All Chapters of Death Bliss: Chapter 61 - Chapter 63

Four days of quiet rearrange the masseria into something I have no name for. The courtyard stays empty where the capos stood formation. The gate stays open. Salvatore is gone, the neutral faction men are gone, the Camorra brokers are gone, and the only vehicle that comes up the valley road is the priest's battered Fiat, which Nonna Carmela waves through without asking anyone's permission.My shoulder heals slowly. The wound pulls when I forget and reach for something with my left hand, and I forget often. I have spent the mornings walking the olive groves, not inspecting and not surveying, just walking. The trees do not care who holds the deed. They drop their fruit on the same earth whether a syndicate owns it or a steward does, and I have decided I am the steward.I learn the groves again. Not the way I knew them at twenty-four, when every tree was a perimeter marker and every sightline was a vulnerability. I learn them the way my grandfather might have, before the heroin money and

The nets go down at first light, and by the third morning I have stopped counting the trees.That is the thing I did not expect. I counted everything in this house for thirty-six days. Steps down the storm corridor, sconces on the old wiring, the angle of the shadow the north wall throws across the gravel, the seconds I let a silence sit before I filled it. Counting was how I kept the ground underneath me. Now it is the second week of November, the harvest is four days old, and I stand under the oldest tree in the north grove with a rake in my hands and no idea how many times I have swung it.The fruit comes down in a green and purple rain. It rattles on the net, and the sound is nothing like anything I heard here in August, when every sound in this valley was a sound someone had made on purpose.My hands have changed. The cramp in my right hand used to live in the web between thumb and forefinger, a translator's cramp, the one I have carried since graduate school. It has moved. It si