How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

“Vincenzo, why don’t you show these boys around?” Then Fat Joe wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief and walked back to the shade of his trailer, out of the furnace of the sun.

  “You should’ve told me you were going after him,” Rocco said. He watched Salvatore under the forklift hood. “You remember me from Melilli, don’t you?”

  “I remember thanking you for the ride,” I said. Then I gave him a little slap on the cheek, made him look at me. “We’re here to work. What are you here for?”

  Salvatore and I took our lunch break on the median strip away from the worksite and the other men. Nella had fixed us sandwiches of mortadella, provolone, and thinly sliced tomatoes with olive oil drizzled on the bread slices. We sat in the grass, napkins on our laps. We shared warm coffee from a thermos. I shared my concerns. “Those boys,” I said, “are trouble,” and Salvatore said, “You worry too much, like a woman,” but I could see that they worried him, too. We got to our feet when Rocco approached, followed by Constantino and Roberto. “Let me handle this,” Salvatore said to me.

  “Constantino told me,” Rocco said, “but I didn’t want to believe him. Of all the places you could’ve crawled off to, you had to pick Middletown. You just couldn’t let it go. Didn’t I warn you what would happen if I ever saw you again?”

  Salvatore stood wordless and with an unruffled look.

  “This is for our saint,” Rocco said. Then he punched Salvatore in the stomach. Salvatore doubled over, and Rocco knocked him down with a blow to the side of his face. Constantino took me out with a solid kick to my bad leg, and I fell to one knee. Roberto came up behind me, held my right arm bent against my back in a hammerlock hold, and pinned me to the ground.

  “This is between them,” Constantino said. “It does not concern you.”

  “Get up and fight, you coward!” Rocco yelled.

  Salvatore touched the cut on his cheek, and then he looked at the blood on his fingers. “Let Enzo go,” he said. “Roberto should be holding my arms back.”

  “On your feet,” Rocco said.

  Salvatore stood-hands at his sides-as if he were offering himself up to the Lord. Rocco struck his face again. Salvatore took the blow, but remained standing.

  “What’s wrong with him? Why doesn’t he fight back?” Constantino said.

  Rocco came at him again with both fists swinging. Salvatore took those punches, and more.

  The construction crew watched from a safe distance. Frank stood beside the foreman and argued for him to intervene. When Salvatore’s strength gave way, he dropped like a stone from a great height. His right eyelid cut and bruised, his face bloodied. “Bastards,” I cried, and I rolled free from Roberto’s hold. “I’ll kill every one of you.”

  “I knew this was a bad idea,” Roberto said. He waddled like a baby duck to its mother, the foreman.

  Salvatore winced when I took his head into my lap. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s over,” Constantino said. “Look at him. It’s finished.”

  “Maybe for you,” Rocco said. He spat on the ground, walked down the median strip, and entered one of the blue portable toilets lined up on the other side of the worksite.

  In the weight of the stone of Salvatore’s head, I felt the push and pull in him of the boy he once was and had buried long ago. An untended seedling with girdling roots that dug deep into the earth, deep into the past. Neglect had made it grow wild and sick.

  “This is my fault,” I said. “I had too much to drink one night and-”

  “Enzo,” he said. “No. I deserved this.” The ghost of the boy he had been stared up at me through half-closed eyes, discolored and bruised and already swelling up. He tried to say more, but his words were lost in a fit of coughing.

  “You are as strong as a mule,” I said to Salvatore. “As strong as a mule and twice as stubborn.”

  “Take these,” Frank said. He stood over me with his hand out, the keys to the forklift dangling from his index finger.

  “Stay with him,” I said. Then I climbed into the forklift, started it up, and drove down the closed lane of the highway. The foreman jumped up and down, waving his arms over his head. His shirt came unbuttoned and his hairy gut flopped out. The workers laughed. I turned into the dirt clearing and picked up the toilet with its door flush against the load backrest, trapping Rocco inside. His muffled screams brought out a cheer and more laughter from the men.

  “Minchia!” Rocco shouted from inside. He thrashed the door against the backrest. “I’m doing my business in here,” he said. He cracked open the door as far as he could. His head just fit into the gap. “What the hell is going on? Are you crazy?”

  “You don’t go near Salvatore again,” I said. “You understand me?”

  “Vincenzo, put me down.”

  I jerked the lift, and the portable toilet pitched front to back. Rocco slipped and fell. The door clattered shut.

  “Porco Dio!” He battered the door against the backrest and shouted a litany of curses. He insulted the saints, blasphemed the Holy Trinity, even profaned the Virgin Mother. But soon the fool tired himself out. He grew quiet. There was a long pause before he finally spoke again, a subdued animal in a filthy cage. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said.

  “Now you understand me?”

  “Si,” he said. “Please, let me out,” he pleaded. “I’m wet like a baby.”

  I set the portable toilet down. Then, as I backed the forklift away, the door opened, and out limped Rocco. A Rubicon of urine ran in a dark stain down the leg of his blue jeans.

  Frank helped me get Salvatore up the flight of stairs and into our apartment. Nella was home from school for lunch. She went white when we brought her brother through the kitchen and into the living room. The steeple of her hands, palms pressed together, covered her mouth. We set him down on the sofa and told her what happened. She dampened a towel in the sink and wiped blood from his brow and face. He winced and scolded her to take it easy. “Turiddu,” she said. She knelt at the sofa with her forehead resting on her brother’s chest and her long, thick black hair splayed out.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and said, “Nella, I’m fine.”

  She turned her ear to his heart, closed her eyes, and listened. Color came back into her face. The same stone-cold features she shared with her brother now softened by the song of their blood, and for her it was the sweetest music ever made on this Earth.

  Nella blinked and looked up from her place at his chest and touched her own cheek where his was bruised like she was looking in a mirror. She touched the same hard bones that made up his face, only it was her face she touched, her bones, and they were under a thicker skin.

  She straightened up and finished cleaning him. Then she took the quilt draped over the back of the sofa and covered him with it. “Stay with him,” she said.

  “I took care of it,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  When Nella had gone, Frank drew up a ladder-back chair beside Salvatore and took his hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t step in sooner,” he said. Salvatore eyed him with his good eye, and a smile cut across his bruised and purple face, and he laughed so hard that he held his side from the ache.

  The next day, the foreman came to the apartment. He walked carefully, dabbed at the mustache of sweat on his upper lip. “Rocco worked you over good,” he said. “I’m sorry. You believe me. There was nothing I could do.” He took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and gave it to Salvatore. “Take the week off. This will never happen again,” he added. He looked at Nella, and then me. “You have my word. Those boys, they’re gone. I fired them.”

  The foreman left the room and Salvatore turned to his sister. “What did you do?”

  “What kind of man doesn’t defend himself?” Nella asked. “You would’ve been happier if that brute killed you, is that it?”

  “There will be no killing,” Don Salafia said through the open door. He had his hand on the foreman’s shoulder. “Go in peace, my son,” he said. And the foreman hurr
ied down the steps. “May I come in?” The priest entered. He sat in the armchair beside Salvatore on the sofa. “How are you?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, Father,” Salvatore said.

  “Of course you are,” the priest said. “You are one of God’s strongest children. You as well, Nella. And you will carry on, the both of you, together, as you have before when God tested you.” The priest took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have faith in you,” he said, “but I need your faith in return.” He put his glasses back on. “I know the history of this conflict, but I ask you now as I have asked Rocco, let it go.” Don Salafia leaned over the space between the armchair and the sofa, placed his hand on Salvatore’s shoulder, and said, “There can be no winner in such a contest. Understand?”

  “I didn’t lift a hand against him,” Salvatore said. “And I never will.”

  Don Salafia smiled. “You are like the saint now,” he said. “There will be no more trouble from Rocco or his friends. You have my word on that.” Then he stood up and turned to go, stopped, and said, “I hope to see you all at Mass. I’ll be reading from Isaiah, a sermon on forgiveness.”

  22

  Frank came over every day after work that week while Salvatore recovered. He came with a bottle of wine, or a bag of groceries under his arm. He looked in on Salvatore and helped Nella around the apartment, keeping the place clean and making sure the garbage went out on time. The construction crew was his first job straight out of high school, but he didn’t mind studying alongside Nella, quizzing her about English words and American history. I knew Salvatore appreciated the kindness, and the attention Frank gave his sister didn’t bother him either. I could tell because his face brightened when Frank came around.

  But still, Salvatore was very much Nella’s brother and he wanted to protect her, to do right by her. Those evenings after dinner, Salvatore and I sat in the living room playing checkers. He sat on the sofa with a view over my shoulder of Nella washing the dishes and Frank beside her, drying them. I won those games.

  One night I told him, “You’re not paying attention.” Then I jumped my red piece over his black one and into the empty square beyond it, and over the second and third piece. “King me,” I said. “Again.”

  He studied the board and frowned. Nella laughed at something Frank said to her, and Salvatore looked up.

  “Your father would approve,” I told him.

  He nodded his head in agreement, pointed to his eye, and then placed his finger over his lips to say shush. He was playing the role his father would’ve played, the silent watchful eye, the chaperone marking boundaries. It was his duty to make sure everyone did things the right way. That was something David never understood. Our fathers, they were here to show us where to step, how to walk tall in this world.

  23

  Salvatore carried himself like a tall man, taller than anyone I knew, even me. Sometimes, I’d even forget that I was taller than him when we were together. His father was the same way. I don’t know where it came from, maybe it went all the way back to the statue, maybe to that painting in the cave. Some distant ancestor saw something there that lit a fire inside him, and he kindled it down through the ages, one generation to the next, learning too late how all fires end.

  I saw this fire in the way Salvatore stood his ground when Rocco came at him. I saw it in the way he grew restless as his strength returned with each passing day. Also, in his laughter, the way it lit up a room and consumed him into silence. The way he laughed when I suggested he enroll in night school to improve his English. He held his side where it hurt, howling and snorting through the pain at the idea of sitting behind a school desk. “I learn from you,” he said. His whole body laughing until he could no longer breathe. Then his lungs let out a wheeze, his shoulders sagged, his face darkened, and the light in his eyes smoldered.

  At the end of the week of Salvatore’s convalescence, on a Saturday night, as I was walking home from the café, I saw Rocco loitering in front of our building. He craned his neck at the second-floor windows. Then he took something out from under his jacket, stepped back into the light from the streetlamp.

  I limped faster along the sidewalk. “Rocco!” I shouted.

  He swung a Zippo down against the leg of his jeans, flicking the lid open, and dragged the wheel of the lighter across the denim. The Zippo sparked a tongue of blue flame. “E chiamamulu paisanu,” Rocco intoned. “Prima Diu e Sammastianu. You don’t get to come to Little Melilli and start over as if nothing happened. You cannot erase what you have done.”

  In his other hand, he held a bottle with a white cloth hanging from out the neck.

  “Rocco,” I shouted again. “No!”

  But he was a Morello-a bearer of the statue from a long line of bearers like the Vassallos and the Cardellas and the Santangelos, all the way back to those first men who carried the saint home. And he had that same damned ember smoldering inside him, set alight and fanned into a blaze the day Salvatore destroyed the statue. I should’ve known better than to accept the word of Don Salafia. Priests and their gentle ways, they cannot put out that kind of fire in a man. A man like that, his breath is the engine that fans those flames.

  Rocco lit the cloth and lobbed the bottle. A light came on in the second-floor window of our apartment. I tried to run, but my knee gave out and I fell to the pavement. The glass shattered with a loud pop. Then the curtain went up in a bright blaze. Nella cried out, and then Salvatore. I pulled myself up using the brick wall of a building for support. Rocco scurried down an alley and into the shadows like a cockroach.

  Inside, I found Nella seated at the chair opposite the two street-facing windows. She cradled her right arm, her nightgown singed and torn. She flinched as her brother turned her arm. He examined the burn and the lacerations from shards of glass that had torn through her flesh. Beside him, an empty pan of water used to douse the flames.

  Soot and debris littered the windowsill, and the wet curtain fluttered in a breeze. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Rocco,” Salvatore said. And the name caught in his throat. He spit it into the empty pan on the floor by his feet, but you could not spit out a bitter taste like that. His forehead curdled, wrinkles creased the corners of his mouth and eyes. His jaw became a rictus of bone and taut skin. “Forgive me,” he said. His head dropped into his sister’s lap while he wept.

  “Shh,” Nella said. She brushed his black hair back from his forehead with her fingers. “Turiddu, shh,” she said. And the tightness in his face ebbed.

  I called a local doctor that we knew, a Sicilian. In fifteen minutes, he arrived with his leather bag. I greeted him outside and rushed him upstairs. Tenants stood in their doorways, some from the third floor leaned over the stairwell railing. A few had been shouting about their interrupted sleep since the disturbance began. But their eyes grew wide when they saw the doctor. And they asked if everything was all right, if we needed help.

  “Mind your business,” I told them. “Go back to bed.”

  In the bathroom, the doctor held Nella’s arm under the cool running water of the tub. She grimaced as he cleaned the cuts and scratches and washed her wounds with antiseptic cleanser. “She’s lucky,” he said. “The burns could be worse, but she should go to the hospital.”

  “No hospital,” I said. “Take care of her here, and never speak of this again.”

  The doctor sighed and nodded his head in agreement. He applied a cream over the burned skin and then covered it with dry, sterile gauze. “Give her aspirin for the pain,” he said. “I’ll be back in the morning to check on her. Make sure the blisters don’t break open.”

  After the doctor left, Salvatore swept up the broken glass in the living room. Then he sat in the chair by the windows like a carabiniere on guard duty. I poured wine into half-pint mason jars and sat at the kitchen table with Nella. She drank with unsteady hands. Her black hair was plastered against her ears and neck, her face pal
e.

  “You should sleep,” I told her.

  Nella stood up. She moved like a tree buffeted by strong winds. All these years she’d bent and sighed through her brother’s and parents’ countless storms. And finally, I could see, she might break.

  “Sleep,” she said. She faced the cabinets. “Who can sleep like this, with that figgh’i buttana walking around out there as free as air and water?” She banged one side of the counter and then the other, saying, “We can’t live in Melilli, we can’t live here.” Then she raised up her hands and looked at the ceiling. “God, I wish you’d tell me where we are supposed to go. We paid for our sins with blood-twice over. Why are you doing this? Why is Rocco? What wrong have we committed against him? The saint is more than a piece of stone.”

  I placed my hand on Nella’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  She spun around, wagging a finger in my face. “Like you took care of it before?”

  “If you hadn’t gone to the priest-”

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “Going to the foreman and the priest for help, it was a mistake.”

  “Beh,” Salvatore said from his perch at the window. “The first mistake was mine.”

  “You were just a boy,” Nella said. “And our parents-after the twins died-we needed them. Where were they? They loved the ghosts of those boys more than they loved their own living flesh and blood. You were right to be angry, Turiddu. With one arm the saint takes you under his protection while his other arm strangles you. You were just a boy, but that bastard, Rocco, he is a man.” She took a hammer from the utility drawer and started toward the door. Her wounded arm hung limp at her side, an injured bird with a bad wing.

  Her brother blocked her path. “Where are you going with that?”

  She stood firm. I knew that scorch-eyed look, and the silent understanding that passed between them. It was like the silence at Adrano at the foot of Mount Etna when I saw in the faces of the soldiers the many faces of the monster on the mountainside.