Unto the Sons Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes, by placing their hands within the folds of their long skirts and pointing their thumbs, which they would tuck under their forefingers, toward any potentially perilous individual. When the men of Maida sensed the closeness of curse-carrying strangers, they would usually place their hands deep into their pockets and quickly touch their testicles.
    If the farmlands were under attack by locusts or other crop-threatening pests, the village priest was summoned to read from a book containing certain prescriptive conjuring words that constituted a curse, and if the spring rains were excessively late, or during any prolonged period of treacherous drought, the statue of Saint Francis of Paola was taken from the church by the farmers and paraded slowly through the fields.
    In this hazardous hill country, ruled for centuries by a remote aristocracy that seemed too often irresponsible and inadequate if not always evil, the villagers were conditioned to petition heaven for comfort andsupport. From elderly fanatics like Domenico to younger skeptics like Gaetano—and to Gaetano’s son Joseph, my father, who made the transition from the Old World to the New—there existed a bond of belief in the God-appointed prowess of Saint Francis of Paola, the fifteenth-century mystical monk credited by eyewitnesses with resuscitating the dead, giving voice to the mute, realigning the malformed, multiplying food for the famished, and, during droughts, creating rain.
    One day, after discovering a parched valley south of Maida that demanded irrigation, Saint Francis was said to have walked a mile to the nearest spring and, with his staff, traced a line along the ground that led back to the acres of dryness. Soon a stream of water was following him along the line that he had drawn.
    On another occasion, after a ferryboat captain at the Strait of Messina, along the southernmost tip of Italy, had refused the saint’s request for a ride to Sicily, Francis had simply removed his large cloak and laid it flat on the sandy shore. Then, after hooking one end of the fabric to the edge of his staff and holding it up in the air like a sail, he was suddenly thrust forward by a gust of wind and placed softly on the sea, atop his raftlike cloak with its billowing improvised bow, which he then guided calmly across the four-mile strait onto the island of Sicily.
    Two hundred years earlier, in Sicily and southern Italy, the guiding force over the people was a papal loyalist named Charles d’Anjou, who had been urged by the Pope to eradicate from the land the last vestiges of the irreverent influence of the thrice excommunicated German ruler of Italy, Frederick II, whose hedonistic involvement with his harem, and halfhearted participation in the Church’s Crusades against Muhammadanism in the Middle East, had established him in Rome as a spiritual outcast.
    Brother of the devout King Louis IX of France (later canonized as Saint Louis), Charles d’Anjou came to Italy with pious credentials, which are exemplified in the large heroic painting of him that my father as a boy saw hanging in the Maida church where the Talese family worshipped. In the portrait, Charles is presented as a benign figure, almost enshrined in heavenly sunlight, being blessed by the Pope. According to my father, however, Charles d’Anjou’s thirteenth-century invasion and conquest of Frederick II’s dominions in southern Italy and Sicily was—quite apart from Charles’s building many splendid churches that pacified the papacy—more accurately characterized by the activities of his soldiers, who burned the crops of farmers, extorted money from men whom they later murdered, and abducted and raped women.
    Several years of such behavior finally led to a people’s rebellion, an eruption of such magnitude that it culminated in the death of two thousand French soldiers of occupation and quickly diminished the size and influence of Charles d’Anjou’s dynasty in the Kingdom of Southern