Robert came out of the old stone house with a sickle. Swifts swooped out over the valley and back into their nests under the eaves. As he sickled the grass and nettles, he thought that there were layers below him of sand and water and rock, and layers above of air and thin cloud, and, above, the layers of the sky, and all the layers rose and fell. From time to time he stopped his work to look at the birds, and as he watched them one hit the stone wall and dropped. He went to it and picked it up, in one hand he held the sickle, in the other the bird, its eyes staring. Across the field below he saw a boy on a black horse trotting toward the house.

Giuseppe jumped off the horse and said in Italian, “What is it?”

“A swift,” Robert said.

After the boy tied the horse to a post, he held out his callused hands. Robert laid the bird in his hands, and the boy twisted its neck and threw it down.

Giuseppe, barefoot, in a singlet and shorts, watched Robert sickle.

“He hasn’t arrived?” Giuseppe asked. 

“No, not yet.”

“Maybe something happened.”

“No, I don’t think anything happened.”

Giuseppe shrugged his shoulders. “Things happen.”

Robert went on sickling. He said to Giuseppe, “Don’t you have any news for me since yesterday?”

The boy stood still, watching Robert strike at the weeds with the dark wet blade, then he said, “The old man in the house by the church is dying.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He goes from his bed to the fire, from the fire to his bed. They don’t know what to do with him. He wants to shoot himself.”

“What is he dying of?”

Giuseppe stuck out his lower lip. “What my father died of.” 

Robert stood. He said, “He was a good man, your father—everyone says so. He worked hard.”

“I know.” Giuseppe pulled his hair over one ear.

Robert imagined he rose tall as he looked down at Giuseppe. “I’m sure your father still loves you as he loved you.”

“I know.”

Robert bent to sickle.

“Don’t you have a father?” Giuseppe asked.

“Yes.”

“Is he in America?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you live with him?”

“Because I’ve grown up.”

“How old is he?” 

“He’s eighty.”

“He’ll die soon.”

“I hope not.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“My father was twenty-five when he died.”

Robert again stood to look at the boy, and, for a moment unbalanced, he felt that he
wanted to pull the boy to him and hold him.

Giuseppe turned the dead bird over onto its back with his toe, and the thin black wings opened. He said, “I wish he’d come.”

“Beppo, Beppo,” sounded from the sky.

Giuseppe tilted his head a little, and, without turning toward his house up the valley, he shouted, “ Aou.” He listened to the response sung out into the sky in short phrases that rose, in lifts, and fell. Without moving, Giuseppe shouted his answer back.

Robert did not understand any of it. “That was your mother,” he said.

“She wants me to go get the bread.” 

“Then go.”

The boy untied his horse and led it, surrounded by flies, to a big stone; he jumped onto the stone and from it onto the horse. ‘I’ll come back,” he said. The lilac bushes on either side of the path closed over the flanks of the horse.

From this place, halfway up the side of the mountain, Robert imagined, again, layers of earth and cloud rising and falling over the valley. He picked up the dead bird and went to the patch of earth he had cleared for planting flowers in front of the house; with the handle of the sickle he dug out a hole, dropped the bird in, covered it, and pressed it down with his palm, thinking, Protect us.

In the kitchen he took the broom from a corner, pulling webs away from the walls, to sweep the red tile floor. After he swept half, he leaned the broom against a table and, restless, went into the other downstairs rooms, where the floors were covered with straw, mouse droppings, insects’ legs and wings; webs sagged from the ceiling beams. He went upstairs, where he had swept, had wire-brushed wasps’ nests from the rafters, and had whitewashed the walls of a bedroom. He wandered from room to room. The beds were made, the cushions put out on the wicker chairs, the rag rugs placed on the clean floors. The fireplace was still heaped with ash. Downstairs again, he picked up the broom, but then crouched to look at a basket of kindling, under the table, spun over with webs. He drew it out, and under it found a scorpion. Bending near, he touched the scorpion with a stick; it raised its claws and tail and moved to the side, then stopped. Robert replaced the basket over the scorpion and, smiling, continued to sweep.

He heard, from outside, “Roberto, Roberto,” and he went to the door. Giuseppe, his elbows pumping, was racing his horse along the edge of the fields toward the house, and Robert went out to meet him. Giuseppe shouted, ‘There’s a telephone call for you. There’s a telephone call at the posto pubblico.” He pulled up the horse, sideways, in front of Robert. “Get on,” he said. Robert tried to throw a leg over the barebacked horse, but he slipped. Giuseppe was shouting as if he were far away, “Stand on the stone,” and he swerved the large horse, rearing, toward the stone. On it, Robert again tried to throw his leg over the horse, but the horse moved forward in jerks, and Giuseppe had to run him in. “Come on, come on,” Giuseppe shouted. “There’s a telephone call.” Just as Robert was mounted behind the boy, Giuseppe kicked his bare heels into the horse’s ribs, and Robert, thrown against him, clung to him for a moment, then took his hands away to press them to his own sides; he slipped on the horsehair. “Hold me,” Giuseppe said. “We’re going to gallop.” Robert put his arms around the boy, and as the horse galloped he pressed the boy’s back and shoulders against his chest. Robert felt the small bones of the boy’s body move. He leaned his face close to the boy’s neck. The horse galloped along the edges of the tobacco fields, out to a dirt road, across the stream. One of Robert’s espadrilles dropped off; he thought that he, too, could easily drop off, and he held tighter to Giuseppe, the boy’s small, taut body held in his body, and both of them were carried by the big black horse racing now up a mountain path through elder bushes. The faster the horse raced, the more the flies raged about it. On the white road, Giuseppe kicked the horse and shouted, “ Ai, ai,” to make it go faster. Round a bend, on a ridge overlooking the valley, was the peasant’s house with the public telephone: a yellow-and-blue disc, with the outline of a telephone on it, hung over the doorway, outside of which Robert, half falling, dismounted.

One foot bare, he ran up the stairs to the house above the stables and into the kitchen. The shutters were closed, and he couldn’t at first make out who was sitting on a chair by the fireplace-a young man, who got up as soon as Robert entered. The young man said, “ Alessandro telephoned; he said he’d telephone again in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks,” Robert said.

The young man, Gianfranco, rubbed his arms. “Sit down,” he said.

Robert sat with him by the fireplace.

“He said he just arrived in Rome. The flight was late leaving America. Don’t meet him at the train station; he’ll come by taxi.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said Saluti.”

Gianfranco clapped his hands together softly between his knees. He asked, “In America, do you have a house together, as you have a house here?”

“Yes,” Robert said.

The telephone, on the wall just inside the door, rang. Gianfranco got up quickly to answer, said, “Yes. Yes. Yes,” and handed the receiver to Robert, smiling. “It’s Alessandro. He just arrived in Rome. The flight was late leaving America. Don’t meet him at the train station; he’ll come by taxi.”

Robert took the receiver. He said, in Italian, “You’re in Rome. The flight was delayed in Boston. I shouldn’t go to meet you at the station; you1l come by taxi.”

Alex laughed. He said, in English, “ And what else?”

“You send saluti,” Robert continued in Italian.

Giuseppe, among chickens, held his espadrille up to him when he went out.

“Is he coming?’

“Yes.”

On the horse, Robert embraced the body of the boy tightly. As they went down into the valley and up past the house, all its doors and windows wide open, toward Giuseppe’s house, higher up the side of the mountain, a sense came to Robert of space upon space opening to him. He pressed his chin to the side of the boy’s head.

Outside Giuseppe’s house Robert slid off the horse. He was covered with short, coarse hairs. Giuseppe got off, and Robert followed him as he led the horse up behind the house, where his mother, in a black dress and a black kerchief, was throwing down corn for the chickens.

“He’s arriving,” Giuseppe, excited, said to her.

“You must be happy,” the widow said to Robert.

“I am,” he said.

“Come into the house.”

Giuseppe said, “The airplane might have fallen and all the passengers killed.”

In the kitchen, the widow washed a glass at the low stone sink, gave it to Robert, and as he held it she poured into it red wine from a large green bottle.

Robert asked, “Where are your other sons?”

‘Working in the fields. Beppo doesn’t work. He’s with you all day.”

“I like having him with me.”

The widow hit Giuseppe on the head. “He talks a lot,” she said. “All he does is talk, he doesn’t work, his father would be angry with him.”

“I’m sure his father would be pleased with him.”

She looked for a long while at her thin son. “He’s a good boy,” she said.

Robert said to him, “Come on, let’s go back to my house.” 

Giuseppe’s mother said to Robert, “Don’t you want a son?”

While Robert shovelled the ashes from the large fireplace in he house and put them into a bucket, Giuseppe hefted another rock and, in a thin gray cloud, carried it in both hands out to lump it near the shed. When he brought the bucket back empty he third time, he clanked it on the hearth. “I think I’ll go to my house,” he said.

“Was your mother right?” Robert asked. “you don’t like to work?”

Giuseppe said nothing.

“It doesn’t matter. Stay with me and watch.”

“I’1l come back later.”

“You don’t want to stay with me?’

“I’ll come back later.”

The different levels of earth and air appeared to separate as the daylight lengthened, and the dim upper and lower levels began to disappear. When Giuseppe returned, on foot, a fine livid layer, halfway between the earth and the sky, remained; it was the level at which the swifts flew out and back, out and back.

Giuseppe said, “He hasn’t arrived yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Let’s hope nothing has happened.”

“What could happen?”

“The train could have crashed, or the taxi in the mountains—”

Outside, Robert and Giuseppe watched the layer of light fade.

The valley went dark. House lights were lit. A woman on the other side of the valley called, “Anna, Anna, “ and when Anna answered, “Aou,” from the near side, they shouted to one another, with pauses between, in high and low voices.

“Let’s go in and light a fire,” Robert said.

While the fire burned, he and the boy stood at the window. Fireflies were flashing among the elder bushes about the house.

Robert pressed his palms to the stone windowsill and leaned out; he felt a pulse in his palms, as if not he but the whole house were pulsing a little.

“There are the lights of a car,” Giuseppe said. 

“Where?”

The boy pointed. It took a while before Robert could see the moving lights high up on the side of the mountain. They vanished, but a while later they beamed out from behind a bend and from their distance seemed to shine on the house before they swerved away again and descended the road. Giuseppe ran downstairs and outside. Robert came after. He heard, now, the car engine. The lights, rocking as the taxi rocked in the ruts of the dirt road, beamed up to the house. In the light, Giuseppe held out his arms; the taxi stopped before him, and the boy ran to the taxi door across from the driver and opened it. Robert stood back. Alex, saying, “Ecco, ecco,” got out. He grabbed Giuseppe, hugged him to him, and asked, “Have you been a good boy or a bad boy?” and released him. Giuseppe simply looked up at his face. Alex turned to Robert and said, “I’m home,” and Robert, too, simply looked at him. .

His hand on Giuseppe’s head, Alex asked the boy. “How is your mother?”
Giuseppe’s eyes were large. “She had a bad cold, very bad, but now she’s all right.”

The taxi-driver got out, opened the trunk, and put two large bags on the ground.

Robert said to him, “Come in for coffee.”

“No, no,” the driver said.

“Yes,” Alex said, “come in for coffee.”

Giuseppe dragged the biggest bag into the house, followed by Alex and the fat taxi-driver, and Robert with the second bag.

Alex said, “I’ll make the coffee.”

“I’ll make it,” Robert said.

He made it quickly in the kitchen, from where he looked at Alex, the taxi-driver, and Giuseppe at the dining room table, talking loudly. He brought in the little cups, with a bottle of brandy, on a tin tray.

“Bring something for Giuseppe,” Alex said.

Robert went back into the kitchen for a plate of sweet biscuits and a glass of vinsanto, which he placed before the boy. Giuseppe’s hands, resting on the table, appeared large and rough for his thin wrists. He said, staring at the biscuits, “No, no.”

“Take them,” Alex said.

Giuseppe said, “No.”

“Come on, take them,” Alex repeated.

Giuseppe picked up a biscuit and stared at it before he took a bite from the edge.

“Whose son is he?” the taxi-driver asked.

“Mazzini, Enrico,” Alex said.

“The one who died?”

“Yes.”

“I used to see him often at the market.” The fat taxi-driver leaned toward Giuseppe. “He was a good man, your father.”

Giuseppe silently ate his biscuit.

The taxi-driver said to Alex, “Now what man does he have to take after?”

“Have another biscuit,” Alex said to the boy.

“No,” he said.

“Anyway,” the driver said, “he is well mannered.”

Alex and Robert, Giuseppe between them, went out to see the taxi-driver off. Then Alex said to the boy, “Now it’s time for you to go home.” Without speaking, stumbling a little, Giuseppe walked out into the dark.

As Alex looked at the rooms, Robert looked at him. Alex touched a damp spot on the wall of a downstairs bedroom and said, “We’ve got to get to work on this.” They went into the downstairs bathroom, where the toilet leaked. Alex said, “Didn’t the workmen repair it? I left instructions. Didn’t you ask them to repair it?”

“I forgot,” Robert said.

“I’ll have to get a lot done while I’m here,” Alex said.

In the dining room, he said, “The walls are damp here, too; all the whitewash is flaking off,” and Robert again looked at Alex, not at the walls. Off the dining room was the storeroom, filled with bags of cement, buckets, hoes, rakes, scythes, and piles of floor tiles. It did not have a light, and they stood in the dim light from the dining room. Alex’s head, his black curly hair and his nose, cheeks, chin, was edged by the dim light. He was big, with  big hands and powerful arms.

Alex turned to Robert and smiled. He said, “You’ve done a lot of work getting the house ready for me.”

Robert said, ‘Work?”

The doors to the outside were open to fireflies in the elder bushes.

Giuseppe appeared at the doorway. He was carrying a weighted, knotted bandanna. He stopped at the threshold.

Alex said, “What is it?”

Giuseppe held up the bandanna. “My mother sends you some eggs.”

“Come in,” Alex said.

The boy came in, put the bandanna on the table, and untied it; he drew the comers back to reveal, on the blue-and-white cloth, ten white eggs. He stood away from the table and, his hands by his sides, stared, as at attention, at Alex.

Alex said, “Sit with us.”

Giuseppe sat. He wouldn’t take anything to eat or drink. He stared, listening to Alex talk. In the pale light of the shaded bulb hanging from a rafter over the table, Robert, too, listened.

He heard, “Roberto, Roberto,” from outside the bedroom window, and got out of the high iron bed, crossed the red brick floor to the shutters, and opened them to Giuseppe, below, standing in dawn mist.

‘What is it?” 

Giuseppe said, “My mother wants to speak to you.”

“Is it grave?”

Giuseppe hunched his shoulders and raised his arms. “Grave it isn’t—no.”

Alex, from the bedroom doorway, asked, “What is it?”

“The widow wants to speak to me.”

“About what?” He was frowning.

“I don’t know.”

“They think that because they get up at dawn we should, too.”

Robert said to the boy, “I’m coming down.”

As Robert dressed, Alex said, “You’re letting her take advantage of you again. You always let them take advantage of you. I know what they’re like. And they know what you’re like.”

“I want to find out what she has to say.”

“Listen, don’t get involved in doing something you don’t want to do.”

The valley was filled with mist, which drifted up, and the white sun appeared to drift with it. Robert followed Giuseppe through the terraced fields, along a path; on either side of the path, in the broom, webs drooped with heavy white dew. Robert’s espadrilles got wet.

Giuseppe asked, “Do you have cows down there in America?”

“Yes.”

“And pigs—do you have pigs down there?”

“Yes.”

“And sheep?”

“Yes.”

“Then it must be just like here.”

The path narrowed through the high broom and heather; it gave way to a patch of bare earth around the stone house littered with bottles. The mist was thin, and the sunlight diffused thinly through it; there were no shadows. Chickens were scratching the bare earth before the stables on the ground floor of the house. Giuseppe stood by the outside flight of stairs to let Robert go up first to the floor above.

A fire of twigs was burning in the large kitchen fireplace, and beside the hearth, on a small chair, sat the widow’s mother, a large, old woman in black, a black kerchief tied under her chin. She tried to stand as Robert came in, but sat back. A dirty handkerchief, with weeds stuffed under it, was knotted around the swollen calf of her left leg. She leaned over and held her leg and moaned.

As she could not speak Italian but only the Umbrian dialect, Robert hardly understood her, but he knew she was apologizing for not being able to stand to greet him.

He said, loud, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

Giuseppe said, “It’s infected.”

The widow came in from the back room. She was thin, gaunt, also in black; her black kerchief was tied under her hair at the nape of her neck. She hit Giuseppe on the head and said, “Why didn’t you offer Robert a chair?” Giuseppe pulled a chair
from the table and put it by the fire for Robert.

The widow prepared coffee in a little pot over the coals. The kitchen was very hot. Flies flew about and settled, flew about and settled on the tabletop, the yellow-brown walls, the black hams hanging from a rafter. Robert said to the widow, “La Nonna’s leg looks bad.”

“Yes,” she said. “She can’t work.”

“Shouldn’t she see a doctor?”

“We never go to the doctor.”

She stood, barefoot and arms folded, before him as he drank the thick coffee from a small white cup. She asked, “Did you eat?”

“I just got up from bed.”

“I’ll give you something to eat.”

“No, I can’t eat at this hour.”

“I’ll give you something little.”

She lifted the lid of a chest in the kitchen and took out a cloth, spread it over an end of the table; she put on it a glass, a knife, a loaf of bread, a round sheep’s cheese, and a cured ham from which meat had been cut to the bone, and she cut slices from it. “Bring your chair to the table,” she said.

Robert did.

“Beppo, go get a bottle of wine.”

She sliced bread, and on the slice placed the ham and a wedge of cheese. Giuseppe came out from a warped door under the stairs with a large dripping bottle of wine, and he poured Robert a glassful. While he ate, the widow sat on a bench; her elbows were on the table and she held her jaw in her hands. She said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know how we’re going to do it. We’ve got to pick the tobacco to take it to the cooperative tobacco-drying plant by tonight, and if we don’t we’ll lose the whole picking. I have my four sons, myself, my brother-in-law. My mother can’t work. I don’t know how we’ll do it.”

Robert chewed a dry piece of bread and cheese and swallowed it with wine. “I’ll help,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “I didn’t ask you here to help.”

“I’ll help,” he said. “And I’ll go and ask Alessandro to help, too.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ll pay you,” she said.

“No, I don’t want any money.”

“How can you work and get nothing for it?”

He smiled. “I’ll get something.”

She laughed. “Grace?” she asked.

Robert found Alex at a stone table outside the house, drinking coffee. The valley was dun-green in the morning light. Robert said, “I promised her we’d help her pick tobacco.”

Alex said, “I’ve come all the way from America here for a rest.”

“What could I do?”

They joined the widow, her young sons, and the old brother- in-law, who had one tooth and wore a black fedora, by a field at the river. In a row, they went down the lines between the tall tobacco plants and, crouching low, snapped off the bottom leaves until each one of them had a thick sheaf, and the sheaves were taken to the widow’s youngest son, Candido, a pale six-year- old, who placed them in a metal form supported by a wooden stand by the riverbank. The sunlight flashed through the lines of tobacco plants; picking, they shouted at one another from line to line.

The widow shouted at Alex, “If they don’t have room at the cooperative for your tobacco, they throw it out. Do you think that’s fair?”

Why don’t you do something about it?” he asked.

She stood, and with the back of her hand wiped her sweating forehead. “What can I do?” she shouted from deep in her throat.

“If it were a Communist cooperative—” he began to shout.

“It is a Communist cooperative,” she yelled.

Her eldest son, Ulderico, who wore old trousers torn off at the thighs, shouted, “I’m going to become a Fascist.” His large brown body shone in the bursts of sunlight as he worked his way down a line between the tall pink-blossoming plants.

The old brother-in-law laughed.

The widow said, “If you work for anybody but yourself it’s always the same. But no one can work for himself today.”

Robert’s shirt and trousers were sticking to him not only with sweat but with the sticky resin of the tobacco leaves; when he made a fist, his fingers adhered to one another.

“Do you work for yourself,” the widow shouted at him.

Robert didn’t answer.

The widow shouted, “Is your father rich?”

“No. My father worked hard.”

“Doesn’t he work any longer?”

“He doesn’t.”

“Who works for him? Don’t you work for him if he can’t any longer?”

Again Robert didn’t answer. He looked for Alex, who, lifting a full form of tobacco leaves from the wooden stand, looked toward him and smiled.

Another son, Matteo, came through the lines of plants with a clean glass, a bottle of red wine, and a bottle of well water. He handed each in turn the glass, then poured in a little water, which was used to rinse the glass, and then filled it halfway with water and the rest with wine. The glass was sticky with resin by the time it came to Robert.

His back, arms, and legs ached when the widow yelled, “E ora de magnà.”

They went to the river. The bar of soap was not passed around but placed on a stone after each one had used it. They tried to wash the black gum from their hands and arms. There were horseflies, and as they washed they swatted the flies.

Ulderico jumped into the water with the soap, sank in up to his neck, rose, lathered himself, sank in again splashing; he emerged dripping, and crouched on the bank, where the three brothers rubbed his body with thin towels, and he laughed. He
had a front tooth missing. He began, still laughing, to hit his brothers’ heads, and they hit his legs, chest, back.

The widow shouted, “Basta.”

From plastic bags, she placed food out on a cloth under poplar trees by the river. They ate with forks the salad from a large white bowl.

The widow said, “Isn’t it true that a person who works hard should be paid for his work? We work, we work, and what are we paid? What do we work for? To die? No. We work to live, and the more we work the better we should live.” She tapped her narrow chest. "I believe that.”

“So would any good Communist,”Alex said.

“Are you a Communist?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“So am I,” she said. “My husband was a Communist, too.” She clasped her hands and shook them. “But does being a Communist mean your work has any more value? They say yes, yes. As a Communist, what is the value of my work?”

Alex lowered his head to eat a piece of cheese.

Ulderico said to him, ‘When did you become a Communist?”

“When I was a young man in Milan.”

“You’re not old.” the brother-in-law said, “but you’re not young. Those must have been the hard days.”

“At my school, I used to lock myself in an office late at night and on a machine make copies of propaganda, and I took the sheets to cinemas under my shirt and threw them from the top balconies, then ran.”

“Why did you do it?” The brother-in-law’s face was covered with small, dirty wrinkles; his eyes were round and sharp black.

“I did it because I believed in the Communist party.”

“Why?”

“It gives our work, however small, meaning in the world.”

The old man pointed at Alex. “What are the answers it has for practical issues? I tell you, Communism is just another idea. What does it do for me? Last year I got two hundred thousand lire for my pigs. Two hundred thousand lire for a year’s work. Can a man live on that?”

“Yes, I know,” Alex said.

“Do you?” The old man rolled his shirtsleeves up from the sleeves of his thick, long underwear.

“No,” Alex said, “I don’t know. You’re right. I don’t know, because I am  well paid for my work in a foreign country. I have money to buy a casa di villeggiatura in my own country and come back for my holidays.”

The old man lowered his head. He said nothing. 

A cicada thrilled in the still heat.

Alex said, “But I believe the fundamental of Communism, as I see it, is right—is right for everyone: it makes us think not just of ourselves but of others, because we’re together in the world.”

“The world is big,” the old man said.

The widow rolled a pear to Alex. She said to him, “I knew you were good. I knew it.” She said to her sons, “He’s like your father.” She laughed and slapped her hands together before her nose. “He had ideas, he had ideas.”

Alex threw his pear to Giuseppe, who caught it in dirty hands.

Barefoot, they went back into the blazing field, in which the tobacco plants shimmered in rising waves. They picked silently, line after line. Robert dripped sweat. Ulderico left, came back with a tractor, and he, Alex, and Robert had to lift the metal frames of leaves onto the trailer. They were heavy. When they had stacked them, Robert turned to the widow, who was collecting leaves that had dropped from the forms, and said, “We’ve finished in lots of time to get the tobacco to the cooperative.” 

She said, pointing with a big leaf, “There’s the field above.”

They worked, snapping the big sticky pale-green leaves from the stalks as the sun moved across the valley. No one spoke, not even when, as the sun set, they piled the frames onto the trailer; and when Ulderico put on a shirt and drove the tractor off to the cooperative, at the bottom of the valley, no one said anything to him. They stood at the edge of the field. Motionless, Robert thought he would not be able to move his stiff body ever again, and when he raised his hand to scratch his cheek his back hurt, down to his buttocks.

The brother-in-law went into the field again to disconnect and left onto his shoulder a long irrigation pipe. He carried it to another part of the field, dropped it, and came for another. The widow joined him, and as she raised a pipe onto her shoulder Robert went to her to take it from her, but she walked off with it. He reached down for one; it was heavy, and he dropped it. The boys, standing before Alex, were watching Robert. Their faces were streaked with resin. He reached down again, hefted he pipe up to his waist, and almost lost his balance as he hefted it, twisting his body, to his shoulder; he had not got it in the middle, and its weight again threw him off balance, so he staggered backward. The boys laughed. He found the fulcrum and walked across the field, passing the old man and the widow going back for more pipes; and when he slowly walked back for another, he met Alex carrying a long pipe. They had, too, to change the pipes in the field below.

The widow said, “You’ll come to our house for supper.” 

“No, no,” Robert said.

Alex said to him in English, his voice strained, “We can’t not go. She has to feed us for the work we’ve done.”

Giuseppe took Alex’s hand as they plodded up the long path, through moonlit bushes, toward the house.

La Nonna was sitting in the dark by the fireplace, where the fire was out, and she was moaning. The widow put on the small electric light hanging from the rafter among the hams. She said to her mother, “How is your leg?”

“Bad,” La Nonna said.

“You let the fire go out,” the widow said. She washed her hands at the low shallow stone sink in the kitchen. Then, while the men and the boys washed, she started the fire with a heap of broom, and while the men and the boys sat on chairs and benches and watched her, she got the water to boil in the pot hanging over the fire. When it was boiling, she shoved the spaghetti into it.

She prepared spaghetti with oil and garlic, and as the men and boys ate this she fried, over the fire, pigs’ livers, which she took with a fork with a big oil-filled jar. She did not sit with the others to eat but put bits of liver on bread and ate standing.

Before Alex and Robert left, she asked if they wanted to see her cows. The two men followed her slowly step by step, down the stairs outside the house to the stables below. She opened a large door into darkness and a hot sweet smell, and went in. A dim electric light went on, and three great white cows appeared, tethered by chains to a stone wall; they turned their heads round and stared with wet, black eyes. The widow picked up a broom made of twigs to begin cleaning the dung from the stable floor.

Alex and Robert walked along the riverbank. The tall poplars were still. Robert was drunk. He said, “I keep thinking about my father, who worked and worked, and I think I would like to work for him to repay him for the work he did for me. I’ve got to get work when I return to Boston, good, hard work—”

“Watch out,” Alex said, “we’re coming to the ditch with the plank over it.”

Robert took his arm.

They went down the path round to the front of the house, which shone among the elder bushes.

Image: Miner's Wives Carrying Sacks, April 1881, by Vincent Van Gogh

Thanks to Susan Aylward for her editorial help in preparing this story.