With the new greenhouses finished and planted our lives at home had finally resumed their familiar rhythms after the disruption of the fire. There was the first false spring after planting, the promise of it, the earth smell and the heat, the greening rows stretched out in their newness though outside the ground was bone-hard and piled high with snow; and then the work, unrelenting, the silent bustle of hands, the endless tedium. The added help of my uncle’s family seemed to balance exactly the added work of the new greenhouses as if by some law, our time always filled as before; what seemed to matter was not the work itself but simply that it should go on as it did without pause or slack. Jobs circled back on themselves as the plants grew, waiting always to be begun again: I passed whole weeks at the same chore, knew only its small, endless repetitions, just the animal part of me present, my knees, my chafed hands.
We worked cut off from each other, lost in the separate hush of the walls our rows formed, the greenhouse sounds reaching us there like jungle static, the crack and hiss of the steam pipes, the tinny background drone of the old car speakers Rocco had connected up to a radio in the boiler room. Aunt Teresa and Tsia Taormina did the winding and suckering, keeping pace with one another as if they drew some solace from each other’s presence though their silence was broken only by brief, abrupt exchanges like the failed beginnings of conversations, Tsia Taormina’s voice tentative, neutral, Aunt Teresa’s dismissive and curt; Domenic and I spread straw, pruned leaves, pruned again. Sometimes Rocco joined us, sometimes Tsi’Umberto, a sort of foreman to us, the disembodied conversations he had with his sons reaching me then across the rows like a kind of familial shorthand, sporadic and arcane, having nothing to do with me.
Tsi’Umberto seemed humbled by the new responsibility of the farm. We looked to him to be told what to do but he in turn always consulted, in his way, with my father, making declarations to him, needlessly grave and considered, which my father corrected or contradicted or simply concurred with with a dismissive shrug; he seemed most content, most himself, exactly when he was just working among the rest of us without any special authority. There was a hint of deference in him toward his sons now, toward Rocco especially, that was almost touching, a grudging yielding to them as if they’d freed him of all his past unforgiving hardness by simply becoming themselves: they were competent, self-sufficient, assured, had somehow weathered all the years of their father’s anger to become what his abuse of them had seemed all along to deny they were capable of.
His deference extended to me as well, but differently, more abstract somehow, less directly earned, based perhaps exactly on what distinguished me from his sons, my separation from the life of the farm. At some point it had been decided that other hopes resided in me, other possibilities; I understood this distinction but not its genesis, whether it was the source of my distance from the others or a symptom, how they had come to make it at all when I showed them so little of myself. It seemed self-fulfilling, with its half-deference and half-condescension, the assumption I wouldn’t fit in, that I could be given only the simplest, least essential jobs, had somehow to be accommodated; and I both used it and resisted it, uncertain any more where my real life lay, both home and school now merely two limbos I moved between, each a waiting for an ending, for an opening into some truer other life.
My father worked apart from us, caught up in his own silent, mysterious arrangements and preparations. He spent a week building storage niches along a wall of the boiler room, labelling them in his cryptic phonetic script; he arranged careful settings for our tools on a board behind the workbench; he hung numbered squares of painted plywood in each of the greenhouses, 1 through 6. There was something at once frivolous and grand in these projects – they seemed to flow from a vision of things imperfectly grasped, aspiring to a kind of North American modernity and perfection but revealing always in the end a makeshift immigrant crudeness. He’d furnished his office with a sleek metal desk, a filing cabinet, a swivelling armchair, maintaining a small professionalism even down to the store-bought lettering on the door. But then he’d covered the chair with a tattered blanket, had installed a rusting second-hand fridge, had bolted a two-by-four to one wall and attached to it hand-fashioned wire hooks, sharpened to a point on the grinder, that he poked bills and statements through to file them; and soon the room had lost all sense of its first businesslike spareness and newness, become merely clutter and crude improvisation, just as the storage niches, with their careful, misspelt labels, had soon become simply random catch-alls for whatever odds and ends came to hand, and just as the tool board, after a brief pristine newness, had soon fallen into perpetual disarray, the holders and pegs my father had placed there merely ghostly reminders of the first order he had tried to impose.
He and Rocco looked after the watering and spraying, took loads in to Longo’s, did repairs. When one of the pumps broke down Rocco took it apart piece by piece to fix it, a kind of miracle, not simply that he built it up again, functioning and sound, but that he had dared risk the chaos of scattered parts in disassembling it; but my father seemed to take this competence in him for granted, seemed almost to call it up in him by his unthinking reliance on it. There was an equilibrium in their relationship, in its neutrality, its detachment, that made my own relationship with my father seem so fraught by comparison. He seemed to expect at once more and less of me than the others did – over a little thing he might rebuke me with sharp impatience, but then for some more serious transgression, a broken plant, a steam pipe left wrongly closed, show suddenly a grim indulgence, souring with his inturned anger yet saying nothing, seeming somehow to take the blame for my mistake on himself. There was a constant tension between us like the brooding, mute avoidance after an argument; but there had been no argument, only this tension without beginning, the instinctive darkening in him in my presence.
On nights I’d had bible classes Tsi’Umberto had always assented to my early departures from work with an unquestioning solemnity, probably assuming they had something to do with school; but my father from the start had seemed to hold them silently against me, never quite daring to challenge me on them yet for that all the more suspicious of them.
“Where is it you have to go, always to these classes?” he said finally.
“It’s part of a church group I go to.”
I thought he should be pleased, knew he wouldn’t be and yet was surprised by his anger.
“What church group, what is that?”
“It’s bible classes,” I said. “We study the bible.”
“Sì, you and your aunt, all that garbage she reads, now she wants to rot your brain as well –”
But already he’d drawn his anger back, made a grudge of it, though afterwards he seemed to imagine some conspiracy between me and my aunt, with her magazines and programs, some complex challenge to the order of things he represented. I sensed his hovering gloom whenever I left for my meetings, felt a defiance in the face of it but without conviction, knew how little he’d understood, how much I would have welcomed from him the excuse of his forbidding me to attend. And yet we’d simply gone on like that for weeks, his unspoken anger, my unwilling defiance, as if this was the only way we knew to communicate at all, this mortal conflict between us without purpose or source.
Riding silent with him on Sundays to mass, feeling him there shadowy beside me, I had the sense sometimes that what divided us wasn’t our anger or our hate but merely this silence, my being unable to make the simplest offhand comment or begin the simplest conversation. There seemed some common ground between us I couldn’t break through to though I could sense every subtle motion of his mind as if he were a thing I myself had created, some need in him I couldn’t give myself over to though I couldn’t bear the pressure of it on those Sunday drives, his dark, hunched silences beside me. If I could have found the way to do these things then we might have entered perhaps into a clarity, become simply father and son, begun to take for granted how such roles unfolded. But instead it seemed he was the child and I the parent who had refused to indulge him, whom he kept his better moods from as if to protect them, the person in him who laughed too loud, was generous, went about his small private jobs on the farm, who at a wedding once at the end of the night had locked arms with some men at the bar and begun to sing, the group of them bellowing out like drunken soldiers to the near-empty hall in their quavering baritones.