How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

I kicked a pebble, and a cloud of dirt trailed around my ankles.

  After my father was gone out of sight, I circled back to the cemetery and climbed over the gate. That was the first time I had been in there at night. It was easier to walk among the tombstones this way, without the sun to show me the names of all the people buried there. I looked at the stones-some of them were taller than me-and at the dark shapes of the mausoleums further inside. Where was the one with the light in its window? It had seemed like it wasn’t so far away from the road outside. Then I saw the light in the distance, and I went after it down the main cobblestone street, onto a dirt path, deep into the cemetery.

  I walked on, never quite reaching the mausoleum. I stopped to get my bearings. All around, headstones stood or leaned like shadows across the rows of burial plots, but I could no longer see the cemetery walls. This place seemed bigger than I remembered. I was lost, and the light was lost to me, too. But I had to go on. I had to know why the light was there and why the dead needed it.

  I wandered off the trail, stepping over graves, until I came back to the dirt path. I knew I had been this way before because I recognized the cracked and half-fallen stones that lined the edges. Then I saw the light again, and I hurried after it.

  At the mausoleum, I stood on my toes to look through the round stained-glass window. But I couldn’t see into the tomb because of the black-and-gold picture of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

  I tried the metal doors but they were locked. And then I heard bushes rustling, the laughter of children. I followed the sound around to the other side of the mausoleum, but no one was there. The laughter stopped. I looked at a row of bushes cut close to the marble wall. Here, the moon lit up a stained-glass window identical to the one on the other side. I reached up and touched the glass where the light went into the tomb, my fingers like the arrows into the saint’s side.

  The laughter came again, only this time it was further down the path. I followed it to my brother’s graves, where I knelt and touched the damp grass.

  Sometimes it felt like I’d been following my brothers my whole life. But I never caught up to them. Sometimes in my garden, finding my way among the rows of vegetables, I could almost see them. Then a breeze would blow, and the leaves of my garden would move, their shadows restless under sunlight. And I would know I was alone.

  Did you see your mother, David, in spite of everything I did to prevent her ghost from visiting you? Did she stay with you the way the twins stayed with me? For you it wouldn’t have felt like a curse. I know that you would say this. I know as if you were here with me now.

  Back on the dirt road outside the cemetery, I walked to the orchard and found my father slumped beneath an almond tree. He was looking into his hands and muttering to himself. I inched closer, crouched behind a line of rough stones, the footprints of an old farmhouse long gone. He was off somewhere in his mind, trying to make order of his thoughts and failing. He pulled at his hair, buried his cheeks in his knees, folding into himself as if he were a child and not the man of his house.

  At the howling of a dog, he raised his head, his right arm falling along the side of his leg to the ground. He stared at his hand, flattening the grass blades. He leaned back against the tree, fingertips grazing the butt of his rifle. He slid it out from under the pillow, checked the chamber, and placed the barrel in his mouth.

  The instinct of a spooked animal possessed me. I wanted to run, but my feet took root in the ground. In the place where my brothers died, I saw them made whole and playing. Still those smiling boys, my little brothers. Then that light and that sound like no light or sound I had ever seen or heard before, or since. And those hands-the fingers curled a little with the palms facing up at the dandelion seeds that speckled the air. Those feet that had nothing to support.

  I went cold. I felt as though every drop of blood rushed out of every vein in my body and went down my legs in search of an outlet, as if trying to escape through my toes. I don’t know, maybe my father was frightened by the taste of metal with a hint of gunpowder, but something made him look, something made him see me. He took the rifle out of his mouth, hit his head against the almond tree, and cried out. He put his hand on his forehead and kept it pressed there as if he was trying to hold everything in, all of it bleeding between his fingers to the corners of his eyes and down his face.

  That’s when I ran as fast as I could, without knowing where. I ran without knowing that my hands covered my ears. I looked back at how far I’d gone, and I knew it wasn’t far enough. How far did I have to go? How far to outrun that sound, and everything?

  I didn’t slow down until I was out of breath and cramping up. I doubled over, pressing my hands against the pain in my side, chilled from sweating in the cold. I wished that my father had never told me the story of how the statue came to us.

  That stone had been around a long time. Who knows where it came from or who the man was that shaped the rock into the image of the saint, and why? What vision he thought he saw when he first saw the slab of stone. The important thing is that a man carved the statue, and it was a man who told the story. We can’t know anything beyond that. We try. We think we do. And that is how we get into trouble.

  13

  Weeds came up through small cracks in the domed concrete bunker, and long stalks of grass grew wild around its outside perimeter. I stepped down into the trench that led to the metal door. I pushed it open, creaking the hinges and sending an empty bottle wobbling across the dirt floor until it clinked against empty food tins. In the corner, I found a musty blanket and wrapped myself up in it. Slats of moonlight shone through three sea-facing gun ports. I crouched there, at the middle port, and looked out from where soldiers had attacked enemy ships at sea.

  Half the night passed. Maybe more, but I could not tell from the cold. I could not tell from my breath on the air in the gray light of the bunker. A stray dog padded outside in the brush. I shut the door, turned the wheel, and locked it. The animal sniffed and growled. A deep thunder rumbled.

  Cold air came in through the gun ports off the sea. In the sky, a sheet of fast-moving clouds blocked out the moon and stars. Soon, the darkness swallowed me. I lay on the ground with my eyes open, unable to sleep. During the bombardment, I had wished for daylight to stop the bombs and gunfire from lighting up the night sky, from filling it with sound. Now, I wished for this night to never end, for the thunderclaps to mask my father’s rifle blast.

  I thought of my father in the orchard. Did he ask where his saint had gone, what he did to make Saint Sebastian turn his back on us? I listened to the storm outside, wondering about every thunderclap, wondering if God had caused the sound, or my father. I should’ve known better than to think I could run away.

  Outside, the dog barked. His two eyes looked in at me from one of the gun ports. The space was too small for the animal to squeeze through, but that didn’t stop him from trying. He wanted his shelter back, to get out from the storm. I reached my arm out, fingers feeling the dirt floor for a stone. I felt a can and threw it at the eyes. The tin clanged against the concrete. The dog yelped and ran off.

  I shivered through the night. I was awake when the rain drummed against the bunker, awake when the thunder broke so loud it made me think it was right on top of me, still awake when the storm passed at first light. But even the storm couldn’t last forever. I knew it wouldn’t, because I had wished it. Outside the gun port, the sky was clear. There was no sign of the dog. Daylight would show me if my father had taken the top of his head off. I turned back to curl up in the blanket again. Next to an empty ammunition canister, a pocket-size leather notebook lay in the dirt, a nameless soldier’s journal. The cracked leather was the color of a saddle, with a matching strap to tie it shut. Some of the pages were water damaged or faded, entries in black ink smudged and illegible. A matchbook marked the last entry. And what I could read there told me everything. It changed everything. At the time, it felt like fate had revived me, given me a sense of purpose and power. But
I know now it was the curse of my brothers still moving against me. They had not yet let me go, would not, until they had taken everything from me.

  1943. Melilli, Sicily.

  The British overran Noto. Many Italians surrendered or fled into the mountain villages to hide among the locals there. But I made my way north, traveling only at night and never on a main road, for I believed the enemy only two, maybe three days behind me. I met up with three Germans, and together we retreated to defensive positions in a village called Melilli.

  In two days the enemy will be on top of us, maybe sooner. The shelling draws nearer. The Germans and I have prepared for the worst by making improvised grenades from discarded food tins and packing them with gunpowder, tying nails around the cans, and sealing the edges of the lids with clay. We used cotton twine soaked in water and coated with gunpowder for the fuses.

  I have little hope this position will hold.

  I took the tin that I had thrown at the dog. Bits of dried clay crumbled around the rim of the lid. There was a hole in one end where the fuse must’ve been. I took the lid off. The tin was empty. It should have been full of explosives, like the shell that killed my brothers. What were they thinking when they banged on it? Did they know that there was a fire inside and that they were letting it out? That same fire should’ve taken me. My hands would’ve touched my mother’s cheek. My grave would’ve been washed every morning. That’s how it should’ve been.

  But I lived. Maybe you could say that I had been blessed, that Saint Sebastian had saved me, but I say that it would’ve been better if the statue had never come to Melilli.

  So I stood on the rocky outcropping at dawn and looked out at the desolate bay and at the sea, calm despite the cold breeze. A plume rose above Mount Etna, blown into a long dark line across the sky. Old men in the village told of a monster trapped there under the mountain in a constant struggle to break free. But that was a story told to children.

  I held my hand in the air over Etna’s crater, and the dark smoke issued from my fingertips. There was no monster. Etna was just a volcano-a great windpipe in the Earth feeding oxygen to powerful fires that burned deep underground. Those fires, so strong they melted stone. The day the twins died, I swallowed a piece of that fire, and it had burned in me ever since. In the same way caring for the vegetable garden nurtured my father, the way the plants sustained him, gave him life, each breath I took fed the fire inside me, made me stronger.

  I walked back to Melilli with the journal in my pants pocket and the tin in my hand. I took the road that went around the opposite side of the hill to avoid passing the orchard. I didn’t want to see what my father had done to himself. At the back of our farmhouse, I saw my mother leaving with my sister, and I watched them from behind a fig tree. My mother had her bucket and washcloth, my sister her schoolbooks. After they had gone, I ran to the house and into the bedroom, opening the soldier’s journal on my cot. I took my father’s toolbox and canister of rifle ammunition from the closet. Then I pried open the casings with a knife, poured the powder into the tin, and tied nails around the outside of the can. I made the fuse and dried it out, passed it through the hole in the top of the tin, and sealed the rim with clay from my father’s garden. Then I hid the journal under my mattress and wrapped the grenade in a blanket, cradled it in my arms.

  In the piazza, Rocco helped the old chestnut grower-Longu Castagna-set up his cart for roasting chestnuts. It used to be that every morning, Rocco would be out on the water with his father before dawn, but since Morello’s boat had disappeared, his father now sold his labor to an estate owner far from the village, and Rocco went to work for Longu, harvesting and selling his chestnuts. Old Longu Castagna and the Morello family, they went back a long way. Some said they went as far back as the finding of the statue. They said that Longu was one of the sailors on the ship that ran aground. But that would be impossible. That would make him over five hundred years old. That was just another story. More likely, the old man belonged to a family-one of many families-whose ancestors came from far away to see the statue that had washed ashore, and followed Morello and the other bearers when they carried it here to this spot.

  The people of Melilli gave him the name Longu Castagna: Longu because he was one of the tallest men in the village, almost five-eleven, and Castagna because long ago the old man had brought back a chestnut-tree cutting from the slopes of Mount Etna and from that single branch had cultivated a grove at the edge of the village. No one remembered his true name or age anymore, and if you asked him, not even old Longu could tell you.

  Rocco set a stone beside each of the two wooden wheels, brought the fire bin down from the cart, and then started cutting X’s into chestnuts on a flat board. “If you’re here for chestnuts,” Rocco said to me, “you are early.”

  That day in the church when we sat before the statue of Saint Sebastian, Rocco had told me not to be angry with the saint, that the ways the saint protected us were not always for us to understand, but I could not remember the prayers our families had made for his five lost siblings, and I could not replace them. No one could.

  “I’m not here for chestnuts,” I said.

  Old Longu whistled a tune I did not recognize while he got the fire going. He turned the cylinder over the fire bin. The flames leapt up, cleaning the metal container. He stoked the fire with a stick, and then turned the handle of the cylinder as Rocco dumped a full bowl of cut chestnuts into it.

  “What have you got there?” Longu called after me.

  The inside of the church glowed in dim oranges and blues from rows of windows near the high wood-beamed ceiling. Seams from the wood slats broke the clouds and angels painted there. My footsteps echoed down the center aisle, through rows of empty pews and gold-trimmed arches and up to the broken angels.

  This was Melilli.

  Safe in his pillared side altar, with a golden metal disk for a halo, the martyr Sebastian leaned against a marble tree trunk. His arms were bound behind him, his body a pincushion of arrows. He gazed down on me with imploring eyes as if he knew my mind. If he could speak, he would tell me to have faith, the way he had faith. This twice-martyred saint. He turned his back on us, if he was ever with us at all, if he was ever more than just old stone.

  I touched an arrow where it entered his chest, fingered the chiseled wound. The wound. I felt it in my own chest, here, a pressure behind the breastbone. A fire inside me ready to bloom a flower of flames.

  I knelt before the statue of our patron saint, set the makeshift grenade at his feet. Dust spiraled upward around the rusted, filthy tin. “Did it hurt?” I asked the stone, and the stone replied with stillness.

  So this was Melilli, this wound we shared in silence. We were all broken at the seams like the painted scene of heaven above me. But they closed their eyes and covered their ears just as the saint had done the day my brothers played with that unexploded shell, and every day after.

  I took the matchbook from my pocket. My eyes stung and teared the way they did when I was chopping onions from my father’s garden. I cursed the half-domed altar, sliced like an onion and cracked with jagged white lines of peeling plaster. I rubbed at my eyes. Bits of clay pocked with gunpowder clung to my fingernails and the folds of my knuckles. My brothers had broken apart like stone under a sledgehammer and left behind a little crater in the orchard. Now I would make another.

  I struck the match. Today, today they would hear me and the weight I carried in the heavy clop of my shoes. I struck the match, and it was the ruin of everyone around me.

  14

  I ran for cover behind the second row of pews before the grenade detonated. My heart was racing. My ears rang as the saint’s body blew apart into fragments of stone and dust. When I stood up, my legs shook. I leaned against the pew in front of me. My throat was dry from the dust, and I coughed phlegm into my hands. I felt chalk and bits of stone in between my teeth. Sebastian’s torso lay on the floor in front of me. His arms, still tied to the tree, broken at the elbows. A fi
re consumed the white cloth that had covered the altar, now split into two charred halves. The flames licked at the walls of the shrine, and the wood ignited with a splintering crack.

  “Turiddu,” Rocco shouted. He ran up the center aisle and fell to his knees and dragged the broken torso of his patron saint into his lap. He rocked back and forth with the stone as he cried, “Oh, Turiddu. Turiddu, what have you done?” He looked at me and asked me why, and when I had no answer for him, he pulled at his hair and wailed like a lost mother mourning her child-and that was as good an answer as any that I could give.

  But I felt no grief, no guilt, not even shame. I felt nothing at all except for the desire to run. So I ran-I ran out the side door of the church. Smoke billowed out after me into the sky. A woman’s scream echoed around the piazza, and I knocked into old Longu’s cart. The cart, the fire bin with its burning red coals, and the chestnuts toppled over, and I hurried to the mountain road with the old man cursing me from below.

  Church bells rang out in alarm. Rocco’s words chased me up the mountainside to the farmhouse. What have you done? I pushed open the farmhouse door. “Mamma,” I called out. I checked the bedroom. The house was empty. I opened the window and looked down the slope, into the village. Between tiled rooftops, people rushed through the narrow cobbled streets and into the piazza in front of the church. A commotion of shouting and swearing men marched up in a cloud of dust. Some of the men brandished guns. They made a pageantry of force on the road-the same road they had walked after the twins died, carrying solemn gifts of food to my family.

  I bolted the door. The crowd assembled around the front of the house. They talked over each other, loud and confused empty talk. They did not know what had happened, only that the church had been attacked and the villains, whoever they were, now hid in the Vassallo farmhouse.