by Marco Rafalà
The gull came back, tapping at the window. I could hear Nella telling me how this bird carried a message. Churches and priests, they weren’t enough for her. She had to see God everywhere in the world.
“What do you want, eh?”
The bird made this laughing little cry and then flew off again.
I watched it cut the air. “What do you want to tell me?” I asked. “You’re just a stupid bird pecking at its reflection in the glass. What do you know about Melilli? How’s my sister?”
That dirty gull flew in circles and then went out like a shot, west. That message I understood. I understood what that meant. I remembered the superstition from my mother. It meant a storm was coming. My mother used to say, The seagull that flies inland flies away from a storm coming in.
When I dropped off the bottle at Signore Fabrizi’s, he wouldn’t let me leave without offering some food. We sat at the table, eating orange wedges and prickly pears.
His wife set a dish of cannoli on the table and said, “It’s nice to see you, Salvatore. But you don’t look well. Is everything okay? How’s your sister?”
“She’s good,” I said. “We’re fine. You know, we stay busy.”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” Signore Fabrizi said. “Not like our son, always out on the streets making trouble. Just last week he stole an old woman’s purse. If it weren’t for the men I know at work who have friends at the carabinieri, that boy would be rotting in jail right now. That was my first and last mistake,” he said, holding up one finger.
“Maybe I can speak with him,” I said. “Or Father Giovanni.”
“Boh,” Signore Fabrizi said. He threw his hands into the air. “He’s no good, that son of mine.” Then he bit his first knuckle.
“We try,” his wife said. “But nothing makes a difference. How did you turn out so good, Salvatore?”
What would they think of me if they knew about the statue and how I let my sister go back there alone because of what I did?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Signore Fabrizi said. “You broke Aldo’s nose. How could we think you’re good? That was different. So don’t worry about it. Let’s play some cards, eh?”
“I promised Don Giovanni I’d clean out the cellar,” I lied.
“Next time,” Signore Fabrizi said. “Next time.”
Outside, the sky darkened as fat storm clouds rolled in from the sea. The air felt cool and heavy with a damp breeze. The streets emptied. People shuttered their windows. The wind picked up, whipping through the city, spinning newspapers and dirt into little funnels. “This looks like a bad one,” I said out loud. And then the downpour hit. I pulled my jacket up over my head and ran. I thought of Nella caught in this mess with her driver-some stranger.
At the rectory, Don Giovanni sat inside by the window, watching the storm and smoking a cigarette. I went up to my room, dried off, and changed my clothes. When I came back down, he said, “What is your answer?”
“I promised myself I’d look after her,” I said. “I must go.”
He put the cigarette out in the ashtray on the windowsill, folded his hands in his lap, and said, “Good.” Then he looked outside. “Bring your raincoat.”
Don Giovanni placed a call from his office. In fifteen minutes, a car idled out front. The driver honked the horn. I ran out and climbed into the little two-seater. In an hour and a half, we reached Melilli.
The rain eased up. I dismissed the driver, pulled the brim of my cap down over my eyes and slipped through the village like a ghost. The buildings, the olive trees and prickly pears, the stone under my feet, it all looked the same. But something felt wrong. I rocked on my heels, bounced a little on my toes, all to catch my balance with the earth, the soil. I knelt down, my fingers touching the wet ground, and I knew-immediately-I knew that I did not belong.
A nativity scene covered in clear plastic stood near the church. The church still dominated the piazza, but it looked old to me now, the writing on the stone worn down, and smaller, the way grief shrunk my father. It didn’t look so big and powerful anymore.
The rain stopped, but the clouds did not break. A man slept inside a little black car parked off to the side. An open newspaper covered his face. I banged on the window. His arms shot up, knuckles knocking against the roof, and the newspaper fell to his lap. He looked around the inside of the car, confused. Then he saw me and rolled down the window. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “I’m sleeping.”
“Where’s my sister?” I asked him.
“Your sister? How the hell should I know? Get lost.”
And as he rolled up the window, I put my hand on it, pushing down. “Nella,” I said. “You drove her here. You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on her, not sleeping. Where is she?”
He pointed at the church. “She went inside,” he said. “When she came back out, she told me she’d be back. I don’t know where she went.”
A young boy, ten, maybe twelve years old, pushed a cart into the piazza. I recognized it as old Longu’s. I let go of the window. The driver rolled it up as I walked away from the car.
“This is Longu Castagna’s cart,” I said. “I’d know it anywhere. Where is he?”
“Dead,” the boy said. “It’s my cart now. Would you like to buy some snails?” He took a lid from a pot and set it aside.
“No,” I said. “What’s under here?” I peeked under the tinfoil on a tray of arancini. “I’ll take one. Are they fresh?”
“My mother made them this morning,” he said. “They’re still warm.”
I paid the boy and said, “How did Longu die?”
“He was very old.” The boy shrugged.
I took the road that went up to the farmhouse and bit into the top of the cone of deep-fried rice with saffron, almost getting to the chopped lamb filling. I never imagined Longu Castagna would die. He was old when my father was my age-that’s how my father told it anyway. And all the other stories about Longu, I knew they weren’t true, but still, the man was a part of Melilli, like the homes we built with stones from the mountain.
My father’s farmhouse stood above the village, a mausoleum to a different time, with tiles missing from the roof and window shutters broken. The door hung from its hinges, the wooden frame rotting away. I finished the arancini and walked inside. The house smelled of urine and mold. A pool of water formed in the corner from a leak in the ceiling. Broken tins, jars, dishes, and cups littered the floor. A crack in the wall cut the stone in a jagged line through the nail hole where my father had hung the silver crucifix. I knelt where my brother’s coffins once stood when families came to pay their respects. It felt colder here. Goose bumps prickled up my arms and down the back of my neck. And then I saw it-the crucifix-face down in the mess on the floor. I took it, wiping it clean with the end of my shirt and blowing dirt from the little crevices in the features. Then I propped it up in the windowsill. I heard a gunshot and flinched, moving away from the window. In the pencil-lead darkness of my shut eyes, voices shouted outside the house, but I could not understand them. Someone pounded on the door. When I peeked through my fingers, the door swung wide on one hinge and banged against the rotting frame in the wind. The gunfire, the voices, all of it was just in my head, echoing there and multiplying.
Out the window, down the side of the mountain and over the village, I saw the cemetery. I knew where Nella would be.
Three young men approached me on the road from the farmhouse. I knew one of them right away as Rocco-his hair thick with dark curls and his face round like his father’s. People used to say how he looked just like his father did at this age or that one, and now, at seventeen, Rocco had filled out into the broad-shouldered, V-shaped trunk of a true Morello. But in his walk and on his face, he carried something different, a distaste for life-for his own or for others’, I could not tell.
Rocco threw a stone at me. I ducked and it whistled past my ear. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. Beside him stood the sons of Cardella and Santangelo, also sevent
een. The beanpole Constantino Cardella had a heavy jaw like his father, and poor Roberto Santangelo, he turned out a pear like his mother. They blocked my way.
“I don’t want trouble,” I said. “I’m here to take my sister home.”
“You don’t have a home,” Rocco said. He picked up another stone, tested the weight of it in his palm. The man who now threatened me hated the boy I remembered-that friend who shared his candies with me the night of my brothers’ wake and stayed with my family until morning. I had done this to him.
The stone hit me in the shoulder, and Rocco reached for another, the other two following his lead. I cut off the road, a rabbit thumping through an open field. Three stones struck my back in succession, but still I ran. I tumbled down a steep slope of ferns and white rocks. I picked up the road again where it curved around the hillside and saw them at the bend, following me with murder in their throats. Roberto lagged behind, his pear shape wobbling a distant fourth in this mad race.
People watched from half-shuttered windows. Others stood aside and spat on the winding streets as I passed. Soon, I could no longer see my pursuers, but their pursuit echoed through the densely packed limestone houses.
At the gates to the cemetery, I felt the tug of my father’s almond orchard, the roots of those trees buried deep in my bones. I wanted to care for the orchard, to see the trees in full white bloom again like the white-haired heads of old fathers and mothers watching over their children. But deep inside, the fruit did not forget-the fruit could not forget-that I had abandoned them. I looked down the dirt road to the grove in the distance, grown wild and dying with no one to tend to it. I wished someone had burned it to the ground and rid the place of all that rotting wood and stinking fruit.
I slipped through the gates and found Nella by the grave site of the twins. She knelt, dressed in black, her head bent toward the ground as if she no longer had the strength to lift it on her own.
“Nella,” I said. I took her face in my hands and wiped the tears from her cheeks with my thumbs.
“You came,” she said.
“Of course I came,” I said. Before I could warn her that we had to leave, she showed me our own stones alongside the stones of our family. I touched the flat marker that had my name carved into it. We were all together here. My brothers. My mother. My father. I felt the pull of them on me, like the pull of too much earth under my feet. I pushed my fingers into the dirt of my father’s grave-the soil cold and wet from rain.
In the overcast light, the cemetery spilled out around us like a charcoal sketch on a gesso board. Out of those grayscale lines, two old women dressed in black stared at us. Don Fiorilla stood on a ladder beside them with flowers for the top vault of a stack five high. One of the women murmured our names. The other woman covered her mouth in horror with her bony hand.
Don Fiorilla turned at the sound of our names. The ladder swayed beneath him. His arms flailed like a man drowning at sea. As the ladder fell, he caught hold of the lip of the vault, his shoes scrabbling against stone. Flowers fell from their holders. “Salvatore,” he cried, dangling from the roof of the crypt. “I tried stopping them.”
The widows crossed themselves and called upon the Madonna for the safe delivery of their souls from the forces arrayed against them.
“Help him,” Nella said, and when I gave her a stubborn look, she slapped my shoulder and said, “Go.”
I righted the ladder and helped the priest down. He held on to my shoulders and took each rung one at a time, and with each step he thanked me, called me “My son.”
“Tell me,” I asked him, “what happened?” The words tumbled out of my mouth. “Who killed my parents?”
The old women scurried away like mice. They passed a small lot where Rocco and his two compatriots moved like sidewinders among the sunken crosses and uncut grass.
Don Fiorilla stepped off the ladder, got down on his hands and knees, and kissed the cobblestone. “I couldn’t stop them,” he said. He balled his hands together, shook the balled-up fist at the clouds, and asked for God’s forgiveness. “Forgive me,” he begged, “for I could not stop them.” Then he turned to me, clutched the ends of my coat. “They are good people. Only a few”—the priest held his hand out, palm up as if weighing how many souls he carried there—“a handful, got swept up in their emotions. They love their patron saint.”
“Salvatore,” Rocco said. “It was you who plunged the knife into their hearts.”
“Leave him alone,” Nella said.
“I have no quarrel with you, Nella. Do not get in my way.”
“Step aside, Father,” Constantino warned the priest, but the priest refused. “I will not,” he said, standing up and brushing off his pant legs.
Rocco stabbed the air with his finger, pointing at me. “I sat with your parents,” he said, “until the end.” He blinked back tears. “Your father, he refused to believe, right up to his last breath, he denied what he knew to be true, that it was you who broke his heart, you who killed him. It was you.”
“I destroyed the statue,” I said, pounding my chest. “The statue. But you.” I spat at Rocco’s feet as he neared me. “You let them murder my parents, and for what? For stone. No, worse than stone. For the fairy tale that held the stone together.”
Roberto tugged on Rocco’s arm and said, “Look at his face. It’s true, what they say, he has the malocchio. Let’s go before he puts the curse on us.”
Rocco jerked his arm free. “It’s too late for that. Isn’t it, Salvatore?”
The priest shouldered between us. “Rocco,” he said, “that is enough. This is not like you.”
“You do not know what I am like, Father.”
“Come, let us go to the church together, and you can tell me. Or, if you prefer, put me in the ground next to Raphael and his family. It is your choice, my son.”
Rocco backed away-pushed by the priest’s words-and his friends followed. He was no longer a Morello of old, no longer of a line of fishermen. He hadn’t been in a long time. The sea did not show in him. He did not have the salted, leathery face or the watery eyes of a man who wrestled the sea for its treasures.
“Wait,” I said, and they stopped, and I said, “Rocco,” but he cut me off, a sliver of cut stone shone in his eye, and he said, “Pray I never see you again.” Then the priest took his arm and steered him away to the gate.
“I’m sorry,” I said. But I did not know if I had said it for Rocco or my parents, the twins or Nella, or Saint Sebastian and God.
“You were right,” Nella said. “There is nothing for us here.”
In the car, the driver made a cushion behind the two seats from some towels he had stored back there. Nella, because she was the smallest, squeezed into that tight space.
I looked at the church through the window of the front seat and said, “You went inside.”
“I asked the saint to pray for you,” Nella said.
“You saw the statue? How can that be?”
“The saint didn’t look the same,” she said. “It’s possible they repaired the damage. Or they made a new one. What does it matter now?”
“Maybe everything,” I said. “Maybe nothing. Do you think he heard you?”
She leaned forward, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, “My brother came back, didn’t he?”
It rained again as the driver turned the rickety little car around in the piazza. I looked out the back as we left and saw the cross at the top of the church-the last thing I ever saw of Melilli-against all those rain clouds.
26
We spent that Christmas and New Year’s with the Fabrizis at the rectory, celebrating with big meals of fish and lasagna, cannoli and buccellati-biscuits filled with pistachios and almonds and other dried fruits-and at midnight of the new year, 1950, we popped open a chilled bottle of spumante. We ate around the same table each holiday, like a family-the Marconis, the Fabrizis, and Don Giovanni, together.
And, like a family, I taught Aldo how to care for the garden. He
never did get his act together, but he didn’t make too much trouble. He listened to my instructions and watched me work. He lacked patience and a delicate touch, but in time, he learned. And, little by little, Aldo became a fine gardener.
27
On Holy Saturday, 1952, the altar in Saint Anthony’s had been stripped in preparation for the Easter Vigil. The church stood empty and dark. Don Giovanni prepared for Mass in the rectory. I sat on the steps to the courtyard with a glass and a new bottle of wine, my gardening tools in a canvas bag by my feet.
After sundown, the congregation would come. They would wait in the church in the dark. They would wait for the priest to light the Paschal candle and carry the light into the church. I always slipped in after him, after the light, to sit beside my sister in the last row.
The gate across the courtyard creaked open. A man with a pack slung over his shoulder limped up to my garden. When he knelt at the row of artichokes, I told him to back off.
“These are good,” he said. “The leaves are tight.”
“Don’t tell me about my own garden,” I said.
The man stood up slowly, favoring his bad leg. “I need to find something,” he said. “Isn’t Saint Anthony’s where I go to find something?”
“It’s not good to go looking for things,” I said. “That brings trouble.”
“Like the trouble at the bottom of that bottle?”
A sediment cloud swirled around the bottom of the wine bottle. “The only trouble is this is the last bottle.”
“I’ll share that one with you and buy you another,” he said.
I got a second glass from the kitchen, and we sat on the steps, sharing the last of the wine. He told me how he had been a soldier during the war, how the war took everything from him, the house he grew up in, his parents, his sense of belonging to the city of his birth, of being Roman. “Now,” he said, “I work and travel all over.” Then he made his first two fingers walk across his lap. “More like this,” he said. And the soldier gave his walking fingers a limp.
