Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Enzo!” she said. It was nearly impossible to make oneself heard over the engine.

“Here I am for you,” he said.

“Enzo, stop the machine. I want to be sick.”

There was only one lane and no shoulder, but he stopped the car immediately, obstructing the road. No one approached from either direction. He opened the door, but she did not let him help her out. Lina pulled down her window, making mewling syllables of concern.

Mrs. Marini walked in the clover toward a fence where some sheep were feeding. The cold and the pervasive, brisk smell of manure refreshed her. The morning had broken completely, and the sun shone all over the sprouting grass in the sheepfold and over the sheep, three of whom trotted out to regard her more closely. Then the rest of them followed. There were about twenty. Enzo stood nearby, his one hand hovering trepidatiously in case a part of her clothes should need to be pulled away from her vomit. In the other hand, he held the strap of her purse, which he had brought from the car.

“What may I do?” he said. He wore a stiff jacket Lina had made for him out of the stuffing of an old chair and a piece of canvas. The collar was half turned up in a rakish way, but it was his only vanity.

Across the meadow, at the edge of the trees, three men in heavy clothes tore the mossy shingles from the roof of a barn.

In fact, Mrs. Marini did not feel nausea and had not felt it before, but it would have been inefficient to explain herself, so she didn’t answer him. The pain in the back of her head left her.

“Hello, you little thing,” she said to a lamb with a black face.

One of the men wrenched a portion of the old tin flashing from the bottom of the chimney and threw it to the ground.

The lamb quivered on its tiny legs; it couldn’t have been a month old. It ducked its head under a ewe’s stomach and nursed while it and the mother both looked upon her with the agreeable, crazed eyes of sheep.

“Little Molly,” she said. “Aw.”

The lamb fell to its knees, then got up again and faced her and spoke its brief word.

Lina said, “She isn’t sick.”

“Yes, I am,” Mrs. Marini protested.

“Oh, not so badly. Let’s get a move on.” Marriage had tapped the honey from Lina’s blood, which was gratifying to see.

Mrs. Marini was not, of course, under the delusion that she had communicated with the lamb, who was only a lamb, after all, whereas she was an old person, from whom so many of those who were once close to her were now absent that it was arguable whether they were all alive and she was the dead one.

She gripped a rail of the fence and made herself laugh.

“See?” Lina said. “Here we go. Chop chop.”

They got back into the car.

“I’m starved. I could have eaten that one you were talking to,” Lina said. She had grown flatteringly thicker, too.

“Your mother will have some coffee and oats, I expect.”

Enzo made a shiver. His bowels did not tolerate whole grains.

Soon they arrived.

Umberto Montanero had grown a dense and handsome beard. The rigid hairs were black, brown, gray, white, and red, and extended to his breast pockets. The whiskers about his mouth were not stained by tobacco or food and did not hide his lips. The flanks were combed, the bottom corners neatly rounded; a cleavage ran up the middle (the chin whiskers were shorter than the rest). It was as though he wore an elegant jacket about his face. He had welded a miniature sickle for cutting twine to a steel ring that he wore on his thumb. He accepted Lina’s and Enzo’s kisses and greeted Mrs. Marini in formal language, making the slightest inclination of his torso in her direction — a satirical bow, a masterpiece of contempt. He took a drink from the pump, and blessed his groundwater, and the morning, and his own good health, and Saint Joseph, and his sound old boots that kept his socks dry.

Lina said they would be out to help him once they had changed their clothes.

“That’s all very well,” he said. His pruning shears were fitted with a spring; he snapped them shut and they popped open again with a decisive screech that seemed to give him courage.

They were standing in the mouth of the barn. A rabbit leapt from the open window of a dead car that lay on its side under the dripping hayloft. The vineyards were immaculate, but the house, the barn, the coop, and Patrizia herself — who emerged from behind the car as three more rabbits fled a branch that she methodically wagged over the packed dirt of the floor — were in squalor.

“Close the gate!” she cried.

“And may you be blessed, too, madam, even you!” Umberto said, indicating Mrs. Marini with his shears and slamming the low gate behind their backs. “And may the Lord sustain me, but only so far as I can throw my spit. And may he bless even you!”

He swallowed his phlegm.

Patrizia, the indispensable companion of Mrs. Marini’s middle age, whom she had dropped, closed her in her stinking embrace.

Mrs. Marini had never relented in her devotion to the sacraments, but she was not a Christian.

Umberto stalked into the vineyard. Enzo and Lina followed shortly, and the two old women were left alone in the house.

The farm was in an unincorporated township on an unpaved state highway in Ashtabula County, near the border with Pennsylvania. The northwesterly winds that crossed Lake Erie from Canada moderated the summer heat and insulated the region from the first autumn cold snaps, producing a long, temperate growing season conducive to grape farming. During the first months of winter, the winds became saturated with moisture as they passed over the comparatively warm surface of the lake, so that the region received three to four times the early winter precipitation of the inland towns and the cities to the west and was nearly always under profound snow by New Year’s Day. Then the lake froze.

Prohibition had compelled many of the farmers there to dig out their vineyards and turn them over to corn or pastureland. The others had replanted them with table grapes, principally Concords, as the previous owner of Umberto and Patrizia’s property had done. Umberto sold the crop to a jelly manufacturer in Geneva, when they had a crop to sell. Owing to consistent cloud cover the previous summer, the sugar yield of the grapes wasn’t even enough to pay the migrant pickers’ wages, so they had let a year’s work rot on the vine.

As soon as the others had gone out, Patrizia retrieved a portfolio from the cellar. All of the documents in it had been folded many times sloppily, as though they had been stowed in a pant pocket. Patrizia had never learned to read. She would like to know precisely what they said, please.

Several hours of deliberate study ensued. Mrs. Marini read aloud and translated. Patrizia tersely paraphrased and asked whether she had the right idea.

Owing to arrears in the payment of their mortgage, the bank owned a lien on the property. Owing to arrears in their taxes, the county owned another one.

Patrizia was unimpressed and unsurprised. In some of the documents she made a series of diagonal folds, a filing code that Mrs. Marini presumed her husband would not notice.

There was a four-year-old auction receipt for a mule, which they had lately butchered and eaten. In this she made a simple lengthwise crease across the middle and flattened it out again.

“What does that one mean?” Mrs. Marini asked.

Patrizia made a gesticulation. It meant, Into the fire, but later.

They broke for a snack.

“We never eat such piquant cheese anymore,” Patrizia said, as what Enzo had brought them from the city today. And her happiness in splitting it with her front teeth was an example of the superior power of the senses over the mind.