Field of Stone

 

by Tony Ardizzone

 

Rosa Dolci

Once there was a poor but honest man, un’omu d’onuri, a man of honor, who worked the whole day—day after day—in the un­relenting heat of the blazing sun, scratching the pitiful dirt at his feet with a wooden hoe, coaxing the useless dust first this way and then that way, like a mother combing her feverish child’s thin, dulled hair, urging the earth to release something he and his chil­dren and wife might eat, so that they might live to work beneath the scorching sun another day, and not starve. Thank God, figghiu miu, that even in these hard times you’re a stranger to real hunger. Do my arms squeeze you too tight? Ha! Imagine the slow and suf­focating stranglehold of true starvation, like a snake slowly coiling itself around your belly and ribs, squeezing all breath and vitality from you. Each passing day you grow more weak. In the shadow of your hut you squat and chew straw.

The man’s name was Papa Santuzzu. He was your nonnu, fa­ther of your father. This is his story and the story of his children. It’s also the story of people like me, whose destiny it was to marry into the Girgenti family. God willing, one day you’ll pick up the thread and tell these stories to children of your own. May you be blessed, figghiu miu, with a fair wife and many children! May you have a clear gaze and a strong back!

Papa Santuzzu’s story starts back in Sicilia, in another world, the land that time forgot, where those who stayed behind some­times gathered against the long night around a blazing fire talking about themselves and all those who’d left. Everyone was expected to bring some wood. As we squatted around the fire someone would beat out a tune or hum until a second would sing or take up some instrument and play, and as the moon slid higher in the sky toward the promise of the coming day a third would start a
tale and like a weaver with her yarn stretch it out and let it spin

and end her story with a rhyme,

and so the next soul with a tale would begin

and all would pass the time

bringing fresh wood to the fire, telling one story after the next, until we’d gone full circle and everyone who had wanted to had given breath to a song or story. Then the one who started the first tale would tell another so as to knot the thread, as the moon grew pale and thin and the fire low, and the village cocks stretched their wings and scratched the rust of sleep from deep inside their throats, and from the waiting fields you could hear the songbirds’ sweet singing.

 

What did Papa Santuzzu look like? Well, his skin was as dark as an olive soaked in brine. His nose was long and sharp, like the beak of a great bird. He had a big black moustache that drooped down nearly to his chin. He wore a gray cap to protect his head from the sun. You could see at once in his brown eyes that he was gentle. When he laughed, your mouth had no choice but to laugh too.

For a poor man, Papa Santuzzu was no stranger to laughter. During a game of tresette one lazy evening in the village, Papa Santuzzu was dealt a perfect hand. He couldn’t keep a straight face and so infuriated his opponent that the man wagered an old donkey, which Papa Santuzzu’s subsequent run of absolutely per­fect cards won. When asked by the man why he had laughed in the face of such fortune, Papa Santuzzu replied that luck is like a person’s shadow, it chases best those who flee from it.

Lu muttu di l’anticu mai mintiu. The proverbs of the ancients never lie.

The old donkey was known as Gabriella because her bray was like the loud trumpet call of Angel Gabriel’s horn. This was a donkey whose song was stronger than her pull. As they say, cani c’abbaia assai muzzica picca. A dog that barks too loud does not bite much. Papa Santuzzu had secret names for Gabriella, names he’d whisper into her long ears while the pair labored together for long hours each day in the fields. She too wore a hat to protect her head from the sun, though her hat was floppy and wide-brimmed and made of straw.

One day Gabriella flat out refused to work. Papa Santuzzu took a deep breath, then tried to reason with her. No good. Gabriella wouldn’t move. Papa Santuzzu tried rubbing her legs, hoping that by massaging her strength he might rouse it. The stubborn donkey remained motionless. He tickled the sweet spot behind her ears. Gabriella refused to budge. He whispered promises in a tongue believed to be irresistible to donkeys. Gabriella whickered and shook her head.

Papa Santuzzu then gave up and called her the name of every lazy no-good-for-nothing thing in existence. It was midday, swel­tering hot, so Papa Santuzzu sat down in the shade of an almond tree. Gabriella lay down beside him, and while the pair snoozed a drunken soldier from the mainland ambled by and took a sudden liking to Gabriella’s straw hat, exchanging it for his own. When Papa Santuzzu woke up, he looked at the donkey and saw that she now wore the cap of an Italian soldier.

“Gabriella, Gabriella,” Papa Santuzzu shouted in great distress. Tears sprang from his eyes. “I know I yelled at you and hurt your feelings, but you didn’t have to go and join the army!”

 

Every day Papa Santuzzu broke his back in the fields. He who does not work, dies. The land was parched and ancient—in places it was as dry and useless as bone—and sprinkled over with a powdery coat of dust so tired that the particles just wanted to blow away someplace where they could sleep for a century and not be bothered.

Now, a piece of land is like any living thing. For it to prosper, it has to be both fed and loved. This was land that was starving, owned by a wealthy baron and ruled by a cruel gabbillotu, or over­seer. Both wanted to take as much from the land as they could. The pair allowed Papa Santuzzu to tend it in exchange for the bulk of his harvest, so great a share that Papa Santuzzu knew that he worked for himself in name only and was in truth another man’s slave. Gabriella was the only thing Papa Santuzzu truly owned. The baron owned even the house Papa Santuzzu lived in with Mamma Adriana, their seven children, a scrawny pair of goats, an occasional hen, and far too many flies and fleas to count.

Gabriella lived in the house too. The house was just a simple hut. One room, a dirt floor, a wooden chair or two, a ladder sprin­kled with chicken droppings leading up to the loft where at night the people and their fleas and flies slept.

The poor land, I believe, was trying to sleep too. For thousands of years, since the beginning of time, Sicilia had been forced to feed a thousand and one mouths, her own true children as well as all of the invaders from the east and south, the north and west. Every nation mighty enough to stretch canvas across a beam set sail for Sicilia and landed on her shores. She was once the bread­basket for the known world.

Back when we all were the great-grandchildren of Adam and Eve, Sicilia was a young, ripe fig. Her fields burst with corn, wheat, rice, sugar, every kind of fruit. It’s said that the most deli­cious sausages hung from her trees. Anchovies leapt from the sea right onto your plate. Herbs furred the forest floor. In the forests loped antelopes whose antlers were so strong they could saw the hardest wood. Elephants with little houses on their backs saun­tered freely throughout the countryside. Each tree in the forest dripped with syrup and honey. In the branches above, silkworms wove the finest cloth. Partridges laid so many eggs that you couldn’t take two steps without stumbling upon a nest. Goats were so full that each morning they pleaded to be milked. Sicilia was a garden paradise, and her grateful people ate of her and re­plenished her in return. Even today someone drinking a glass of wine will toss the last mouthful back onto the earth out of respect and gratitude.

But over time the mouths multiplied, and the first flotilla of in­vading sails landed upon shore. These pirates recognized no law. They took whatever they desired. Soon the native people built their villages in twisting mazes, known only to those born there, as means of protection against the thieves. The cristiani shut their eyes and ears to everyone strange. They made a maze of their lan­guage too. Only a fool gives clear directions to his house or his daughters’ whereabouts.

The land was also misused. Sicilia’s mighty forests were cut down. Her richest fields were gutted and left empty. The earth wasn’t given back a tenth as much as was taken from her, and over time too many new hands reached out for her, too many new mouths ate of her, too many hungry stomachs were born bawling out their complaints, until the island erupted and belched smoke and fire, crying out that she needed to rest, and the genti di cam­pagna shouted no, not yet, we’re starving, feed us, you can’t go to sleep yet.

Every day Papa Santuzzu and Gabriella worked to keep the tired earth awake. The ground was tough and stingy, like the meat of an old goat, like the petrified heart of someone ignored, mean and hard and sad enough to shatter Papa Santuzzu’s hoe into splinters. Worse, the earth was choked with so many rocks that there wasn’t sufficient space on which to pile them all. Some rocks were so big that even with Gabriella’s help Papa Santuzzu couldn’t roll them from the fields. The soil was so poor that even weeds snubbed it. The dandelion likes to set down his long claw just about anywhere, but he’d scamper past this inferior dirt. We’d eat dandelion, cicoria, borage, thistle—nearly every green thing—whenever we could find them. Greens swell the belly, though af­ter too many days of eating them the culu cracks and the mouth desperately craves something else.

Once, the only thing to grow in Papa Santuzzu’s plot of earth was a nasty bush of thorns. These were vicious and stubborn thorns, as is the nature of things that are thorny. Whenever Papa Santuzzu tried to cut them back or pull them out they leapt at his eyes and sliced his legs and hands and arms, eager for the blood that would nourish them. The thorns spread so far and wide across the ground that the insects crawling the dry earth imagined that the sun had been swallowed up entirely. Even Gabriella be­came lost in the snarl of thorns! Only her long ears and the crown of her army hat could be seen.

Papa Santuzzu stood in the field, listening to Gabriella’s plain­tive trumpet. He too became lost in the vicious maze of thorns, which pierced his skin and eagerly drank his blood.

Now instead of feeling sorry for himself, as some would, Papa Santuzzu thought of how he really was quite fortunate. That took some imagination, for the thorns had grown so thick around him that he could hardly move.

The thorns haven’t pierced my hands and feet, Papa Santuzzu told the sky. I am thankful to the Lord for that. They haven’t pierced my side. They haven’t crowned my head, as they did the Saviour, Jesù Cristu. For these blessings I am thankful.

Just then Papa Santuzzu noticed a melon trapped in the tangle of thorns. It was a small and modest melon, hardly worth eating. Still, Papa Santuzzu worked a hand free, tore the melon from its vine, then managed with his knife to slit the fruit open. Inside the slit crouched a tiny spirit. The spirit tried to escape, but Papa Santuzzu caught it and held it fast in his hand.

“Let me go!” the spirit cried. “Let me go!”

“Not until you’ve helped me,” Papa Santuzzu said.

So the spirit stopped squirming and told Papa Santuzzu he could have three wishes.

First Papa Santuzzu wished that Gabriella would be free.

“Done!” the spirit said. And the donkey stood free of the thorns.

“Now clear this field entirely,” Papa Santuzzu said.

“Done!” And the field was clear.

With his last wish Papa Santuzzu was tempted to ask that the field be filled with grain. But instead, maybe for the first time in his life, your father’s father stopped thinking like a wretched la­borer whose sole purpose was to put coins into another man’s pocket. Papa Santuzzu took a gulp and wished for a house as big as the baron’s.

“Hey,” the spirit cried, “do you think that if I had a house as big as the baruni’s I’d be living in this scrawny melon?”

With that the spirit scampered away. Papa Santuzzu stood alone with Gabriella in the middle of the barren field. But at that moment an exciting new idea dawned inside Papa Santuzzu’s brain. Just like when he’d won Gabriella in the game of tresette, Papa Santuzzu had a glimmer of thought. He imagined that someday he, rather than the gods that ruled, might be able to alter his destiny.

 

Up until then he worked long, unimaginably hard hours with­out question or protest. At the end of each day, when the sun blazed like a red coal in the sky, he had only the hardened cal­louses on his hands and a thousand and one aches in his back to show for all his labors. Each day he’d stand, glance at the uncaring sun, mumble a prayer to a mostly silent God, and mop the sweat from his face with his big kerchief. While the baruni in his mansion grew fat on meat, Papa Santuzzu and his family ate slugs, bab­baluci, and boiled weeds.

One night after the air grew quiet and cool, Papa Santuzzu stared through the gap in his roof. As was his habit he pondered the stars. He was just like the stars, he told himself. He and the slowly shifting flecks of light had no choice but to hang in the sky in their fixed, ancient, preordained positions.

Gabriella had limped all that afternoon, he considered as he gazed at the sky. His daughter and three sons again had mewed with hunger after they’d licked the supper bowl clean. Again Adriana had gone without so that the children might have more to eat. There were new taxes to pay to the thief of a government. Papa Santuzzu considered that the government in Roma was just another absentee landlord, only bigger and more greedy! It even had a tax on Gabriella! Worse was the conscription law that re­quired of young men seven years of armed service. Seven years might as well be seventy since the boys almost never returned. Every autumn soldiers from the mainland marched through the province and took away its sons. These cruelties were, are, and always would be, Papa Santuzzu considered. He stared at the bits of light dotting the deep and endless sky, and just then a shooting star arced westward across the heavens.

He dreamed then of possibilities even more fantastic than the perfect run of cards that had brought him Gabriella, or the spirit that had nearly granted him the baruni’s house. Papa Santuzzu dreamed of something he’d heard men discussing in the village. This dream was about a wonderful, faraway land.

The marvelous new land was called La Merica. This place was said to have such vast, fertile fields that all you had to do was to push a seed into the ground and it would grow! You had to step back fast, claimed the men, or the plant’s stalk would knock you right down! In La Merica there were rivers and seas leaping with fish. There were vast mountain ranges filled with so much gold that roads were actually paved with it! No one went to sleep hun­gry. In La Merica there were three villages where a working man could earn a real bundle. Like conspirators the men cupped their fingers beside their mouths as they whispered the villages’ names. “New York,” they whispered. “Brazil. Argentina.”

Papa Santuzzu gazed up at the glowing stars in the sky, his lips whispering the magical names of the three golden villages of La Merica. “New York. Brazil. Argentina.”

Mamma Adriana lay beside him in the straw, wheezing, her belly already beginning to swell with your saintly twin aunts. The firstborn child, Carla, lay at her side. The three boys—Gaetanu, Luigi, and Salvatore—slept near her feet, mouths open, drooling, their legs twined together like the strings of a single rope. From the straw on the ground floor of the hut came the resonant snores and sporadic grunts and various intestinal discharges of Gabriella.

If he could win a donkey, Papa Santuzzu thought, if a spirit could clear an entire field of thorns, if a star could wrestle itself out of its fixed hole and leap like a rabbit westward across the sky, then maybe, just maybe, his children could live in a generous and more forgiving land.

Papa Santuzzu pulled himself up from the straw, crossed him­self, then thrust his head and shoulders out the gap in the roof. “New York!” he shouted as loud as he could up to the stars. “Brazil!” he shouted. “Argentina!”

 

See, all the talk in the village had dropped the bean of an idea into Santuzzu’s brain. Once it grew into a tall beanstalk, there was no stopping him from climbing it. His old thoughts and old ways hardly had time to step back before the force of the new idea knocked them right down.

Don’t think it didn’t take some doing. And don’t think it didn’t shatter Papa Santuzzu’s heart. For a parent there are few pains worse than to see a child wanting. Papa Santuzzu knew that his children were hardly better off than Gabriella. Said simply, they were slaves. Adriana knew this too, and over the next years with the birth of the twins and her last child, Assunta, she felt joy edged with the most unbearable grief. Adriana understood too that the chains of miseria had to be broken.

Figghiu miu, it would have been so easy for Santuzzu and Adri­ana to say let our children be the ones to break the chain. After all, just look at us, we’re old. We’ve worked, we’ve suffered, we have such pains. Certainly now we deserve to sit in the shade of our years and allow our cloudy gaze to fall on the heads of our grand­children! Let them be the ones to decide to send their kids to the New Land. Besides, who will close our eyes when we die? Who will wash us? Who will cover our bodies with stones and grieve?

I tell you, after a woman gives birth she labors for a while longer until she delivers the broken sack that only moments ago held the infant she now cradles in her arms. The ruptured sack is a lovely, shimmering thing. It emerges inside out, rippling with veins, multicolored and shiny, like a muscle. You nearly believe it is alive. As the woman delivers it, out pours a fluid the color of fine red wine. There is so much of this birth wine the midwife has to hold a bowl beneath the mother to receive it all. You can hold the sack in your hands and imagine how the newborn fit inside it, how it swaddled the child, how its smooth and perfect surface kissed the babe’s cheeks and face, every part of its miraculous body.

Mischinu! Listen to me! How I go on. But whenever I think of the pain Adriana and Santuzzu must have felt as they said fare­well to their seven children, the image that comes to my mind is a ruptured and shimmering birth sack.

 

In the end I believe it was Mamma Adriana’s decision. If the man is the head of la famigghia, the woman is surely its center. She is the family’s heart and womb, you understand? She is the source from which the strength and vibrant urgency of la famigghia flows.

So Adriana and Santuzzu called Gaetanu to them and, for his own good, ordered him to leave. And the earth overheard them and opened her eyes and wept such salty tears that fish leapt into the air three times filling the baskets of the campagnoli, and that night in the village there was a great feast.

The people of the countryside ate, then made music and danced. Even Gabriella feasted and brayed along with the music.

The next morning Gaetanu made ready to depart. He kissed Papa Santuzzu for the last time. He kissed Mamma Adriana for the last time. I watched the three of them, standing beside the road in the sun. I was just a girl, barely bigger than you are now, the daughter of Gnaziu and Francesca. Mamma Adriana pulled on her hair and said, “Tannu, my son, Tannu, Tannu. May the Ma­donna be with you always and keep you safe.” She handed him a basket of bread and leftover fish.

Papa Santuzzu was unable to utter a word. All he could do was to stand in the sun beside Gabriella, his face shaded by the bill of his cap, wiping away his tears with the backs of his hands.

Above them the sun shone down stupidly, as if nothing im­portant was taking place on the spinning world below.

 

So Gaetanu began his long journey, walking the whole way from Girgenti to the city of Palermu, then sailing across the blue water to Napuli, where he would meet the steamship that would tumble him across the mad ocean to La Merica. No sooner had he left the village than deep in the forest he heard some talking. He stopped. Three old women stood in a clearing.

The first woman said, “We’re hungry, stranger.”

“Wake up,” said the second woman. “Cu dormi nun pigghia pisci. He who slumbers doesn’t catch fish.”

The third woman said, “Have mercy on us, in the name of your dear mother and her mother before her and so on and so on until the birth of time.”

Gaetanu considered the three women. They were ugly and old and as gnarled and skinny as twigs. But Gaetanu had a generous soul, and so he opened wide his basket and gave the women all he had—three leftover fishes and some scraps of bread.

In the bottom of the basket he saw a piece of thread that had fallen from Mamma Adriana’s sleeve. The thread was all he had left in the world. He held it to his heart. Then something strange took place. The more dearly he held it, the longer and thicker it grew! Soon it was as fat as a fat piece of rope. Gaetanu held the thick rope in his hands.

The old women chewed carefully, as those with only a few teeth do. One enters the world with a cry and no hair and teeth, one leaves the world the same way. Then the old women shriveled one by one into gold coins that fell softly to the forest floor.

Gaetanu smiled and put the coins in his pocket. With them he purchased passage on a steamship to La Merica after he borrowed many more coins at an incomprehensibly high rate of interest from a struzzeri who hung upside-down by his feet from the ceil­ing, and with his long fingernails scooped the marrow from Gaetanu’s bones while sipping a cup of his hot, terrified blood.

 

The next day Luigi and Salvatore saw a fish flying in the air.

I saw it too from where I worked in the fields. You don’t often see such a thing, so we leaned on our tools for a moment and stared up at it. We were threshing grain that day, singing as we threshed. I was helping with the gleaning. You know that my mamma died when I was only a little girl, and my papa was so lame he could no longer walk the distance from our hut to the fields. And these were two whose hands were never seen in their pockets! The fields we tended were more than a league away from the hut where Papa Gnaziu and I lived.

I worked with the other village girls. Already your father had taken notice of me. Sometimes our eyes would meet across the bobbing heads of grain, and for a moment or two we’d lock gazes. I didn’t have the prettiest smile or anything bright to wear so I imagined there was a brightness inside me—something silver or red—so he’d see that I noticed him too. I’d let a little of the bright­ness shine out through my eyes, then cast them down quickly so he’d think well of me.

On the day of the flying fish he was standing alongside Luigi, who pointed and shouted and waved at the sky. The tuna saw Luigi’s wave and dropped, landing at Luigi’s feet. In its mouth the tuna had a message from Gaetanu.

“Dear Luigi,” spoke the tuna, “I’m in La Merica, the Golden Land, in the city of Lawrence, state of Massachusetts. I’ve just completed the arduous task of paying off my debt. Also I took in marriage a marvelous woman known by the name Teresa Panta­luna. While we speak of names, the authorities on the Island of Tears gave me a second one, the name of our province, so I am now Gaetanu Girgenti! That’s a lot of nice sound to come out of a mouth all at once! Anyway, here’s a basket of food and a piece of rope. May the food ease the hungers of your journey. The rope is so that you’ll be able to find Teresa and me. Inform the men on the Island that you’re my brother. Hold onto the rope tight. No matter what, don’t let the rope go! With it, my brother, Teresa and I will pull you across the sea.”

Then the tuna opened wide its mouth and out popped the rope and the basket of fish and bread. So Luigi, the second brother, set out with his older sister Carla.

The earth again wept, and all the people feasted, and the don­keys sang and danced.

The next day in the forest Luigi and Carla met the three old women, the bones of their arms and legs so thin they resembled sticks.

“We’re starving,” they said. “We’re so hungry we’ve gnawed even our most bitter memories. All of time has collapsed into an unbearable gnawing pain.”

Of course Carla gave them the basket of bread and fish. Who could say no in face of such need? The women gobbled the scraps in an instant, then begged for the piece of rope. “To keep our skirts up,” they said. “See, we’re so skinny, our skirts keep falling right off.”

Luigi put a finger to his forehead, thinking. He remembered the fish’s warning. “No,” he said, “no matter what, I’d better not let go of this rope.”

In the light of the women’s disappointment Carla said, “It’s a lot for a woman to lose her skirt, Luigi. Look at the rope, it’s plenty big. It’s long enough for us all.”

She offered the women one end, all the while holding tight to the middle. The women blessed her as they wrapped the rope around their waists. By the time they were through all five were tied together, like a bundle of sticks, with Carla and Luigi in the middle.

Then the women turned into three gold coins, and the end of the rope fell to the ground and transformed itself into an eel, and the eel said, “Don’t worry, just follow me.” All the while Luigi and Carla held on tight. Hold tight onto my finger, just like Zia Carla and Ziu Luigi. Yes, that’s it. Tighter. Yes!

So Carla and Luigi followed the eel through the forest. Along the way they stopped for Ciccina Agneddina, who was to be Luigi’s wife, and Gerlando Cavadduzzo, the famous baker, who married Carla. Together the quartet found the ship and with the gold coins paid for their passage, and the eel pulled the boat across the blue-green ocean to the Promised Land where Gaetanu and Teresa were waiting.

 

The next day in the fields there worked only Santuzzu, Salva­tore, and blind, old Gabriella. By now Salvatore did the labor of three grown men. He was very handsome and unbelievably strong. Like a hard, hot iron his body was! I can’t even begin to tell you. Your papa was a tree the wind couldn’t bend, a mighty rock on the seashore, un pileri, a fine specimen of a man. As he la­bored in the fields he saw again the flying tuna. In the tuna’s mouth was a message from Gaetanu and Luigi.

“Brother,” the letter said, “it’s time that you joined us. Here’s the rope and a basket of food. Don’t let go of the rope, no matter what. Bring Papa and the twins, Rosaria and Livicedda, as well as the infant Assunta. Tell everyone we miss and love them. Say a prayer on behalf of each of us on the ground beside our dearest mother’s grave.”

I accompanied your father to the village, where we found the man who could read and write. Before touching our letter he washed and dried his hands, then drew his spectacles ceremoni­ously out of a box lined with green velvet and held the twin circles of glass up to the sun, then strapped their glistening hooks behind his ears.

By then Gnaziu, my father, had passed from this world. No one from my family remained in the village. My brothers and sisters had all drifted away, like winged seeds in the spring wind. The wind blew a few of my brothers to Brazil. The wind carried the others along with my sisters to Argentina. To the shores of New York, the wind blew only me.

Sometimes late at night I still can hear the songs my mother sang while I fed at her breast. Sometimes just before it rains, when the wind is high and the light is dying, my nose fills with her smell. Her smell is a mix of almond blossoms and souring milk tinged sweetly with sweat. I close my eyes and hold a soft piece of cloth against my cheek. Sometimes I can feel her standing beside me. I feel her trying to take my hands in hers. Sometimes her fin­gertips brush against my face or hair. Sometimes I think that if I call to my sisters in the other La Merica that lies far away to the south they might hear me and answer back. I try calling to them with my mind. Then I make my mind very still, and I close my eyes and listen.

So the day that the letter was brought to us was extremely sad, you understand, because I knew even before the penman had time to clear his throat what words were inked on that paper, and what those words might mean.

 

Together Salvatore and I carried the words to Papa Santuzzu. He was waiting for us, sitting silently in the shade of a gnarled olive tree. By then he was so old that his eyes were no longer black. They’d turned white, dusted with chalk. He couldn’t see much more than our shadows, but he was like an old owl, he didn’t miss much.

“Regard me,” he said. He took off his gray cap. His hair was as light as lemon blossoms. His eyes were bowls of cream. Alongside him in the dappled shade sat Gabriella, front legs curled beneath her body, which had turned the color of snow.

“Do you remember that rock we found five springs ago,” Papa Santuzzu said as he pointed toward a distant field, “or was it seven, eight, nine, ten?” For a while he counted on his fingers. He knew how to count from one to ten. “The one that at first seemed so easy Tannu said he’d take care of it all by himself?” Papa San­tuzzu laughed. “Yet as Tannu dug, it grew bigger and then even bigger?”

Who could remember one rock, I thought, when there had been so many.

“I remember it well, Papa,” Salvatore said.

“We worked on it for weeks,” Papa Santuzzu said.

Why were they talking of rocks? I wondered.

“The weeks stretched into months, Papa,” said Salvatore. “The months grew into years. For years every spring we tried to dig it up.”

“You remember that in the end,” Papa Santuzzu said, “we de­cided that it wasn’t a rock at all. It was a hard edge of the world.”

“You said it was an edge of the bedrock, Papa. It was a part of the island of Sicilia herself.”

“A living edge of the world itself,” Papa Santuzzu said. “I climbed down into the hole around it and could hear it breathe.”

“I remember all the trouble we had pulling you back out,” Sal­vatore said.

“I didn’t want to leave there,” said Papa Santuzzu. “The rock’s breathing seemed to match my own.”

“Tannu had to climb down and tie you in a harness,” Salvatore said.

“Pieces of rock that have broken off,” Papa Santuzzu said, “even very big pieces, in time you can drag them or break them apart and carry them from the fields. But you can’t move the earth itself.” For several moments he patted Gabriella’s side. “You know, when I started all this years ago I think at first I meant to move only one rock. Or maybe three. I should have remembered that once you begin clearing a field of stone, you’re tempted to clear it all.” He gave us a hard stare. “Don’t leave anyone behind, you two, you understand? Not Livicedda and Rosaria, or even Assunta. Do I have your promise on that?” Salvatore nodded. “But don’t be fools and try to move the world itself.”

“I understand, Papa,” Salvatore said.

“Don’t cry,” Papa Santuzzu said. You could see he had only two or three teeth left in his head. “Hey, you didn’t think I could ever leave my Adriana?”

“She will always be here too,” Salvatore said, pointing to his heart. “There will never be a day that I won’t think of her with love and pray to her.”

Papa Santuzzu nodded, pressing both of his palms against his heart. Gabriella brayed softly and shed a big tear.

Then Papa Santuzzu opened his arms, and his third and youngest son embraced him. Then I embraced him and covered his face with my kisses and tears. By then I was one of his children too.

I didn’t know how to tell him good-bye. There were no words to say.

*

And the earth wept the most salty of all oceans, and the cam­pagnoli feasted and prayed to the Madonna and the special saints, and the donkeys spun in circles, dancing with the goats and chickens.

We entered the forest. Your papa told me and his sisters, “Hold tightly onto this rope.” Even though it was day, we could hear the howls of wolves. Then we came to a clearing and saw the three old women.

“Feed us,” they said, “we’re very hungry.”

“Clothe us,” they said, “for the bright light is cruel, and the winter air is very cold.”

“Stay with us, all of you, today and all days, because we’re old and lonelier than the grave of Pontius Pilate, condemned to eter­nally wash his hands with fire.”

Your papa opened the basket and gave them all that was in­side, three fish and a few scraps of bread. The women ate. Then Salvatore gave one of the old women his jacket, the second his shirt, and the third his only pair of shoes, saying, “Please, don’t request my pants too! These are three of my sisters.” He intro­duced Rosaria and Livicedda, and then Assunta, who still sucked her thumb and carried everywhere with her a piece of an old rag. “And this girl”—he motioned to me—“her name is Rosa the Sweet. She’s my wife of only a few months, and she’s barely had time to sew!”

The first old woman cackled and answered, “If she’s your wife of only a few months, you don’t have much need of pants!”

“We hope you’ve shown her how well the needle can stick the cloth!” laughed the second old woman.

“You’ll be blessed if in darkness the bride comes to enjoy your threading the eye!” the third old woman cried.

I didn’t appreciate such joking, but in the forest strange things are known to occur. One learns that it’s wiser to hold one’s tongue than to chase after one’s head. So Salvatore gave them all he owned. Then they asked him for the rope.

“Here,” I said quickly, offering them the skinnier end of the rope. “Remember, a free bowl of soup never lacks for salt.” I tell you, I didn’t like them taking all of your father’s clothes.

The moment the old women touched the rope they turned into three pieces of gold, and the eel led us to Palermu. As we rode in the back of a wagon toward the sea, we thumbed our noses at the moneylenders.

The boat leapt away from the shore. We looked back at the land as it began to grow smaller, then even smaller. To Sicilia we cried, “I cannot live with you, nor can I live without you!”

 

The sea beyond was beautiful, very lively and green, like a fine field after a week of rain. Then the ocean turned angry and gray for nearly a month. It seemed as if the voyage to La Merica would never end.

Some on board the ship became so sick and nauseated they prayed to the saints to die. Some made vows so extreme not even Jesù Cristu could keep them. The men in Palermu packed us into the steerage hole like plugs of tobacco in a pipe. The air down there—whew, what a stench! It could turn sweet milk to cheese. Even a dead man with no dignity would have to pinch his nose! We had to take turns going up on deck, and if you weren’t careful the smokestacks above blew cinders into your eyes. We shared the space above with cattle and pigs. Their mess ran all over the deck every time it rained. You couldn’t help but step in it, or where someone had been nauseous. Then up the ship would roll, then sharply down down down and over to one side, then back to the other side and again up, riding the dizzy, never-ending waves.

We held onto the rope so tightly you’d think we’d squeeze off our fingers. On the other end Gaetanu and Teresa Pantaluna, Luigi and Ciccina Agneddina, Carla and Gerlando Cavadduzzo were pulling. Here, help them. Give the rope a pull. “Unh, unh,” they pulled. That’s it, figghiu miu.

Then we glimpsed the incredible city and the massive statue of the lady. The sky above our heads was so full of smoke we thought for sure the city was on fire. No, said a man on board, who had made the trip once before, that’s how the sky of the New Land looks every day. They took us on a second boat to the Island of Tears.

Ellis Island—mischinu!—it was itself a whole village. They brought us into a great hall, where we were told to sit on wooden benches and wait. You wouldn’t believe the noise in the huge room. A thousand voices, all going at once in a thousand different directions! Even now just to think of it I want to cover my ears. When they separated me from Salvatore and then from Livicedda and Rosaria and Assunta, I felt as if I’d fallen into a bottomless well. Aboard ship I’d heard stories of husbands taken from their wives, children taken from their mothers, brothers from sisters, never to see the other again. I had only a shawl and my dress and a pair of shoes. I held the empty basket on my lap. All around me was moaning madness. Waiting on the bench by myself, I thought perhaps I had disappeared or had died. I worried that I’d never see a familiar face again.

The doctors counted my teeth, pulled the lids of my eyes inside out with a hook, poked my ears, smelled my skin, listened to my lungs. I told each doctor I was Rosa, daughter of Gnaziu and Francesca, may they rest, spusa of Salvatore, brother to the twinned Rosaria and Livicedda, as well as Assunta and Carla, Luigi and Gaetanu of Girgenti, our province in beloved Sicilia, and had they seen any of these fine women and men?

The doctors searched my hair for lice, thumped up and down my spine, twisted my hands and feet, listened to the terrified drumbeat of my heart. Some women were sent back. The doctors cursed them with signs and symbols in chalk on their backs. I prayed that they would not put their chalk on me! I could see the New Land in the magnificent sunlight beyond the tall windows. Some women were separated from their daughters. Some women could not hold their fright inside themselves any longer, and they wept and moaned with great sorrow and fear.

“All right,” a man said to me in English. “You can go on now. Do you understand? You’re free to go.”

“Free to go,” I answered.

I knew enough to know what those words meant. Repeating the words out loud in my mouth made me feel different, like something born, as if I were brand new.

 

When I saw your father he was smiling so hard that I thought his face would crack. He stood waiting for me with his three sis­ters.

We took a steamer from the island with the others. Now I didn’t mind the rolling waves. The Golden Land’s greatest city stood proudly on the approaching shore, thrusting itself up hap­pily into the warm sun.

Several paces from us on the steamer, a dark-faced man scolded his young wife, then seized his son’s blue straw hat and roughly threw it into the sea. I could guess by his somber clothing that the father had spent some time in La Merica. A pair of ribbons covered with polka dots fluttered from the back of the boy’s blue hat as it fell. It was as if this hat from the old world wasn’t fine enough to be brought to the shores of the New Land.

All at once I feared that there was something in me, in Salva­tore, in all of us, that would have to be thrown into the sea too.

 

The three old women? My child, listen and I’ll tell you a secret. They shrunk yet again and grew very small, smaller than you, smaller than your belly button, smaller than even the little finger­nail on your little finger, and then they hid inside the pocket on Zi’Assunta’s skirt. Now they live here in La Merica, deep in the forest or somewhere out on the street, testing the hearts of those they meet.

They came along with us, see? We brought many of the old things—the old ways—along with us.

Remember, anything you can imagine can happen to you once. Twice, it’s coincidence. But three times and you’d better watch out. The three sisters are giving you a test. So when they ask you, you’d better answer right.

They’re outside, waiting. Perhaps someday they’ll meet you too. Have a generous heart, give them anything they want, but whatever you do don’t ever let go of the rope! You may share it with them if you’d like, let them hold one end, allow them to wrap it around themselves, whatever. But never let it completely out of your hand.

The rope is la famigghia, see? Each of us is a thread, wound up in it. Before you were born, a rope connected me to you.

One still does, figghiu miu.

 

Stronger than twine or the truest of leather,

Family binds us forever together.