Page 4 of The Sicilian Inheritance

You’re going to take my ashes to Caltabellessa. I want you to know the town where I was born. You’re lost, my love, and you need to get back to your roots. But I also need you to do something for me. If I had tried to explain it, you would have thought I was nuts, but I’m sorry I didn’t try, so here it goes...

I’m enclosing a deed in this letter, a deed for what I believe is a small plot of land that belonged to our family in Sicily before they came to America. The owner is listed as my mother, Serafina Forte. It’s been mine for a long, long time and I always told myself that when I retired, when I had the money to fly off to Sicily, I’d go back to our land. I’d hoped I would be able to do that trip with you, but time ran out. And to be honest, I was a little scared of digging up the past. But I’ve gotten sentimental in my old age, and I think we need to know our family history. That’s what people do when they’re close to death. They try to learn more about the people they’re gonna meet on the other side.

So here we are, my love. This is my last wish from the great beyond. Spooky, eh? I need you to go back to Caltabellessa. It’s all taken care of. The hotel is booked for a week, the plane ticket is bought and it’s nonrefundable. No more excuses. I want you to investigate whether this paper is worth anything and if it is, I want you to take all of the money you can make from it and rebuild your life. Reopen your restaurant and take care of your girl. I’m sending you on an adventure, my love. Don’t you dare waste it.

TWO

SERAFINA

1908

The girl is cursed. My mother whispered this to my father late at night, even though she knew I could hear her through the wall. Mamma sensed I’d been wicked, that I’d brought shame on our family, but all she muttered was the girl is cursed like what was happening to me was all the result of the devil’s magic.

Before the sun rose the next morning Cettina and I visited la strega, the witch, to try to undo the terrible thing I had done.

The old woman lived beyond the end of the road. As we walked higher and higher around the steep curve of the hillside the stone path turned to gravel and then to dirt. My skin tingled with the uncomfortable feeling I’d been tricked, like maybe Liuni and Gio would jump out from behind a tree and laugh at us for believing in fairy tales.

Sheep bells chimed in the distance calling us back home. Cettina, my oldest friend, the closest thing I had to a sister, led the way, gripping my hand so hard my bones ached.

Visiting the witch, asking her for help, had been Cettina’s idea. La strega was a distant relative of hers, one her family never acknowledged. No one with half a mind would admit to being the witch’s kin even though every woman in town depended on her healing powers for something or other. Men never visited the witch. She only ever tended to the women and then only in secrecy. I didn’t know if she chose to keep away from the whispers and stares from our villagers or whether she was asked to live just beyond the town’s border to keep her magic separate from the sacred sphere of the church. Most likely a combination of both. But Cettina cared for the old woman. My friend had a beautiful heart—bigger, perhaps, than was good for her—so she’d sneak away once a week to the woman’s cottage on the edge of the cliff, bringing things the witch needed from town—flour, lye soap, sugar, copies of the Giornale di Sicilia.

“She can read?” I’d asked.

“I think she learned in Palermo,” Cettina said.

The capital might as well have been on a distant star for how far away it seemed. That the witch had once lived in the big city and chose to return to our dusty rural village of peasants only added to her mythology.

Cettina added, “I have seen her reading long books and articles.”

None of the old women in town could read. Even many of the girls our age didn’t know how to decipher more than simple sentences. Some of them, including Cettina, had quit school long ago to help their mammas raise little ones. The state required children to attend school for just four years. At fifteen, I was the only girl left in our class, a fact that my own mamma often complained about because she wanted more help at home. My love of learning made no sense to her. It was impractical at best and dangerous at worst. I hadn’t told my mother that I was at the top of all the students in my class, one of two who would be sent down to the upper school in the city of Sciacca to receive more education. A girl from our town had never done it before. My teacher was going to ask for special permission to send me. One day I could maybe even get my teaching certificate, become a maestrina. I’d asked Papa months ago, and he’d been skeptical, but my desperate enthusiasm won him over and he promised to try to convince Mamma.

It was the only thing I had ever truly desired. It was the only thing that could offer an escape from our tiny village. Generations of women before me had lived their entire lives circling the tip of the small mountain doing nothing but caring for babies and husbands. For me that life seemed the worst kind of prison. But leaving would be impossible if the witch couldn’t help me.

Cettina knew what the witch could do because she had the ears of a wild boar and had listened as her mamma’s friends discussed the work of la strega, her spells, her healing. We had not had a midwife in town for many years, not since old Nunzia followed her sons to la Mérica. The physician, Peppe Spica, lived far away in Sciacca and did little to treat women’s troubles. It was said that la strega could deliver a baby without pain to the mother, an insult to God since the Bible insisted women deserved pain in childbearing in penance for the sins of the first woman. Cettina had also heard that the witch had medicine that could solve my particular problem.

“What if it does not work?” I asked as we neared the witch’s home.

“It will,” my friend promised. “I will be here to help. I will take care of you.” Cettina’s voice was brave with conviction.

We swallowed our breath and held it tight in our chests as we passed the cave where the dragon had lived hundreds of years before, the terrible reptile who ate the bad children, or so our parents and grandparents had told us. Everyone knew you had to hold your breath or you’d bring bad luck on your entire family.

“Do you want to stop at the dragon’s ear?” Cettina asked.

When Saint Pellegrino eventually slayed the dragon many hundreds of years ago, the beast had turned to dust, all of him crumbling except for his giant ear. The ear turned into rock, becoming one of the outer walls of the cave on the mountaintop. The villagers believed you could tell the dragon’s ear your darkest secrets, the things you could never confess to the priest.

I nodded and walked to the crumbling side of the cliff to mumble into the sun-warmed stone, quiet enough that even Cettina couldn’t hear me. “This is all my fault. I am a terrible, sinful girl and I deserve all my ill fortune.”

Cettina pulled me back to the trail. Our village grew smaller and smaller behind us. If we turned to the right and walked a few paces from the path we’d tumble off the edge into the valley below, a deep crevice filled with thorns and gnarled olive trees too tough and old to bear food.

I thought to turn back when the witch’s house came into view, as if my doubts willed it to appear. The structure was built directly into the mountain, not unlike the dragon’s ear, but with a crooked door and two small windows on either side. A century ago, this building used to be a stall for the militia to look out for invaders coming in from the sea. The windows were just big enough for arrows to fly out. Most of these places were abandoned now, but the witch had moved here because she had no family that wanted to claim her, no husband, and nowhere else to be.

Or so the stories went.

Cettina paused outside the door. Perched on her tiptoes, she grasped the sides of my face in her palms, her fingers cupping my cheekbones. Cetti’s large eyes grew even rounder as she pressed her lips softly onto my forehead, a drop of sweat falling from her upper lip. “I love you.”

“Come in.” A strong voice bounced off the old stone walls inside the house. She sounded younger than I expected, but when the woman stepped into the doorway I saw that her soft baggy face was impossibly old, the skin mottled like an old log. Her narrow marzipan eyes held on to the two of us. A tattered blanket fell over her shoulders like a cape tied at the hollow of her neck. It flapped a little in the wind as she led us inside.

The witch’s home smelled like an animal right before slaughter: wild, anxious, clinging to hope. Blood mixed with something sweet: ripe lemons and rosemary. Six dark wood chairs with high backs sat around a table that gleamed like it had been rubbed over and over with oil. A quilt sewn from rag scraps was tucked around a straw mattress in the corner of the room. Meat, maybe rabbit, roasted in a fireplace as high as the ceiling. The stones of the hearth were lined with uneven shelves: on one side were rows and rows of glass canisters of all shapes and sizes; on the other, stacks of books and periodicals. There were more words in that tiny room than I had seen in my entire life. I ran my fingers along the spines of the volumes.

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