Annie learned Benito had grown up in Montefollonico, and his stepfather was a tailor. Benito met Angelina at school and they married soon after they were out. His father wanted to train him as a tailor, but Benito wanted to be a farmer. He worked on a farm in the Val d’Orcia and bought his own farm eventually. Benito and Angelina lived there until recently when they moved back into the village, leaving their son Vincenzo to take over the farm, which produced olive oil and pork.
His face lit up when he talked of the farm, Annie noticed. He spoke faster and Janice had a harder time translating and they all laughed at one point when Janice said “piano” asking him to slow down. Benito was a farmer and had spent his life working the land—just like all the May men before him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
IT WAS AFTER ten when Annie and Janice got back to the room, but at home it was late afternoon. Evelyn had not yet responded to the e-mail she sent earlier. Annie read and then reread an email from Jake about picking up a new bull with Scott. Annie was glad he had a buddy his own age since there was over thirty years difference between him and Joe Gibson. Reading his words made her miss him to the point of nearly aching. Annie wanted to hear his voice, something to make her feel closer to him with so much that separated them.
When her call went to his voicemail, she left a short message about their connection with Benito and promised more later. The call she had placed to Beulah had gone unanswered.
Janice returned to the room after making her phone calls from the empty hotel lobby.
“The kids are having a great time,” she said. “They don’t want to come home. On the other hand, Jimmy is exhausted, but said they’re getting the wildfires under control.”
“I feel disconnected from the rest of the world,” Annie said. “It’s as if I’m in another era of time right now, reliving Elena and Ephraim’s history.”
“It’s kind of heavy, isn’t it?” Janice said, crawling into her bed. “What a strong love she had for him, to have his name written on her tombstone after a whole life with someone else.”
“What do you think would’ve happened had he lived? Would he have gone back to Italy after the war, married her and brought her home to Somerville?”
Janice yawned. “I guess we will never know.”
Annie turned off the light but lay in bed and stared out the window. A nearly full moon was rising in the sky. Luna Bella.
In only a few hours, Jake would see the moon rise over the rolling hills of Kentucky. It was only a month ago when she had stared blissfully at the full moon after Jake told her he loved her. Then, everything was possible. Now, the beautiful dream seemed impossible.
Annie thought about Elena having that kind of love for Ephraim and then having to part with him. Later, finding out she carried his child and the longing after the war to be reunited with him. After months, when no word came, she finally accepted the dreaded truth that he was gone from their lives forever. Possibly, the young woman lay in her bed and stared at a moon hanging low in the Italian sky on a night like tonight, and made a decision. Benito needed a father.
Elena had married Roberto, a good man, a provider, but not the love of her life. The rest of her days, Elena guarded the place that belonged only to Ephraim for the day when she could claim it publicly by attaching their names in death.
Annie turned over and tried to sleep. Vesta’s words came to her from Jeremiah: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.”
It was impossible to change her family, who she was and what people thought about her. It was possible to do good instead of evil, with God’s help. Love instead of hate. Stay instead of leave. Choose truth instead of lies.
Somewhere in the night under the light of the waxing moon, Annie realized that while Elena guarded her heart for Ephraim, she had guarded her heart against Jake. It had nothing to do with protecting Jake and everything to do with protecting herself.
***
“You look bad. Didn’t you sleep well?” Janice said, squinting at her from her bed the next morning.
“Thanks.” Annie threw a pillow at her. Janice caught it and flung it back. “Terrible night. I’m not sure I slept at all.”
“Why? I thought you’d be so relieved at finding Benito,” Janice said, and walked to the bathroom.
“I had this overwhelming feeling I was losing Jake forever,” Annie said. “In fact, I need to call him.”
“You can’t call him now, it’s two in the morning back home,” Janice said, a toothbrush in her mouth. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“It wasn’t a dream. It’s all this stuff with Ephraim and Elena and how they missed a lifetime with each other. Janice, I’m not like my father. So maybe all this is really about protecting myself, holding back for fear of losing again.”
Annie plopped down on the closed toilet seat, feeling herself on the verge of tears.
“This horrible fear is the very reason I could lose him.”
Janice spit the toothpaste out. “This is news to you? What’ve I been trying to tell you?”
“I know, I know. Somehow it came into focus last night.”
“Am I your best friend?” Janice asked, the toothbrush emphasizing each word.
“Of course you are.”
“Do I love you like one of my own sisters?” Janice asked.
“I know you do.”
“Please hear what I am about to say in love,” Janice said. “I don’t think you’ve ever wanted to let your defense down with another man because of what your father did. It’s why you’ve picked losers in the past, so you’d never be in danger. Jake comes along and you can’t resist him. He’s the one. You’re happy for a while until you freak out because there’s no exit door. So you create this whole Taylor-name thing as your way out.”
“I didn’t create it!” Annie said.
“Okay, wrong word,” Janice agreed. “You didn’t create it, but you gave it life. You could’ve laughed off the words of a silly gossip. Instead, you let it become this major thing because you need a way out.”
“I feel sick,” she said.
“Annie, don’t give your father this much control over your future and don’t throw this gift away,” Janice said, her voice gentle.
“I don’t want to throw it away,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I love Jake. I’m just not sure how to do it.”
Janice knelt beside her. “Of course you don’t,” she smiled at her. “That’s what faith is all about. You take one step at a time.”
Annie thought back to a long ago time with her grandfather. They were sitting on the front porch swing, breaking green beans the summer before she left for college.
“I don’t know what school will be like,” Annie said. “What if it’s too hard and I can’t do it?”
Her grandfather took the pipe out of his shirt pocket, filled it with loose tobacco from a pouch, and tamped it down. “Sometimes you have to jump off a cliff and grow your wings on the way down.”
“What’s that?” Janice said and Annie was aware she had mumbled the words aloud.
“Grandpa told me once that sometimes you have to jump off a cliff and grow your wings on the way down. This feels like falling off a cliff for me.”
“Then don’t fall. Jump,” Janice said.
***
After Annie showered, she gave the bathroom over to Janice, and sat on the bed in her robe. The lack of sleep and the emotional morning had physically exhausted her. It was like recovering from a surgery where an abscess had been lanced. While Janice showered, Annie used her laptop to check her e-mail and saw a response from Evelyn.
“Annie, Beulah will be so pleased. I am just getting this and will share it with her Wednesday morning, as soon as I can get over there. I went with Jake and Tom to see a farm down in Tennessee and we just got back. Beulah took Rossella to Lexington today to show her around along with Betty and Joe Gibson. All is well and we can’t wait to get you ho
me.”
There was no e-mail from Jake. Before she lost her courage, she typed: “I’m ready.”
***
Before lunch, Benito drove to their hotel and picked them up in his small car. Through Janice, he pointed out places of interest: an old villa now an agriturismo, a hectare of grapes belonging to a certain winemaker, and a friend’s large grove of olive trees. Annie noticed the plowed ground was beige, nearly the color of sand on the Atlantic beaches back home, different from the black, fine dirt in Kentucky. When asked, Benito said “the soil drained well, which was good for grapes and olive trees.”
They were on a very small road that hair-pinned around the hilltops and gently made its way to the valley below. Benito turned left onto a gravel road that led through a grove of olive trees.
“These are their olive trees,” Janice translated.
Soon, a farmhouse came into view, built with the same brick and sandstone combination common in the village and finished with a terra-cotta tile roof. How different from the typical clapboard farmhouses and shingled roofs in Kentucky, Annie mused. But the environment provided the materials, and in Kentucky there was an abundance of wood. Here in Italy, stone, mud and clay to make bricks and terra-cotta came from the landscape.
Benito parked the car and they got out. Two men emerged from another stone building she guessed must be the barn. Father and son, her cousins, Vincenzo and Luca.
Benito made the introductions in Italian. There was much kissing on both cheeks by both Vincenzo and Luca. Vincenzo looked to be in his forties and had the same gray eyes of his father and her grandmother. But he appeared to take after Angelina with his other features. Luca was a handsome teenager, with brown, serious eyes, who seemed past the ravages of puberty but before a boy took on the appearance of a man.
Vincenzo spoke in good English.
“We are so happy to know you. This has brought my father much joy. He says now he can live the rest of his life in peace, knowing about his family.”
Vincenzo waited while his father said something in Italian.
“Papa wants to know if you have a picture of his father? If not with you, one you could send him later?”
“Oh, yes,” Annie said. “My grandmother has several. We will make copies and send them.”
Vincenzo told his father and a wide smile broke out on Benito’s face. “He is very happy about this,” Vincenzo said. “Now, would you like to see the farm?”
“Oh, yes. And may I take pictures as well?”
“Of course,” Vincenzo took them first to see the pigs, which she learned were a special breed called cinta senese.
“This pig is native to here and eats in the grass and the forest,” Vincenzo said, pointing to the trees that bordered their property. “The pork is the best and has a special taste,” he said, passion growing in his voice.
“See the pig is black with a white band around its middle,” he said. “The white band is the cinta,” he said, pointing to a sow with six piglets tugging at her. Annie took pictures of Vincenzo and Luca as well as the pigs, not only for her grandmother, but for Jake as well.
Then they walked a distance away to the other side of the farm where several hectares of olive trees grew in a line.
“We harvest in early November, usually, so we are just a few weeks away.”
He plucked an olive and explained how they had to be at the right stage for pressing the oil.
“When they are ripe, we take them down the road a few kilometers to the press. We pay them to press for us, then we have our oil.”
After the farm tour, Vincenzo led them back up the hill to the farmhouse. Janice was talking to Vincenzo and Luca while Annie fell in step with Benito. He held his hands behind his back, leaning into the hill, with a contented smile on his face. He caught her looking at him and smiled at her and extended his arm. They walked in step up the hill together, arm in arm, no translation needed.
Vincenzo’s wife, Anna, and their daughter, Rosa, had set a table for lunch. More kissing ensued with meeting Anna and Rosa before they all sat down together to enjoy the Gianelli’s olive oil and bread as well as Prosciutto, salami, and sausage from their cinta seneses and pici pasta with a pecorino cheese and white pepper sauce, another local dish.
Before they left, Janice took several pictures of Annie with her new family members. They exchanged contact information and made promises for visits, both in Italy and in Kentucky.
Annie brushed off a tear as they waved goodbye. Benito drove away from the hotel—the only male relative left to her. Italy had always been a place she loved, but now Italy held a part of her heart, a heart she hoped would remain forever unguarded.
Chapter Thirty
AFTER ALL ROSSELLA did on Monday night for the dinner party, Beulah wanted to do something kind in return. It seemed that some of the tension had gone out of the house once Rossella had proved her skill in the kitchen to Beulah’s friends and neighbors. Despite the stolen chicken, she felt it was her duty as a hostess to offer Rossella a day of sightseeing. She would just as soon have stayed home, but Rossella should see more of Kentucky than the farms on May Hollow Road.
While she was happy to drive around Somerville and even Rutherford, she was no longer comfortable driving up to Lexington with all the traffic. Beulah asked Joe and Betty if they would drive her car and off they all went early Tuesday morning.
Rossella’s eyes nearly bugged out at all the manicured horse farms with the dry-laid stone fences, grand entrances, and the thoroughbred barns nice as human homes.
“I know the fella who runs this one,” Joe said, turning into one of the driveways that led back to the farm office.
They waited in the car while Joe went in to see his friend. Betty craned her neck from the front seat.
“Land sakes, this is fun! I sure wish Evelyn could have come with us. What in the world did she have to do that kept her from it?”
Beulah knew good and well that Evelyn was with Tom and Jake today but she was not going to be the one to tell Betty Gibson.
“She had more work to do on the wedding,” Beulah said vaguely.
“Ha!” Rossella said, with a wave of her hand. “Amore.”
“What’d you say, Rossella?” Betty asked.
“Amore. Love,” Rossella said.
“Yes, weddings are wonderful aren’t they?”
“I don’t mean young couple. I mean …”
Beulah suddenly turned to her back seat companion and tried to give her the eye without Betty noticing.
“What wrong with your eye?” Rossella said, and frowned at Beulah.
“Nothing,” Beulah said.
“C’mon y’all,” Joe said. “Jack’s gonna show us a Derby winner.”
Beulah sighed in relief. After the horse farm, they toured the Mary Todd Lincoln house museum in downtown Lexington so Rossella could see where the Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln met his wife.
They had lunch at a sandwich shop and when Beulah thought it was time to go home, Joe suggested a bourbon distillery tour just outside of Lexington, so off they went to Woodford Reserve.
She kept a close eye on Joe Gibson in the tasting room, making sure he wasn’t sampling too much before driving them all home. As for her own self, Beulah passed on the sampling, having had enough alcohol in the last week to last her the rest of her life.
The subject of Evelyn and Tom had been avoided. If Betty Gibson got hold of that piece of information, especially before Evelyn was even aware of it herself, it would be disastrous. The delicate bud of early love would have no chance to blossom.
***
After such a full day, Beulah slept late the next morning. Rossella’s door was still shut when she made her way to the kitchen for coffee. Just after she plugged in the percolator, the wall phone rang. She debated answering it since she could hardly take Betty Gibson’s phone calls before a cup of coffee. But it could be Annie, so she answered.
“Beulah, I got an e-mail from Annie last night.” Evelyn said
. “They found Ephraim’s son. She has written everything and has even sent some pictures. I’ll bring it over now if it’s a good time.”
“He’s still alive?” she said, sitting down hard on the kitchen chair. “What about his mother, Elena?”
“He is alive and well, with children and grandchildren, but Elena is gone,” Evelyn said.
In ten minutes, Evelyn was seated at her kitchen table, handing her a photograph of Benito. She clasped her hand to her mouth and shook her head.
“He looks so much like Ephraim. His skin’s a little darker but look at those eyes, and his nose.”
“This is his wife, Angelina,” Evelyn said. “You need to read what Annie wrote to get the full story.”
Evelyn waited patiently while she read.
“He was a farmer,” Beulah said. “Just like Ephraim, and Daddy and his daddy. All the way back as far as we know,” she said. “What about that?”
The wonderment of it all was nearly beyond comprehension.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Evelyn said. “Today, they’re going to meet his son and grandson on the farm. Annie will send another e-mail later.”
Beulah shook her head, unable to speak. Joy, pressed down and overflowing.
“Thank you,” she said to Evelyn. “I’m glad you know how to run the computer. It sure does make the world seem small.”
She stared for a long time at her nephew and silently asked God to allow her to live long enough to meet him, either here or there. Finally, she gathered up the pages and set them aside, knowing she would pour over it all again in the quiet of her bedroom.
“How was your day in Lexington?” Evelyn asked.
Beulah told her what all they had done. When she finished, she wondered how to broach the subject of Tom Childress.
“And you were with Tom and Jake?” she said.
“Oh, Beulah,” Evelyn said, her forehead creasing. “I’ve wanted to tell you, but you’ve had so much going on; I didn’t want to add anything else.”
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