In a Glass House Read Online Free PDF Page B

the truth, what’s happened.”
    “
Sì
. We might as well just publish it in the newspaper, and then everyone will know.”
    “Everyone knows as it is.”
    “Don’t be an idiot. You know how they are here – every little thing they know about us, they make up some story. We’ll take care of our own problems.”
    Later I heard Tsi’Alfredo’s truck drive away. I drifted into sleep, but was awakened again some time afterwards by Tsi’Alfredo’s voice from the kitchen.
    “Enough with your stupid questions! Is it possible you can’t keep your mouth shut for even a minute?”
    “And what will we do, then? If you’d done what I told you in the first place –”
    “
Ma chesta stronza –
”
    Some object hit a wall or cupboard with a crash.
    “Have you gone crazy?”
    Tsia Maria’s voice was strangely altered now, tense with a panic that made me want to close it out. A door slammed, and the house grew eerily calm; then from the kitchen came a sound of sweeping, the clink of broken glass. I noticed suddenly that Gino was awake, was lying open-eyed beside me staring up at the ceiling; but he turned finally and hunched his shoulders away from me without a word.
    It was barely dawn when Tsi’Alfredo brought his children and me back to my father’s farm to begin work again, the sun just a streak of orange along the horizon and the air frosty with cold. But someone had preceded us: my father’s truck wasparked at the edge of the field, and already from a distance I saw him stooping in one of the rows, a small dark speck against the grey line of trees behind him. When we’d come even with him Tsi’Alfredo jumped from the cab.
    “Where in Christ have you been?”
    Tsi’Alfredo was moving toward him, stepping over empty trays in the row in long quick strides.
    “Mario, for the love of Christ what got into your head?”
    The rest of us had gathered in a group at the end of the row, watching now as Tsi’Alfredo came up to him. But my father remained hunched over his tray.
    “
Dai
, Mario, what’s happened?” His voice carried strangely clear in the morning stillness. “It’s nothing,
dai
, don’t be like this.”
    My father was crying. Tsi’Alfredo got down on his haunches beside him and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder.
    “It’s better to be dead than to live like this,” my father said; but his voice had the tremor of a child’s.
    “
Dai
, what are you saying.
È niend’
, Mario, it’s nothing.”

III
    For several weeks after the planting my father and I were alone on the farm, Gelsomina coming by on Saturdays to do laundry and cook up soup and sauce for the following week, and the baby staying at Tsi’Alfredo’s. But though we were together more often now, my father’s presence seemed still merely a kind of gloom that surrounded me, my body tensing against him like a single hard muscle when he was near, taking in only his animal scent and then the shape he cut like black space in a landscape.
    For a week or so he had me clean out an old chicken coop in the barn, leaving me alone there the whole day in the barn’s dim mysteriousness. Bits of dust hung like gold in the slits of light that passed between the wallboards; from the shadows of the upper rafters came a constant cooing and flapping of wings. In the chicken coop there was a nest of some hard clayish substance against one of the ceiling beams, and every morning a swallow would swoop out from it in a swift arc when I came in, slashing a quick hieroglyph in the air like a secret signal before disappearing in the branches of a mulberry tree across the lane.
    The coop was crammed with all manner of refuse, busted packing crates, hoops of thick wire, old farm implements with decayed leather harnesses, rolls of rusted chicken wire. My father would give me a few terse instructions, sullen and precise, when he left me there in the morning, but then as soon as he’d gone everything he had said became a haze. When he came back to check on me