Chapter 16
Serafina
The farmhouse was surprisingly beautiful.
Low. Stone. A pitched slate roof gone soft at the edges with moss.
Two windows on the front with the glass old enough to ripple the view of the hillside behind us, and a door that had been painted green a long time ago and had weathered down to something between green and nothing.
He killed the engine. The quiet was fantastic.
He did not get out right away.
He sat with both hands on the wheel and looked at the door.
I understood, without him saying, that this was the threshold for him too. That he had done this drive alone a hundred times and that bringing another person with him had changed it.
“Come on,” he said.
The air outside was cold and smelled of woodsmoke.
Donatella’s scarf was warm at my throat.
The grey lamb was in the tote on my shoulder.
I carried my bag. He carried nothing. He fished a key out of his pocket—an old brass one, long-stemmed, the kind of key that went with a lock you could break with a hammer if you had to—and he slid it into the door and opened.
He stepped back. Let me go in first.
The floor was terra-cotta. Uneven. The tiles were the color of old brick and they had been walked on so long that there was a dark soft path worn into them from the door to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the hearth.
The hearth was on the far wall. Stone. Blackened inside. A small pile of split wood stacked neat beside it and an iron poker leaning against the stones and a layer of fine grey ash on the hearthstone that had not been swept. He used this fire, every year.
The kitchen was to the right. A cast-iron range with the enamel chipped at one corner. A deep stone sink. A wooden drainboard, and on the drainboard, upside down, a single ceramic cup with a chip out of the rim. One cup. Drying from the last time he had been here. Waiting for him to come back.
I felt my throat close.
“Marco.”
“Mm.”
“There’s just one cup.”
He was behind me in the doorway. “Didn’t think I’d ever bring anyone else here. I’ll get another.”
I moved to the table.
It was oak. Heavy. The grain had opened with age and someone—him?
—had rubbed oil into it recently enough that the wood still held the smell faintly under the smell of cold stone.
One chair, pulled out at an angle, the way a person leaves a chair when they have gotten up from it intending to come back in a minute.
An oil lamp on the table. A book of matches.
A small brown notebook with a rubber band around it.
I looked at him.
He nodded.
I slid the rubber band off. Opened it.
His handwriting. The left-hand pages were dates.
The right-hand pages were columns. Temperature.
Rainfall. A word that was the Sicilian for frost. Numbers that I understood after a second were brix readings.
Harvest dates going back nine autumns. A note in the margin of one page that said old man right about the north row.
Another that said mother would have laughed at this.
Another, further on, in a different ink: try again next year.
I closed the notebook. Put the rubber band back.
I set my hand flat on the cover and left it there.
“You kept it all,” I said. “By hand.”
“I like the hand.”
“You like that no one can subpoena it.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “That too. Clever girl.”
The bookshelves were against the long wall opposite the hearth.
Two of them, floor to ceiling, built into the stone.
I walked to them slowly. I did not touch the spines.
I just read. Agricultural manuals in English and in Italian.
A book on roof thatching. One on dry-stone walls.
A paperback of Pavese. A thick Sicilian-English dictionary with the cloth split at the spine and the split held together with tape.
A slim volume of poetry in Italian I did not know.
A Bible. A cookbook in Italian that looked like it had been written by a woman for her daughter, hand-bound, the pages swollen from use.
A stack of seed catalogs tied with string.
A wooden box, closed, the lid carved with what looked like a grapevine.
No novels. No thrillers. No self-help. Nothing that performed taste. Only the books of a man who was learning to do things and wanted them to get done.
I turned.
The coat was by the door. A heavy wool coat, olive green, the color that coats go when they have been olive for a long time.
It was hanging on a single iron hook. The shoulders of the coat had taken the shape of the hook—a small peak rising up under the collar on each side, worn into the wool over years—and the cuffs were frayed.
It was not a coat for the city. It was a coat for this place.
And it had been there long enough to have become part of the wall.
I put my hand on the sleeve.
I could feel the cold of the stone behind the wool.
I turned to face him.
He was still in the doorway. He had not moved. Hands in his pockets. Watching me move through his house the way you watch someone read a letter you have written to them, not offering any commentary, waiting for them to get to the end.
“You did all of this,” I said.
“Yes.”
“By yourself.”
“Of course.”
I looked around once more. The tile. The hearth. The one cup. The oiled table. The notebook. The coat that was part of the wall.
“Show me the rest,” I said.
“First, I light the fire.”
The back door opened onto a porch I had not known was there.
Two wide slate steps. A wooden rail he had built himself—I could tell because one of the posts was a different grain from the others, a repair made in a year he had not been able to source the same oak—and beyond the rail the land fell away.
It fell in rows.
I stopped at the top of the steps and I could not, for a second, take a full breath.
The vines ran down the slope in parallel lines that followed the grade of the hill, not the compass.
The vines were bare. This was the wrong time of year for leaves.
They were gnarled, low, knee-high, a whole army of small dark knuckled things with their arms stripped back to the permanent wood and tied to a single wire running between posts.
At the foot of the slope, a line of bare hardwoods marked the end of the cleared land.
Past the trees, more trees. Past those, the suggestion of a farther hill.
The sky was grey, and the vines stood under it in their rows with the patience of old things.
“Come on,” he said.
He walked ahead of me down the first row. His boots made a dry sound on the packed earth between the vines. I followed. He stopped at the fourth vine from the top and knelt, and he waved me down beside him, and I knelt in the dirt in my jeans and I did not care what it did to the jeans.
He put his hand at the base of the vine.
“Look.”
He showed me the place where the trunk changed. A thickening. A small knot of wood a few inches above the ground where one kind of bark gave way to another—the rootstock below, darker, the scion above, paler, the join between them a lump that had healed over but had never gone smooth.
“Graft,” he said. “The root is American. It has to be. There’s a louse in the soil here that eats the European root, always has. My cuttings could not survive if I put them in the ground on their own root. So I got American rootstock locally and I grafted the Sicilian wood onto it.”
“You did the grafting yourself.”
“The first year, no. I paid the old man. He showed me how. The second year I did half. The third year I did all of them. I have been doing them all ever since.”
I looked at the knot.
“This is the place where the two meet.”
“Yes.”
“The root is the country. The top is the country it came from.”
He looked at me sideways.
“I have never put it that way,” he said. “But yes.”
I put my hand on the wood.
The trunk was cold. The bark was rough under my palm and it had the texture I remembered from the vines behind my grandmother’s house, which had been pulled out when I was eleven and paved over for a patio my father had wanted.
I had not touched a vine since. I had not even known I had not touched a vine since. My hand remembered before I did.
“These came from Monreale?”
“These came from Monreale.”
“Which hill.”
“The cooperative’s. Above the town. South-facing, the one you can see from the belvedere where the tourists take pictures of the cathedral roof.”
I knew the hill.
I knew it because from my bedroom window in Palermo, if you pressed your face to the glass and looked left, past the roofline of the neighbor’s house and over the top of the old lemon tree in our courtyard, you could see it.
Just a piece of it. The curve where it rolled down toward the valley.
You could see it at sunset turning gold, and you could see it in winter going brown, and you could see it in spring going green in a way that made your chest hurt if you had been away from Sicily for any length of time.
I looked down the slope in front of me.
It was the same curve.
It was not identical—no two hills in the world were identical—but it was the same shape, the same roll toward the trees, the same angle where the grade softened before the bottom.
He had bought a piece of Wisconsin that rhymed with a piece of Monreale.
Or he had found it and known. I did not know which, and I did not think he knew which, and it did not matter.
I knelt there in the cold earth with my hand on the vine that had come from the hill I could see from my bedroom, and I did not speak, and I did not move.
His hand settled on the back of my neck.