A Harvest of Secrets by Roland Merullo
Genres: Fiction Other
Book Preface
July 1943
It was late on a warm and humid Saturday afternoon, midsummer, and Vittoria SanAntonio was walking the paths of the elaborate flower gardens her late mother had planted. From time to time she’d stop and snip the stem of a rose, dahlia, poppy, or bluebell, and slip the delicate treasure into the porcelain vase she carried. Each bright blossom seemed to correspond to one part of the jumble of feelings inside her. Most immediate—a splash of bloodred—was her trepidation about the impending war. Her father and his wealthy friends, the house servants and barn workers, her own acquaintances in Montepulciano—everyone was saying that an Allied assault was imminent, though no one seemed to know exactly when or where the Americani would make landfall on Italian soil.
Connected to that—vibrant orange in her mind—were thoughts of her lover, Carlo, called to military service with several of the other vineyard workers. She had no idea where he might be: Greece, Albania, Russia—Mussolini had sent his forces far afield, and she knew it was entirely possible that Carlo was no longer even alive. For a short while after he’d been pulled away to military service, she’d thought she was with child, and in spite of the shame that would have brought her, and the destruction of what was left of her relationship with her father—his daughter made pregnant by a simple worker!—she’d hoped it was true. But no, that was not to be. Not yet at least. Not yet.
Behind the fear of war and the whole-body and whole-spirit ache for Carlo’s touch and words stood a background of speckled blue, a longing for her late mother—gone eleven months—that never seemed to ease. Vittoria sensed now, from scraps of recalled conversation, that, beneath her disguise as an obedient wife and central Italian socialite, her mother had been a keeper of secrets. Vittoria was almost sure the secrets were linked to political activity, and that her mother had been about to reveal them to her only daughter. On her sickbed, near the very end, her mother had opened her eyes and said, Quello che devi sapere, carissima . . . What you have to know, dearest one . . . and then lapsed into unconsciousness again.
Vittoria heard a burst of laughter fly out through the open barn door. She turned her eyes in that direction and saw Old Paolo, the vineyard foreman, tossing an armful of hay to the mule in its corral. Her brother, Enrico, was there beside his elderly friend, working in happy imitation. In the distance, she thought she heard the rumble of Allied bombers, heading for the factories and rail yards of the North.
She felt a few hard drops of rain splash against her cheeks. The vase was full. Her interior world was still a colorful mess, so different from the neat rows of vines and the manor house’s perfect ochre stucco, the image her father liked to present of a famous estate in perfect working order, a famous family without blemish or trouble. The rain began to fall harder. She heard the sound of an automobile gliding into the courtyard—Massimo’s car. Her mysterious godfather, come for a weekend visit. She hurried across the patio toward the shelter of home.
Shortly before first light, Old Paolo left his bedroom on the second floor of the main barn, retrieved his shotgun from the smaller of the two first-floor storage closets, and set off on what he hoped would look like his regular Sunday-morning rabbit hunt. He hesitated a moment at the barn’s open doorway, said a quiet Ave Maria, and then went past the mule enclosure and across the gravel courtyard, glancing once at the flower gardens and the manor house and the automobile parked near its entrance. Black, beautiful, polished to a high shine, an American macchina, Eleonora said it was. FORD, the word on the grill. Although he knew who owned the vehicle and had seen it there often over the years, still, two things surprised him now: that the visitor could find fuel in wartime, and that he seemed not to worry about being stopped by German patrols. The visiting Signore must be a man whose money allowed him to live beyond the reach of fear, and living beyond the reach of fear was a great blessing in these times.
Whispering prayers as he went, asking for protection, for courage, Paolo skirted the vegetable plot and climbed past the rows of vines that covered the hillside. Eighty-seven rows there were; he knew the feel of them like he knew the feel of the shotgun resting against his shoulder. Staked, tied, pruned by his own hand, bursting now with their midsummer greenery, the vines were magnificent creatures, angels of the growing world. By fall, they’d produce tens of thousands of bunches, the juice from their grapes would be turned into thousands of bottles of wine, and the wine would be sold all across Italy—and perhaps, if the war allowed, in other countries as well. Money from those sales would add to the fortune of Umberto SanAntonio, the man who controlled his life and the lives of all the other field-workers and servants on the estate.
The man who controls my life, Paolo thought, as he climbed past the last row of vines and into a copse of chestnut, beech, and pine trees on the property’s northern flank. When the war that had been raging across Africa and Europe finally reached this place, as he suspected it soon would, he wondered what would happen to that control. To these vines. To the visitor with the American car. To Umberto, his lovely daughter, Vittoria, and her brother, Enrico. What would happen then to the Vineyard SanAntonio, where he’d worked and lived for all his many years on this earth?
There was no radio in the barn, and neither he nor any of the other field-workers could read well enough to make sense of a newspaper. But the news reached them anyway, passing from one estate to the next, mouth to ear, servant to worker to servant. Paolo knew—everyone knew—that the Allies had been victorious in North Africa and were now on their way to Italy. Their arrival would surely mean that the German and Italian forces would be pushed up the peninsula. Eventually, the fighting would reach this place, north of Rome, east of Pisa, and then suffering would pour over their lives like spring floods over bottomland. Was one supposed to wait for that to happen? Do nothing and wait?
Breathing hard from the climb, sweating, praying, doing battle with his own fear, Old Paolo went quietly along the forest path until he reached a boulder, taller than a man, wider than the delivery truck was long, shaped like a huge table. L’altare, everyone called it. The altar. He leaned his shotgun against the stone and left it there, in order to seem as unthreatening as possible, and then, murmuring a last prayer, he took three more steps around the side of the boulder. There, as expected, stood a man he’d never seen before. The man was young, not in uniform, with an enormous beaked nose, dark-brown hair hanging down over his forehead, and an Italian army rifle in his hands. He was pointing the rifle directly at Paolo’s face, and Paolo stood still and felt a bit of urine squirt into his pants. “I am sent by the priest,” Paolo said. For a long minute the young man held the rifle that way, finger on the trigger, and then he slowly lowered it.
There was something in the young man’s eyes—a murderous iciness—that Paolo found alien and terrifying, as if it belonged to another world, a place of hatred. These are the kinds of people I’m involved with now, he thought. May the Lord protect me.
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