The Miracles of Santo Fico (26 page)

Nina also began visiting her great-uncle more often. She missed her turns at bringing him his lunch tray. She always volunteered, but for some reason, her mother wanted to do it. Nina could do it next time, but when it became clear that next time would never arrive, Nina started dropping by the church for no reason. She couldn’t see how thin and drawn her great-uncle had become of course, but she knew he wasn’t well. She heard it in his voice. She had often heard sadness in his voice when he talked of God and she’d even asked him about it once, a long time ago. He had explained to her that he was never sad about God, but sometimes he became sad about himself because he had let God down so much. Nina had tried to argue this with him a number of times, but he always changed the subject. What the girl heard now wasn’t just sadness, it was something else and it took a few days before she put a name to what she heard— despair. Her great-uncle Father Elio was giving up on something, but she didn’t know what. She wanted to comfort him, but she didn’t know how, so she prayed for the right words to say. Nina didn’t begrudge her blindness—what would be the point? But now she longed to sit with her uncle Elio in the evening and read to him from a great book filled with some wisdom that would answer all the questions of his troubled heart and give him peace. But she had to content herself with just being with him and loving him.

Down the road at the shepherd’s cottage by the sea, things weren’t going much better for Leo. He avoided going into town because he didn’t have any ideas for a new miracle and he couldn’t face Marta. He also couldn’t stop thinking about Father Elio. He hadn’t understood why Marta was so desperate about the old man until he sat next to him on the steps of the church. Now, when he tried to sleep at night, Father Elio’s hollow eyes faded in and out of the frozen face of Saint Francis and now both holy men stared out at him, accusingly, from the darkness of haunted dreams. He couldn’t make them go away.

He was also having trouble living with Nonno. It wasn’t Nonno’s fault. In fact, since the water returned to the fountain, Nonno had been much better. He still spent his days sitting by the fountain, but now when people happened by they seemed much more willing to stop and sit and chat with the old man. And it seemed like almost everyone in Santo Fico happened by the resurrected fountain at least once a day. Groups of children were there almost all the time. True, there weren’t that many children in Santo Fico, but those who were now seemed to live at the fountain, and Nonno had become their hero. Nonno loved the attention. And he loved the children.

Leo’s problem was that the shepherd’s hut was proving too small. It contained one pungent dog too many for Leo and he found himself spending more and more nights outside. He would have said something to Nonno, but he’d never seen anyone come to love a hovel as quickly as Nonno and that dog took to that stone hut. It was as if the ancient builder, whoever he was, had that pair in mind. Leo decided that when he returned to America, he would leave the shepherd’s hut for Nonno and the dog. But for now, he found himself spending his days, and often his nights, wandering the land where he grew up— and which he had worked so hard to ignore since his return.

It started the morning after the fiasco at the fountain. Leo woke early and found himself in a terrible humor. He had spent a troubled night. How could such a wonderful plan go so terribly wrong? He had thought a walk before breakfast might calm him, and for no particular reason, his legs took him away from the cliffs and the sea and he followed the trails that led toward town—even though he knew that Santo Fico wasn’t his destination. He stalked down one dusty trail after another, kicking at the clumps of tall grass, his mind lost in a labyrinth of frustrations. At one point he unexpectedly came upon the herd of Lombolo horses that grazed his property. Both were startled, but Leo simply pulled off his hat, waved it in the air, and shouted angrily at them. The huge beasts flared their nostrils, bulged their eyes, pounded the soft earth with their sharp hooves, and ran away.

That was when he discovered he was across the path from the olive grove and he wandered into the grove for no particular reason. The gnarled old trees were familiar, but they had changed greatly. They were bigger, fuller, and sadder. He had never seen them so untended. He knew how they liked to look—trimmed and pruned, lean and tight. These trees sprouted long sucker branches that randomly shot toward the sky or hung almost to the ground. Leo picked one of the olives. It was small and hard. He knew that it wouldn’t grow any larger. It would never fill with oil and juice, and become so full and ripe that it almost burst. These trees were thirsty. He imagined their old roots digging deeper and deeper into the sandy soil searching for water. But what water could be found was stolen by the sucker branches.

As he walked through the olive grove, Leo came upon an old pair of pruning shears sitting quite forgotten in a fork of one of the trees. They showed the rust of years. Leo imagined his father standing under that tree, using the shears. He imagined his aunt Sofia’s strong, musical voice calling his father out of the field for dinner. Aunt Sofia—she had stayed with her dead sister’s husband, and cared for him near the end. Leo imagined his father setting the shears down in the crook of the tree and walking slowly back to the house through a warm, crimson evening. His father would have had every intention of returning the next day to the shears because he was not a man who didn’t take care of his tools. But no one returned and here the shears sat.

Leo studied the tree and he tried to imagine which branch his father might have been pruning. He picked one. He reached up and snipped it off. He liked the clean, sharp sound it made as the blade snapped through the branch. He liked the familiar pressure of the shears in his hand, and he liked the way the useless branch fell to the ground; so he snipped another. And so he began.

Leo used up the rest of his day in the olive grove, moving from tree to tree, doing again what he had done during the first half of his life, and what he had tried to deny during the second. That night he dreamed less.

The next day he awoke early again. This time he had no rage to work off, no frustration was vexing him—he just felt like going for a walk after breakfast. His stroll took him to the vineyard, and by some odd chance, he’d brought along his father’s shears. But he discovered that the greatest need of the vineyard wasn’t pruning. The thick twists of spiraled stems were healthy enough, but few tendrils trailed off and what branches had grown were thin and almost leafless. There would be no grapes this year. Vines are hearty plants that like the heat and grow well even in a dry, flinty ground, but this summer’s drought was too much for even these tenacious old plants. The vines were dying of thirst.

But what broke Leo’s heart were the rosebushes. At the head of every row of grapes was a single rosebush and they too were dying. They had been planted long before Leo was born and probably before his father’s time as well. As a boy, he was told, “The rose is like the grape, except the rose, it’s more fragile, more sensitive to some of the ailments that also harm the grape. Whatever the vine might catch, the rose catches it first.” Leo learned that by watching the roses, the vine-tender had some warning of danger and precautions could be taken to protect the vines. He remembered how his mother loved her rosebushes. Just like the workers in the fields tending to the vines, his mother would be on her knees before the roses—turning the soil, feeding them, pruning their tiny branches.

“Snip above the five-leaf cluster if you want a flower,” she would say and his father would laugh.

“You love those roses more than the vines,” he would call to her from across the field.

And she would call back, “When you have so many to tend to the vine, someone must be willing to love the rose.”

And when the vines were rich with leaves and the thick, full bunches of grapes dragged down near the ground, at the head of each row stood a guardian rosebush bursting with flowers—each bush a different color, and each color more vibrant than the last. And he remembered that his father would come out just after sunrise and cut armfuls of cool roses and take them back home to his mother.

“These fields are haunted,” Leo thought aloud and he knew that he had denied his ghosts as long as he could.

Leo pushed his way through the tall weeds at the top of the hill that was the highest point on the farm and went directly to an ancient pipe that seemed to sprout directly out of the ground. At the center of the old pipe was a rusted worm screw and the other end opened over a wooden trough that pointed down the hill and became lost in the overgrowth of weeds. With a bit of searching Leo found a short length of iron bar that was designed to be levered into the top of the worm screw, and then he spent the next half hour tugging and pushing until, at last, the screw turned. Clear water shot through the cobwebs at the end of the pipe and washed down the dusty trough toward the bottom of the hill.

Leo used up the rest of the day with a shovel in his hand, racing along ancient ditches, trying to outrun the water that rushed down the hill to the olive orchard. Once he was there, he opened this gate or he shut that gate, skillfully diverting water from one row to another, until all the rows of olive trees were islands in a series of long, thin shimmering lakes. Then the race began again as the water tumbled through a new series of ditches, across the fields, and toward the vineyard.

At last, Leo sat on the bank of the irrigation ditch and watched the water roll by, just as he had when he was a boy. He watched the water disappear into the thirsty ground around the vines and the rosebushes. He watched the swifts dart overhead and chase the tiny insects that hovered above the water. In the afternoon, the Lombolo horses came by for a drink, but when they saw Leo sitting on the bank they kept their distance. When, after a safe minute, he didn’t wave a hat or shout at them angrily, they came to the ditch and drank. Leo watched them drink. And he watched the swifts darting and diving through the air.

That evening Leo walked along the cliffs above the sea as he made his way back to the shepherd’s hut. He knew he was making mistakes. He was pruning the olive trees in the wrong season. His watering was washing away too much topsoil around the vines. But he didn’t care. He would do better tomorrow.

The smoke coming from the Pizzola place could be seen all the way from the top of the north coast road. Topo was on his way to see Leo because he just couldn’t stand the pressure and this whole miracle business was making his life far too complicated. Every time he even crossed the piazza, he could see Marta watching him from a hotel window and he could swear he saw prison bars reflected in her eyes. This whole thing was Leo’s fault, but if Leo couldn’t fix things, then it was up to Topo. He had an idea. They had tried Leo’s miracles. Now maybe it was time to try one of his. Leo Pizzola wasn’t the only one who could come up with miracles.

Topo forgot all of these concerns when he saw the great billows of black smoke rising from where he thought the Pizzola house to be. He hadn’t planned on running, but he did. By the time he arrived at the sad old house he had slowed. The house wasn’t burning, at least for the moment. The smoke came from farther down the trail, from the olive grove.

To his astonishment Topo found Leo hauling great cart-loads of dried weeds and dead branches out from under the trees and across the path, well away from the grove. He stacked them in a pile near the edge of a large circle that he had cleared in the dry grass. Nonno stood on the bare dirt inside the circle, patiently and carefully feeding a roaring fire. He took debris from Leo’s pile and, when he judged the time right, tossed it onto the blaze. The gray dog sat near a waiting garden hose that had been laid out just in case. As Topo walked by him, the dog gave him a reassuring blink— should the need arise, he was ready with the hose.

“Are you crazy? This is the wrong season to burn,” shouted Topo above the roar of the flames. “You burn in the fall. You could burn this whole place down.”

“We’re being careful,” said Leo and he walked back to the olive grove. He didn’t need to be reminded he was out of season.

Topo followed at his heels and he noticed that many of the trees seemed to be standing up straighter. They looked like olive trees again and many of the rows were raked clean. Topo liked what he saw; this was closer to the way it should be, but he was confused.

“Why are you doing this? I thought you wanted to sell this place.”

“I do,” Leo lied. “Do you see a lot of buyers banging on the door? Nobody’s going to buy it looking like this.”

That made sense to Topo and Leo was content that his friend had other things on his mind and didn’t press the matter.

“I need to talk to you.”

Leo checked out Nonno’s supply of fuel. He could take a break for a few minutes, so they found a shady spot beneath a tree. Topo glanced around to make sure that neither Nonno nor the dog could overhear.

“How’s the fresco?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t you think maybe you should move it? I mean, just while Nonno’s staying there?”

“No. It’s fine where it is,” Leo lied again. The truth was, his heart stopped every time Nonno came in the door. It was as if the fresco howled at him from beneath the cot. In fact, every time Nonno moved around the room, Leo was sure he was going to suddenly point at the bundle beneath the bed and exclaim, “Hey! What’s that? It looks like something you stole from a church!” The fact of the matter was, Leo was working hard to not think about frescoes, or fortunes, or miracles.

“I’ve got a plan,” Topo said, grinning slyly.

Well . . . It wouldn’t hurt to listen.

The plan that Topo presented, Leo thought, was exactly the kind of plan Topo would devise. It was theatrical and flamboyant—filled with drama and spectacle. It had plot, a script, a cast, and special effects—and it was really pretty good. Topo’s idea was deceptively straightforward. If the problem was that Father Elio felt God had rejected him because of some big, mysterious sin, then instead of trying to come up with things that would prove that God loved him, why not just have someone tell him that God still loved him? The miracle was not in the message, but in the messenger. It should be an angel, come down from heaven.