The Harvest

In the night, Lucia awakens and remembers how it used to be, those hot summer days in Tuscany when everyone at the villa stretched out for siesta. She gravitated to the boathouse, where she’d mosey into the murky shade with the sound of water slapping the hull. And soon there would be Guido, also seventeen, climbing out from the water, pushing back his dripping hair.

“Come, slip into the water,” he’d say, trailing fingertips over the surface.

“No, Ma worries when I swim alone.”

“But you’ll be with me.” Shy smile.

“Oh, a boy! That’s even worse than drowning!”

He’d lean closer, pressing his wet limbs against hers, leaving blotches all over her cotton blouse and culottes, marks that vanished once she got back in the sunshine.

Tonight, three decades later, she senses Guido in bed beside her, his bulk a testament to his commitment to family and home and tradition. Theirs is a solid marriage, seen as strong and enduring by their friends in New Jersey who know them as Guy and Lucy. A marriage that produced four children, all young adults now, all busy with college or work and not able to be part of la raccolta delle olive, the annual Tuscan harvest. Despite the sweat and dirt, it's like a honeymoon for Lucia and Guido, after all the years of never getting away on their own.

Why has it taken them so long to return, her sisters will demand to know. We were busy raising children, she imagines answering, but that is a lie. One of many she will be telling, perhaps.

At the first ray of dawn, Lucia in her poplin pajamas tiptoes from the room. They are staying in a tiny bunkhouse, the overflow sleeping quarters from the main villa where her sisters and their families are staying. She stubs her toe. Stramaledetto! she gasps and then swallows the pain, the expletives. Guido slumbers on.

No one else appears to be up; from her window the villa looks dark. La raccolta is hard labor: carrying nets to the groves, laying them out, raking the branches, all the time taking care not to tread on the olives. And then in the mill: cleaning the crates of raw olives, mashing them, feeding the press. No wonder everyone sleeps like a log.

The day is brightening; sun gleams from the mirror hanging near the bunkhouse door. She looks closely at it—not at her reflection, which is haggard, but at the hand-carved frame. She recognizes the handiwork of Guido’s uncle, Rocco. Lucia is instantly awake; it’s as if Rocco has stepped directly from the gloom to pinch her. He was an eccentric, vulpine presence she instinctively tried to avoid from the moment she could walk.

She rakes her fingers through her sleep-tousled hair. The frame—the memory of Rocco surrounded by wood shavings and razor-edged chisels while he carved tendrils on the brows of putti—disquiets her. With a fingertip she traces a wooden spiral. A small spiral—yet she feels dizzy. After all these years, she thinks. Still.

She must get out, must clear her head. She pulls on shoes, a windbreaker, and a traveler’s belt, which was looped over the back of a chair. She exits the bunkhouse, feet crunching gravel on her way to the rental car. She’d seen a hole-in-the-wall café during the drive from the airport to the villa, and plans to go there now. But the villa parking lot is full of vehicles, including a truck that boxes in her car. During la raccolta, many able bodies return, like salmon to their spawning grounds.

She notices the boathouse. The sun is glinting from its slightly dented aluminum roof. It’s at once shabbier and more real to her than anything else on this trip. The closer she approaches, the more waterlogged the turf. A cold wetness penetrates her canvas boaters. She jiggles the rusted latch until it gives way, then she enters the boathouse, leaving the door wide for light to pierce the gloom. A familiar dank smell fills her nose. She sees a boat, a hulking craft that blocks the view. An ordinary boathouse, she tells herself. Perfectly ordinary.

So long ago. Memories come rushing back. Right here, in this corner, she used to hide, anticipating, moistening at the thought of Guido’s cool limbs upon hers. He always swam to enter secretly via the boat side.

In the other corner—she can scarcely bear the thought—is where, once, Rocco had lain in wait for her.

She takes out her cell phone from the traveller’s belt and snaps a photo. She uses a flash, so everything is devastatingly illuminated. This is her method of exorcism: She snaps photos of things she hates: she reduces them to small flat representations. This defangs them. Her phone has a picture of a rat snapped in the subway tunnel. And a tarantula that escaped from its aquarium in her daughter’s bedroom (and was safely re-caught). And the creepy T-shirt vendor at the farmer’s market where she sells the artisanal extra-virgin olive oil.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, she thinks.

She speed-walks back to the bunkhouse, alert to small noises of others waking. Inside, she pries off the clammy canvas boaters. She peels off the windbreaker and tries to drape it over the abhorrent frame, but she can’t get it to stay put. She feels dizzy simply touching it, as if Rocco is waiting to ambush again.

Despair mounting, she slides into bed beside Guido. He grunts softly as she shifts her weight. Her eyes adjust to the dimness, and she watches expressions on his face moving like storm clouds on the weather-channel map. She wonders: how has he reconciled what happened on that long-ago afternoon? When he swam into the boathouse ready to hold her for a few stolen minutes—and instead found Rocco trying to subdue her?

So many years and they have never spoken of what happened next. At first, they couldn’t—they’d crept away, separately, stunned and shaking, leaving a lifeless form under water. They’d forced themselves into busy-ness, with farmwork all afternoon and evening and the next day. Acting normal. On occasion, Rocco had sneaked away from the villa before, so the search for him started late. On the third day his waterlogged body appeared among reeds near the boathouse. No sign of trauma… an accidental drowning.

Guido had been among the pallbearers. Not blinking an eye. Lucia kept watching, waiting for the mask to slip, especially when they were alone together, but Guido avoided her for the next month. In church, she confessed to the sex but never mentioned holding a man’s head under water.

Meanwhile, their student visas had come through. A secret that was next-to-impossible to keep when at the villa, seeing the boathouse every day, became easy to keep at a private school in upstate New York. They plunged into a new life in a new land. The Guy & Lucy Show. The boathouse memory faded, flaring only when she smelled dankness or heard the slap of waves against an empty hull.

Now, as she watches Guido sleeping on the bunkhouse bed, she wonders what episode is playing in his mental cinema. Is he reliving that first playful kiss? Or is he re-thinking the problem of winding a net around a struggling man? Forget the bond of parenthood; nothing binds you quite as tightly as being accomplices in an unrevealed murder.

Stop it, she thinks. Just stop it.

You can fool some of the people all of the time.

She lies there recalling times she nearly came clean: first time, two days after the funeral, when she’d heard Rocco’s mother weeping in the night. Second time was when they walked alone over the Victory Bridge and she had an eerie feeling Guido planned to remove the only other witness to the deed. And then, the third time, after their big argument—over what? a sofa?—that had escalated to the nuclear option, when she was ready to pack up the baby and, oh yeah, report the crime to Interpol. A sofa? She can hardly believe it was so trivial.

Then she discovered anti-depressants. Their secret remained intact, the truth of what happened to Rocco on that sultry day in July in a boathouse in Tuscany.

In her mind she tours the old places—the hilltop towns, the winding roads, the lanes of cypress trees—and she falls asleep again. Then she dreams about Guido dragging Rocco into the water, plunging him in while she cast a net around him, pushing him under and holding him down until he grew still. She hears water slapping against an empty hull.

She awakens, gasping, heart pounding, uncertain in her jet-lagged state whether it’s morning or evening.

*       *       *

Last Christmas, Guy had been so hungry for Lucy. He nuzzled her neck, running his hands up and down her arms, her back, her breasts, and whispered, “I remember that first time in the boathouse, Lulu. I’d love to go there again…”

“I’m sure they’ve torn it down by now,” she murmured. “Besides, everyone will be there. And tongues will wag, old history will be dredged up.”

But he kept talking it up—with her, with the children, with both families in Tuscany. “For once,” he promised, “we’ll help with la raccolta.” He bought tickets.

The night before the flight to Florence, he had a terrible case of cold feet. He told her that it would flay him alive to see the boathouse. He was dreading being face-to-face with his senile mother, his grasping siblings, and her relentless sisters. He was going only because she insisted.

“It’s just for three weeks,” she said. “We’ll be too busy to spit.” His reluctance surprised her, or more properly, his disclosure of his reluctance. She smoothed his forehead with her cool palm.

You can fool all of the people some of the time.

*       *       *

On the final day of the visit, the sisters are sitting around the table, staring at Lucia. The breakfast is growing cold on the table. One of the children picks at it. Her sisters are silent except for Corinna, who is a year and a half younger than she is, but looks ten years older. Corinna says, “Do you think, sharing our bedroom so many years ago, that I did not notice when you stopped having siesta there?”

This is all my fault, Lucia thinks. I let Guido think we only needed to act innocent. He didn’t know about the sisterly shark tank.

“One time I got up and followed you,” Corinna continues. “I saw you sneaking down to the river. I saw you letting yourself in the boathouse. I waited, hidden, to see who else went there. But no one did. Instead, Mamma found me, slapped me, said, why are you out in the blazing heat? Ma sei scemo? I couldn’t tell her it was you I was waiting for, Lucia. So I went back to our crummy little bedroom and waited until it was time to get up.”

 Lucia says nothing, scooping the foam from her caffé latte with a spoon. Touching it to her tongue.

“A week later, Rocco goes missing,” Corinna says. “At first he misses the evening meal—the only time ever he missed it, but no one saw that as significant as I did. Handsome Rocco. I figured you had your eyes on him; what girl did not? Not like his ugly, spider-legged nephew Guido.”

“Corinna!” Maria cries, aghast. “Bada a come parli!”

Lucia narrows her eyes. She’s forgotten how cruel Corinna can be; she will say anything to provoke a response. She frowns, knowing she should stick up for Guido, but resisting the obvious ploy to be dragged into an argument.

“And then, the next day, you stopped going to the boathouse for siesta. Right away. You knew he wouldn’t be there,” Corinna says. “Even though it was the following day when they declared him missing.”

Lucia pries the end off her cornetto and puts it in her mouth. As if she is tasting it. Act normal.

“Oh, you are cold-blooded. No tears.” Now Corinna is standing and stabbing her finger at Lucia. “The next day they find him—drowned in that part of the river curiously close to the boathouse.”

Lucia rips a bigger piece from the cornetto, stuffs it in her mouth.

“Of course I said something,” Corinna says. “I went to Mamma right away and told her. She laughed. Laughed!  She said, life was not a romanzo giallo. And then she slapped me, told me not to distress poor Rocco’s family with discorsi pazzi. But you!” She shakes her finger at Lucia. “You never once shed a tear for him. I used to listen at night as you fell asleep. You never once cried.”

“Truth be told, I hated that creep,” Lucia says calmly—and immediately regrets being drawn in.

“My sister, the murderer,” Corinna accuses.

“I couldn’t have overpowered him! He was a grown man; I was seventeen. No. You are mistaken.”

“Even now I see how strong you are,” Corinna insists.

Lucia’s eyes sting. She regrets how intensely she has been working, trying to keep pace with Guido. Why does Corinna target her? Why not Guido? He is, maddeningly, blameless in the eyes of everyone. He is kind. Good-natured. Constitutionally incapable of homicide, they think. Her resentment churns. For a picosecond she imagines turning the interrogation light on him. Casting the blame. And yet—she was grateful, so long ago, that Guido had interrupted Rocco and had taken immediate action.

“Corinna, I think the long days are tiring you,” Guido says. Lucia is startled; she had not seen him come in. She wonders how much he has overheard. Now he presses the button on the espresso machine and the noise becomes too loud for speaking. While it grinds, he can inspect Corinna, maintaining a mask of grave concern. As soon as the noise ends, he declares, “My family accepted the coroner’s report. My uncle Rocco over-indulged in wine that day. He died from accidental drowning. Please, leave us to our mourning. Do not tear apart families with lies and suspicions.”

Lucia and Guido exchange a glance. Easy for you, she thinks. Your alibi is as airtight as an astronaut’s suit.

“Come quick, the horse escaped!” Nella coaxes Corinna outside with a small crisis not-crisis. The sisters disperse. Soon the dining area is full of children and spouses grabbing a bite before they go out to the groves.

Maria comes to the bunkhouse where Lucia is packing, and Guido is shaving. Outside, a van waits to take them to the small local airport; from there they will fly to Florence.

“That Corinna—completamente pazza!” Maria says, shaking her head.

“Is this a new thing,” Lucia says, deliberately casual, “or has she been raving about this all along?”

“For years,” Maria says. “It’s so embarrassing! That’s why we never pressured you to come back. We hoped she would, you know, get it out of her system.”

“Some people develop obsessions,” Lucia says. She tries to sound neutral, unshaken.

“Yes, an idée fixe,” Maria says. “Like, ‘electromagnetism is poisoning us’…” She stops and stares at the bunkhouse mirror, which now has a sheet of newspaper taped over it. “What is this? Do you have some problem with mirrors?”

“No, nothing,” Lucia says lightly.

“Oh, are you following the recent election?” Maria asks. By happenstance, it is the front page of La Nazione. News of the recent far-right victory. She shakes her head disgustedly. “What is it they say? You can fool some of the people all of the time… and all of the people some of the time…”

But not all of the people all of the time.

Lucia shrugs. “I kind of forget how that goes.”

The End