How Fires End Read online

  Sam’s house was only a mile from mine, but it felt light-years away. And he wasn’t Sicilian or Sicilian American like everyone else I knew in this town—like me. He had the coolest hair, buzzed in the back, long and floppy in the front. His bangs were so long they touched his chin. He chewed on the strands when he was thinking hard about something. In his room, a checkerboard of album covers and posters papered the walls. I’d never seen people like these—men, women, I wasn’t sure—with smeared red lipstick, heavy black eyeliner, and wild hair, each one like some dolled-up Medusa. At Sam’s house, the records crackled and popped like a campfire, and I warmed in the glow of those sounds. Then he lent me his Walkman so I could take that glow with me.

  When I lied to my father about going to the library, he said, “Go straight there after school and wait for me to get you.” And I answered, “Sure thing.” But he grabbed my arm before I could jet, and he looked at me in that way he had, as if he could see his dead brothers in my eyes.

  “Bad things happen when you don’t listen to your papà,” he said.

  “I’ll go right there from school,” I said. But he only held my arm tighter, pulled it toward him until he’d pulled what he wanted to hear out of me. “And I won’t leave until you pick me up. Promise.”

  Imagine an object so massive that not even light could escape the pull of its gravity. If light could not escape, nothing could. That was how my father loved me.

  “Okay,” he said, as if he could breathe again, and he released me back into his orbit.

  2

  At home, after the fight, I shucked off my soaking-wet clothes in my bedroom and changed into dry jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Out the window, my father stood ankle deep in snow in the backyard. He had dragged the charcoal grill from the shed and was roasting store-bought peppers. My reflection overlaid the scene in the glass, black hair cut short and parted at the cowlick on the right—the twig offspring of that thick old oak.

  Outside, I held open a brown paper lunch bag for my father to fill. The craggy lines of his face tightened in the light from the fire. His mouth sagged to a frown. He clicked the tongs in his hand, a metronome of disappointment, and turned over a pepper. The fire spat a red spark. He pulled back his hand. “See,” he said, “you have to be quick so the fire doesn’t bite you.” He picked up a steaming and blackened pepper with his bare hand. “And you have to be strong,” he said, and dropped the pepper in the bag.

  In the snow behind him, deep drag lines from the grill and footprints alongside them tracked back to the shed. Smooth waves of snow covered his garden beds. Months of hard work and care would make those beds flush with spinach and chard, peppers and eggplant. Everything he loved grew from the hard work of his hands in that garden.

  “I got a couple good hits in,” I lied. “Before you showed up.”

  “Yeah,” my father said, stretching out the sound of the word. He laughed a small laugh that made me feel small. “Okay.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Go inside before you catch cold.”

  “What did Rocco mean by that Fascist?”

  My father turned the peppers on the grill. He took his time with each one, a tempo set by his tongs. Click-click. Click-click. Peppers sizzled. “That word, it does not mean what you think it means.”

  I inched closer to the heat to keep from shivering. “So tell me.”

  Click-click. Click-click. The fire bit him and he shook his hand. “Mannaggia la miseria,” he cursed. “See what you do?” He placed his burnt thumb in his mouth and decided what to do with me, the boy who’d lied and distracted him from his work. He hung the tongs from the grill handle and motioned for me to follow him to the tarp-covered woodpile by the old shed. I rolled the paper bag closed, set it down on the porch step, and traipsed through the snow after him. He’d made the shed himself from scraps of plywood and mismatched siding planks, roof felt and corrugated iron. Icicle teeth sharpened the edges of the rusted metal roof. A twist of black-and-copper electrical wire held the door shut.

  He handed me a thin stick of kindling, and I carped, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You break it.”

  I snapped it in half.

  Then he collected a bundle of thin sticks and said, “Now these.”

  The bundle wouldn’t break. I tried again, this time against my thigh. It wouldn’t even bend, no matter how I strained against it.

  “Now you understand,” my father said. He wiped his hands on the thick canvas of his work pants.

  “Can you do it?” I asked him.

  My father pulled my knit hat down over my ears. “No one can,” he said. “But some men, they like to fight anyway, and men like that are crazy. Better you stay away from them.”

  “Is that what you would do?”

  “Never mind what I do.” He returned to the grill, his face lit and unlit by the cloven fire, moving in and out of darkness and light, as if he belonged to both. “What I do?” he said to the crackling flames. It was a question that clung to the air the way the smell of charcoal and smoke and sweet grilled peppers clung to my father’s clothes.

  Later, when we moved inside, he posed the question again. We were in the kitchen, peeling roasted peppers, and I had made a mess of mine. When he finished salvaging my botched pepper, he held it up for me to see. “What I do?” he asked. “I take care of my family.” Then he dropped the skinned pepper in a clear glass bowl of sliced raw garlic and olive oil. “How old are you now?” he asked me.

  “I’m thirteen.”

  “Dio mio,” he said. “Almost a man you are. A few more years yet.” With his towel, he cleaned the juice and seeds from the table. “I was younger than you and already a man,” he said, “when the war came.”

  His calloused hands trembled. He worked the last of the peppers. His eyes locked on something in the distance, something I could never quite see. “Get me the wine,” he said.

  I brought a bottle of his murky red up from the basement, pulled on the white T-shirt fabric that held the cork in place. He stopped me from pouring him a glass.

  “Let it breathe,” he said. “It needs to breathe before you drink it.” He nodded at the empty foldaway chair. His look pulled me back down into its flimsy vinyl padding. “We prayed,” he said. “In caves, we prayed the bombs would not find us. Even as the mountain shook like one of Mount Etna’s earthquakes, we prayed, and when the fighting stopped—” He cocked his head to one side and tsked. “They destroyed everything.”

  He opened a can of sardines at the counter. Then he cut two slices from a loaf of crusty sesame seed bread and dropped them into the toaster. “It was August,” he said, moving into the story I knew well, the one he always circled back to even now, forty-three years later. So I did what I always did. I listened and I tried to see them, who they would have been, who we all would have been if my uncles hadn’t died.

  “August,” he said again, this time in Sicilian. “A hot day, the day my brothers wandered away from the celebration in the piazza. I had to find them. My papà wanted me to find them. And you know where I find them? Those stupid boys.” He frowned, thinking about the answer. When he spoke again, he spoke in English, his voice almost a whisper. “They were in the almond orchard playing with an artillery shell. I yelled at them to stop, I did.”

  When he talked about his brothers, there was a lesson in the story, unspoken—and he told me that lesson all the time. If I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t listen to his every word, if I didn’t watch out, I could end up dead like them. A fear like that could crush you.

  My father poured wine into a mason jar. He sat back down, leaned over his food, elbows on the table. He stuffed a forkful of peppers into his mouth, and bit into a slice of dark toast topped with sardines. “Those stupid twins,” he said. He wagged a finger at me. “I told you to stay at the library until I came for you.”

  I sunk into my seat and forked green and red peppers from the bowl. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The kitchen grew quiet except f
or the clank of utensils against dishes and teeth. My father raised his head from his food. He pursed his lips. His brow furrowed. He drank his wine, and then raised the jar to the light for me to see the rusty hues. “Just a sip,” he said. “Go on. Try.”

  When I tried his homemade wine, I scrunched up my face. “It tastes like vinegar,” I said.

  He snorted like a horse. “A few more years yet,” he said.

  My father never talked about my mother the way he talked about his brothers. She died when I was five years old and he never mentioned her at all, so I didn’t either. One day she was there, and then she wasn’t. And all her belongings, all the pictures of her and of us together, they disappeared, too, as if my father wanted me to forget her. It was like she never stopped disappearing. But I still had my mother’s glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling—the stickers she and I had put there together. The stars she had taught me how to read.

  Tell me the story again, I’d say. The one about Pisces, and I’d point at the green constellation. What are they? she’d ask me, and I’d yell out, Fish! How many fish? she’d say. Two fish tied by their tails, a mother and her son transformed. They swam free from the monster, Typhon.

  Typhon sought revenge against the gods for the deaths of his serpent-footed brothers. He stood as high as the stars, a sickle-winged colossus, roaring with the heads of a hundred wild beasts. He rained down a barrage of mountains and fire on the gods, and the gods trembled before his wrath. They changed into animals, retreating in a thunderclap of mighty hooves. The world shuddered. Waves cut the horizon with glassy teeth, an ocean gnawing at the sky, frothing at the mouth in the pitch of Typhon’s storm. All seemed lost until Minerva goaded Jupiter into fighting back. But even the king of the gods could not destroy Typhon. So Jupiter buried the monster under Mount Etna, where he still spews fire and ash into the air. In this way, a volcano was born.

  Sometimes my father was Typhon, fueled by an inconsolable rage for what had happened to his brothers, trapped under a mountain of rock but still burning and angry at everyone, even me. Sometimes Tony was Typhon, a stupid beast bent on mindless destruction, always able to spot the weakness in me. But now I understood that Typhon was something else, too—a secret, long-simmering hatred between Rocco Morello and my father. And my lie had banged on that secret, like an unexploded shell between them. It had freed a monster not even the gods could tame.

  3

  That Saturday, my father put in a half day at the factory where he worked as a machinist grinding parts for submarines and military aircraft. When he got home, he went into the basement without a word. He spritzed his long trays of white button mushrooms. Then he replaced his wine barrel’s leaky wooden spigot and sealed it with a rag. In an hour, he shrugged back into his flannel-lined blue jacket and walked me to Saint Sebastian Church. Sicilian immigrants from Melilli had built it in 1931, modeled after the church they’d left behind-the Basilica of Saint Sebastian. Most Sicilian families in Middletown, even Tony’s family, came from Melilli. Some, only a few, came from neighboring villages. There were even some Italians from the south sprinkled in like crushed black pepper on a salad. But most of the Sicilian families here came from Melilli. Except mine. Mine came from Syracuse.

  Still, my father would tell me the story of the church as if he’d built it with his own bare hands. “You know who built that?” he asked me as we stood on the corner of Washington and Pearl across from Saint Sebastian, waiting for the traffic lights to change.

  “I know,” I said.

  My father smacked the back of my head and said, “Yeah. You know? You know because I tell you.”

  The granite church towered over the street, rising from a blanket of snow. It was the only building on the south side of the block, apart from the white clapboard rectory. The afternoon light lit up the swooping lines of the facade. And at its curved peak, the stone relief of Saint Sebastian glowed.

  “People from all over came to Melilli to see the statue,” my father said. “It’s not too far from where your zia and I grew up. We went every year for the feast.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting my zius?”

  “Zii,” he corrected me. “I never forget them. Don’t you believe for a second I forget them.”

  The traffic lights dangling from wires overhead clicked to red. The cars racing up and down Washington Street came to a stop at the four-way intersection. My father placed his hand on my shoulder and guided me across the street. He was the captain steering his ship through treacherous waters. But he couldn’t see all the jagged rocks beneath the surface here. American teenagers weren’t on his nautical charts.

  Catechism students who had completed their confessions waited on the wide sidewalk in front of the church for their parents to pick them up and take them home. On the left, Brother Calogero watched the boys. On the right, Sister Rosalia presided over the girls in their tight jeans and puffy winter coats. They huddled in groups, their heads bent toward each other, tossing their hair and sneaking glances at the boys.

  My father tugged my earlobe. “What are you looking at? Girls?”

  “No, nothing,” I said, swatting his hand away.

  “Better be nothing,” my father said. “Or you get this where you sit down.” And he made a slapping motion with his hand. If he could hear me rolling my eyes in their sockets, what sound would he hear?

  “Okay, behave,” he said. “Come to Vincenzo’s when you’re done.” My father only went to church for my sacraments of initiation and for the Mass on Christmas and Easter Sunday, and he never went with me. Religion was for the young and for women, he told me, to learn right from wrong. As he walked away, he called out, “Be careful crossing the street.”

  Cringing with embarrassment was like a dog whistle. It made a nails-on-chalkboard kind of sound that only a bully could hear. Right on cue, at the top of the church steps, the heavy wooden center door creaked open, and out stepped Tony with a black eye to match my swollen lip, but his bruise hadn’t come from my fist. I shuffled up the stairs. As we passed one another, Tony shoved me to the side with his shoulder.

  “Watch where you’re going,” he said, straightening his red leather zipper jacket.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I wanted to swallow back those words as soon as they came out.

  Inside, arched columns marched the length of the church, dividing long central wooden pews from stubby side ones. The stained-glass windows and high frescoed ceiling dwarfed the other Catechism students awaiting their turn for confession. I slunk past them and slipped into the front pew. Three stories above the statue of Christ flanked by Mary and Joseph, the plaster walls flaked like dry skin on an old man’s face. At the feet of the statues, flames played inside red tubes that shielded votive candles.

  Chris Cardella, the lanky track star of Woodrow Wilson Middle School, plunked down next to me. “Heard you got your ass handed to you last night,” he whispered. His navy-blue-and-white windbreaker crinkled as he leaned forward, inspecting my face—swollen lip, the skin around the swelling bruised purple, and crusted pink scrapes above my left eye.

  “Whatever.” I scooted to the far end of the pew and hopped the aisle to the side pew in front of the altar of Saint Sebastian. Two marble columns framed an oil painting taller than me. In the painting, the saint was bound to a tree, a splash of green leaves sprouting from the twisted branches of its twisted trunk. Arrows pierced his arms and chest. That’s what he got for standing up to his enemies, for refusing to back down. Who knows, maybe he could’ve found another way out, if only he’d looked.

  Brother Calogero hadn’t come inside yet. I slipped out the side door. The last of the Catechism students gathered on the marble stairs, their voices like the cawing of a flock of starlings.

  The wide street-facing window of Vincenzo’s café was fogged on the inside. Men sat at checkerboard tables. Cigarette smoke swirled above their heads. They shouted over each other in Sicilian, using hand gestures like punctuation. Vincenzo moved among the patrons
with espresso and beer and pastries. His tall, angular frame hobbled by a bad leg. At the bar, my father sat alone, broad shoulders and thick arms hunched over the white Formica counter.

  “Ciao, David,” Vincenzo called above the clatter of the café. “Come stai?”

  “Okay. I guess,” I said with my face turned down to hide the bruises Tony gave me.

  Vincenzo lifted my chin up. “There’s no shame in losing a fight,” he said. “I lost plenty in my time.” His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed at the purple swelling and scabbed-over scratches. “Any fight you walk away from is a good fight.”

  My father swiveled to face me, a green Peroni bottle in his hand. “You done?”

  In Catechism class, Brother Calogero had told us that lies were like vinegar—they left behind a smell, and the only way to cleanse ourselves was to pour out our hearts like water before the face of the Lord. Lies were only venial sins, though, at least the small ones. Still, when I answered yes, I looked down at my boots, at the snow around the soles, and at my wet footprints behind me.

  “Iamuninni, David,” my father said. “Let’s go.” He threw his head back and poured the last of the beer down his throat. Then he slapped the empty bottle down on the counter and reached for his wallet in his back pocket.

  “Can I stay and help out?”

  My father paid for the beer because he always paid, no matter how many times Vincenzo protested, and Vincenzo always protested. My father waved the objections aside and asked Vincenzo if he would mind walking me home, and Vincenzo told him that he wouldn’t mind, and then he patted a nonexistent paunch and said that he could use the exercise. So my father left an extra five on the counter, tapping it with two fingers. “For whatever he wants,” he said.

  Vincenzo limped behind the counter to the brass and wood cash register that he’d bought at a garage sale years ago. He cranked the side hand crank to open the drawer—the only part of the machine that worked. He kept it because he liked the way it looked on the counter, old and dignified beside the framed cloth map of Sicily on the wall.