Mark Lee - The Canal House

The Alfa Romeo was parked behind the convent. Daniel said goodbye to the little nun and we drove out of the city. That evening, we didn’t speed down the road and Daniel actually glanced at the landscape. The country air was cold and smelled like pine trees.

I STAYED AT BRACCIANO for fifteen days. It was a relaxing vacation, even though it involved two of the things I hate most in this world—waking up early and gardening. Usually La Signora marched in around seven o’clock in the morning and started banging pots on the stove. She treated Daniel with firm affection, as if he was a difficult farm animal that kept breaking out of his pasture. One morning she was cleaning up the breakfast dishes while Daniel played a Louis Prima CD on the portable stereo. As Prima sang “When You’re Smiling,” Daniel took La Signora’s hand and danced with her in the kitchen. The old lady laughed and twirled around on the stone floor. For a moment I could see her fifty years ago, breaking hearts at a village dance.

On a typical morning we planted the trees that Daniel had bought for a few thousand lire at the government nursery. He would drive over to the nursery, place the plastic buckets of two or three saplings on the floor of the Alfa, and lean the slender trunks against the passenger seat. Back at the farm, he’d carry the trees down to the ravine and plant them near the stream to fight erosion. La Signora handed me a pick and shovel, then pointed to the ground between the terraces and the cypress windbreak. You. Go. Plant trees.

The volcanic soil was rock hard, packed down by centuries of overgrazing. It took me several hours to dig what I thought was an acceptable hole, but La Signora said it was too small. When I objected, she harangued me in Italian, most of which I didn’t understand. I kept digging, hacking away at the soil, until she finally murmured, “ Bene, bene ,” and dumped two baskets of mulch into the hole. In all, I planted three oaks and two cherry trees. I got a blister on my left hand, but I had to admit it felt good to look down the slope at my small accomplishment.

We usually finished work around noon, then ate the big meal of the day. I took a nap on the couch while Daniel sat in his bedroom and played CDs. He was searching, always searching, for those moments of pure music. Now he was obsessed with the early recordings of Louis Armstrong and I had to listen to repeated trumpet solos from “Tight Like This” and “Potato Head Blues.” I knew that Daniel was thinking about the plane crash when he abandoned Louis Armstrong and put on Bach’s cello suites. I felt as if I was living with someone who had just been released from prison. The sun was shining and La Signora was singing in the kitchen, but sometimes Daniel would sit in the arbor and stare at the dirt driveway as if he was waiting for the police to take him away.

In the late afternoon Daniel helped La Signora with the wet garden while I took my cameras and wandered down the hill. I forgot that I was a shooter for two weeks and spent hours photographing the texture of the stone on the Roman bridge. Leaves were falling and the countryside was brown and dark gold. I’d look up and see a huge flock of swifts surging across the sky.

At night we’d cook up some pasta or roast a whole chicken on the spit in the fireplace. Daniel bought his wine from a barrel at a local farm and he kept it in old scotch bottles with screw-top caps. We’d drink a fair amount, then play chess or gin rummy. It was during these games that I learned a few more facts about Daniel’s past. After his mother’s death when he was eighteen, he bought a car and began to drive around the United States. He spent two seasons running a chair lift at a Utah ski resort and worked for a traveling carnival that toured the West.

Eventually he’d ended up in Washington, fighting fires for the state forestry service. After one particularly tough job, when he and three other men were caught between fire lines, he returned to the camp covered with soot, sat down on his bunk, and wrote about the experience. “I just wanted to tell the story,” he said. “I wasn’t doing it for money or because I wanted to be famous. I thought, if I wrote down all the facts, I could understand what happened.”

An editor at the Seattle Times read the handwritten submission, ordered some photographs, and printed the entire five-thousand-word article. When Daniel dropped by to pick up his check, the editor told him that he was wasting his time digging fire trenches, that he should take a few journalism classes and start writing for the newspaper. Within a year, Daniel was a general assignment reporter for the Times . It seemed incredible that he could get paid to drive around the city and ask strangers questions. Like a priest or a doctor, he had the right to step around the strip of yellow emergency tape and enter into different worlds.

“I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life and I thought …” He paused for a second and took another sip of wine. “I believed that, if I asked enough questions and talked to enough people, I could get some answers for myself.”

“But that’s not true?”

“No.” He finished off his wine and got up from the table. “I’ve asked thousands of questions, Nicky. And I don’t know one damn thing.”

Daniel was quieter, slower, more deliberate. For the first time in his life, he was cautious about the future and regretful about the mistakes he had made in the past. I know that he wrote letters to a half-dozen people whom he had angered for some reason. Three of the letters were returned unopened and two people wrote back, accepting his apology. His chief enemy, the AP bureau chief in Moscow, sent a long e-mail with a great many exclamation points and capital letters. He hoped that Daniel would step on a land mine in a war zone and suffer a painful death.

I was the follower and Daniel was the leader in Africa, but now the relationship had changed. Daniel had lost his psychological armor, the proud confidence I had seen before the accident. I felt older than him, almost protective in an odd way. He was like a sick man whose defenses were down, susceptible to any infection. He was safe at Bracciano, but I wondered what would happen once he left this sanctuary.

Gradually I began to coax Daniel back into his responsibilities. I encouraged him to pay his bills and send messages to his editors. He told everyone that he was recovering from the plane crash and that he would return to work in a few months. Using Daniel’s computer, I checked my e-mail and found a message from Richard Seaton: Newsweek says you’re in Italy with Daniel McFarland. How is he?

I wrote back a chatty little note: Daniel is okay. He just needed some rest and relaxation. Beautiful weather here .

There were immediate consequences. The next day a red pickup truck came through the gates and rolled slowly down the driveway until the driver found us digging a hole for a pine tree. The driver got out wearing the brown uniform of an overnight delivery service. Inside a manila envelope was an engraved invitation to a black-tie fund-raising party at Westgate Castle, Richard’s country estate near Gloucester.

Along with the invitation was a letter from a Miss Hedges, obviously some kind of social secretary. In a neat and precise cursive she informed us that there was also a house party that weekend for Mr. Seaton’s friends. Richard wanted to know if Mr. McFarland and Mr. Bettencourt could arrive at Westgate on Thursday afternoon.

Daniel jabbed his shovel into the ground, then studied the invitation. “It must be strange to own a castle. I wonder if Billy Monroe is in charge of the drawbridge.”

I reached into the manila envelope and found a second letter written on cream-colored stationery.