How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “She’s a seamstress,” Salvatore told me. He took a seat at the bar, then shot up and leaned against the counter, drumming his fingers on the Formica. He smiled and looked up at me. “She’s fair skinned with this red hair, red like red wine grapes,” he said. “An American, but she did a good job fixing the hemline on my suit pants.”

  The next day Salvatore ripped the armpit on one of his good button-down shirts and brought it in to the tailor’s where she worked, as an excuse to see her again. It took Salvatore three carefully torn dress shirts to work up the courage to ask her out. She told me later how his thickly accented tongue tripped over some of the English words, and how she blushed and said, Yes. She had accepted, she said, because she could tell that Salvatore had ripped his own shirts. And because that made her laugh.

  They had their first date at my café on a warm summer evening at one of the tables outside under the stars. I liked them together, instantly. Some people made beautiful couples. And you could see, in their beauty, why they were together. Then there were couples that just made sense. Salvatore and Eileen, they were like that. They made sense.

  She was the first to fall asleep that night, according to Salvatore. Curled around him, her fingers grazing the dark arm hair from his shoulders to his wrist. She drifted off with the steady music of his heartbeat in her ear. In the dark, he felt her body close against his, and he closed his eyes and listened for her slow breathing.

  In early September of that year, they married in a small ceremony at Saint Sebastian Church and bought the house across the street from Frank and Nella. Eileen was young, not yet twenty-six, and Salvatore was thirty-eight. Six months after that, David came into this world.

  I never saw Salvatore happier than the day David was born. Sitting there in the hospital room, perched on the edge of Eileen’s bed, holding his son in his arms, I think he believed Eileen had sewn up the mistakes of his life with her needle and thread.

  27

  For Nella, the days passed away in growing apprehension over the baby’s well-being. She pestered Salvatore about his nightmares, wondering if they still troubled him, and when she got nowhere with her brother, she quizzed her sister-in-law. Eileen told her that everyone has nightmares. But Nella was sure Salvatore’s nightmares were more than just bad dreams.

  So she hung strings of garlic over the crib and pinned the Saint Sebastian medallion her brother had given her to David’s undershirt. Eileen thought Nella’s concern for David was sweet, the folk traditions of the Sicilian peasants endearing. Though Salvatore complained and sighed, he didn’t have the heart to go against his sister. But when she brought a strega to the house, behind his back, he’d had enough of Nella’s superstitions.

  On a Saturday, Salvatore and I had just returned from West Hartford, where we bought an old-fashioned wine press from a Portuguese man who was clearing out his grandfather’s basement. On the ladder-back chair in the living room sat a wizened, shrunken woman, her back bent like a vine pulled down by a ripe tomato. The tray table stood to one side with a bowl of water, a shot glass of olive oil, a saltshaker, and a pair of scissors. Eileen sat on the sofa, holding David cradled in her arms while Nella paced the width of the room.

  “Maronna mia,” Salvatore said. “What the hell is going on?”

  David let out a thin wail. Eileen shushed the boy, bouncing him in her arms. “Whatever happened to the two of you during the war,” she said. “Whatever happened to your family, you don’t have to tell me. You know that, Sal. But if this puts Nella’s mind at ease, where’s the harm?”

  The strega tossed up her hands. Wiry strands of her hair wormed out from under her black shawl like the snakes of the Medusa. “I must have quiet,” she commanded.

  Nella eyed her brother. She implored him, her hands together in prayer. It was an old argument, one he had put to rest in Syracuse all those years ago when he made a promise to his sister to do his part as Serafina suggested. To let his brothers go. But he couldn’t. I knew he couldn’t. What kind of man could let go of his family?

  The tension eased from Salvatore’s shoulders. “This is it,” he said. “After this, no more.” His hand cut a straight line through the air.

  Nella agreed.

  The strega dipped her thumb in the shot glass and held it upside down over the bowl, dripping the olive oil into the water, one drop at a time, while reciting some secret prayer passed down to her from her mother on Christmas Eve in the long tradition of the stregoneria. She leaned over the bowl, studied the dispersal of the droplets, and saw no eye-shape among the oil. “No malocchio,” she finally pronounced.

  Nella threw her arms around her brother’s shoulders.

  “Okay,” Salvatore said. He embraced his sister. “Okay.” They exchanged kisses on the cheek and when they separated, he held her arms and said, “You see? Nothing to worry about. David is fine.”

  The strega hacked into a skeletal hand. She wiped phlegm from her palm with a tissue. When she caught her breath, she cleared her throat. “There is evil in this world,” she said. “It can come from anywhere, anyone.” She tugged on her lower eyelid as if to say, Watch out. Be vigilant. Then she dipped her thumb in the oil and made the sign of the cross on David’s forehead. “You can’t be too careful.”

  28

  When David was three months old, we took him to the festival of Saint Sebastian. I stood at the foot of the stone railings of the church with Frank and Nella, Salvatore and Eileen. She cradled David in her arms. We had on our Sunday clothes from the eleven o’clock Mass-pinstriped suits for the men, nice long skirts and blouses for the women. This was our Little Melilli, made by the first Sicilian immigrants to Middletown, the stonemasons and stonecutters and carpenters who worked without charge building this church, building for themselves a new world.

  And at the center of that world stood the three days of the Feast of Saint Sebastian, when they spilled out into the streets and called back centuries of history. Three days when no distance existed between the stone and mortar, the brick and steel of Middletown and the limestone village of Melilli cut into the craggy mountainside.

  The congregation lined the sidewalks as a sea of barefoot men and women dressed in white with red sashes converged on the church from lower Washington Street and from family plots at Saint Sebastian Cemetery. They chanted, “E chiamamulu paisanu. Prima Diu e Sammastianu.” And they shouted out, “Pray for us.” They streamed up the stairs and through the open doors of the church, carrying red and white flowers in honor of the soldier-saint.

  When the bearers brought the statue-held shoulder high on its pallet-out into the street, the crowd erupted into cheers. Confetti rained down from a bucket lift. Some of the men threw their flowers at the saint’s feet. Women kissed their hands and touched the statue. Parents held their infants aloft for the saint’s blessing.

  “Lift him up,” Nella said. “Up,” she said again, pushing her own hands palm up toward the sky.

  Eileen raised her son to the statue as it passed. He cried, held high over everyone’s head. David’s fat little legs kicked the air, and his plump little arms flapped like chicken wings. His stubby fingers opened and closed, grasping at the air between him and the statue. Then he wet himself, his cries grew louder, and Salvatore laughed, a big-bellied laugh. He doubled over and held his knees. His eyes watered. That got Eileen giggling and David, with pee running down his leg, wailing.

  Frank and I joined in, and Nella crossed her arms over her chest and gave her brother a look, the kind that felt like a biblical stoning. Then a smile cracked her face and she broke down laughing, and her laughter turned to snorting. Soon all the people around looked down their noses at us. But we couldn’t help ourselves. David was every bit his father that day. He may not have been born Sicilian, but he was cut from that stone.

  Across the street, I unlocked the café door. Eileen brought the baby inside and set him down on a blanket on one of the tables. Nella helped change his diaper, and then she asked if she could hold him.
When Eileen nodded yes, Nella wrapped David in his blanket, cradled him in her arms, and walked toward the storefront window. She bent her head close to his, watching the street.

  “You should’ve seen your nonnu during the festival in our village,” she said. “If I close my eyes, I can still see him carrying the statue through the streets with the other men. So proud. He carried our saint for all of us. For you. He was a good man, your nonnu, a fine man. In another world you would’ve shared his name.”

  29

  That spring, the first after Salvatore and Eileen bought the house, he plotted out almost the whole backyard as a garden. Eileen played with David on a blanket on the grass while Salvatore measured and built the garden beds out of lumber and galvanized screws. He spoke to his son about the plants he would seed, the lettuce, basil, bell peppers, and zucchini. He pointed out the poles and the chicken wire, drawing a picture in the air with his hands to show the trellises he would make for the cherry tomatoes, snap peas, and green beans. He poured everything he had into that soil, his hands finally doing the work they were meant to do.

  In August, on a hot night, Salvatore and Eileen had everyone over for dinner. They sat the guests-Nella and Frank, me and Fulvia-at the picnic table out back, and they served up salad fresh from the garden, a bowl of roasted peppers with garlic in olive oil, pasta with zucchini and green beans, and the tender meat of grilled rabbit. For the last two days, that rabbit had been at Salvatore’s crops. Two days Salvatore tried catching the animal. He bought a trap, laid it out with a mess of carrots, lettuce, and apples. But the rabbit ignored the caged bait for the run of the vegetable garden. That morning, Salvatore had cornered the rabbit by the woodpile and caught it with his bare hands.

  Eileen rocked the white wicker cradle next to her chair. David was fast asleep. She had grown up in an orphanage, never known her parents, so we were her family as much as she was ours. We ate until our stomachs ached and drank until we ran out of Chianti. We even finished off the dusty, old squat bottle in the straw basket, the corked wine from Don Salafia. He had given it to Salvatore and Eileen as a present on their wedding day.

  After dinner, we sat in the living room. Nella had David in her arms, her hand cupping the back of his head. Fulvia tickled his belly. The baby smiled, his eyes wide. He grabbed hold of her long braided hair. Eileen went into the kitchen to get dessert, Salvatore to get a bottle of grappa and shot glasses. Frank stepped outside for a cigarette.

  In the front hall mirror, Salvatore brushed a strand of hair from Eileen’s face. She smiled up at him, pecked him on the cheek, and walked out of view. She returned to the living room with a plate of cannoli. Salvatore set the bottle and glasses down on the tray table. He poured my glass, handed it to me, and said, “This fall we make our own wine.”

  At six months old, David started talking in a stream of consonants and vowels strung together with gurgles and sighs. Salvatore couldn’t shut up about it. He memorized that boy’s babble even though he couldn’t understand it himself. And Salvatore grew impatient, wanting to know when he could talk with his son. But Eileen, she acted as if she understood the endless words and funny noises David made. Those two, they spoke their own language from the beginning.

  Next summer, on a bright Saturday morning, Eileen set David down on a blanket between two of the raised garden beds. He played with his wooden toy car, spinning the wheels and banging it on the ground, and he talked in a slur of words and shrill sounds. Eileen filled a basket with snap peas and lettuce, responding to her son in a lyrical voice. Their voices like a song of simple words and made-up ones in glissando tones.

  Salvatore stood hunched over his garden, pruning basil. “David,” he said. “Watch.” Then Salvatore showed his son how to pinch back basil above a set of leaves with his fingers. “To make the plant grow bushy,” he said.

  I sat on the back porch, trying a glass of the first batch of our red wine. It was thin in my mouth. Maybe next year we’d get it right.

  David pushed himself up to standing, and toddled toward the peppers. Then he hoisted himself over the garden bed, trampled through the plants, and plopped down in the dirt. The boy took fistfuls of soil and threw them into the air. He put his dirty fingers in his mouth and gibbered. He uprooted a pepper plant.

  “No!” Salvatore yelled. He lifted David up out of the garden bed and held him out to Eileen. “You have to watch him,” he snapped. “He could get hurt.”

  David cried, holding out his arms for his mother.

  Eileen took him into her arms. “Shh,” she said. “It’s okay.” Then she turned to Salvatore. “There’s no need to yell.”

  Salvatore surveyed the damage to his peppers and shook a limp hand in the air. “I wouldn’t sit down for a whole week if that garden belonged to my papà.”

  “It isn’t your father’s garden,” Eileen said. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Boh,” he said, conceding to her with a wave of his arm.

  She set David down on the blanket and combed her fingers through his fine hair. “My little gardener,” she said. “You take after your old man, don’t you?”

  Salvatore grinned. “Old man,” he said. He flexed his biceps. “I’m young and strong like the bull. Let me show you.” He pinched her ass and she jumped into the air, squealing. Then he chased her around the garden beds until they collapsed into the grass by the blanket, with David climbing on top of them and pulling at his father’s hair.

  30

  When David was four years old, Salvatore came to my café, his face cut into a frown. He told me how he’d spent the day in the garden with his son, teaching him about the soil and the plants. But David, he just wanted to play. When his father wasn’t looking, the boy had wandered into the shed and climbed onto the lawn mower, trying to reach the hanging garden tools.

  “I turned away for a minute,” Salvatore said, “a minute and he was gone.”

  “But you found him,” I said. I put a hand on Salvatore’s arm. “He’s okay.”

  I closed the café early and walked Salvatore home. In the kitchen, Eileen had left dishes covered in foil on the table for him, and a heart drawn and shaded in with pencil on a slip of paper torn from a yellow notepad.

  “Eileen,” he called upstairs, but there was no answer.

  We found her and David stretched out on the grass in the backyard, staring up at the autumn stars blooming in the night sky. Eileen must’ve heard us, but that didn’t matter. Nothing could interrupt her time with her son. She kept talking with David, her voice expressive and clear.

  Salvatore sat down on the folding chair on the back porch. I went inside for a bottle of our red wine from last year. We’d gotten the blend of red and green grapes just right after a few seasons of trying. The wine had just a hint of the pressed skins, giving it that nice rose petal blush. I added a splash of club soda to my glass and returned to the porch. When I offered Salvatore the wine, he shook his head no.

  “Can you find our constellation?” Eileen’s words carried across the lawn.

  “There,” David said. He pointed out the V of stars up above. “Like in my room, stickers on my ceiling.”

  “That’s right,” she said. She took his hand into her larger one, and she held it up to her cheek.

  “Tell me the story again,” David said.

  And Eileen told him the story of Pisces, of gods and monsters, of how a volcano came into this world.

  Salvatore leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his face rapt as if he, too, were a boy just beginning to come into a world of light and wonder. A world where stars had names and stories, and where boys had the time to learn them all.

  31

  The bottle of wine sat empty on the table. Several burgundy droplets stained David’s note. Outside the café, the morning sun glared off the snow-a pristine, white landscape, save for a few furrows of tire tracks in the road from early risers who left for work before the dawn. Soon, salt and plow trucks would come and make a mess of all that quiet beauty.


  Sunday. Harbor Park. Midnight.

  David had written these words alone in his bedroom. The letters spelled other words if you knew how to read them, hidden there behind the tight hand: fear, anxiety, hope, excitement, anger, and maybe even love for the raven-haired girl that had come to my café.

  I didn’t know what I would say, what I would do when Tony arrived after school today, if the boy even had the courage to come back at all. I wished he’d never told me. Nella rapped a gloved knuckle on the glass door. She was bundled in a black wool coat, a blue scarf wound around her neck, and a blue knit hat pulled low over her ears. She had a lemon look on her face, like she’d just tasted something sour, and it said, Have you been here all night?

  As I stood up from the table, I slipped David’s note into my pants pocket. I opened the door and she bustled inside, peeling off layers.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  “Frank saw the light on and the grille up on his way to work,” she said. “He called me from the foreman’s office.”

  “So I had a little trouble sleeping last night,” I said and waved her off. Behind the counter, I began grinding coffee beans.

  Nella took the empty wine bottle to the sink. “How long has that been going on?”

  I packed coffee grounds into the filter and started a pot brewing. “Do you want a cup?” I filled a plate of almond biscotti from the bakery case. She rinsed the empty bottle to return to Salvatore.

  In all her life, Nella had never missed a day caring for her brother, not even after David’s death. She made all the funeral arrangements, picked the casket and the flowers and the palm cards. She dealt with the church and the cemetery. She kept her brother’s house spotless, even David’s bedroom, everything the way he left it. She prepared pots of tender lamb stew and loaves of spicy sausage and broccoli scacciata. She stayed with Salvatore in the evenings to make sure that he ate. In the mornings, they sat together on the back porch with coffee and little almond cakes, still warm from her oven.