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A flash of lightning lit the sky outside of Gaetana’s window followed by a crack of thunder slapping the clouds. A warning.
We all glanced into the coffin, but Stefano’s eyes were still blessedly closed. Gaetana rose and finally shut the wooden lid with a dull thunk. “I think he has left us by now. And I no longer want to stare at his shriveled old face. It only reminds me of his shriveled old balls.”
Another slash of fire turned the sky a violent mix of orange and purple and I felt Cettina stiffen in front of me as she bowed her head and trembled her fingers in her lap. Was she making the sign of the cross? Did she think what we were talking about was sinful?
My own body tingled with a strange excitement as I walked to the window to breathe in the sizzling air. I looked down at the courtyard, expecting it to be deserted except for the stray cats looking for shelter from the rain, but there was a shadow striding toward the house. For a brief moment I imagined it was Stefano resurrected from the dead, returning to shame all of us for our joy at his funeral, one fist raised in anger, the other shoved down his pants.
But then Marco stepped into the weak glow of the gas lantern outside of Gaetana’s door. His shirt was plastered to his broad chest, his hair long and slick on his cheeks. When he looked up, our eyes met. I considered sneaking down the stairs to greet him, to return to that moment in the hallway when our bodies were so close, when his lips grazed my cheek. What would it feel like to slip into the dark alley alongside the house and let him pin me against the stone wall? To feel his lips move from my cheek, to my mouth, down my neck?
These thoughts visited me often when I was half asleep and alone in my bed. It felt more illicit to have them when only a flight of stairs separated the two of us.
I forced myself to turn away first, to grab Cetti’s sweater and tell her that her husband had come to walk her home.
A look of relief overtook her features as she stood, smoothed her dress, and said her goodbyes, raising her voice to be heard over the raucous conversation. As she prepared to walk out the door, I grabbed her arm. “Do you want me to come with you?”
She considered it for a moment before glancing out the window at Marco. “No. I do not think so.” I thought I detected an edge in her voice, but I dismissed it as my imagination, as my own guilt for the wicked thoughts that traipsed through my mind as I stared down at her husband in the rain. We both knew there had been whispers over these past months. The old gossips wondered why Marco and I had to spend the night in Sciacca. When we returned to the village in the morning Marco’s car looked practically brand-new, as Enzo had promised. The boy’s cousins did good work, which made our story about an accident seem almost ridiculous, but doubting Marco was like doubting Jesus Christ himself and whispers were whispers. A small village loves nothing more than gossip because what else did we have to keep us amused and connected to one another?
There were other rumors about me, about the work I did. Rosalia had warned me that practicing medicine in the public eye would bring both gratitude and scrutiny. “They will be thankful for your work but afraid of your power. Choose who you heal and how.” So I was careful. When we learned that the children I treated in Sciacca had been healed, I explained it was a consequence of the good sea air and a blessing from the Lord. Just the other day I did the same when I was accidentally called to an exorcism. As I walked to my appointment I fell into step behind Father Caputo when I realized we had both been asked to the same house to heal the same girl.
I deferred to him as we walked through the front door. I nodded to the mother of the home, the one who had summoned me. I tried to silently express that the priest should take the lead, should take over. I couldn’t exactly disappear, but I also couldn’t do my work. The priest was led to the bedroom of a teenage girl while her father insisted she needed a purgation. She certainly looked possessed by something as she moaned and screamed, writhing in a pool of her own sweat. Her wails echoed off the walls of the small room.
The priest wasted no time falling to his knees at her bedside and thrusting a crucifix in her face. He out-screamed her yowls, “I am talking to you, Satan, Prince of Darkness. I curse you, I chase you out of this child.” Then he reached into his pocket and threw raw flour into the girl’s face. Her sneeze would have been almost comic had she not clearly remained in pain. He slapped her across the face. Her head snapped to the side and the screams stopped as she lost consciousness.
The father thanked the priest and slipped some money into his palm. Only once he was gone did I dare sit next to the girl and gently pull up her dress to examine her as she slept. Her rapid breathing assured me that the slap had not done permanent damage. She would wake up in time and still be in pain. The mother had told me that the child’s urine ran thick with blood and she was tortured with discomfort. I’d experienced some form of this illness myself, all of the women had. I treated her with a solvent to cleanse the vagina and then slipped an opium tincture into her mouth.
“It is an infection of the urinary area. Give her all the water she can handle. Keep her asleep. Time will heal it and the opium will help with the pain.”
The mother kissed my hand, but I pushed her away. “If she is healed then let everyone believe it was an act of God. The priest did his duty. I did nothing.” I was learning how to protect myself with humility and silence.
Cettina was nearly out the door of Gaetana and Stefano’s home when she returned to embrace me again. The corners of her mouth turned downward. “I do think you should leave here soon. This is not... It will not end well.”
She wasn’t wrong. There was much for every woman in that room to fear. But what did Cettina know of our future? What did she see? Maybe nothing at all, or maybe everything. Maybe she was the only one of us, being separate from our new freedoms, who could see the dangers. Because in the end, she was right.
It did not end well for most of us.
—
Eventually, they would all say that I killed the man. Some called it murder, said that it was intentional, that I did it in cold blood, that I was a monster with dark thoughts. But all I was trying to do was save his life. I did not let him die with any intent or malice. I should have walked away and let him bleed out into the dirt. At least then it wouldn’t have been my fault.
The man who died beneath my hands was a visitor to our town who had been staying with Cettina’s brother Carmine on their land below the village. A tall, ugly man, only slightly older than me, he strutted around Caltabellessa like he owned it, grabbing at women and even the teenage girls. There were whispers that he was a money man for the mafiusi. The Black Hand, they called him. He had something to do with organizing the protection payments for the farms in our region.
Farmwork has never been easy or particularly safe. A hand or a foot is easily lost to a thresher or scythe. Horses bolt, tree branches break. Men drink on the job and everything becomes that much more dangerous. By the time I reached the farm there was probably nothing I could have done for the ugly money man after he was thrown from his horse onto the tines of a pitchfork left in a stack of hay. The spike pierced his back straight through the ribs and yet he was still conscious when I arrived. There was less blood than you might have expected given the grisly nature of the wound. Perhaps this was why Carmine was so certain he could be saved, why he called for me at Cettina’s house in the first place while the two of us were having lunch. What I knew, the very second that I saw the victim, was that the thing that was killing him, the pitchfork, was also keeping the blood in his body. He had been rolled onto his side so that I could see the wooden shaft of the instrument emerging from the front of him like a lightning rod.
“Take it out,” Cettina’s brother ordered me.
“Wait a moment,” I insisted as I scrambled to the ground and felt around the wound, causing the injured man to groan and cough. Blood poured from his mouth, another frightening sign of what was happening to his organs beneath his skin.
“Do it,” Carmine barked.
I turned to face him, tried to explain what was happening in the simplest way possible. “I worry that his lung has been punctured and maybe one of the main pathways into the heart. If we pull the fork out we may not be able to save him.”
“But you cannot leave it in,” Carmine said. “I knew we should have called for the real doctor. We should drive him to Sciacca in the truck.”
“I do not think you should move him.”
“But there is no blood except for that.” He pointed at what came from the man’s mouth, now staining his shirt and pants, covering my hands. The injured man’s eyes lolled back in his head. We were already losing him.
“You cannot move him without shifting the tines of the fork and we don’t know where they will go inside his body. I do not think that is a good idea.”
