Stories: All-New Tales

and when one time I kicked one—

I do not remember why—he kicked me to

the floor and said not to touch his babies.

So I

carried

his rocks

when I should

have been carrying

schoolbooks, but I cannot

pretend I hated him for that.

I had no use for school, hated to

study, hated to read, felt acutely the

stifling heat of the single room schoolhouse,

the only good thing in it my cousin, Lithodora, who

read to the little children, sitting on a stool with her

back erect, chin lifted high, and her white throat showing.

I

often

imagined

her throat

was as cool as

the marble altar

in our church and I

wanted to rest my brow

upon it as I had the altar.

How she read in her low steady

voice, the very voice you dream of

calling to you when you’re sick, saying

you will be healthy again and know only the

sweet fever of her body. I could’ve loved books

if I had her to read them to me, beside me in my bed.

I

knew

every

step of

the stairs

between Sulle

Scale and Positano,

long flights that dropped

through canyons and descended

into tunnels bored in the limestone,

past orchards and the ruins of derelict

paper mills, past waterfalls and green pools.

I walked those stairs when I slept, in my dreams.

The

trail

my father

and I walked

most often led

past a painted red

gate, barring the way

to a crooked staircase.

I thought those steps led to

a private villa and paid the gate

no mind until the day I paused on the

way down with a load of marble and leaned

on it to rest and it swung open to my touch.

My

father,

he lagged

thirty or so

stairs behind me.

I stepped through the

gate onto the landing to

see where these stairs led.

I saw no villa or vineyard below,

only the staircase falling away from

me down among the sheerest of sheer cliffs.

“Father,”

I called out

as he came near,

the slap of his feet

echoing off the rocks and

his breath whistling out of him.

“Have you ever taken these stairs?”

When

he saw

me standing

inside the gate

he paled and had my

shoulder in an instant

was hauling me back onto

the main staircase. He said,

“How did you open the red gate?”

“It was

open when

I got here,”

I said. “Don’t

they lead all the

way down to the sea?”

“No.”

“But it

looks as if

they go all the

way to the bottom.”

“They go

farther than

that,” my father

said and he crossed

himself. Then he said

again, “The gate is always

locked.” And he stared at me,

the whites of his eyes showing. I

had never seen him look at me so, had

never thought I would see him afraid of me.

Lithodora

laughed when

I told her and

said my father was

old and superstitious.

She told me that there was

a tale that the stairs beyond

the painted gate led down to hell.

I had walked the mountain a thousand

times more than Lithodora and wanted to

know how she could know such a story when

I myself had never heard any mention of it.

She said

the old folks

never spoke of it,

but had put the story

down in a history of the

region, which I would know

if I had ever read any of the

teacher’s assignments. I told her

I could never concentrate on books when

she was in the same room with me. She laughed.

But when I tried to touch her throat she flinched.

My

fingers

brushed her

breast instead

and she was angry

and she told me that

I needed to wash my hands.

After

my father

died—he was

walking down the

stairs with a load

of tiles when a stray

cat shot out in front of

him and rather than step on

it, he stepped into space and

fell fifty feet to be impaled upon

a tree—I found a more lucrative use

for my donkey legs and yardarm shoulders.

I entered the employ of Don Carlotta who kept

a terraced vineyard in the steeps of Sulle Scale.

I hauled

his wine down

the eight hundred

odd steps to Positano,

where it was sold to a rich

Saracen, a prince it was told,

dark and slender and more fluent

in my language than myself, a clever

young man who knew how to read things:

musical notes, the stars, a map, a sextant.

Once I

stumbled

on a flight

of brick steps

as I was making my

way down with the Don’s

wine and a strap slipped and

the crate on my back struck the

cliff wall and a bottle was smashed.

I brought it to the Saracen on the quay.

He said either I drank it or I should have,

for that bottle was worth all I made in a month.

He told me I could consider myself paid and paid well.

He laughed and his white teeth flashed in his black face.

I was

sober when

he laughed at

me but soon enough

had a head full of wine.

Not Don Carlotta’s smooth and

peppery red mountain wine but the

cheapest Chianti in the Taverna, which

I drank with a passel of unemployed friends.

Lithodora

found me after

it was dark and she

stood over me, her dark

hair framing her cool, white

beautiful, disgusted, loving face.

She said she had the silver I was owed.

She had told her friend Ahmed that he had

insulted an honest man, that my family traded

in hard labor, not lies and he was lucky I had not—

“—did

you call

him friend?”

I said. “A monkey

of the desert who knows

nothing of Christ the lord?”

The way that

she looked at me

then made me ashamed.

The way she put the money in

front of me made me more ashamed.

“I see you have more use for this than

you have for me,” she said before she went.

I almost

got up to go

after her. Almost.

One of my friends asked,