it was to picture him stamping his feet over rotting teeth. Carmela took her sudden impatience to know where her life would take her as another painful reminder of her immaturity. A wise woman like her mother never let her thoughts race headlong into anything.
Another wave of energy bubbled up inside. She dropped a second mold into the whey, dipping her hands into white warmth. As she lifted it out of the pan, Carmela felt the liquid streak down her forearms. All her simmering thoughts evaporated into the milky air.
The sun began to hit the height of afternoon when the clatter of a vehicle brought everyone out from the back of the house, where lunch was drawing to a reluctant close. It wasn’t a sound any of them were accustomed to hearing there. A cloud of dust rose from the dirt track leading to the farm, which was set back almost a kilometer from the main road. The family would travel the three kilometers from town on foot or in Lucia’s fruit truck. The brothers paused to scrutinize, squinting into the near distance. As the vehicle reached the rusted gate, it stopped.
The engine fell silent.
Tomas marched over to the driver.
The family’s distrustful Sardinian glares scissored across the scorched earth. A serviceman got out of the jeep with one lithe jump. Nothing about the crisp white of his shirt, or sweat-free brow, suggested he had traveled from the base in a roofless vehicle under the unforgiving August heat. Tomas shook his hand and gave him a welcome pat on his back. Everyone shifted.
“L’Americano! Venite! Gather round!” Tomas called out, as the two turned and began their walk toward the group.
“And that,” Lucia muttered under her breath to Carmela, “is what tourists call a breathtaking view.”
Carmela flashed her aunt a disapproving frown.
“What? You don’t make babies sitting on the back pew.”
“This,” Tomas announced, “is Lieutenant Joe Kavanagh. He’s from the base.” He gestured to the mob. “Got a bit up here,” he said, tapping his temple. The officer flushed.
“He’s promised to help me get my hands on some equipment. Wants to see how we do things.”
The bashful lieutenant smiled as if he had understood every word of Tomas’s Italian. Although he appeared to hold substantial rank, judging by the appendages on his jacket, there was something about the way his knowing eyes swept over the land that suggested he was no stranger to farming. Carmela glanced at the faces around her but gathered little from their inscrutable, unblinking expressions. Tomas reached a warm arm around the soldier. “Is this how you treat a guest?” he called out to everyone. “Pour the man a drink!”
Maria, Lucia, and Carmela hurried back to the house as the men joined Tomas. Maria covered a tin tray with ridotto glasses and a green bottle of garnet-colored wine. Carmela placed a slab of pecorino onto a chopping board, uneven and scarred with scratches from years of use. Then she filled a basket with roughly torn strips of pane fino, the large circular flat bread for which the town was famous, along with a handful of small paniotte rolls she and her mother had baked that morning.
Tomas led the visitor toward the long wooden table under the shade of a gnarled vine canopy at the back of the cottage. Its legs were made from two wide oak trunks, a rugged altar at which feeders worshipped Maria’s cooking.
“This is the man you told me about?” Peppe whispered to his brother, as they sat down.
A handful of local young men, hired for extra help that week, straggled behind like a pack of dogs salivating for a treat.
“Play our cards right and we could do very well,” Tomas replied.
Tomas gestured for the American to sit. Carmela noted the lieutenant’s posture. He seemed so at ease, or else created an impeccable performance to that effect, even among this group of strangers intent on force-feeding him and making him drink into a fog. The men took their places on the benches and thrust a glass into Kavanagh’s hand, filling it to the rim with Tomas’s wine. Their glasses raised skyward. “Saludu!” Tomas called out.
“Salute,” the lieutenant replied.
That silken voice unlocked a memory.
Carmela stood by the door that led into the house, hovering between participation and service, the chopping board and basket still in either hand. She watched as the men coerced him into drinking in one gulp so they could refill. Peppe signaled to Carmela to pass the pecorino, made from their own sheep’s milk. She walked over to him and placed both board and basket before him, allowing him the honor of slicing the cheese. He carved out a generous slab, wrapped pane fino around it like a blanket, and bellowed across the table, “Tieni! Take it, Americano. God bless our sheep! God bless America!”
The men clinked to America and long life. Kavanagh was fed a sample of their ricotta too, and several slices of their homemade sausage, fragrant with fennel and thyme, balanced with just the right amount of salt. The group made easy work of polishing off three of them. When four bottles stood empty and the lieutenant still appeared intact, Tomas called down to Maria at the other end of the table. “Got ourselves a professional, Mari’. Bring out the hard stuff!”
She disappeared into the house, followed by Carmela and Lucia.
“Going to take more than wine to make this one dizzy,” Lucia whispered, frisky. “I’m going nowhere until that collar is undone and I get myself a look at more skin than just a neck. And those eyes, no? Clear like the Chia coves.”
Maria reached into the bottom of the wooden dresser and shook her head with a reluctant smile. She passed up glass bottles of homemade liquor to Carmela, for the tray; aqua vitae and Tomas’s fragrant mirto, an aromatic, potent after-dinner drink made from their native myrtle berry.
“Give it here!” Lucia exclaimed. “I’ll do the pass with the mirto, Mari’, get me a closer look!” With that she whisked the bottles out of Carmela’s hands before she could get them onto the tray. Carmela followed Lucia as she flew back out of the door, laying out fresh ridotto glasses before each man.
“Oh, here she goes,” Peppe said, as Lucia sidled up to the table. “Why must you always nosey about the men, woman? You stay in there and I’ll stay out here, and we’ll all go home happy!”
“Someone’s got to protect her beautiful nieces from you lot!” she replied, flashing Kavanagh a toothy grin.
The men laughed at the couple’s familiar repartee, which accompanied the end of most meals. Peppe fidgeted in his seat.
“Americano! Which one for you?” Lucia asked.
“Mirto, per piacere.”
A stunned pause fell over the merry group. His Italian impressed them. Mumbled surprise rumbled into clinking glasses. The men slurred wishes of good health as the initiation fast approached completion. The afternoon trickled through another bottle of each digestif, alongside plentiful servings of Maria’s seadas, thin pastry-encased slices of cheese, pan fried till crispy on the outside and oozing on the inside, topped with a drizzle of the neighbor’s acacia honey.
The setting sun cast its ruby glow over the men as they cajoled in a soup of half languages that everyone appeared to understand. The Americano started to gesticulate in Sardinian. Carmela noticed his hands were worn, those of a man
