Unto the Sons (19 page)

“Hey, where are
you
going?” Sebastian yelled from behind a haystack, just as Joseph thought that he had disappeared from view.

“I’m late for school,” Joseph called back, not stopping.

“There’s no school today, you little fool!”

Sebastian ran after Joseph with his pitchfork. Joseph stopped, eyes focused on the ground.

“And from the looks of you,” Sebastian continued, now standing over his brother, “you’ve just done something terrible.”

“I have not,” Joseph protested.

“Then how come you’re sweating like a pig, and looking like you’ve just seen a ghost?”

Joseph said nothing. Sebastian jammed his pitchfork into the dirt in front of Joseph’s feet. Then he grabbed hold of Joseph’s arms from behind and locked them across his back.

“Where have you been?” Sebastian demanded.

“In the olive fields,” Joseph replied, grimacing.

“Who with?”

Joseph remained silent.

“Who with?”
Sebastian repeated, pulling Joseph’s arms up higher and twisting them so tightly up toward his neck that he soon could no longer stand the pain.

“There was a woman down there!” he blurted out.

Sebastian reduced the pressure. But when Joseph did not continue talking, Sebastian again tightened his grip.

“The woman had her blouse unbuttoned!” Joseph cried out finally. “I could see her breasts, and she called me over to her.”

Howling with laughter and disbelief, Sebastian softened his grip.

“No woman wants a skinny runt like you! And you wouldn’t know an unclothed woman if you saw one.”

As Joseph complained about spasms in his back and arms, Sebastian stopped taunting him but did not release him. He held him tightly, laughed, and pressed his face down close to Joseph’s neck and asked, in a sniggering manner: “Would you
really
like to see what a woman looks like with her clothes off?”

Joseph did not answer.

“You can come to the main barn with me today during the siesta,” Sebastian continued. “There’s a ladder in the back that reaches the roof, and from there you can look down and see some of the cave women and men in the hay. You want to know what they do together in the hay?”

“No,” Joseph shouted, trying to cover his ears with his hands, and still unable to free himself.

“They do the same thing you’ve seen the animals do,” Sebastian said, pulling him tighter.

Joseph said nothing. Closing his eyes, he remained motionless, now resigned to the pinned position. He felt disgust and humiliation. Sebastian’s breath was upon his neck. Except for the chirping of the birds in the trees, and the distant mooing of cows, he heard no other sounds on the farm. He was controlled by Sebastian. Yet he was determined not to cry. He anticipated more harassment, but now Sebastian almost seemed to be getting weary or bored. His head rested on Joseph’s back for a few moments, and then he suddenly released him. Joseph slumped forward, his arms falling heavily and numbly to his sides. He crouched with his head between his knees and began to rub his arms. Sebastian came around and stood in front of him. Joseph saw Sebastian’s dusty boots but he did not look up.

“I’m sorry,” he heard Sebastian say. Sebastian handed him a handkerchief, as if Joseph were crying, but Joseph swatted it away. It fell to the ground. Joseph straightened up and turned away from Sebastian. Across the field he saw a horse-drawn wagon filled with workers, dust rising from the wheels. It was about time for the siesta. Ignoring Sebastian, though aware of his unmoving shadow slanted beside him, he walked quickly toward the woodland path that led uphill to the road back to the village, still feeling pain and numbness in his arms. At this moment, he
hated his brother. He hated him, and he also pitied him. Sebastian was stuck on the farm.

While Sebastian had resented their grandfather’s forcing him onto the farm, he had also disliked going to school. In contrast to Joseph, Sebastian had been unable to keep up with the daily lessons in the classroom. He could barely read and write. He was also a troublemaker. After several complaints from the teachers, he permanently dropped out of school; and that was when their seventy-three-year-old grandfather, Domenico Talese, the patriarch of the family in Maida, had seized the opportunity to place Sebastian on the farm full-time.

Although fifty other Talese relatives and friends were already employed on the farm, Domenico often complained that they were mostly
pigri
, lazy, and
meschini
, good-for-nothing, and also too old and brittleboned for the laborious work. The younger, more energetic men of the village had been lured away by the fantasy of democracy in America, Domenico often observed sourly, neglecting to mention that among the pioneering fantasists was his firstborn son, Gaetano, the forty-year-old father of Sebastian and Joseph, who had first fled to America as an adventurous bachelor of sixteen, back in 1888, after a quarrel with Domenico. According to what Joseph had been told by his mother (who had married his father during one of his visits home, but had steadfastly refused to accompany him back to America), the early quarrel between Gaetano and Domenico had arisen from Gaetano’s resistance to his father’s determination to subjugate
him
to farm life. And now Domenico was trying to do the same thing to Gaetano’s oldest son, Sebastian—while seeking to pacify Sebastian with the promise that if he obeyed his grandfather and remained close enough to absorb his wisdom, he would someday become the sole inheritor of his grandfather’s estate—which included not only the farm, but also Domenico’s wheat mill, his aqueduct, his moneylending business (
if
Sebastian learned to emulate his shrewdness, Domenico emphasized to his grandson), and also the row of stone hillside houses that Domenico owned and the extended Talese family occupied as tenants.

Sebastian sometimes boasted quietly to Joseph about their grandfather’s promise to make him rich, but Joseph was never envious of Sebastian—so long as Joseph could go on with his schooling, could continue his apprenticeship among the smartly dressed people in Cristiani’s tailor shop, and could remain forever free of full-time service to the farm that would become Sebastian’s ill fortune to own. Joseph could imagine
nothing worse than being Sebastian—having to rise each day at five to the wake-up call of the whip being lashed by their grandfather against the outer walls of their house; and then mounting a mule and joining the slow-moving procession of farm workers down through the shadowy woodlands into the valley, in the dark light of a fading moon; and finally, fatigued after a day’s work in the hot fields, returning home at dusk with his face scorched by the sun, his arms stung by mosquitoes, his boots and clothes grimy and malodorous.

Seeing Sebastian come home made Joseph sad, even made him feel guilty. But his compassion shifted to alarm whenever Sebastian suggested, as he often did in spiteful moments, that this grim existence might also represent Joseph’s future; for Joseph feared that this could be true. There was no one to prevent it. Joseph’s father, away in America, was a stranger he could not rely upon. And Joseph’s mother believed that there was nothing odious about farm labor, having herself been reared on a farm; indeed, Marian Talese considered farming a more practical livelihood than working as an unpaid apprentice in a tailor shop that made fine clothes for clients who, in this ever-worsening economy of southern Italy, might be unable to afford them. At this time she also had, in addition to Joseph, two younger children to worry about—a son of five and a daughter of three—and her husband’s irregularly arriving checks from America (where he was sometimes laid off) made her especially appreciative of the coins and comestibles that Sebastian earned on the farm from his affluent but hardly generous grandfather.

While Grandfather Domenico fancied himself an extremely just and religious man, even Joseph knew that he did not believe in charity. Domenico believed in bone-wrenching labor and long hours of sweat—a belief he had impressed upon the tired body and embittered soul of Sebastian, who, as time went on, was beginning to complain to his mother about the unjust conditions of his life.

One evening, as Joseph sat at a small table doing his homework in the second-floor bedroom he shared with Sebastian, he overheard his brother downstairs pleading with their mother: “Why am I the only one around here who has to wake up with the chickens and ride a mule with those old men to the stinking farm?” Hearing her sympathize with Sebastian, Joseph became very nervous; and the next morning, without being asked, he got up with Sebastian at five a.m. to the sounds of their grandfather’s whip, and thus began a new policy of Joseph’s trying to appease Sebastian, to disarm him with a kindness that might reduce his resentfulness, to bow
and cater to him in the manner that Francesco Cristiani often used on the most difficult customers in the store.

It soon became a routine: Joseph would greet Sebastian with a polite good morning, then hop out of bed and bring in Sebastian’s work clothes that their mother had washed, then dried over the fireplace the night before; while Sebastian dressed, Joseph would return with a cup of coffee from the pot their mother had just brewed in the kitchen. As Sebastian sipped the coffee, Joseph would go out to the courtyard to gather more wood for the fire, wearing over his nightclothes an old sheepskin coat their father had left behind. From across the courtyard Joseph could hear the animals stirring in the stables, and the hoofbeats of his grandfather on horseback galloping back and forth along the cobblestone road on the interior side of the long wall, occasionally cracking the whip against the houses to remind everyone inside that a workday was about to begin.

After carrying the wood inside, Joseph would return upstairs with a metal tray filled with charcoal that he carefully placed, one piece at a time, in the brazier that burned on the bedroom floor near the washstand that Sebastian was using. Not wanting to draw Sebastian’s attention unnecessarily to the different lives they were now living, Joseph kept his schoolbooks under the bed, and the Cristiani-made clothes that he wore each day to the store and to school hanging behind the closed doors of the armoire.

When Sebastian had finished washing and dressing—usually in a sweater his mother had knit for him and the oversized secondhand workmen’s attire his grandfather had provided—Joseph followed him down to the kitchen, where their mother would have packed Sebastian’s lunch box with slices of sausage and cheese, peppers and figs, and half a loaf of dark brown bread. Their mother was a lively, small-boned woman in her thirties with graying dark hair that she pulled back into a bun; draped over her shoulders was a heavy wool shawl that hung almost to the hem of her long maroon skirt. Until recently, Joseph had thought that his mother was pretty. But lately her lean face had become quite drawn, almost pinched, and bereft of spirit; and except when conversing with Sebastian, she had little to say, seeming adrift in private concerns. A letter from their father had arrived a week before, but she had refused to let Joseph read it—which was just as well, for Sebastian had been in the room at the time, and Joseph knew from experience how sullen Sebastian became whenever Joseph reached for the mail from America and knowledgeably perused what they both knew was beyond Sebastian’s capacity to understand.

Each morning, after he picked up his lunch box and kissed his mother good-bye, Sebastian would head for the door, and Joseph would follow him. In the weeks of Joseph’s placating new routine, neither Sebastian nor their mother had shown any signs of gratitude; but Joseph repressed any disappointment when, pulling the sheepskin coat more tightly around his nightclothes, he proceeded across the chilly courtyard toward the stable, where he would help Sebastian load the donkey carts with jugs of mountain water that the workers drank instead of the possibly malarial waters of the lowlands.

There were usually at least a dozen men inside the stable bridling the horses, while others were outside along the fence packing the wagons, murmuring among themselves. A few of them would wave toward Sebastian as they noticed him lifting the water jugs, but they never seemed to be aware of the smaller figure of Joseph on the other side of the donkey cart. The men wore bulky sweaters over their rumpled trousers, and peaked caps or wide-brimmed felt hats that were faded and sweat-stained from endless hours in the sizzling sun. The outer soles of the men’s boots displayed small iron spikes that were intended to lend traction on the slanting, often slippery gravel roads that curved down from the village to the valley. But even on the flat ground around the stable, the men walked tentatively and slowly, as if suffering from arthritis or some other physical restriction.

Although they all lived somewhere within the row of houses owned by Domenico and were related to him intimately or distantly—being his sons, his uncles, his cousins, the offspring of these or their in-laws—Joseph did not feel particularly close to any of these men, and he often had trouble identifying them by name. One individual whom he did recognize instantly was his grandfather’s distant cousin Pepe, a shy and spindly gray-haired man with a ruddy pockmarked face and skin that was scaly, almost reptilian—the result, Joseph’s grandfather had explained, of Pepe’s parents’ having sinned many years before against the moral laws of the Church. They had fallen in love, and concealed the fact that they were first cousins as they stood before the priest marrying them in a distant church near Naples; and subsequently, after returning to Maida, they produced an ugly, blemished child they called Pepe.

Pepe was now in his fifties, his parents were dead, and the young women of the village always kept their distance when they saw him walking through the town, although he was never forward or impolite to anyone. During the day his only companions were the farm workers. At
night, he was alone at the end of Domenico’s property, in a shack behind the last of the row houses, next to a poultry coop.

Another man Joseph recognized was the rotund and genial Vito Bevivino, the only worker in the group who was energetic and zestful—which was perhaps why Domenico maintained him as the farm’s foreman even though he was eighty years old. He was a widower who had been married to one of Domenico’s sisters; and now he was Domenico’s closest friend, maybe Domenico’s
only
close friend, among the kinfolk he employed. It was Vito’s traditional duty to emasculate two of Domenico’s choice pigs each year so that the animals would be sufficiently tender and tasty for the Easter feast that was held in Domenico’s house for the entire clan, including Pepe; and it was Vito’s duty each morning to organize the procession of family workers and animals for the seven-mile trek down to Domenico’s farm in the valley.