Under a Sardinian Sky

by Sara Alexander

  “Kendricks, ammonia.”

  The private waved a small vial under the boy’s nose, and Salvatore gave a confused whimper, eyes still shut.

  “He’s coming to,” Kavanagh said. “That’s enough. We have to work quickly.”

  Kavanagh leaned over his bloody head and examined the wound. “Tell the father it appears superficial. The skull is intact. The damage must have been caused by flying shrapnel. He escaped the direct hit.”

  Carmela moved to Peppe and relayed Kavanagh’s information in whispers. Meanwhile Private Kendricks dipped several needles into the pan of boiling water and fished them out with forceps. Kavanagh used his own pair of forceps to handle the needle while Kendricks threaded it. Kavanagh leaned over Salvatore and swabbed at the wound with several layers of cloth dipped in the sterile water. Then he began to pierce the skin around his temple. Carmela watched his wide fingers move with delicacy. No tremor of nerves or adrenaline.

  Salvatore’s semi-conscious state lasted two stitches before he jarred awake with a shriek that Carmela felt at the base of her spine. The soldiers held him still, as ordered, their faces void of emotion. Peppe wrapped him arms around himself and clawed at his sides, muttering to Jesus. Mrs. Curwin turned to Tore, who was hanging at the doorway, immobile. “Whiskey,” she said. Tore left, then returned with a tumbler for his uncle. Peppe’s hand shook so much when he handed it to him that Tore decided it best to place it up to Peppe’s lips himself. Peppe took a few sips before his head began shaking.

  “Carmela,” Mrs. Curwin whispered, “tell your uncle his boy is in safe hands.”

  Carmela took her uncle’s head in her hands and rocked with him. “Tutto andrá bene, Zio.”

  Salvatore’s screams rose with each pierce of the needle.

  Kavanagh spoke. “Kendricks. Gauze, compress, muslin.” And with that, both wounds were covered and Salvatore was slowly pulled up to sitting. “This is a lucky boy. Undetonated mines are almost unheard of these days.”

  Piera and Carmela ran to his side trying to get him to breathe through his sobs. Peppe jumped up from his seat and wrapped his fat hands around his skinny boy, thanking Mary and Jesus, letting his tears drop onto the boy’s shoulders.

  The operating theatre was cleared as quickly as it had appeared. The privates made their way back out to their vehicles. Franco entered.

  Carmela looked at him. For a flash it seemed as if he were a complete stranger.

  “The Americans save the day again,” he said, slurring.

  “Buona sera, Signore,” the lieutenant replied in Italian, catching Franco off-guard. “Carmela, please tell this gentleman—I understand the house belongs to his uncle—that we will be taking a full reconnaissance of the land tomorrow from 06:00 hours.”

  “The lieutenant says they’re coming in the morning to—er . . .” She turned back to Kavanagh. “Reconnaissance?”

  “We will look everywhere in the fields for mines,” he explained, his eyes glinting a deeper blue, complementing the darkened timbre of his voice.

  “Marito, darling, it could have been any one of us! The boys!” Mrs. Curwin cried, unable to contain her panic.

  “Suzie, darling,” Mr. Curwin soothed, clasping her into him. “Undetonated mines are extremely rare. This area was one of the first to be swept clear. The boy is going to be fine. You heard the lieutenant, he had a lucky escape.”

  Carmela turned to Franco. “The soldiers are returning to check the fields. I think he means to apologize for having to walk the property.”

  “Tell him the allies should finish what they started.”

  “Lieutenant—Franco says that’s fine.”

  The men shook hands.

  “Carmela,” Kavanagh began, his face warming with the start of relief. “Please tell your uncle I would like to take the boy to our hospital on base. I’d feel better if I could keep a close eye on him. We have antibiotics too to keep any infection at bay.”

  “Zio, Salvatore should go with the soldiers to their hospital.”

  He nodded. “Carmela, you go with him, yes? I will get Zia Lucia. You stay with him. You can understand what they say.”

  “Yes, Zio.” She turned back to Kavanagh. “My uncle will get his wife from town and meet us there. I will go with my cousin. Is that all right?”

  “Of course. We’ll ride in my vehicle.”

  “What’s going on?” Franco asked, stepping between them.

  “I’m going to the military hospital with Salvatore.”

  “Says who?” Franco replied.

  “I do!” Peppe bellowed, a lion protecting his cub. “If I say she is to go with my son, she is to go with my son!”

  Mrs. Curwin took a step toward the group. “We’re indebted to you, Lieutenant. I am so sorry, Signor Peppe. Carmela, you go. I can help Piera with everything here.”

  Kavanagh lifted Salvatore. Carmela followed the two of them through the darkened living room and out through the house. Kavanagh placed him onto the backseat of his open-top jeep. He turned to Carmela. “You’re to keep him awake back there, you understand?”

  “Yes.” She longed to allow the sobs that gripped her throat to release.

  The engine jerked to life, and soon they careened through the night. The moon shed little light on the craggy landscape. Carmela wished the enveloping blackness felt comforting, but as the jeep started along the winding descent all she felt were dread and the hard thumps of her heart. She clung to her cousin’s bony shoulders, asking him questions to keep him talking.

  The dread swelled to anger. If she had insisted he play closer to the house. If she had been less concerned about the look of the table, maybe all of this could have been averted. If she had forced him to help his father or Vittoria, he would have been spared this. A matter of inches had lain between Salvatore’s survival and obliteration. We’re like harried ants, the lot of us, she thought. How much time we waste in the belief of control over our destinies. How God must laugh at us, racing down here to nowhere!

  And where had Franco been when everyone was crowding around the table? Carmela imagined he’d been taking care of the guests, but her heart intimated otherwise. Surely he wouldn’t have been drinking through the screams? How long had he waited after she had gone to drink some more?

  The cluster of lights from the base rose into view by the bay below.

  Her heart lurched.

  She convinced herself it was because of the task at hand and not because her eyes had caught the piercing blue of Kavanagh’s in the rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER 6

  The ward gleamed a disinfected white. Several nurses floated across the polished floors. Their starched caps, perched at the center of their impeccable locks, caught the dim light of the lamps clamped on the bed frames. Carmela sat by Salvatore as she watched a nurse apply fresh dressing. He winced when she swabbed close to the wound. As she finished, the nurse looked at Carmela, flashed a brief, sympathetic smile, and left.

  Kavanagh sidled up to the opposite bedside, holding his hat in his hands. “I’m so sorry, Carmela. God knows it could have been a whole lot worse.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked down at Salvatore, who turned his head, a few breaths from sleep. Kavanagh’s skin flushed, his short blond hair gilded in the lamplight. He lifted his gaze back toward her. It was not the deep blue of his eyes that struck her as much as the dignity that shone there.

  “We thank you. So much,” she said.

  As Kavanagh took a breath to reply, an older man in uniform stepped in.

  “Captain,” Kavanagh said, snapping to attention.

  “Lieutenant,” Casler answered, followed by a perfunctory nod to Carmela. “You’ve done a fine job on the native. Not bad for a med school dropout.” He flashed an arch grin.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Pity. Was turning out to be quite the party. . . .” His eye tracked a nurse walking by.

  Carmela caught a whiff of whiskey on his breath.

  “Who’s this?�
�� he barked. “The mother?”

  “No sir, a cousin. Carmela.”

  Her eyes met Casler’s.

  “Ma’am,” he said, with a sweep across her body as if it were the first time they’d met. He looked back at Kavanagh. “I thank God every day for stationing me in paradise with a wife back home who won’t get on a plane or boat. Hot savages everywhere you look, for Chrissake,” he said with a sideways glance. “Get hard just looking at them.”

  Carmela pretended she didn’t understand.

  Kavanagh masked his embarrassment with an awkward smile. “Sir, with your permission I would like to lead a reconnaissance and full sweep of the area tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” the captain answered, his eyes planted on Carmela’s neck.

  “May I talk to you, sir?”

  “That’s what we’re doing.”

  “In private, sir?”

  “Farm girl’s a red spy?” he answered with a guffaw that nearly woke Salvatore.

  Carmela stared at her hands.

  Casler’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter? You don’t tell jokes down south, Kavanagh?”

  The double doors at the ward entrance flung open before Kavanagh could answer. Lucia charged through them like a crazed bull, Peppe close behind. Carmela ran to her aunt. “He’s fine, Zia, he’s going to be fine.”

  Lucia brushed past her niece to Salvatore’s bedside. She slid her arm underneath him and pressed him to her chest.

  “Signora,” Kavanagh said, “piano—Carmela, please try to get her to let him rest.”

  “Zia, l’Americano says he needs sleep.”

  Lucia ignored them, burrowing her face into her son’s hair and rocking him, her tears running down her cheeks and falling in fat drops. He began to wriggle awake.

  Carmela placed a gentle hand on her aunt’s shoulder and a chair by her side. “Here, sit, we can stay for a while.”

  A nurse at the adjacent bed drew a curtain around a young officer in traction. “Excuse me,” Captain Casler said, catching her eye as she disappeared behind. “I need to continue my rounds. Be sure the family does not stay long, Lieutenant.”

  Carmela watched him leave, returning her gaze to Kavanagh for a moment, who, though holding a polite distance from her family, seemed to be looking at Salvatore with a warmth she would not have anticipated from anyone other than a relative. The memory of him being celebrated at Antonio’s bar floated into her mind. She found herself wanting to know how he must feel with his new baby being so far away. It seemed that this was not a man who might bear the distance with ease. The start of a tender smile faded as he straightened.

  “How long does Salvatore need to stay, my aunt is asking,” Carmela asked.

  “Certainly overnight. I’m afraid visitors cannot stay.”

  Carmela’s expression dropped.

  “But I’ll speak with my captain,” he said, fumbling a little for words. “It would be better if Salvatore wakes and someone familiar is nearby.”

  An hour later Lucia and Peppe had been wrenched from their son’s bedside and led out by Kavanagh. Carmela watched her cousin’s chest rise and fall until sleep overtook her as well. She drifted in and out of restless dreams till she was jarred awake with a bolt. It felt like the dead of night. The witching hour, her mother called it, when the souls of the dead slipped out and the babies slid in. It took a moment for her to realize her hands were wet from the upturned glass of water trickling from Salvatore’s bedside table onto her palm, not the river in which she had dreamed she was drowning. She must have flicked it over somehow, by mistake, in her sleep.

  “Would you like a drink?” Kavanagh whispered.

  Carmela looked up, on guard. No words came to her rescue.

  “I’m having trouble sleeping,” he said, handing her a small glass of water.

  “Thank you.” She reached over to Salvatore’s glass and straightened it. “Sorry.”

  He walked over behind her chair and mopped up the spill with a tea towel. “Bad dream?”

  Carmela shifted with unease. Surely he hadn’t been watching her sleep? She took a sip. Her swallows sounded louder than usual. He folded the wet towel and returned to the other side of the bed. They sat in the quiet of the shadows.

  “My baby is four weeks old today,” Kavanagh said, breaking the silence. “Times like this I’m reminded of the distance.”

  “Boy?”

  “Yes. Seymour. After my grandfather.”

  “I was supposed to be named after my grandmother. Only thing we would have had the same,” she said with a smirk. Kavanagh smiled, seeming somewhat surprised at her sense of humor—a quality that Carmela knew most of the local girls were not known for, among the soldiers at least.

  “It will be nothing like that feast at Mrs. Curwin’s, but we’ve got a kitchen with supplies—can I fix you something?”

  She should refuse politely—after all, he was already manipulating the rules by allowing her to stay. To take food seemed a step too far.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I’ve got to take this wet thing back too,” he said, throwing the tea towel from one hand to the other. He gestured for her to follow him. “Come on, it’s just up here.”

  She hesitated for a moment. Her stomach rumbled. Then she stood up and followed him.

  They made their way along the length of the ward, passing a couple of nurses. Carmela liked to think their eyebrows didn’t raise as she walked by. She realized she was still wearing her apron and that the jeep most likely left her hair looking as if she’d dived through a hedge backward. She berated herself for caring and for feeling a little too excited to be spending a night in this foreign world.

  They arrived at the kitchen, a small galley of white cabinets and shiny lemon Formica countertops. At the far end was the largest refrigerator Carmela had ever seen. Kavanagh moved over to it and pulled the chrome handle. She saw a stack of sliced cheese in perfect squares and a line of fat, sausage-looking shapes in colorful packages. A nurse entered with a tray of empty glasses. Carmela turned, feeling like a trespasser.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant,” the nurse said, flashing him a bright smile. As she filled the glasses with water from a large jug, her eyes slit sideways to Carmela. “Is there anything I might help you with?”

  “No, Kelly, that’s fine. Just fixing a snack.”

  “I’m happy to do that, Lieutenant, just as soon as I’ve given out these.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Kelly, thank you though.”

  Carmela watched the peachy-skinned nurse leave, imagining how beautiful she would look in the cotton summer dress she had sketched a few days ago. It struck Carmela that the female staff could bring a lot of business to Yolanda. She wondered if they had shops on the base, or if they spent the entirety of their days dressed in various combinations of white starch, like novice nuns.

  Kavanagh placed two slices of bread on a couple of pale blue plastic plates and laid two slices of cheese on top. The deft, steady hands she had seen at work in Mrs. Curwin’s kitchen now looked hesitant. He pulled back the wrapper of one of the fat sausages and smeared a pink slab of the contents over another slice of bread. Then he pressed them together.

  “It’s a sandwich, Carmela,” he said, on the back of her quizzical look.

  She looked down at the plates, wondering what animal had been pureed for the purpose of this meal.

  “Your first?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Am I the first person to make you a sandwich?” He sounded like a young boy for a moment. Carmela felt a great urge to ask him about the story of his life up until the point where he found himself alone in a small, clinical kitchen with a Sardinian woman. He was looking straight at her. She realized she hadn’t answered. “I suppose, yes,” she said, smiling with three o’clock delirium. Some where between the accident, the roofless ride, and the lack of sleep, she had let her guard slip. The image of Zio Peppe screaming at Franco surfaced, but she buried it. Reality could wait till
tomorrow.

  Kavanagh lifted up both plates, and Carmela followed him back down the hallway to Salvatore’s bedside. He pulled over a small table on wheels and set a chair from another bedside for Carmela to sit on. He sat opposite. She picked up the soft, white square.

  “It’s not homemade pasta—which was unbelievable, by the way—but it’s also not as bad as it looks. Honestly.”

  She smiled. He had enjoyed her food at the party. She watched him look at her, expectant, as she bit into the bread. There was a whisper of taste from the square cheese, followed by the overpowering saltiness of the mystery sausage spread.

  “Well?”

  An awkward pause, as Kavanagh waited for her to swallow her tiny mouthful.

  “American,” she answered.

  He laughed. His shadowed face lit up as he did so. “You speak English well, Carmela.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Mrs. Curwin. We have worked there for five years. She gave me records, books. I like it very much.”

  They chewed in silence for a moment. He devoured the food without wasting a crumb, not chewing openmouthed like the young men who helped at the farm. The way he still looked as if he’d just arrived at the party rather than having dealt with a medical emergency and the hysteria of Carmela’s family impressed her. Had she ever even known a man with a cool head?

  “That’s good,” he said, wiping his mouth with a white napkin. “Especially now.”

  “Now?”

  “I probably shouldn’t mention it before it’s official,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning in close enough for Carmela to pick up his woody scent, “but we’ve had word from our senior officers that the base is considering opening up positions for locals in the near future.”

  “Positions?”

  “Clerks, front desk work, administration, that sort of thing. No point us being here if the local people don’t benefit.”

  His singsong lilt was difficult for Carmela to decipher when he spoke at such speed. He seemed to intuit her thoughts, because he stopped for a moment. “I’m racing?”