A Harvest of Secrets(54)
“Thank you.”
The man laughed again, made no move to refill the glass, but instead called out in German. Carlo was taken back to the cell, where, through a parched tongue and lips, he gave Carmine the full report.
“No torture?” Carmine asked. “No pulling out fingernails?”
Carlo shook his head.
“What then?”
“You were right: we’re going to be sent north to work.”
“We’ll work,” Carmine said quietly. “You watch how we work. We’ll work like the old men on the benches in Napoli work. We’ll make bombs that fall apart while they’re still in midair.”
Thirty
Once all the other workers had gone, Paolo’s mind was overtaken by a frantic whirl of fear and worry. He sat at the low table in the barn and very slowly ate his tea-soaked eggs, sausages, and bread. When the meal was finished, he carried his cup out to the well—the water there so much better tasting than the water from the indoor tap or the cistern—and stood at the edge of the courtyard, taking small sips and staring at the vines. In a little while, Enrico burst out of the manor house’s side door and trotted across the gravel toward him, and Paolo could see that, magically, most of the sadness had disappeared from the boy’s face. His drooping mouth and wide-set eyes carried, again, the light Paolo was used to seeing there. The light of heaven was the way he thought of it, as if what had been taken from Enrico in the womb had been replaced with the promise of an afterlife free of pain. As if sorrow couldn’t stick to his skin for more than a day. Many times Paolo had seen it. Many times he’d been grateful to Enrico for reminding him that there was more to life than worry and duty, that there might be something to hope for at the end of these six or seven or eight decades of struggle.
“Can we work, Paolo?” the boy asked happily, coming up close beside him and putting one hand on Paolo’s shoulder in imitation of the way he’d seen men act with each other. Almost everything Rico did, Paolo thought, was a mirror of what the people around him did. He said things he’d heard other people say; he did things he’d seen other people do. That wasn’t so different from the way everyone behaved, but it was as if Enrico had a special talent for holding on to the good and filtering out the bad. He didn’t complain, wasn’t lazy, never spoke badly of anyone, was as kind to the animals as if he knew they had souls. And, no matter how his own father ignored him, Rico always greeted the man with a happy Papa!, as if he were joyously surprised to see Umberto, or as if the Signore had ever once been affectionate toward him in return.
“Sì, sì, certo,” Paolo said, but it was painful to look into Enrico’s face, to bear witness to the happiness and hope there. On this morning, with the rest of the workers gone and the threat of the Germans filling his thoughts to the point where he kept expecting to see their trucks coming through the gate, Paolo knew where Enrico’s happiness and hope were headed.
“I’ll go get Gaetano!”
Paolo wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders, and steered him toward the hillside. “Let’s you and me do the work today, Rico.”
“And Gaetano. And the others. We need help because people are at the war. Men. The men are at the war and will be home soon, so everybody has to work.”
“We do,” Paolo said, leading Enrico along the path between vines, trying to decide what to tell him and what to hold back, how far into the future to put off his disappointment. “But the others had to go away for a while.”
“Where? To church? It’s not Sunday now.”
“It’s not Sunday, you’re right.”
“Where, then?”
“They went to the sister of Costanza, near Siena. She has a farm there and needs help.”
“We could help, too.”
“We could, but somebody has to stay here and finish the wheat, so you and I will do it.”
“Okay. Yes. We’ll finish the wheat, you and I will finish it. Can we finish it today?”
“No. It will take a few more days.”
“Good. I like doing the wheat, Paolo. I like it.”
“You’re a good worker.”
“We can take the wagon there and put the wheat on it and bring it to the other barn.”
“Your sister has the wagon. She went to the nuns. She’ll bring it back soon.”
“I want to see her. I miss her.”
“She’s a good sister.”
“And when she comes back with the wagon, we can load the wheat on and bring it to the other barn.”
“Right.”
“And we won’t finish it today.”
“Right, Rico. Esatto.”
As they crested the hill and went along the edge of the forest, and then down into the field where the wheat was grown, Paolo could see with a painful clarity just how much there was still left to do. With only the two of them working, it would be impossible to get the wheat in before it was time to harvest the grapes. And how were they going to harvest all those grapes, in any case, one old man and one helper? Bad enough that the three strongest men were away in the army and might never return. Bad enough that the itinerant workers who usually came through the area for the vendemmia were most likely also at war. If Marcellina and the others had stayed, he might have decided to leave the last of the wheat in the field and do the more important work: preparing for the cutting of the grapes. There was so much to do before the vendemmia. Once the preparation was finished, the grapes would be ready, and would have to be gotten in before the rain came and turned the clay hillside into a slippery swamp. They’d pick the grapes by hand, painstakingly, then load the fruit into reed baskets, carry the baskets on the wagon or on the mule’s back to the large, open container where the grapes could be crushed. The stems would be separated out, and if, as he did in certain years, the Signore wanted some white wine as well, the skins, too, would be taken away at this point from certain batches of the purplish-green soup. Paolo wasn’t an expert like Carlo or Gennaro Asolutto, but he knew that it was important, at least for a time, to let the yeast of the skins mix with the sugar of the pulp. That was where the alcohol came from, where the taste and richness came from. Working together, they all could have managed that much, and gotten the wine into demijohns and bottles, and then gone on to the olive harvest in November, and if there was a hectare of wheat left in the field, or a few kilos of olives or hazelnuts left on the trees, it wouldn’t be tragic.