It snowed Christmas Eve, while the boy slept on a cot in the kitchen and the two men went to bed on straw mattresses spread over the floor of the parlor, by the stove. Enzo was conscious all night long; the straw blades pierced his nightshirt, and his father’s raucous snores abused him like a harangue. He rarely slept through the night in his mother-in-law’s house, anyway, although usually it was the quiet that disturbed him.
Eventually he crept outside wearing his rubbers and the brown merino coat he kept at the farm — an elegant garment, a hand-me-down, belonging originally to Mrs. Marini’s husband, that Enzo had misused by allowing the dander of Patrizia’s rabbits to penetrate it. The air was still and nearly warm, and the thick snow traversed it cautiously, as if trying to escape notice, although it covered everything and rose to his knees. He dipped his hand in it and brought it to his mouth and ate, and felt the cold course in his veins.
On Christmas morning, oranges, grapefruit, and cheese were exchanged as gifts. Patrizia had crocheted an afghan for Ciccio out of a drab yarn she had bought for a nickel at an estate sale.
After breakfast, they dressed and went out. Patrizia drove the tractor at a crawl through the snow, while Enzo and the boy stood in the high wagon it pulled, each swinging behind him an enormous oak mallet that he brought down on the tops of the posts as they passed them. The old man followed on foot in the rut of one of the wagon wheels, delighting in the snow, the like of which in depth he had never seen.
The vineyard under snowfall looked like a sheet of paper on which a single word had been typed, and typed again, and again, and again; until the ink in the ribbon failed and the word, at first so distinct, could hardly be read.
What was the word? For Ciccio Mazzone, to whose bored and erratic mind it occurred that the vineyard under the snow looked like a page and the identical rootstocks and locust posts like the same letters endlessly repeated, the word was a phony Latinism, an American invention meant to sound like it came from the noble Romans, although it probably came from a West Virginia riverboat pilot or an itinerant preacher; the word meant “to flee” or “to abscond,” but he would rather not speak it until he was on his way out of this fucking place, if you don’t mind.
For his father, on the other hand — who watched the boy with satisfaction as the great hammerhead sailed behind him, twisting his back as it went, until with a little upward heave the boy pitched it over his head — the word, if there was a word that repeated itself across the white page of his mind, uninvited and unremitting, was not, in fact, bastard, not anymore, not for ten years, at least; nor Carmelina, sorry to say, he had given up on that; but sleep.
Sleep, said the posts when he pounded them, as he inhaled the sulfurous fumes of the diesel engine and tore a frozen shoot off one of the vines and chewed it.
Two nights later, Enzo and his father headed back to the city. Ciccio stayed at the farm. The old man’s return train for New York was to leave early the next morning, and Enzo thought of the soft springs of his bed at home with love and hope.
The roads had been cleared after the Christmas Eve snow shower, but now it was snowing again. Shortly after the men drove away from the farm, the snow turned to rain. The highway was black and shimmered under the headlights. After tomorrow, it was unlikely Enzo would ever meet Francesco Mazzone again.
The windshield wipers were beating like mad. Enzo saw the road less distinctly than the rain itself — the glowing atoms that emerged from obscurity in the near distance, hung there for a fraction of a second, and then shot at him by the millions.
“Now, about the boy, there’s something I should explain—,” he began, and turned his head.
His father’s posture was rigid, as always, and his heavy arms were folded tightly against his ribs. But the rumpled eyes were shut, and the head was bowed in sleep.
Enzo could faintly make out the white stripe on the side of the road, along which he was guiding the truck.
He had parked the old Buick by the curb, he had climbed the stairs. His socks had been soaked through since lunch. He was never to forget that he had gone into the apartment — right through the front room, and then directly to the bedroom — opened the bureau, and changed his socks. Only then had he strayed back into the front room and found her on the floor behind the coffee table, her face pressed against the ottoman. Somehow she had fallen, evidently, and somehow, in falling, her dress had been hiked up over her behind. Which for some reason was naked. And somehow, evidently, she had hit her head, because she was unconscious, on the floor there, with the bleeding, although he could locate no bruise on the head. She had fallen and had been bleeding seriously, the blood was on the Oriental, and she was unconscious. He had carried her to the bathroom, her little legs were limp and slick, and put her in the tub, bending the knees so the feet would fit inside. He stood up, scanning the room, for what? A hairbrush — her hair was a mess — and didn’t find one. He ran to the kitchen, looking, for what? A rag. He had been utterly at a loss as to what had taken place. There had been a water glass, strange, a single water glass drying on the rack by the kitchen sink. It wasn’t Lina’s way to leave glasses out; she dried them and returned them to the cupboard. He had filled the glass with water from the tap and had drunk it down.
He was so tired.
Something warm and analgesic was suffusing his brain. The effect was like the stuporous, chemical ease that follows sexual release, and it led him toward the fathomless sleep of early marriage. The sleep of the thousand years.
Nine years passed.
He had come home from work. How many times had he come home from work? He had told the boy to run him a bath. He had asked the boy where his mother was, and the boy had said he didn’t know.
In the corner of Enzo’s vision, his father’s sleeping head jerked upright. “My God, wake up!” the old man cried.
Enzo looked again for the white stripe along the right side of the road and found it. But it was two stripes, and they were yellow. He was driving in the wrong lane.
Brilliantone.
Stand up so I can beat you.
Ad astra per aspera.
Momentum? Momentum is easy. Momentum, on a perfectly frictionless surface, is equal to the mass of the object times the speed.
He engaged the brake, and yet the truck continued its forward motion. Headlights growing brighter by the millisecond. The wheel was turned from side to side, and yet the truck kept on going, straight as the road, and struck the opposing vehicle face on face in an exclamation of shrieking metal and glass.
Sleep.
Up the highway, down the highway. He washes, you dry. Close the mouth when chewing. Close the light when leaving the room.
I was eleven. There was an uncle, the name was Gregorio, who leased me from my father at grain-cutting time, and who I loved better than all the others. He had left to fight in the war against Turkey and returned with a collection of postcards depicting the cities of the north in painted colors, one for each of us. But for me, secretly, there was another gift, a silver cutlass taken from the Turk he killed in Libya, my finest possession. I used to keep it in a hole in the ground in a wooden box, under a medlar tree.