Death 2 Evisceration （Growing Pains） #3
THEY BUTCHERED ONE OF the doctor’s chickens and boiled it in a pot.
The chicken would be added to Assunta’s bill.
They tried to feed Stella the chicken broth, but when she opened her mouth to swallow the broth spilled out the sides of her face and streaked her cheeks.
It was as if there were a round ball of air in her throat, repelling anything that tried to pass through it.
She could speak, but her throat was scratchy.
Maria gave her mint to chew and this at least called forth some saliva.
“You were attacked by the pigs, little mouse,” Nonna Maria told Stella.
But Stella remembered. “No, I wasn’t. They just wanted the bread. I had bread and they just wanted to eat it.”
“Silly girl,” Maria said soothingly. “Next time you just give them the bread.”
“There won’t be a next time!” Assunta said. She knew what she thought of pigs now.
“I tried to give them the bread.” Stella’s words were puffs of air. “But I couldn’t give it to them.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t give it to them?” Maria asked, petting Stella’s head, which was the only piece of her that bore petting.
Stella was relieved that she could explain what she’d felt, that someone was going to take this fear from her.
“There was a hand. Like this.” With her right hand she seized her left and squeezed so the fingers bunched together like grapes, slowly ripening before the women’s eyes as the blood swam in fruitless circles. “A hand was holding me.”
“Whose hand?” Maria asked. “Concettina’s?”
“No, Cettina was over there.” Stella gestured to her left. How freely her arms moved, without any pain! The rest of her was a burning belly. “It was an invisible hand.”
Maria and Assunta were quiet, because this sounded awfully supernatural to them.
Eventually, Maria thought to take out her rosary, and the two women started a soft chant of the Hail Marys.
Cettina sat on the floor and stared up at her sister, who lay quietly on the bed and stared back.
They didn’t have to say anything to each other, nor did they have anything to say.
Stella had been the one who was trampled, but Cettina had had to watch it.
When the suffering child was finally asleep, Assunta admitted, “I don’t think it’s the Eye, Ma.”
Maria did not respond to this. Sitting on the bed with her palm on her granddaughter’s forehead, she frowned with half of her mouth.
ON THE SIXTH DAY, the doctor allowed Assunta to take her daughter home.
It seemed she had escaped infection. After the doctor reswaddled Stella’s midriff and torso, Assunta handed him a packet of lire—his fee, the cost of the surgery, five nights’ lodging, the price of one chicken, the entire bill paid in full, no installment plan needed.
The once-beloved pigs had been sold to Zu Salvatore, who ran the store in the centro, and in whose basement their haunches were currently suspended.
Between the cost of their food for the year and this set of medical bills, the pigs had almost paid for themselves.
AS THE THICK CRUST of a scar formed over the wound that split her abdomen, Stella was bed-bound for many weeks—very trying for a child of six.
During this time her godmother Za Ros entertained her by teaching her various womanly handicrafts.
She taught her to embroider handkerchiefs and to crochet increasingly elaborate decorative lace.
Stella, naturally competitive, focused her bored energy on mastering these tricks, then basked in the adults’ admiration. Everyone told her how clever she was.
On an unseasonably warm day in February, after four arduous weeks of only being allowed to leave the bed to use the chamber pot, Stella convinced her mother that she felt well enough to go outside.
Assunta clutched her daughter’s arm as they walked the forty steps to the church chiazza—that was as far as Assunta would let Stella go.
They stood on the plateau and looked down over the mountain together, silently appreciating the panorama.
Weak February sunlight cut through the veil of gray clouds and splashed the olive valley below them, a yellow puddle of springtime between the mountains.
Stella’s ancestors had stopped here on this plateau three hundred years earlier to build the village of Ievoli because of this incredible view.
From the chiazza where these ancestors erected their church, one could see all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea to the right and the Ionian Sea to the left.
The volcanic island of Stromboli smoldered perpetually at the edge of the lichen-green bay, and Stella and Assunta watched together as it emerged from the hazy horizon when the sun began to sink behind it.
This was Stella’s world, this mountain hers to live on despite everything that tried to kill her. Her belly aching, Stella slipped her hand back into her mother’s and they walked home for supper. But she would come back to watch the sun set again tomorrow.