My father’s land, about thirty acres in all, was split part way up by a creek that wound its way through the farms on the 3rd Concession, the land on either side sloping gently down to it to form a tiny valley. Beyond the creek was open field, indistinguishable from the other fields that flanked it, whatever private history it might have had revealed only in the occasional arrowhead or fossil that the plough churned up in the fall. But the front part of the farm, with its strange buildings and variations, the cavernous barn and kiln, the irrigation pond, the greenhouses with their white wooden frames and their weed-choked alleys, the coal-dust-filled boiler room, was its own little world, as compact and multifaceted as the tiny villages, often merely the centuries-long elaborations of single families, that had clung like outcroppings to the rocky slopes around Valle del Sole. When I first arrived at the farm its tidy arrangements, the trees that rose leafless in an orderly row along the edge of the driveway, the little courtyard formed by the house and garage and kiln, made it seem like something in a picture, without dimensions, unreal; it might have been set out by some titan child, who had simply placed this tree here, this house, this red barn, like so many giant toys. The roofs of the greenhouses then were covered with a thin crust of snow that made me think of sugar, though here and there the snow was cut away in perfect dark squares – I thought the squares must form some kind of pattern or code, but they were only spots where the glass had broken, and the snow had fallen through.
Our house, of white clapboard, appeared to stand in those first days like an object frozen in a moment of time and then forgotten, with an air at once of abandonment and preservation. My father had preceded us there but whether by days or weeks or months wasn’t clear, only the barest evidences of him scattered here and there, a few dishes in the kitchen cupboards, a dirty towel on the rack in the bathroom, as if he had come like an intruder, feline, ready for flight, the house still seeming to await some small crucial act that might shatter its chill calm. There was a modernness to it that I thought of as what was foreign, not Italian, the preternatural gleam of the kitchen with its chrome table and chequer-board tiles, its porcelained fridge and stove, then the living room with its picture-book decorum, the sofa and armchair there, faded and worn but imposing, a different order of things than what I’d known in Valle del Sole; a hundred mysteries seemed to shelter there, the radio above the fridge whose insides slowly warmed to a glow as it came on, the telephone with its distant buzz like insects mindlessly churring. But if the house had any informing spirit it didn’t seem to reside in its objects, which despite their novelty gave no feeling of welcome to the rooms that held them, refusing to give up their histories, sitting stubborn and mute in their separate spaces like things that had turned their backs to you. The only thing that betrayed them in this was a smell, a faint odour of mothballs and sweet rot and something else, not as simple as sweat or the smell of a breath but definitely human, lingering on the furniture, in the cupboards in the kitchen and pantry, in the chintz curtains left at the windows, and stealing over me sometimes to leave an odd hollowness in me like a gloom, the creeping intimation of whatever unknown lives had gone on there before us.
The day after my arrival a girl named Gelsomina came to live with us to look after the baby. On the train my father’s awkward ministrations to the baby had seemed to draw attention to it as to a magical thing, women in the seats around us bending to coo to it in their senseless languages, slowly taking it over for its feedings and changes while my father sat darkly by. But now it was brusquely turned over to Gelsomina like something to be quietly disposed of. Gelsomina was the daughter of my father’s cousin Alfredo – I remembered the visit he’d paid my mother in Valle del Sole the previous fall after her troubles had begun, come back from America then in his fancy suit, though now he spoke as if he hadn’t seen me since I was a baby.
“Ma guarda cuist’, do you remember your Uncle Alfredo? Look how big you are, I remember when you were as small as a cabbage.”
But his friendliness seemed forced, almost bitter, put on more for my father’s benefit than for mine.
Gelsomina, thin-limbed and moody, dark like the back-country urchins who’d come into school sometimes in Valle del Sole from their distant homesteads, was strange with me as well. I was sure we’d known each other in Italy, could call up images of her from the gatherings of my father’s side of the family in Castilucci; but she gave no sign now of this past between us, as if we could no longer be the same people we’d been once, now that we were in Canada.
“I’m only helping here until I can work at the factory again,” she said, making it seem as if she’d been in the country a long time already, though her father had brought the family over only the previous fall. “I was there before but I had to leave because one of the inglesi told the boss I wasn’t sixteen yet and it was against the law. But it’s just they can’t stand to see the Italians make the same money they do when they’ve been in the country a hundred years.”
Tsi’Alfredo and his wife Maria brought things for the house, pots and pans, a washboard, jars full of tomato sauce, a stack of diapers. Other paesani came by as well, people who called me by name but who I recognized only vaguely or not all, couldn’t connect to a place or a time; but if they had gifts they’d quietly turn them over to Gelsomina, as if shielding my father from the shame of their generosity. My father would tell Gelsomina to bring glasses and wine, and sometimes he’d talk with these visitors in such a casual way that the shadow around him receded and he’d seem transformed, different from the man who had sat beside me on the train, from the one who in some painful way was my father; but other times he sat silent at his corner of the table and the guests talked only among themselves.
There were two bedrooms in the house, one off the pantry and one off the living room. My father slept in the first, in a bed with a headboard of slim metal tubes like the bars of a cage; Gelsomina and I shared a double bed in the other with the baby. For all this compelled closeness, Gelsomina and I hardly spoke to each other – the house seemed to impose its own silence on us, to police and enforce it. Even the baby was quiet, its blank eyes probing the world with what seemed an unnatural calm, though often in the middle of the night it would begin to whimper and I’d watch through a haze of sleep as Gelsomina soundlessly rose out of bed to make up a bottle. I’d go into the kitchen with her sometimes, taking comfort from her cool efficiency, the way she moved through the room undaunted by its porcelained strangeness, the chrome taps, the dark coils on the stove that slowly melted to red as the heat fed into them. The milk she used came in large thick-lipped bottles that the milkman left every morning on the steps inside the back door; before warming it she’d mix in a cupful of boiled water into which she’d stirred a few pinches of sugar. When the bottle was ready she’d touch the nipple against her wrist to check its heat, then nestle the baby with practised ease in the crook of an arm, her movements so certain and smooth they seemed instinctual; but there was an edge in them too, an urgency, one that seemed less protective of the baby than of the silence that ruled over the house.
My father was working shifts at the canning factory then, on top of the hours he spent on the farm. To me it seemed only that he came and went like a spirit, his presence never certain but somehow lingering around us always, like the house’s strange smell. In my sleep I’d hear his truck starting up in the middle of the night, its lights flashing past the bedroom window a moment later like a dream, but then in the morning I might be awakened by the sound of his hammer and rise to see him already stooped on a catwalk atop one of the greenhouse roofs, home again though I hadn’t heard him return. Gelsomina, at least, seemed to make some sense of his movements: once a day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night, she’d fill a big silver lunchbox with sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and set it out on the back steps, from where it would disappear each time my father’s truck pulled out of the driveway and appear again, empty, several hours later. But then often at mealtimes Gelsomina would set a third place at the table that wouldn’t be filled. Sometimes a day passed when my father didn’t come into the house at all; and then at night we’d see the boiler-room light still burning when we went to bed.
The worst times were when my father was sleeping. He slept, as he worked, in erratic fits, without apparent pattern, perhaps asleep when Gelsomina and I awoke in the mornings, or coming suddenly into the house in the middle of the afternoon and disappearing almost at once into his room; and each time he closed himself behind his bedroom door he set the seal on a second order of silence. Gelsomina and I would take the baby out to the front porch then, which was separated from the living room by a thick door with a heavy latch we had to remember to click back so we didn’t lock ourselves out, and there we would sit out our exile on chairs we’d brought out from the kitchen, the baby set on a mattress of blankets on the wood floor. The porch had windows all around, pleasant and warm when the sun was shining, with an air of dreamy indolence that made me think of summer days out tending the sheep in Valle del Sole; but almost every day now was cloudy and wet, the April wind rattling through the windows then and our breaths hanging in the air with the damp cold. After a half hour or so the baby would begin to whimper, its little fists reddening and its nose beginning to run; but Gelsomina would merely wrap it more tightly in its blankets and rock it in her arms to silence it.
The baby didn’t have a name then, seemed too small somehow to merit one – at night, tucked between Gelsomina and me in bed, its body looked so tiny and frail I was afraid I’d roll over and crush it in my sleep. It hadn’t grown at all since it had been born, only its eyes showing any change, clearing slowly from murky grey to a pellucid blue till it seemed some spirit had crawled up inside it and was peering out now from its hollow sockets.
“It’s a bastard,” Gelsomina said. “My mother says your father should put her in an orphanage.”
But instead we merely kept up our careful avoidances, the baby closed away in the bedroom whenever my father was in the house, at meals Gelsomina sitting sideways in her chair to be ready to rise if it should begin to cry. A line seemed to divide the house in two at the living-room door, Gelsomina seldom bringing the baby into the kitchen and my father, for his part, seldom crossing beyond it. Every day I half expected that someone would come to take the baby away from us, and that our lives would assume then some more normal course; but the weeks passed and still the baby remained.
Then one night I was awakened by the baby’s cries, unusually insistent and loud. Beside me Gelsomina was already up, rocking the baby in her arms with a troubled urgency.
“Calmati,” Gelsomina hissed. “Calmati!”
But the baby only cried more fiercely, in the moonlight her face seeming gnarled like an old woman’s.
“Here,” Gelsomina whispered, setting the baby in my lap. Its thin hair was dank with sweat from the spring mugginess of the night, the first warm one we’d had since I’d arrived. “Hold her while I make a bottle. If she wakes your father he’ll break both our heads.”
So my father was asleep, then – Gelsomina must have heard him come in after we had gone to bed. I tried to silence the baby by rocking her, clutching her close to me hoping to smother her sound with my body; but her small fists hit out against me to push me away. I panicked and clamped a hand down hard against her mouth; but in an instant her chest had begun to heave so wildly that I pulled my hand away in fright.
Gelsomina returned now with the bottle. The baby resisted it at first, seeming too intent on her crying.
“Oh, basta!” Gelsomina whispered.
Then finally she took the nipple and grew quiet again, instantly transformed by her silence, made suddenly toy-like and harmless again when a moment before she had seemed so monstrous.
Gelsomina’s eyes flashed to mine.
“Go back to sleep. Anyway it’s not our fault.”
But it seemed some demon had got into the baby now: over the next days she grew more and more unmanageable, sleeping fitfully, crying at all hours, as if she had only just overcome the shock of her early birth and was suddenly bursting on the world with all the energy and rage of a newborn. My father said nothing, only grew more shadowy, more elusive, sleeping less often, coming in less often for meals.
“She must be sick,” Gelsomina said. “My sister cried like this when she had the colic.”
“Do we have to take her to a doctor?”
“A doctor! Who’ll pay to send her to a doctor? If she dies it’ll be better for everyone.”
But the baby did not die, only continued for days her incessant crying. Gelsomina kept placing a palm on her forehead but could feel no fever there – except for her crying the baby seemed normal, her limbs beginning to thicken, her hair filling in, her cheeks puffed out with what looked like ruddy health.
My father had stopped coming in for meals entirely now. Then one night, while Gelsomina and I sat wide-eyed in bed trying to quiet the baby, we heard the back door slam, saw my father’s shadow pass outside our bedroom window, saw the boiler-room light go on, then off again; but my father didn’t return. The next day was Sunday, when we usually had lunch at Gelsomina’s house; but well past noon my father still hadn’t come in from the fields. Finally Tsi’Alfredo called on the phone.
“Tsi’Mario said I should tell you we can’t come today,” Gelsomina said. “He has to get the field ready to plant.”
Tsi’Alfredo’s voice crackled loud an instant from the other end.
“He told me to call,” Gelsomina said, “but I forgot.”
But she was making things up – she hadn’t spoken to my father at all.
“Why did you say that?” I said afterwards.
“Mind your own business. Do you think I want to go back to the factory again?”
My father switched back to the night shift at the factory that week. But he didn’t come into the house any more to sleep, the rotations of his lunchbox on the back steps the only evidence that he had come into the house at all, at night his footsteps sounding from the boiler room when he came to collect it. Then one afternoon Gelsomina made me go out there with her while my father was in the back field.
“I just want to see,” she said.
“See what?” I said.
“Never mind what, just come.”
It was the first time I’d been out to the boiler room. I had thought it must be a kind of house, with its glass windows and false-brick walls, but it seemed merely a storage place where so many odds and ends had been heaped haphazardly over the years. A boiler rose up near the entrance like an outsized bull, a tangled web of pipes and shafts and cables leading away from it; then beyond it the room was all dark clutter and filth, wooden storage niches along the walls crammed with strange implements, switches and fittings, lengths of pipe, coils of wire, a workbench littered with oily tools and tin cans and with a mess of gears and metal shafts that looked like the remains of some great engine. A film of coal dust covered everything like a pall, the windows so powdered over with it they let in only an eerie twilight. Along one wall, though, was a bank of niches that looked newly built, unpainted and fresh, its tidy slots seeming hopeful somehow in their empty newness.
Gelsomina led me to the back of the building toward a room whose walls rose up only part way to the ceiling, its roof forming a loft. An old calendar, 1957, was tacked outside the door, yellowed with its four years’ lingering, a few dates circled in red and cryptic messages written beneath in a foreign hand. Inside the room, a small mullioned window looked out from a dimness that smelt of mould and something else, a faint animal scent like the smell of a stable. A massive wood desk, its surface blotched and pitted, filled most of the space; but on the floor against the inside wall, spread out as far as the foot of the door, was a narrow stretch of straw, a blanket heaped at one end of it. A rawboned cat raised its head from the blanket’s folds as we came in, yellow eyes shining; it stared for an instant, stiffly alert, then sprang up suddenly and disappeared through the doorway into the boiler room’s shadows.
“See,” Gelsomina whispered, jutting her chin toward the straw as if it were the final proof of some argument she’d been making. “That’s why he isn’t coming inside any more.”
I made out now the hollows and contours there – they followed the shape of a human body like a mould, as if the body still lay there, invisible, silently impressing its weight into the straw.
There was an oily bag on the desk. Gelsomina found cheese inside, a half loaf of stale bread, then a half jug of wine on the floor between the desk and the wall.
“I told you,” she said, though to me it seemed that whatever mystery it was we were solving only loomed larger now.
She had begun to try the drawers of the desk. The three on one side were jammed or locked, but the top one on the other opened easily. Inside was a handful of shotgun cartridges, and then, at the back, a pile of old photographs. Gelsomina began to leaf through them.
“God, look how big he was then,” she said. “He looks like an ox in those clothes.”
“You shouldn’t look in there,” I whispered. “We should go.”
But I’d edged closer to her to see the photograph she held – it showed a group of soldiers scattered pell-mell across a hillside as if caught in mid-action. But they were playing a game: one in the forefront had his hand drawn like a pistol while another a few feet away was pretending to die as in a child’s game, his knees buckling and his hands clutched over his heart.
“That was before your father was married,” Gelsomina said. But it took me an instant to realize that he was the man in the centre of the picture, the one pretending to die – it was a kind of shock to think of him like that, playing like a schoolboy, to see the smile urging itself like a ghostly afterthought just beneath his look of mock pain.
That night my father returned from work well before the end of his shift. We heard his truck door slam, his footsteps outside our window; then in the morning there was no lunchbox on the back steps, and no sign of my father in the greenhouses or the fields. Gelsomina went out to the porch once or twice to stare toward the boiler room, then finally went out to the garage to my father’s truck. She came back with his lunchbox – inside it his sandwiches sat still intact in their folds of wax paper.
The sandwiches seemed an accusation, a final evidence that the fragile normalcy of our household had been shattered. All day we were silent as if awaiting some threat to overtake us, whatever doom it was that had been stalking us since we’d first come to the house. The spring sounds through the window screens, the birds, the rustle of leaves, seemed magnified, unnaturally loud; way off in the distance some neighbour’s tractor churned steadily on, a small quiet hum in the afternoon stillness.
There wasn’t much food left in the house. Ordinarily my father bought groceries once a week, supplemented by the vegetables and preserves Gelsomina’s mother gave us on Sundays; but it had been a long time now since we’d got any new supplies. Gelsomina began to ration out what was left as if preparing for some lengthy dearth – for supper that night we had only an egg apiece and fried onions. Then afterwards she discovered we’d run out of the red tokens she put out every night for the milkman. After rummaging a dozen times through the kitchen drawers she turned finally to where I sat watching her from the kitchen table.
“You’ll have to go get some money from your father,” she said.
But I pretended not to have heard.
“Are you listening to me?” She’d come to stand over me. “You’ll have to go, there’s no other way.”
I didn’t dare look up at her.
“I don’t know where he is,” I said finally.
“Don’t be an idiot, he’s in the boiler room, he’s been there all day.”
“The light wasn’t on when I looked before.”
I caught a flicker of movement and flinched, thinking she was about to strike me; but at the last instant she seemed to check herself.
“Go on,” she said, more gently, leaning closer, “it’ll only take a minute. If you go I’ll give you five cents from the change the milkman gives me.”
But I hunched away from her, inching toward the edge of my chair.
“It’s your fault he’s angry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have looked in his desk.”
“Ma ’stu stronz’ –”
She’d raised her hand against me in earnest now, but before she could strike I slipped from my chair and ran toward the bathroom.
“Scimunit’!” she shouted, coming after me. I slammed the door against her, fumbling in the dark for the key and turning it hard. Gelsomina began to pound against the door’s thin panels.
“Open the door or I’ll break it!”
And afraid that she would I leaned my back into it, could feel the weight of her fists reverberating down my spine.
“Do you want the baby to die, is that what you want? You’re just a mama’s boy, that’s all you are. But your mother’s dead, don’t you know that? She’s dead!”
The baby, asleep before, had begun to cry. I heard Gelsomina move away from the bathroom door, heard the back door slam, then her footsteps on the driveway beneath the bathroom window. Still in darkness I climbed onto the toilet seat and made out her silhouette moving down the driveway in the evening gloom. At the boiler-room door she stood blankly for a moment as if waiting for someone to answer a knock, then moved toward a high window nearby, gripped her fingers on the sill, raised herself up to peer inside. But in the end she turned away and started back up the drive. I ducked.
“Don’t think I can’t see you there, idiot.”
I heard her footsteps in the house, kitchen sounds; then finally the baby’s crying died down. When the silence had stretched on for several minutes I reached into the cupboard at the end of the tub where we put our dirty laundry and pulled the laundry onto the floor in a heap, spreading it along the edge of the tub to make a bed and then stretching out there to sleep. For a few minutes I seemed to float in the room’s comforting darkness as in some tiny windowless vessel, invulnerable, lost to the world; but then Gelsomina was at the door.
“Vittorio, you can come out now.”
But I lay perfectly still, thought that if I stayed quiet enough, inconspicuous enough, she would go away.
“Don’t be a fool, you can’t stay there all night. I’m not going to hit you.”
Silence, then a sound of metal against metal. I remembered suddenly that all the keys in the house were the same, Gelsomina forcing out the one on my side now with one of the others. The bolt clicked back and the door swung open, Gelsomina haloed an instant against the kitchen’s light like an apparition.
“Look at you!” she said, laughing. “Like a cat!” And she bent to take me up from my bed, hugging me to her with such force that I burst into tears.
“Dai, what’s the matter now, what kind of a little man are you?” But she was crying too.
“He’s angry because we looked at his pictures,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid, he’s angry because of your mother, it’s not our fault. Because she went with another man. You’re too small to understand.”
But in the morning there was no milk on the back steps, only my father’s lunchbox, which Gelsomina had set out as usual the night before, though when we opened it we found the old sandwiches from the previous day still untouched there. Not wanting to waste them Gelsomina had us eat them for breakfast, though by now the bread was stale and the meat had a metallic aftertaste. Afterwards Gelsomina said we shouldn’t have eaten any meat at all because it was Friday. But it didn’t seem like Friday or any day to me, every day the same, with no way to tell one from any other.
Gelsomina made up the last of the milk for the baby’s feeding.
“I’m going to call my father,” she said.
But she seemed unable to get the number right, painstakingly dialling several times but then each time hanging up as soon as a voice came on at the other end.
“Damn him! Doesn’t he know we have to eat? God knows what he’s doing in there, probably picking fleas off the cats.”
Well before midday the baby began to cry. Only a few fingers of milk remained now from her first feeding, Gelsomina mixing what was left with a few cupfuls of boiled sugar water. The baby took to the cloudy liquid without complaint but Gelsomina sat grim-faced during the feeding, holding the baby with a stiff carefulness as if she had become something dangerous.
Gelsomina gathered together what food we had left from the cellar and cupboards. There was sauce but no pasta; for lunch Gelsomina made up a thin soup from it that we dipped stale pieces of bread into. Afterwards Gelsomina retreated into the bathroom to do laundry, her back and shoulders working with a restrained violence as she scrubbed. I followed behind her to hand her clothespins when she went outside to hang it, the clothes billowing on the lines like a strange portrait, each of us represented in odd fragments. On a back line, behind the cover of sheets, Gelsomina hung a long row of newly white diapers, perfect squares of cloth that slanted and warped in the wind like gliding birds.
For the rest of the afternoon Gelsomina kept the baby quiet with feedings of sugar water, but toward evening she began to grow restive. The liquid seemed to pass straight through her: by nightfall she had wet her diapers several times, and Gelsomina had begun to replace them with ones still damp from the wash. With the constant wet the baby’s thighs grew chafed and red, as evening wore on her sporadic crying merging into an almost constant wail. Gelsomina left her crying in the bedroom while we ate what remained in the house of the bread and meat normally used for my father’s sandwiches; but afterwards the baby wouldn’t take to its bottle at all.
“Stop it, for the love of Christ!” But the baby only cried louder. One of her fists shot out against the bottle and knocked it from Gelsomina’s hand onto the bed.
“Oh! Basta!”
She cracked a hand hard against the baby’s cheek.
In an instant the baby’s wails had grown so intense they were almost soundless, her chest heaving so wildly it seemed she had emptied her lungs with her cries and was unable now to refill them.
“Addíu, what have I done,” Gelsomina said, and she had begun to cry as well. She clutched the baby to her and sobbed into her shoulder, her body seeming to melt suddenly, to lose all its straight-backed authority and brazenness. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t take care of us, that she didn’t always know the right thing to do.
“E niend’, it’s nothing,” she kept saying, like a chant, “èniend’, poveretta. È niend’.”
But when we were awakened the next morning by a call from Gelsomina’s father, Gelsomina made it seem as if nothing was wrong.
“Tsi’Mario’s not in the house,” she said. “I think he went out to the boiler room.”
Her father’s voice crackled briefly from the other end.
“He doesn’t go to the factory any more,” Gelsomina said, after a pause. Then her father’s voice again, louder; Gelsomina grew defensive.
“How should I know why? Maybe he has too much work to do on the farm. He’s always in the boiler room.”
Before long Tsi’Alfredo’s truck pulled up in the drive. He stopped first at the boiler room but emerged alone a few minutes later and drove around to the back door, coming into the house red-faced with anger.
“Where is he?”
“Isn’t he in the boiler room?” Gelsomina said.
Tsi’Alfredo struck her hard against the back of her head.
“Stronza! Couldn’t you see that his truck is gone?”
Tsi’Alfredo made us get into his truck. The baby had been crying all morning, Tsi’Alfredo grimacing in irritation now as he pulled the truck onto the road.
“Can’t you keep that thing quiet?”
Tsi’Alfredo lived on the town line just beneath the Ridge, a trip of several miles along backroads and highway before the sudden slope his own road dipped into, from the top of it the lake briefly visible in the distance like a mirage. His house, narrow and weathered and tall, was covered in the same false brick as our boiler room; but his own boiler room was built in concrete, and his greenhouses in frames of metal. Gelsomina had taken me inside them once, the plants there filling the space like a fairy-tale forest with their prickled cucumbers and yellowing flowers, the air alive with the hum of bees and the smell of earth.
Tsia Maria was waiting for us at the back door. I noticed that the fields around the greenhouses had been planted since the last time I had been there, pencil-thin rows of green stretching away toward a distant line of trees.
“And Mario?” Tsia Maria said.
“Ah, sì, and Mario. That idiot, your daughter –”
Tsi’Alfredo’s son Gino had come out beside his mother, towering over her in his oversize adolescent mannishness, his face still puffy from sleep and his hair falling in unruly tufts across his forehead. Tsi’Alfredo made him get in the truck when Gelsomina and I were out, then drove off back toward the highway.
Tsia Maria had taken the baby from Gelsomina.
“Why is she crying? Didn’t you feed her?”
We had gone into the kitchen, drabber than the one in my father’s house, the tiles worn away in spots to the wood beneath and the walls yellowed with grime. There was a washtub now in one corner with clothes soaking in it and a pot of sauce cooking on the stove, its smell filling the room.
Tsia Maria handed the baby back to Gelsomina and began to prepare a bottle.
“Why was your father angry?” she said. “What happened to your uncle?”
Gelsomina’s two sisters had huddled around her at the table, silently staring at me as if I’d become a kind of curiosity.
“How should I know what happened to him?” Gelsomina said sulkily. “He wasn’t there, that’s all.”
“Is it possible you couldn’t see that something was wrong? Why didn’t you call us? Half the town knew he’d lost his job at the factory, and like fools nobody thought to tell us. And with me and your father working every night to finish the planting, and then the greenhouses –”
But I didn’t sense any anger from her. She seemed always outside of the way other people were thinking or feeling, as if the world didn’t impress itself as deeply on her as it did on others; yet I took a kind of comfort from her easy ramblings, so even-tempered, so devoid of any sudden swells or crags, that they made the world of events seem a wide plain where nothing stood out as more important than anything else, as more grave or portentous.
When she’d finished preparing the bottle she took the baby back from Gelsomina to feed her.
“And then this baby,” she said. “If that woman her mother had never set foot on the earth she would have made everyone’s life easier.”
“Mamma –” Gelsomina said.
“Ah?” Tsia Maria glanced toward me. “He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, eh, Vittorio? When you’re older you’ll understand what your father had to put up with.”
When Tsi’Alfredo returned later that morning he was alone. But the back of his truck was laden with trays of young plants, their leaves forming a carpet of green that shimmered and waved in the wind like water. Tsi’Alfredo made us all get into the cab, only Tsia Maria and the baby left behind, and in a few minutes we were at my father’s farm again, bumping down the lane that led to the back field. There were cars parked in the lane between the barn and the pond, and then in the field itself more than a dozen people were already at work, men unloading trays of plants from a trailer that Gino was slowly guiding across the field with my father’s tractor, while others, mainly women, followed behind on hands and knees, setting the plants into the furrows that had been dug for them. But my father wasn’t among them.
“The holiday’s over,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “You’ll have enough work now to keep you out of trouble for a while.”
He showed me how to plant. Getting down on his haunches he scooped a handful of dirt out of a furrow and lifted a plant into the hole he’d prepared. The plants were held in sleeves of thin wood, open at the bottom, that had to be torn away.
“Like this,” Tsi’Alfredo said, sticking two fingers of each hand into the sleeve on adjacent sides and giving a quick tug. The sleeve came apart neatly at the corner, a square of wet earth still intact around the plant’s roots.
“It should look exactly like that when you’re finished. If you let the dirt come off the roots the plant will be dead in half an hour.”
With a swift circular motion of his hands he levelled the ridges of dirt that flanked the furrow so that finally the plant sat firmly embedded in the earth.
“Don’t leave it at the bottom of a valley – just a little down, the way I did it, and fill up the space between each plant as you go. Understand?”
“Sì.”
He went through the process again a few times, using a short stick to measure out the distance between each plant. His hands moved swiftly, each plant finding its place with the same smooth precision. Still on his haunches he watched me as I tried to imitate him, Gelsomina and her sisters, already at work in the rows next to me, stopping to watch as well. But I couldn’t get the wooden sleeves to tear apart neatly as Tsi’Alfredo’s had, with each failure Tsi’Alfredo reaching over impatiently to finish the job himself, grimacing at my awkwardness.
“Like that. No one taught you how to work back in Valle del Sole, eh?”
But when he saw that I couldn’t get it right he sent me up to the barn for a bucket and then set me following behind the women to collect the wooden sleeves they left discarded in their rows as they planted.
“Oh, Vittò! Look at the way he’s dragging that bucket, you’d think he had all the sins of the world inside it!”
“You never saw fields like this back in Italy, eh, so flat? You can plough a field like this in the morning, and plant it in the afternoon. Not like there.”
“What does he know about it? When did the children have to go out and work in the fields the way they do here? At harvest, maybe, that’s all. But here men, women, children, it’s all the same – if it’s not the fields it’s the greenhouses, if it’s not the greenhouses it’s the factory.”
We worked for what seemed a long time. Tsi’Alfredo’s truck came and went, carrying more loads of plants. I made piles of wooden sleeves at intervals along the edge of the laneway that flanked the field, trying to measure the time by the spaces between them. But then Tsi’Alfredo saw what I was doing.
“You don’t have to make so many small piles like that, what were you thinking?”
We ate lunch at the edge of the field. It was warm now in the noon sun, though the air had a crispness like the spring air in Valle del Sole. Tsi’Alfredo had brought water and wine, a few loaves of bread, some meat and some cheese. The women sat on the ground or on overturned plant trays; the men leaned against Tsi’Alfredo’s truck or sat on its tailgate. Gelsomina sat away from me, with the women, seemed not to want to be seen as one of the children. One of the men cut slices of cheese and meat with a jackknife he pulled from his pocket, offering the slices around to the rest of us on the knife’s blackened tip.
“And Mario?” one of the men said to Tsi’Alfredo.
“Nothing.”
“Mbeh, maybe he just took a little trip,” one of the women said. “To clear his head.”
“Sì, a trip, what are you saying?” someone else said. “And his fields not planted yet at the end of May.”
“Anyway he would have had to leave the factory, sooner or later. With the farm and no one else to look after it –”
“He would have left when he wanted to,” Tsi’Alfredo said, red-faced. “Those damned foremen there, when it’s one of their own they look the other way, but one of ours, for every little thing –”
Later, when we were working again, I overheard some of the women talking.
“Someone told me they let him go because he fell asleep.”
“Ah, sì, fell asleep, does that sound like Mario? Now if you told me he broke someone’s skull –”
Tsi’Alfredo kept carrying trays of plants, and by mid-afternoon the men setting them out had reached the line of trees that marked the end of the field. They went back with the tractor and trailer to collect the empty trays left behind by the planters, driving up to the barn to unload each time the trailer was full. But Tsi’Alfredo had gone away again in his truck, and hadn’t returned by the time the men caught up to where we were planting.
“And now?” one of the men said. “What do we do, senza boss?”
He gave the word “boss” an extra energy, as if making a joke.
“Mbeh, when lu boss is away,” another said, “you stretch out under a tree and have a nice sleep.”
But this time when they came back from the barn from unloading, the tractor was pulling a narrow trailer that I’d seen before buried in weeds at the edge of the pond. The trailer was stacked high with long silver pipes that the men began to set out in rows along the field, each pipe ending with a tall T that looked like the head and neck of a strange bird. While they were working, Tsi’Alfredo came back in his truck and stopped to help them, and before nightfall they had again reached to where we were planting.
It had begun to turn cold. The men got down on their knees to help plant, doubling up in rows that had already been started; but Tsi’Alfredo drove back down the lane in his truck, Gino following on the tractor. Some minutes later an engine echoed to life from the direction of the barn, sputtered and died, then started again, building this time to a steady roar and then faltering suddenly like a bus grinding up a hill. A hissing sound rose up from the pipes laid out along the field, and then gradually the heads on the T’s started to twirl until finally long jets of water had begun to shoot out from them, filling the air all along the field with splaying arcs that glinted like silver in the dying light.
By the time we stopped work it was truly dark. Tsi’Alfredo and Gino had come back, their clothes drenched from walking up and down the rows of pipes to check them. About a third of the field still remained to be planted.
“So, Alfrè,” one of the men said. “What’ll it be in the morning, church or the fields? It’s the same to me, either way I’ll be on my knees.”
Gelsomina and I went back to Tsi’Alfredo’s for the night. I rode with Gino on the back of the truck – he didn’t seem to mind the wind, sitting in the brunt of it on one of the wheel humps, his scruffy hair blown back and his damp clothes billowing and cracking like laundry. But I had huddled up against the cab with the cold, my muscles aching as if from fever. I nodded off for a moment, imagined that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, reliving the dreamy roll and swell of the storm we’d passed through. Then a sudden jolt of the truck woke me. Gino was grinning.
“Tired, eh?” he said, shouting to be heard above the wind. But his voice had no sympathy in it.
At Tsi’Alfredo’s I heard the baby crying from some upstairs room.
“She’s been acting like the devil all day,” Tsia Maria said. “I spoke to Letizia down the road and she said it’s the milk, you can’t use it here, you have to buy a special powder or something. What do I know about it?”
We had a large supper but though I’d been hungry all day the first few bites seemed to fill me now. Afterwards we were sent directly to bed, Gino and I sharing a narrow cot in a small room off the kitchen. Gino fell asleep almost at once, but for a long time I lay in awkward wakefulness, pinned between Gino’s broad undershirted back and the wall. I could hear Tsi’Alfredo and Tsia Maria talking in the kitchen.
“Maybe you should call the police,” Tsia Maria said.
“Don’t talk nonsense, what are the police going to do?”
“Mbeh, who knows where he’s gotten to? Maybe he’s lying in some ditch with his head broken.”
“Grazie,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “And what are you going to tell the police when they ask you why he’s gone?”
“Tell them the truth, what’s happened.”
“Sì. We might as well just publish it in the newspaper, and then everyone will know.”
“Everyone knows as it is.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know how they are here – every little thing they know about us, they make up some story. We’ll take care of our own problems.”
Later I heard Tsi’Alfredo’s truck drive away. I drifted into sleep, but was awakened again some time afterwards by Tsi’Alfredo’s voice from the kitchen.
“Enough with your stupid questions! Is it possible you can’t keep your mouth shut for even a minute?”
“And what will we do, then? If you’d done what I told you in the first place –”
“Ma chesta stronza –”
Some object hit a wall or cupboard with a crash.
“Have you gone crazy?”
Tsia Maria’s voice was strangely altered now, tense with a panic that made me want to close it out. A door slammed, and the house grew eerily calm; then from the kitchen came a sound of sweeping, the clink of broken glass. I noticed suddenly that Gino was awake, was lying open-eyed beside me staring up at the ceiling; but he turned finally and hunched his shoulders away from me without a word.
It was barely dawn when Tsi’Alfredo brought his children and me back to my father’s farm to begin work again, the sun just a streak of orange along the horizon and the air frosty with cold. But someone had preceded us: my father’s truck was parked at the edge of the field, and already from a distance I saw him stooping in one of the rows, a small dark speck against the grey line of trees behind him. When we’d come even with him Tsi’Alfredo jumped from the cab.
“Where in Christ have you been?”
Tsi’Alfredo was moving toward him, stepping over empty trays in the row in long quick strides.
“Mario, for the love of Christ what got into your head?”
The rest of us had gathered in a group at the end of the row, watching now as Tsi’Alfredo came up to him. But my father remained hunched over his tray.
“Dai, Mario, what’s happened?” His voice carried strangely clear in the morning stillness. “It’s nothing, dai, don’t be like this.”
My father was crying. Tsi’Alfredo got down on his haunches beside him and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder.
“It’s better to be dead than to live like this,” my father said; but his voice had the tremor of a child’s.
“Dai, what are you saying. È niend’, Mario, it’s nothing.”