How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  13

  Outside Sam’s house, his silhouette and that of his mother seated at the dinner table flitted across the shade drawn over the large front window, its red shutters folded back like accordion bellows against the brick. Sam’s shadow threw its arms out wide. The profile of his mother’s head leaned back as if in laughter. If my mother and my long-ago uncles hadn’t died, maybe my house would be like that, too—warm all the time.

  I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my black sweatshirt and left, picking flowers out of people’s front yards—early red tulips and yellow daffodils and pink azaleas. My mother used to slip into Indian Hill Cemetery late at night for stargazing, before she met my father. When she got sick, she made him promise to bury her at Indian Hill so she could be under the stars with the old brownstone chapel tucked away on the hillside and the gnarled trunks of thick old trees.

  Thumping beats boomed from the staggered rows of a squat, brown university housing complex. Scraggly-haired students in leather jackets and studded denim huddled in the courtyard, red plastic cups and cigarettes in hand. They leaned into each other with ease—pale faces and steaming mouths. A girl with a shaved head in a black trench coat and stomping black boots whirled in a corner, adrift on the party’s wild eddies. Sam’s bedroom posters come to life. I slipped by them, invisible, down to Vine Street and the cemetery.

  I climbed over the short stone wall and took the road that wound around the hill, past the chapel with the sheltered front entrance and the bell tower that shot up into the night sky. The rows of headstones and monuments, the faded ones and the new ones, they all looked alike at night. Shadows sprouting out of the earth.

  A crimson maple with twisted trunk and branches leaned like a head of fire over my mother’s grave on the grassy slope, her name carved in flat blue-gray granite. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I got a Mohawk. It’s gone now. Dad didn’t like it, but you would’ve thought it was cool. You would’ve convinced him to let me keep it.” I toed the earth with my sneaker. “Well, maybe not, considering you wouldn’t have liked how I got it.” I arranged the flowers in a circle around her name—a floral wreath for a crown. I traced her letters with a finger, and a cool breeze rustled through the trees. Pulling the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head, I hunched my shoulders against the chill and sat with her the way I did when I was little, when I made my way here to her grave on my own and waited for my father to hold his hand out for me. I had never wanted to leave. I had dug my heels in, pulled against his grip, and kicked a thin layer of dirt into the air.

  Up the winding road to the top of the hill, the peak stood without any gravestones, a smooth green dome rising above town. Some of the older kids at school said this hill was where the Mattabesett Indians were killed and buried by colonial settlers, and that’s why there weren’t any stones—no markers—because this hilltop was a mass grave.

  I sat cross-legged and looked at the shapes of the headstones around the base of the hill in the dark and at the wall in the distance, and beyond, at the streets and houses with their cold little lights. From here, Middletown—and everyone in it—felt small and strange like it was in another solar system entirely. I spread out on my back, searching the sky for Halley’s Comet. The earth beneath me was hard and cool, and I wondered if it was the bones of the dead I was feeling.

  The night was calm but for creaking branches and the low songs of crickets, a ceiling of sound between me and the stars. Right away, I spotted the Big and Little Dippers—the bears, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. And my mother’s voice—an echo out of time and space—cooed like a bird nudging its young out of the nest so it could learn how to fly. Follow the arc of the Big Dipper handle. Follow it the way I showed you to the kite-shaped constellation, Boötes, the herdsman.

  He drove his plow and kept the heavens turning in a procession of stars.

  Yes, went the dimples of her big smile.

  My mother bought the glow-in-the-dark stars for my bedroom ceiling right before I started kindergarten. She told me we could put the stars anywhere I wanted, but I begged her to make them real. She stood on my mattress arranging them in patterns only her fingers knew. Then she turned off the lights and pulled the curtains closed. We lay side by side on my bed, my mother smelling like warm cocoa and a dash of cinnamon.

  When I asked her what they meant, she showed me how to trace the shapes the stars formed. See, she said, the two lines make a V, and I said, I don’t see it, and she pointed again and I shouted, I see it! Then she kissed my forehead and said, That’s the cord tying the fish together by their tails. But I couldn’t make out the fish, so she took my hand in her hand—her fingertips soft like mine—and together we traced the air. Here, she said, follow the cord out to there and there. That’s our sign, David. So if you’re ever scared at night, you can look up and think of me and know you’ll never be alone.

  But it was spring now, and Pisces wouldn’t be out until the autumn. And even though this was the real sky, not the fake one my mother made for me, the one that never changed, I looked for the constellation anyway. Mr. Clark had said that looking into the night sky was like seeing into the past. Dead beauty engraved in the sky. Someday, a long, long time from now as the stars continued to move, the constellations would break apart, and all the old stories they told would be lost. One day, there would be no more Pisces in the sky. No more mother saving her son from a monster. But that day was so far in the future that it felt like those two fish would be together for an eternity. I’d been alone longer than the time I got to spend with my mother.

  A thin brushstroke of light appeared parallel to the horizon, right where Pisces would be come October. According to Mr. Clark’s handout, that was Halley’s Comet. It had to be. The tail pointed away from the sun, swept outward by the heat. Debris from the surface layers stripped off. Out there, in space, the comet had passed the sun and now hurtled away toward the outer solar system. The pull of the sun pulling the comet back, stripping it down smaller and smaller with each orbit, disintegrating in its final trajectory into shooting stars burning up in our atmosphere. Streaks of color in the star-dappled night and then gone.

  Later, after I’d gone home, I sat on the shingled roof of the back porch, legs bent up to my chest and arms around my knees. A quarter of the way up the cloudless sky hung the bright sliver of a waxing crescent moon. My father shuffled up the steep cement stairs to the backyard. He cursed when he shut the basement bulkhead door. It was old and heavy and the wood was rotting. He muttered about pulling the door off, replacing it with steel, how much that would cost. His shadow, thrown on the lawn by the outdoor light he’d left on for me, grew. It swept out, tall and thin, to the edge of his garden, then receded little by little into the surrounding darkness.

  “David,” he called out.

  The porch steps creaked, and the metal chair’s plastic seat cushion let out a long wheeze under the burden of his weight. “David,” he called out again.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go inside before you fall and break your neck.”

  I crawled back through the window and sat in the sill. The stars looked like the pin-sized holes on the tin grate in the confessional, and I turned away from them.

  My father called for me a third time, drawing out the vowels in my name.

  “Yeah.”

  “Scimunitu,” he said. “Shut the window and go to bed.”

  I swung my legs around, dropped onto the hardwood floor, turned and brought the screen down hard. It locked into place with a click. Sitting there, elbows and chin resting on the sill, I stared through the dirty screen window. At the edge of the light, pea poles shot up into the night. The little shoots twining around the wood, just starting to climb.

  My father went inside and turned off the porch light. He stepped back onto the porch, letting the door close behind him. “I see better this way,” he said. He sat back down. The metal chair creaked, and the cushion farted. His deep, booming voice had grown quiet and thin.

  In the kitchen, I
spied on him from the bay windows. He took a photograph of my mother from his flannel-shirt pocket. She wore a black skirt and a white blouse with sparkles that caught the light. He touched the corners of the picture, ran his fingers over the surface as if to catch a stray hair and return it to its place. Then he turned to me in the window. His tired, bloodshot eyes invited me to join him.

  Outside, I sat down beside him, one knee bent and pressed to my chest. Dirt caked the sewn rim of his work boots. The memory of her moved through the deep lines of his face. He showed me the photograph. “Do you remember her?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “She was always buying white blouses, that woman, your mother. Our closet was full of them. So many I had to give away.” He slipped the photo back into his shirt pocket, and then stood up from the creaking chair. He held the porch railing, looked out into the night, and asked me if I’d seen my comet, and I told him that I hadn’t. I wanted to keep that moment for myself. “Maybe next time,” he said. Then I asked my father if he saw his brothers, if his brothers ever came back to him, and he said, “They’re gone. They can’t come back.”

  But they did. They returned to him all the time. My mother, too. They were his stars, the ones that made up his constellation, and it was like Mr. Clark had said, it was looking into the past, the light was still there even though the star had died, and they were all pulling against one another, pulling my father in different directions, pulling me. All of us.

  The next Monday at school, Sam asked me why I hadn’t met him at his house to watch for the comet. I told him that my father wouldn’t let me go and that I was sorry.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I couldn’t see it. But we’ll get another chance when we’re like eighty.”

  “Eighty-nine,” I said.

  “Sounds like a plan.” Sam clapped his arm around my shoulder, as if we were already old men, sitting in the yard waiting for Halley’s Comet to come back around one more time.

  14

  When I was five years old, I cried at my mother’s wake, wondering what I’d done that made her get sick and go away. What about my father? What if he got sick and went away, too? What would happen to me? I leaned into his strong arm. I wanted him to hug me, to take me in his arms and tell me it would be okay and that my mother was coming back and we would all be together again someday. But instead, his rough hand took hold of me. His thumb went all the way around the other side of my bicep and brushed the tips of his fingers. “Sit up,” he whispered. So I sat up straight and wiped the tears from my face with my shirtsleeve. Maybe my father cried somewhere in private, the wounded part of him that he’d never show me.

  My father shook hands with people offering their condolences, and he thanked them. His voice never cracked. Perfumed women kissed my cheek, and men who smelled of ashtrays and hard cheese patted me on the shoulder before walking back to the rows of chairs out front. They took their seats facing the closed casket. Vincenzo knelt down and hugged me. I threw my arms around his neck and wouldn’t let go until Zia Nella pried my hands apart and kissed them and set me back in my chair.

  Men in the funeral home parking lot smoked cigarettes beneath black umbrellas and muttered: His brothers died, and now his wife. It is the curse. The curse has followed them.

  That night I stared at the green stars on my bedroom ceiling, trying to find something left of my mother that I could return to. The two fish tied together by the long cord of gravity, the Heavenly Knot. Venus and her son, Cupid. She had been born from the foam of the sea. The sea could save them both from the flames of the fire-monster Typhon. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs and out onto the back porch. I sat by my father’s feet, holding my legs bent up to my chest. I pulled on the lace of his shoe and held it tight. He mussed my hair and let me stay out with him for a little while, like I was one of his tomato seedlings left out to harden before the last frost.

  15

  Monday nights in Catechism class, at bingo tables in the church basement, we learned the Apostles’ Creed by heart. We recited the creed together and then wrote it out from memory in little blue books. Brother Calogero collected our books and checked them to see if we missed or changed a word. We repeated this exercise until the whole class could write and recite the creed from memory without error.

  Sometimes Brother Calogero interrupted us with questions as the class read aloud in unison. He sat at his gray metal desk. His kind, untroubled face bowed down to his hands locked together, eyes closed. “What do you think that means?” he would ask us. When he posed this question about the fifth and sixth articles—He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father—Tony parroted a line the brother had often repeated, that the Lord had to suffer for the sins of man in both his body and his soul. Someone added that Christ went into hell to free the just who had died before him, and a smile pierced Brother Calogero’s rosy cheeks, and he said, “This is also true.”

  We were supposed to find comfort in the idea that suffering begot salvation.

  But my bruises from Tony’s shoulder-checking me into pencil-yellow cinder block walls or gunmetal banisters at school didn’t save me. His notes, slipped through my locker vents, meant to intimidate and shame me, dared me to send them back like a teacher would, all marked up. I took his notes home and shoved them in an old shoebox under my bed. My father had his box of secrets. Now I had mine.

  In late April, Sam’s mother bought him a used acoustic guitar and a series of half-hour lessons from a guitarist at River’s Music on Main Street. When he completed his Monday-night lessons, he’d wait for me at Vincenzo’s café, and I’d walk over from the church as soon as my Catechism class let out. The Monday night before the Saint Sebastian festival weekend, less than three weeks before confirmation, Sam and I sat in the corner booth. The evening rush of customers had slowed to one harried mother wrangling two young children to sit quietly with their picture books while she puzzled over the paper’s crossword and drank a cup of coffee. Sam took his guitar out of its gig bag and showed me what he had learned—campfire chords, he called them. He clutched the neck near the headstock, strummed, and said, “This is a G. And if you move your fingers like this—” His wrist tensed. He barred the bottom two strings on the first fret with his index finger and stretched his middle and third fingers to notes on the second and third frets. “You get an F.” He played the chord. It thunked like stiff cardboard. “That’s a hard one,” he said.

  The woman glanced up at us over the rim of her large-framed glasses. The top of her pen pressed against her pursed lips.

  “Hey, boys,” Vincenzo said. He stood behind the counter with a rag in his hand. “Why don’t you do that upstairs?” He gave me the key for the door at the top of the stairs behind the stockroom.

  The door to his studio apartment opened into a small galley kitchen. An old metal cooking pot and a crusty cast-iron skillet hung from S-hooks on a rod above the stove. The faucet dripped into the porcelain sink, stained brown where the water plopped. I overtightened the faucet handle and the drip slowed. Sam set his guitar down on the plaid couch flanked by a pair of unmatched wooden chairs. He craned his neck at the bare off-white walls that hadn’t been painted in years. Opposite the couch, hand-built raw-wood shelving ran the length of the wall under three street-facing windows. The wood bowed from the weight of double-stacked books in Italian and English—the only indication that anyone lived here.

  “Where does he sleep?” Sam lifted a cushion and peered at the pull-out bed tucked inside. He leaned over the backrest and fished out a worn canvas pack from behind the sofa. He sat cross-legged on the floor with the pack in his lap. “Holy shit,” he said. He drew a long, thin-bladed knife, blued with age, from a leather and brass scabbard. “A bayonet!” He inspected the pitted wood and steel handle, read aloud the word—Terni—stamped on the blade, and tested the weight of the weapon in his hand. “Wicked.”

  “We shouldn’t go through Vi
ncenzo’s stuff,” I said.

  “But this is so cool.” Sam set the bayonet down on the floor, took out a cloth-wrapped bundle, and unfolded it. He picked up each item and set them down again—dented aluminum cups, a tin opener, and a three-pronged fork—until he held the canteen. It bore the faded markings of the Italian Royal Army—REI, Regio Esercito Italiano. Then he saw the enameled lapel badge with a fasces in the center of the national colors of Italy and the letters PNF. “Who is this guy?”

  I grabbed the pack from Sam. “No one,” I said. “He was just a soldier. That’s all.” I nested the cups, wrapped them up with the other items, and put them back, moving a rusty first-aid kit box and a large manila envelope thick with documents to make space. An old, crinkled map poked out of the torn side seam of a small canvas map case. Stenciled on the front flap were the initials US. I eased the map out. The three-pointed island of Sicily unfurled like an accordion in my hands. Smudged notes filled the margins in German and penciled arrow lines crisscrossed the printed grid. A braillelike texture dotted the surface.

  I turned the map over. Handwritten names in black cursive ink strokes were crammed onto the back, an illegible list but for the last two: Emanuele Vassallo, Leonello Vassallo. My uncles, but with a last name different from mine.

  “Vassallo.” I tested the sound of that family name on the air. It left my lips a thin and hollow noise, a misplayed campfire chord. Whatever history it carried, it wasn’t mine. My father had made sure of that.

  I held the map faceup again. A black-ink swirl encircled the village of Melilli. An ash halo around an old, dying star. I pressed my smaller thumb against a larger bloodstained thumbprint that covered one of the Aeolian Islands—a volcanic archipelago dotting the sea off the northern tip of Sicily—and words spilled out of me like prisoners in a prison break: The story of the twins and how my father tried to save them. How he faced down Rocco Morello in the street. The box of festival bulletins in his closet, the photos from Melilli, the one of him and Rocco together there as children.