in front of her, fingers interlaced. “Only that he was a nice boy for a Protestant, and your friend.” She couldn’t keep her hands still for long. They arced around her face with the grace of a ballerina as she spoke. “It’s nice to see you have friends. But the hair, you had such beautiful hair, like the twins—” She stroked the ends of her own long black hair, shot through with gray. “Well, it will grow back.”
“Sam had nothing to do with the Mohawk. It was my idea.”
“But someone put this idea in your head, no?” She tapped my temple with a finger, the conductor’s baton demanding attention. “What would make you want to do that to yourself?”
We stopped at a four-way intersection. At my feet, black carpenter ants swarmed a wounded beetle. The beetle scrabbled at the pavement, but with only two good legs, all it could hope for was to complete a tiny circle before the ants dragged it into the brown grass.
My father had left me dry toast and a plate of fried eggs covered in aluminum foil on the kitchen table. He was on a ladder in the backyard, clearing out the gutters. In the low-slung basement, I fed the wood-burning stove with a split of firewood from the woodpile. The cellar smelled smoky and sweet—a mixture of warm stone, damp earth, and fermenting grapes. I pulled Tony’s note from my jeans pocket and smoothed the crumpled paper flat on a thick slab of granite on the workbench under the stairs. Your dead, Marconi. With my chewed-up ballpoint pen, I corrected Tony’s grammar: You’re dead.
The ceiling boards creaked as my father came inside the house.
“What are you doing down there?” he called out from the cellar door.
“Nothing,” I said and shoved the note back into my pocket.
He clomped down the narrow stairs. “I need a bottle of wine for Vincenzo,” he said.
My father’s wood basket wine press and hand-cranked crusher marked the entrance to the storage room he’d built with cinder blocks. The room was cool and dark. He pulled the chain and the bare bulb overhead flickered on. In the far corner, two oak barrels of aging wine with wooden barrel spigots lay on their sides on a pine-board rack. A chest freezer stocked full of vegetables from his garden sat under cobwebbed shelves of bottled wine. There was a bottle stored there for me—a fat jug of brick-red wine—sealed with rag and cork and marked with my name in black permanent marker on a strip of masking tape.
“I made that the year you were born,” he said. “Your bottle is in that difficult stage.” He looked me over like I was one of his dusty bottles on the shelf and he was trying to decide if I was worth opening. “Pretty soon,” he said. And he seesawed his hand from left to right. “A few months, maybe another year, we can open it and see what kind of wine we get.”
But he already knew what kind he’d get. More vinegar than wine, something that was only good for cooking where you wouldn’t taste the sour. I grabbed a bottle for Vincenzo and followed my father back up to the kitchen. On the hollow wooden staircase, I ran my free hand along the basement wall’s large jagged stones. Bits of our foundation’s cracked masonry crumbled through my fingers in a fine dust.
The next day in school, I met Sam at his locker before homeroom. A candy-blue streak shot through his flop of blond hair.
“Cool color,” I said. Then I palmed the stubble on my scalp. “Can’t exactly hide a Mohawk.”
“Dude,” he said. “That shaved head is righteous.”
Locker doors clanked and slammed shut. A river of students shouted over each other’s heads. They crashed around us—two scoured boulders in the rapids, pitted and worn but immovable.
Later, as the seventh-period warning bell rang, I slipped the note into Tony’s locker.
8
Mr. Clark turned from the blackboard as I walked into class late. He reminded me about our homework, and I got up and added my assignment to the pile on his desk—my answers to a series of questions at the end of the chapter we’d just read. The chapter was about the early formation of the Earth and the moon and how the moon had been formed from a cataclysmic event—a giant asteroid had struck the still-molten Earth and broken off a piece of the planet itself. And that piece became the moon, trapped in Earth’s gravity, a part of the Earth that could never return home but could never escape either.
“David,” Mr. Clark said. “How can scientists determine the age of the moon?”
“Radiometric dating.”
“That’s correct,” he said, and then he chided me for my lateness and the class for not correctly answering the question. A boy sitting in the back row wondered aloud why I had to make them all look bad.
It wasn’t the first time someone had said something like that about me. But I was a different boy, one who finally had the courage to give it back. “Why do you have to make it so easy?” I said.
The class broke out into a collective ooohhh.
Mr. Clark frowned a wrinkled brow at me, like he was puzzling out what had happened to his best student, where that quiet boy had gone. “That’s enough,” he said. “So, who besides David can tell us what radiometric dating is? Hint, it has nothing to do with your Saturday night plans.”
In the hall, Tony and Chris plowed through the crowd and shouldered Sam and me into our lockers.
“Watch out, fairies,” Tony said.
Chris walked backward and smirked at us. “Found a boyfriend, Marconi?”
“Step off,” I said.
Tony made an about-face. “Or what?”
I slammed my locker shut and took a step forward, brandishing a textbook.
“They’re not worth detention.” Sam tugged at my sleeve.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Tony said.
Sam pulled me into the river of students flowing by. Behind me, Tony opened his locker.
In the back row of the bus, Tony sat red faced. Beside him Chris shot spitballs at me through a straw. He taunted me, calling me Kojak, and boasted that my melon was perfect for target practice. I crumpled notebook paper in my fist, turned around, and threw it at Chris. “Quit it,” I said.
Chris ducked, raising an arm to shield his face.
Tony caught the paper ball. “Leave him alone,” he said. “Little bitch is mine.”
“Face front or you’re off,” the bus driver shouted at me. He eyeballed me in the overhead mirror.
I slouched down low and started peeling at a tear in the green vinyl seat cover, picking out the bile-yellow foam padding. The crumpled paper whipped over the top of the seat back and into my lap, and the driver did nothing. The page crinkled as I smoothed it over the seat to see the hastily drawn circle with two X’s for eyes and a frowning line for a mouth.
At my stop, Tony followed me off the bus—two stops before his own, his footsteps ghosting mine. Run-down two-family houses and old maple trees cast long shadows across the cracked and pebbled pavement. I walked faster. So did Tony. He stepped on the back of my sneaker, and my heel slipped out of the shoe.
“You’re supposed to leave me alone,” I said. I knelt and tugged the folded canvas back over my heel. Tony’s shadow enveloped me but he kept his distance. “That’s what your father told you, right? Because he’s afraid of my father.”
“You think you’re so fucking smart,” Tony said. “You think you fucking know everything, don’t you?”
I flipped Tony the bird over my shoulder as I walked away.
“Do that to my face,” he said. He pulled on my shoulder an
d spun me around, and I swung at his fat head, but he grabbed my fist and twisted my arm behind my back. “My father’s not afraid of some little bastard he chased out of Melilli.”
It was a strange thing for him to say, the weakest taunt he’d ever come up with. And one that was so wrong. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “He’s not even from there, doofus.” I stomped on the toe of his pristine white Reeboks.
Tony swore and his grip loosened, but only for a second before he forced me down to the strip of brown lawn between the sidewalk and the curb. With a knee to my back, he crushed the breath out of me. My cheek ground into the dead grass. He yanked my hand up to my shoulder blade, and I cried out—so fast I cried out. I hadn’t even landed a punch. “You know nothing,” he said. He pulled harder. I flailed beneath him like a fish flopping around in the bottom of a fisherman’s bucket, desperate to return to the salty sea. He was so heavy. I couldn’t breathe. And I couldn’t stop the tears. But it wasn’t the pain that made me cry, though my arm burned like my muscles were on fire. No, it was because I was that twig boy again and Tony had just snapped me in half.
“My father isn’t afraid of anyone,” Tony said.
“Okay,” I blubbered. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“We’re not afraid of anyone.” He gave my arm one last twist and then let me go.
9
In my bedroom, I crawled under the covers and refused to get out of bed for dinner. My father sat on the mattress edge and felt my forehead with his thick palm and said, “No fever.” He let air out of his nostrils. A huffing, fire-breathing dragon. “Where does it hurt?”
I rolled away from him. “Let me sleep.”
“Did you get into another fight?”
“No,” I said. “Now leave me alone.”
He touched my shoulder lightly but then pulled away. He sighed. “Get some sleep.”
I yanked the covers up over my head and slept until noon the next day. The house smelled of simmering chicken broth with garlic and parsley. My zia bustled in the kitchen. The stars on my ceiling had stopped glowing hours ago, and I could no longer see my mother and myself in those ordinary stickers. This was how flat the night sky would be when all the stars were dead stars, furnaces extinguished. A book with all the words erased. The stories those stars told, lost. If only the story of what just happened could be so easily stamped out.
Mr. Clark was right. My fists weren’t worth much after all. I sat up in bed, held my knees to my chest, and rested my cheek on my knees. My arm and shoulder still ached, an echo of Tony just under my skin, still holding me down.
At the card table in the kitchen, Zia Nella placed a bowl of her minestrone in front of me. Then she felt my forehead, kissed the top of my shaved head, and sat down beside me. She hunched over her own bowl, slurped the oily broth and noodles. “Eat,” she said.
When we were done, we moved into the living room. I spun the television dial. Soap operas flickered into talk shows and turned into blue static with dark horizontal lines dancing up the screen. On PBS I found Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, all thirteen episodes back to back. I sank into the couch, my head on my zia’s shoulder. She watched with me. Sagan talked about how supernovas seed the universe with the materials for life. My zia wanted to know how he could know that. “It’s impossible to know for sure,” she said.
And I said, “It’s a neat idea to be made of stars. Don’t you think?” I wanted that furnace inside me—a piece of a star’s fusion reactor.
She tsked. “Be careful with ideas. You get an idea stuck in your head, and goodbye, world.” She rubbed her palms together the way my father did when he told me how people like us, people born donkeys, had to work hard their whole lives—and here was where he rubbed his palms together—until one day, that’s it. Fini. No more life.
10
Before my zia left, I asked her if she and my father were from Melilli, and she said, “Where did you hear that?” And I told her I’d heard it from Tony. Then she pulled her hair back with a rubber band and tugged it tight against her scalp. “Come,” she said.
My father kept his bedroom walls bare, and the floor swept clean. His bed, neatly made, stood centered under the window. Zia Nella pulled out a full laundry basket from the closet to get at a cardboard box in the back. Inside, a mildewed shoebox peppered with dust was nestled among stacks of glue-bound bulletins commemorating the annual Feast of Saint Sebastian. The church printed them each May for the weekend of the festival. My father had saved every bulletin going back to 1952.
He never took me to the festival. It was always too noisy for him or too crowded, or he was too tired to go. My zia and ziu took me on Sundays to watch the statue of Saint Sebastian paraded around the block, but Vincenzo took me on the rides. He’d sit with me on the Ferris wheel Friday evenings when the feast officially opened. He’d ask me about school. He’d give me tickets for all the rides and games and food I wanted. We’d stay up late together Sunday nights for a last spin on the Ferris wheel before the closing of the festival, the one night out of the school year my father let me stay up past ten o’clock. I imagined my father going to the festival without me, maybe late opening night or early before the crowds arrived, to pick up a bulletin each year. Or maybe my zia brought one back for him, a silent pact that she would brave the crowds and he would stay home, alone with the vegetables in his garden.
We used to go together, all of us, when my mother was alive.
Zia Nella took the top bulletin off the stack, the one from last year’s feast, and flipped to the memorials in the back. She sent my mother’s picture in every year. In Loving Memory of Eileen Marconi. “She was so beautiful,” my zia said. She touched the small, grainy headshot. This was the only photo of my mother that we had—the one my zia had saved. In the black-and-white picture, my mother’s hair looked gray, the fiery red cooled to ash. You are missed. Salvatore & David Marconi. Antonella & Frank Lombardo.
She put back the bulletin and took out the shoebox. She blew dust from its dented lid. Written there in faintly drawn pen strokes were my father’s name and an address for an apartment on Ferry Street in downtown’s North End. The return address was in Melilli, Sicily, from someone named Fiorilla.
“The war was bad,” Zia Nella said. “Bad for everyone, but for some, it never ended.” She held the shoebox in her lap and set the lid aside. A tarnished silver cross teetered atop a messy pile of old black-and-white photographs. She held the cross in her open palm. “After the twins died, our parents, they got sick.” She made a fist around the cross and held it to her heart. “In here, they were sick in here, you understand?” And she tapped her fist against her chest. “They couldn’t take care of us, and your father, he thought this was all his fault. Me? I blame the day the war came to Melilli for everything, even your mother’s death. The curse of the war took her, too.” She raised the cross to her lips and kissed it.
My father’s craggy face was easy to read—he called it his labirinto, a labyrinth of deep lines born of long-held sorrows that grew deeper and longer all the years of his life—but my zia, inside, she was a beach of stones in every size and shape and color you could imagine. You could spend a lifetime combing those shores and never find the one rock that held the secret of what my zia was really thinking. Sometimes you got lucky, though, and the right stone washed up at your feet.
“Melilli,” she said, weighing the word on her tongue. “That was our life before. We left all that behind when we came here. These pictures are all we have left. They are our secret. You understand?”
She showed me portraits of people I’d never seen before, standing in stiff positions against smooth sepia backdrops. Careful not to damage the frail edges, she held one out for me to see. She smiled at the peasant man in the photograph holding a basket of almonds. “This is my nonnu,” she said. “Here he is with my nonna.” She pointed at a photo of a seated elderly couple with mouths turned down in frowns, faces crumpled and sagging under the weight of old age. Then my zia
moved past a dapper young man in a dark suit, his flat cap at a jaunty angle, to a family snapshot taken during the Saint Sebastian festival.
In it were two young boys—twins—and a little girl who held her mother’s hand, and two grinning older boys, seven, maybe eight, years old. The taller boy, the spitting image of Tony Morello, had his arm around the other, my father. They stood on a crowded lot. Behind them, four men carried the statue of their saint on a wooden pallet hefted on their shoulders.
On the back of the photograph someone had written Melilli, 1941 and the names: Leonello, Emanuele, Antonella, Giuseppina, Salvatore, and Rocco.
Melilli. 1941. My father and Rocco Morello, their story—and mine, too—went all the way back to that time and place. Tony was right.
11
For the first time in my life, I wanted to talk with Tony Morello. Really talk, not just hurl insults. In the halls at school, I watched him from a distance. The smaller boys—and we were all smaller than Tony—parted around him wherever he went. They exchanged nervous, shifting glances that only resolved when they spotted me. I had a perpetual target on my back, and they knew it. Chris increased the size of Tony’s mass even more. Tony walked taller and roared louder in the company of Chris Cardella. That two-headed troll lumbered less, swaggered more. His insults, peppered with minchia and other vulgar Sicilian expressions, cut deeper and echoed off the linoleum-tiled floor and locker-lined walls. But alone Tony was different. Alone he shrunk, just a little, and glowered in silence.
Thursday afternoon, after the second warning bell between fifth and sixth periods, Tony stood at his locker, one hand gripping the top of the door while he made a show of rummaging through textbooks and spiral notebooks and loose sheets of paper. The halls emptied. Tony shut the door and spun the combination dial. He tugged the latch, then turned away. At the closed stairwell doors, he stared through the long, narrow window, as if contemplating making a run for it down the concrete steps and outside.
