Death Bliss

Masseria Armenise — Six Years Earlier

I wind my father's watch by candlelight, because the generator has been down since Tuesday and my uncle says a man who cannot live without electricity has already surrendered something he will spend the rest of his life trying to buy back. It is the kind of thing my uncle says to make thrift sound like philosophy. I have stopped correcting him. I am twenty-six years old and I have learned that some men mistake correction for challenge, and my uncle is one of the men in this house who cannot tell the difference, and telling him so would only prove his point.

The watch is heavier than it looks, gold-cased, the crystal cracked in the corner where I dropped it running from a wasp's nest when I was eleven. I never had it fixed. My father wore it whole for thirty years, and I like that mine tells a different story even while it keeps the same time.

Domenico is asleep two doors down, on top of his sheets in the heat, one arm flung over his eyes the way he has slept since he was small, since our mother used to come and move that arm so the light would not wake him and he would let her without ever quite waking. He is eighteen and he still sleeps like a boy who trusts the house around him. I have let him keep that. It is not a large thing to give a younger brother, a few more years of believing the walls are only walls.

Matteo knocks at eleven, the way he always knocks, a single flat sound that means someone wants you and does not intend to explain why. I am dressed already. I have learned, growing up in this family, that you dress for a summons the way you dress for a doctor's appointment you have been putting off — not because you expect bad news, but because bad news arrives whether you are ready or not, and being ready costs nothing.

“Your uncle asks you to walk with him,” Matteo says. “By the well.”

I have walked with my uncle by the well perhaps two hundred times in my life. He likes the well because the stone holds the day's heat into the evening and he says a man thinks better with warmth at his back. I have never once, in two hundred walks, thought he meant anything by it other than what he said.

I strap the watch to my wrist and I do not think about it again, which is the last ordinary thing I will ever do without thinking about it, though I have no way of knowing that yet. That is the cruelty of a good watch. It keeps perfect time and tells you nothing about how much of it you have left.

The courtyard is empty at this hour, the olive trees black shapes against a sky gone the deep unlit blue of an hour before true dark. I can hear the cicadas and, under them, the low tick of the cooling stone. My uncle is already at the well when I reach it, his hands folded behind his back, looking down into water he cannot see. He has done this my whole life — arrived first, so that you come to him, so that the meeting begins on his ground before a word is spoken.

“Lorenzo,” he says, without turning. “You favor your father more every year.”

“So Nonna Carmela tells me.”

“It is not only in the face.” He turns now, and in the last grey light his eyes are unreadable, which is not unusual — my uncle's eyes have been unreadable to me since I was old enough to look for something in them and find nothing looking back. “Your father believed a family survives by keeping its word. Every word. Even the ones that cost something.”

“I believe that too.”

“I know you do.” He says it gently, the way you might say it to a child who has just told you something true and sad about themselves without understanding either. “That is why I am glad you came to walk with me tonight, and not one of the others.”

I do not understand him. I will spend whatever time I have left not understanding him, and I do not know yet that the not-understanding is the mercy, that it is the only mercy he is going to give me. He reaches into his jacket, unhurried, the way a man reaches for reading glasses, and behind him the olive trees stand black and silver-green and utterly indifferent, the way they have stood for four hundred years, the way they will stand tomorrow when someone finds a watch in the grass beside the well, its crystal cracked in one corner, still keeping perfect time for no one.