The Four Winds(15)

“You are a town girl,” Mr. Martinelli said in a thick Italian accent.

“Not anymore, I guess.”

“This is a good answer.” He bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt. “My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family. We plant, we tend, we harvest. I make wine from grape cuttings that I brought here from Sicily, and the wine I make reminds me of my father. It binds us, this land, one to another, as it has for generations. Now it will bind you to us.”

“I’ve never tended to anything.”

He looked at her. “Do you want to change that?”

Elsa saw compassion in his dark eyes, as if he knew how afraid she’d been in her life, but she had to be imagining it. All he knew about her was that she was here now and she’d brought his son down with her.

“Beginnings are only that, Elsa. When Rosalba and I came here from Sicily, we had seventeen dollars and a dream. That was our beginning. But it wasn’t what gave us this good life. We have this land because we worked for it, because no matter how hard life was, we stayed here. This land provided for us. It will provide for you, too, if you let it.”

Elsa had never thought of land that way, as something that anchored a person, gave one a life. The idea of it, of staying here and finding a good life and a place to belong, seduced her as nothing ever had.

She would do her best to become a Martinelli through and through, so she could join their story, perhaps even take it as her own and pass it on to the child she carried. She would do anything, become anyone, to ensure that this family loved the baby unconditionally as one of their own. “I want that, Mr. Martinelli,” she said at last. “I want to belong here.”

He smiled. “I saw that in you, Elsa.”

Elsa started to thank him, but was interrupted by Mrs. Martinelli, who called out to her husband as she walked toward them carrying a basket full of ripe tomatoes and greenery. “Elsa,” she said, coming to a stop. “How nice to see you up.”

“I . . . overslept.”

Mrs. Martinelli nodded. “Follow me.”

In the kitchen, Mrs. Martinelli took the vegetables from her basket and laid them on the table: plump red tomatoes, yellow onions, green herbs, clumps of garlic. Elsa had never seen so much garlic at one time.

“What can you cook?” she asked Elsa, tying an apron on.

“C-coffee.”

Mrs. Martinelli stopped. “You can’t cook? At your age?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Martinelli. No, but—”

“Can you clean?”

“Well . . . I’m sure I can learn to.”

Mrs. Martinelli crossed her arms. “What can you do?”

“Sew. Embroider. Darn. Read.”

“A lady. Madonna mia.” She looked around the spotless kitchen. “Fine. Then I will teach you to cook. We will start with arancini. And call me Rose.”



THE WEDDING WAS A hushed, hurried affair with no celebration before or after. Rafe slipped a plain band on Elsa’s finger and said, “I do,” and that was pretty much that. He looked to be in physical pain throughout the brief ceremony.

On their wedding night, they came together in the darkness and sealed their vows with their bodies, just as they had done with their words, their passion as silent as the night around them.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, he tried to be a good husband and she tried to be a good wife.

At first, in Rose’s eyes at least, Elsa seemed unable to do anything right. She cut her finger when chopping tomatoes and burned her wrist taking freshly baked bread out of the oven. She couldn’t tell a ripe squash from an unripe one. Stuffing zucchini flowers was nearly impossible for someone as clumsy as Elsa. She converted to Catholicism and listened to Mass in Latin, not understanding a word but finding a strange comfort in the beautiful sound of it all; she memorized prayers and learned the rosaries and kept one always in her apron pocket. She took confession and sat in a small, dark closet and told Father Michael her sins and he prayed for her and absolved her. At first none of this made much sense to her, but in time it became both familiar and routine, a part of her new life, like no meat on Fridays or the myriad saints’ days that they celebrated.

Elsa learned—to her surprise and to her mother-in-law’s—that she wasn’t a quitter. She woke up each morning well before her husband and got into the kitchen in time to make coffee. She learned to make and eat and love food she had never heard of, made from ingredients she’d never seen—olive oil, fettuccine, arancini, pancetta. She learned how to disappear on a farm: work harder than anyone else and don’t complain.

In time, a new and unexpected feeling of belonging began to creep in. She spent hours in the garden kneeling in the dirt, watching seeds she planted sprout and push up from the earth and turn green, and each one felt like a new beginning. A promise for the future. She learned to pick the rich purple Nero d’Avola grapes and turn them into a wine that Tony swore was as good as his father could make. She learned the peace that came with looking out at a newly tilled field and the hope those fields inspired.

Here, she sometimes thought, standing on land she cared for, here her child would flourish, would run and play and learn the stories told by the ground and the grapes and the wheat.



THROUGHOUT THE WINTER, SNOW fell, and they hunkered down in the farmhouse, settling into a new routine; the women spent long hours cleaning, sewing, darning, and knitting, while the men took care of the animals and readied the farm equipment for the coming spring. On snowy evenings they huddled around the fire and Elsa read stories aloud and Tony played his fiddle. Elsa learned little things about her husband—that he snored loudly and was restless in his sleep, that he often woke with a cry in the middle of the night, shaken by nightmares.