Authors: Nino Ricci
“I dunno. I have to ask at home.”
The question had been put so officially I felt obliged to bring it to Aunt Teresa. I thought she’d object, with an immigrant’s narrow view of what was acceptable, but she seemed to share my own fear of appearing not to know how things were done here, seemed uneasy about denying Rita anything when we gave her so little.
“Who is this girl?”
“I dunno, she’s just a girl. Her name’s Elena.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Amherst or something like that.”
She seemed to waver an instant.
“Then just make sure she has some extra clothes to take with her.”
And on Friday Rita and Elena set off hand in hand up the school driveway toward Elena’s house in town, Rita with her plastic bag of clothes like some street urchin Elena had taken in.
No one, though, had told my father about this arrangement. I’d somehow imagined Rita’s absence would go unremarked but when we sat down to supper Friday evening her empty place was like a hole in the room.
“Where’s the girl?” my father said.
“She’s at some friend’s house.”
“What friend?” The anger rose in him as his mind took in the full force of the outrage. “Who told her to go there? That’s what we need now, to have her running around to other people’s houses like a gypsy!”
“Always the same story with you!” my aunt said. “What did you think, that we could keep her locked up in the house all her life like an animal?”
And she managed to stave him off for the moment, setting his guilt before his rage like a wall.
The bad luck that had begun with the early frost hadn’t yet run its course: toward mid-October I awoke one morning to the wail of a siren to find the boiler room was burning, one side of it already a mass of gnarled flame in the morning dark. For an instant it seemed unthinkable that the fire could be real, that I wasn’t still in bed asleep and dreaming, couldn’t somehow simply clear the fire from my window like a television image. But a dozen firemen had come, their engines glistening red under a drizzle of rain, lights flashing, and it was their presence that started the panic in me, as if they had made the fire real by believing in it. They were working in rough formation around the fire’s periphery but seemed dwarfed by it like playthings, with their toy-yellow firemen’s suits, their tiny engines and tools, the jets from their hoses arcing into the flames ineffectual as air. Some of them, oddly casual, were milling around the end of our driveway or leaning against their engines as though simply waiting the fire out.
Aunt Teresa was standing in her housecoat on the front lawn, her arms hugged to her chest, her hair falling in wet strands in the drizzle; but my father was nowhere to be seen. I opened my window, a burst of hot air mingling strangely with the chill of rain, and Aunt Teresa glanced toward me without speaking. Then for a long time we stood staring at the fire joined by the silent awareness of each other’s presence. There seemed nothing to be done, nothing but to watch with a horrified fascination the damage fire could do. It seemed to blot out the world, to still time somehow, as if we’d remain forever caught in the endless moment of it as in a photograph. I could make out details in it now, the mesh of pipes and charred beams, the elephantine
outline of the boiler; in the force of it the ends of the three old greenhouses had collapsed, further up their roofs glowing eerily orange from refracted light.
Across the road Mr. Dyck and his wife were huddled beneath an umbrella speaking with Tsi’Umberto, their faces flashing red from the engine lights. Their muted voices reached me oddly resonant above the sound of rain and the dull roar of the fire.
“I guess he tried to go in there but there wasn’t much you could do by then.”
Rita had awoken. She stood beside me staring out silent at the fire.
“Why don’t they stop it?” She seemed to be trying to gauge its enormity, what responsibility she might bear for it.
“Stupid, what do you think they’re trying to do?”
When the fire had begun to subside an explosion sent great tongues of flame shooting upward again. The firemen drew back; one of them came toward my aunt.
“Ma’am, why don’t you go on inside,” he said. “And you might ask your husband if there’s anything else in there likely to blow up.”
But afterwards the fire began to burn itself out. The world seemed gradually to take shape again, the lightening dawn, the spare, grey stillness of the skeletal wreckage slowly emerging from the dying flames. I wanted to hold off this re-entry to things, didn’t want time to move forward again or the firemen to be gone. Already they’d begun to reload one of the engines, the truck slowly gathering round itself its hoses and men; and then finally it backed into our driveway to turn itself around and pulled away with a heavy crunch of gravel.
The rain had stopped now, a rim of orange sunlight pushing up against a filament of cloud that had spread itself along the
horizon. In the boiler room’s wreckage a few wisps of steamy smoke were still rising from a heap of charred wood where the coal room had been, but the rest of what remained sat in damp torpor, unreal against the morning light, the boiler, with its umbilical network of pipes, hunched stolid amidst the ruins like a brooding monster. Only the far end of the building, where my father’s office had been, was still partly intact, the wall there left standing like a false front in a western, blackened beams banked up against it and its windows, shattered now, simply passages from open air to open air.
One of the firemen had come up the driveway toward the back door and returned now with a slow gait to the remaining engine.
“I don’t know what he’s crying about, he’ll get the insurance,” he said to one of the others. “Half the time they set these things themselves anyway.”
When they’d gone I went out to the kitchen. Aunt Teresa was at the table there, her hair still wet with rain.
“Should we go to school?” I said.
“What are you going to do here?”
When Rita and I went to leave, we found my father sitting on the basement steps, his face in his hands, He looked like a character in a movie, James Dean or Marlon Brando, sitting out on some tenement fire-escape in some nameless American city; but he was sobbing, almost silently, just a hint of a thin wheezing like someone struggling for breath. I thought of the bus coming, of people seeing somehow in the boiler room’s yawning ruins our humiliation, my aunt sitting blankly in the kitchen, my father crying on the basement steps.
For the next several days Tsi’Umberto’s family came to help us with work on the farm. With no way to heat them the plants in the greenhouses had to be stripped; we salvaged what fruit we could, picking it green and setting it on a bed of straw in Tsi’Umberto’s small greenhouse to ripen. Our new greenhouse had been almost completely spared, the plants there still fresh, only the corridor that connected it to the boiler room damaged, the glass shattered and the grape vines my father had planted there charred black. The others, though, had felt the full blast of the fire, the plants singed to the far end of them from its tunneling heat and heaps of glass even yards from the boiler room bubbled and twisted like melted plastic.
But we never spoke about the fire, seeming to feel in it not so much tragedy as disgrace; and the mess it had left, the shattered glass, the half-fallen walls, remained as it was, festering there at the front of our farm like an untended wound. For a few days some of the cats wandered the ruins as if they could not understand how something solid and permanent had simply vanished, how whatever memory or image they held of some familiar nesting place could find no correlation now in this charred wreckage. But gradually they migrated to the barn, Aunt Teresa setting their meals out now in the abandoned dish that still sat in front of the doghouse.
With no more greenhouse work to be done after the plants had been stripped our lives appeared broken somehow, without routine, without purpose. Aunt Teresa got work at Longo’s Produce again but my father couldn’t seem to form any project, spent his days working alone at useless jobs in the barn as if trying to shore up what remained to him. He seemed to regard the fire as a personal affront, flushing as at an accusation when
someone mentioned it to him at the barber-shop a couple of weeks after it.
“We were just asking,” the barber said, in English. He was a man from Valle del Sole, gregarious and worldly, though the look of him, the thickness of his hands, the strange tight ridges of flesh around his neck, always conjured for me, with the immediacy of a smell, all the village’s hard peasant crudeness. “Anyhow the insurance it’s gonna pay for it, you were gonna have to tear it down yourself one of these days.”
“Maybe that’s how some people think about things,” my father said.
And he retreated further into his gloom, seeming to feel in this casual public scrutiny some last stripping away of his dignity.
Then like a twist in a movie, the unlikely circling back to some crucial half-forgotten thing, Lassie suddenly reappeared on the farm: he was simply there in the courtyard one Saturday morning, spectral, rummaging without conviction in the food dish near his old house.
“That damn dog,
per la madonna
–”
But it was almost a relief to see my father’s anger finally find a clear object.
“If you’re going to get rid of it,” Aunt Teresa said, “at least do it before the girl sees it. We don’t want all that nonsense again.”
My father went out to the garage and came out a moment later with his shotgun, Aunt Teresa and I watching him from the kitchen window. He seemed ready to shoot Lassie on the spot, had already cracked open the barrel and was slipping in a cartridge. Lassie had begun to come toward him, tentative, but when my father pointed the barrel at him he seemed finally to
understand what was happening and bolted toward the corner of the kiln. My father fired, recoiled; the shot seemed to graze Lassie’s backside, leaving him cowering half-prostrate against the kiln’s side wall.
But Rita had come to the window at the sound of the shot. Before we could stop her she had run out to the courtyard, reaching Lassie before my father had had time to reload. My father stood not a dozen feet from them, the gun half-poised in his hands. He said something to Rita that I couldn’t make out, but Rita remained where she was, her arms clutched to Lassie’s neck.
Aunt Teresa opened the window.
“Mario, for Christ’s sake, leave them!”
My father struck Rita hard with the back of a hand. One of us should have gone out then, done something, but we seemed paralyzed; and then everything happened very quickly. There was a sort of scuffle, Lassie suddenly lunging, teeth bared, toward my father with Rita still clutched to him, and then somehow my father’s gun fell away and he’d pulled off his belt, was lashing out with it, at Lassie, at Rita, everything happening in an eerie soundlessness, only Lassie’s low growl, Rita’s truncated gasp each time the belt struck her.
Aunt Teresa had bent to the window screen again, her face flushed.
“Mario, stop, for the love of God, you’re going to kill her!”
And there was such hysteria in her voice I thought that he would, felt my stomach churn as if the house had abruptly pitched forward like a ship in a storm.
Aunt Teresa was outside. Rita had fallen to the ground now and Aunt Teresa scooped her up and away while my father was still fighting back Lassie, finally landing a kick to his ribs that sent him scrambling down the lane toward the back field.
Aunt Teresa had come inside, Rita clinging to her seeming mangled like some doll that had been left out in the elements, her clothes smeared with dirt and blood and one cheek purpled and large, the swelling there twisting her mouth into a freakish half-smile.
She was sobbing, a low animal moan, the only sound we’d heard from her.
“That damn dog and the curse he brought with him,” Aunt Teresa said.
She began to tend to Rita, dabbing iodine on the welts on her back while I held a cold cloth to her cheek to keep down the swelling. Rita’s shoulders twitched each time the applicator touched her but the movement seemed disconnected from her, merely her body’s reflexive shudder.
My father had gone. Through the window I’d seen him cross to the back field with his gun, and now the morning seemed to deepen its stillness as if in waiting. Finally a shot rang out, followed hard by a long animal cry, dying in waves; then a second shot, this one echoing off into silence.
My father drove away in his truck that morning and by the following day still hadn’t returned home. Aunt Teresa made phone calls, to Tsi’Alfredo, to Tsi’Umberto, held muted conferences with them in our kitchen late into the night; but still my father didn’t return. The sight of Rita brought out a grim distraction in Tsi’Alfredo.
“I hope you’re not letting her go to school like that,” he said, though in a tone that suggested he blamed her for what had happened.
Then on Wednesday, my father still not back yet, there was a police car in the courtyard when I came home from school. Two officers were talking to Aunt Teresa at the back door, one holding at his side my father’s shotgun.
“I was telling your mother the border people took this when your father crossed into Detroit,” he said, turning to me with a kind of relief, seeming to expect from me some level of understanding he hadn’t been able to get from my aunt. “I guess when
he didn’t come back for it they thought we might want to check if there was any problem.”
But Aunt Teresa remained oddly wary and unyielding, standing in half-retreat at the doorway as if to bar any entry.
“He gotta friend in Detroit,” she said to him, her deficient English making her seem hopelessly backward, thickheaded. “He be back day after tomorrow.”
The policeman wavered an instant.
“I guess we’ll leave this with you then,” he said finally, handing the gun to my aunt. “Sorry to be any bother.”
As soon as the policemen had gone Aunt Teresa called Tsi’Alfredo.
“He went up to Detroit. He’s probably with that guy from Rocca Secca up there, what’s his name, Marcovecchio, the one he was in the army with.”