The Night Falling

by Katherine Webb

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Puglia, 1921. Leandro Cardetta, born into poverty, emigrated to America to make his fortune and has returned home to southern Italy a rich man, accompanied by his glamorous wife, Marcie, an ex-showgirl fighting middle age. Now Leandro has money enough to hire renowned English architect, Boyd Kinsgley, to renovate a crumbling palazzo into an Art Deco statement of wealth, and host Boyd's teenage son and his diffident young second wife, Clare, for one extraordinary summer.

Under the burning sky, beyond the luxury of Leandro's home, tensions are high. Veterans of the Great War are desperate for work and food. Among these is Ettore, Leandro's nephew. Gripped by grief at the loss of his fiancée, Ettore has sworn to identify Livia's killer, and take his revenge. He is too proud to go to his uncle for charity, but when he injures himself one day, he has no choice but to knock on Leandro's door. Meeting Clare there will change everything - and in the most violent way.

During the fierce summer of 1921, all these lives converge. Exactly how did Leandro grow rich in America, and what is the strange hold he has over Boyd? What happened to the first Mrs Kingsley, and what secret haunts the outwardly exuberant Marcie Cardetta? Hearts will be broken, blood will be spilt and the hardest of life's lessons will be learnt as shadows fall.

Read by Anna Bentinck

Release date: March 26, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

Chapter One

Clare, afterwards

They must all change trains at Bari and the platform fills with shambling people, creased and surly like sleepers newly woken. Mostly Italians; mostly men. Clare takes a breath and tastes the sea, and suddenly she needs to see it. She goes alone, leaving everything she owns and not caring; walking unhurriedly when once she might have been anxious – fearful of theft, of impropriety, of the next train leaving without her. This new fearlessness is one of the things she has gained. Everything she’s seen and felt over the summer, every wild thing that has happened has purged the fear from her; but she doesn’t yet know if gains like this one will balance out the loss.

Bari’s city streets seem alien after so many weeks in Gioia and at the masseria; they are too big, too wide, too long. But there are the same knots of restless men, and the same feeling of waiting violence. Clare draws some curious looks as she goes, with her worn-out foreign clothes, her fair hair, her air of detachment. This could well be the last day she ever spends in Puglia – if the choice is hers, it will be. After today, after she rejoins the train, she will leave it and every second, and every passing mile, will carry her closer to home. This thought slows her steps. Home is not home any more. That, like everything else, has changed; home is another of the losses, stacked up against the gains. But as she continues to walk she wonders about it, and decides it could also be a good thing. A part of her release.

The pavement is lustrous, worn by use, polished by salt spray; gradually the light in the sky changes, and seems to lift and widen. Her gaze is drawn upwards for a moment, but then the street opens onto the quayside and the sea is there in front of her, with the early morning sun still soft on its surface, and the colour of it is a revelation. Clare walks to the very edge of the land, until all she can see is the blue. A blue that seems alive, that seems to breathe. This is what she was looking for, what she’d hoped to see. She lets the colour soak her, like it soaks the sky, and even though it’s painful it’s somehow still a comfort. A reminder to go forwards, and not look back. She stays there for a long time because she knows that when she turns away this colour – this exact blue – will be just another memory, the best and bitterest of all.

Chapter Two

Ettore

He has heard another man say, on the long, dark walk before dawn, that hunger is like a stone in your shoe. At first you think you’ll just ignore it – it’s an irritation, but it doesn’t really hinder you. But then it makes you limp, and makes it hard to walk. The pain grows. It cuts deeper and deeper into your flesh, crippling you, slowing your work, catching the corporal’s cruel eye. When it reaches the bone it grinds in and becomes a part of you, and you can think of nothing else. It rusts your skeleton; it turns your muscles to rotten wood. The man warmed to his theme as they trudged, and felt their bones rusting. He kept thinking of ways to embellish it, hours afterwards – the comments coming apropos of nothing and puzzling the men who hadn’t walked within earshot of him that morning – as their arms swung the scythes to cut the wheat, as the sun rose and burnt them, as blisters swelled beneath their calluses. Over the squeak and clatter of wooden finger-guards on wooden handles, his embellishments kept coming. Then it turns your blood to dust. Then it fells you. It creeps up your spine and lodges in your brain. And all the while Ettore thought it was a stupid comparison, though he said nothing. Because, after all, you could always pull off your shoe and kick the stone away.

He can’t kick his hunger away, any more than he could wake up if Paola didn’t shake him. She’s rough as she does it, and punches him if he doesn’t wake at once; her knuckles are sharp against the bones of his shoulder. She moves as briskly and abruptly in the pre-dawn darkness as she does at day’s end, and he doesn’t know how she manages it. How she has the energy, or how she sees so well in the dark. Other men, conditioned from childhood, wake of their own volition at three, at four, at five at the latest, but by then the chances of work are slipping away – it’s first come, first served, and the queues are long. Other men don’t need their sisters to rouse them as Ettore does, but without Paola he would slumber on. He would sleep the day away soundly, profoundly. Disastrously. For a few seconds he lies still, and asks nothing of his body. Just a few seconds of rest, in darkness so complete he can’t be sure whether he’s opened his eyes or not. There’s a smell of tired air, of earth and the rank stink of the prisor, which needs emptying. Even as Ettore notices it, the collector arrives outside – the slow plod of mule hooves in the small courtyard, the creaking of wheels.

‘Scia’ scinn!’ the collector calls, all weary and hoarse. ‘Scia’ scinn!’ Hurry up! Come down! Sighing sharply, Paola checks that the wooden lid is tight to the ceramic prisor pot, then hefts it up and carries it out. The stink gets stronger. In the dark, Paola says, at least your neighbours can’t see as you tip it into the collector’s huge barrel. But as the little cart moves away, jolting on the uneven stones, there’s always a trail of human waste on the ground behind it, slippery and foul.

Paola shuts the door gently behind her, and keeps her footsteps soft. It’s not her brother or Valerio that she doesn’t want to disturb, but her son, Iacopo. She likes the men out of the room before he wakes, so that she can nurse him in peace, but this rarely happens. With the scratch and flare of a match, and the growing glow of a single candle, the baby is awake. He makes a small sound of surprise and then mewls quietly in protest, but he is sensible and doesn’t cry. Crying is hard work. Part of the ammonia stink in the cramped room is coming from the child. Without water to wash him, or his blankets, it’s hard to get rid of the smell; there’s the sourness of vomit, too. Ettore knows that once she is alone Paola will wet a rag to clean him, but she’s careful not to let Valerio see her do so. He is fiercely jealous of their stock of water.

Livia. Ettore shuts his eyes on the candle flame; sees its red imprint on the inside of his skull. This is the order in which his thoughts run each day, every day: hunger, then the reluctance to rise, then Livia. Impulses really, rather than thoughts; Livia is as visceral, as connected to his body and his instincts rather than to his mind as the other two things. Livia. It’s less a word and more of a feeling, irresistibly linked to memories of smell and touch and taste and loss. Good losses as well as bad – the loss of care, for a moment; the loss of all responsibility, of all fear and anger, washed away by the simple joy of her. The loss of doubt, the loss of misery. The way her fingers would taste after a day spent cleaning almonds – like something green and ripe you could eat. The way she seemed to feed him, so that when they were together he forgot to be hungry. Just for that while. He can picture the exact grain of the skin on her calves, soft as apricots at the backs of her knees. And then there’s the loss of her, like a slash with ragged edges. Like the onslaught of ice a summer hailstorm brings: bruising, freezing, killing. The loss of her. The muscles around his ribs pull tight, and shake.

‘Up, Ettore! Don’t you dare go back to sleep.’ Paola’s voice is hard as well – it’s not just her face and the way she moves. Everything about her has gone hard, from the flesh on her bones to her words and the contents of her heart. Only when she holds Iacopo is there softness in her eyes, like the last remembered light after sunset.

‘You’re the stone in my shoe that I can’t ignore,’ he tells her, standing up, stretching the stiff cords of muscle that run down his back.

‘Lucky for you,’ Paola retorts. ‘If it wasn’t for me we’d all starve while you lay dreaming.’

‘I don’t dream,’ says Ettore.

Paola doesn’t spare him a glance. She crosses to the far side of the room, to the recessed ledge in the stone wall where Valerio sleeps. She does not touch him as she wakes him; she only speaks, loudly, near his ear.

‘It’s past four, Father.’ They know Valerio is awake when he starts to cough. He rolls onto his side, curls up like a child, and coughs, and coughs. Then he swears, spits, and swings his legs to the floor. Paola glares.

‘Vallarta again today, boy, if we’re lucky,’ Valerio says to Ettore. His voice rattles in his chest. Paola and Ettore share a quick, meaningful glance.

‘Best hurry then,’ says Paola. She pours them both a cup of water from a chipped amphora, and the ease with which she does it shows that the jar is already less than half full. Paola must wait for their appointed day before she can go to the fountain for more – it’s either that or buying it from a dealer, which they cannot do. Not at such prices.



Masseria Vallarta is the biggest farm near Gioia, some twelve hundred hectares. It’s one of the few, even now at harvest time, that has been hiring men every day. Before the war this was the one time of year when work was guaranteed – weeks of it. The men would sleep out in the fields rather than bothering to walk back and forth every morning and night; waking with soil in the creases of their clothes and dew on their faces, and the bite of stones underneath them. The debts of the winter could finally be earned back, and paid off – the rent on their measly apartments, bills for food and drink and gambling. Now, even the harvest is no guarantee of work. The proprietors say they can’t afford to hire the men. They say that after last year’s drought, and the vacuum of the war, they are going out of business. If they are hired to Masseria Vallarta today, Ettore and Valerio will walk ten kilometres to reach the farm, and start work at sun-up. There’s no food from the night before; they ate it all. There might be something at the farm for them, if they are hired, though it will come out of their wages if there is. The men stamp their feet into their boots, button their battered waistcoats. And as he goes out into the cool of the morning, into the ageless shadows of the little courtyard and the narrow streets that lead to Piazza Plebiscito, where they will queue for work, Ettore makes his promise. He makes the same promise every morning, and means it with every fibre of himself: I will find out who did it, Livia. And that man will burn.

Chapter Three

Clare

It’s always a shock to see how much Pip has grown during term time, while he’s away for weeks on end, but this time it seems like something more fundamental has changed. Something more than his height, the length of his face or the width of his shoulders. Clare studies him, and tries to put her finger on it. He has fallen asleep with his head against the dusty window of the train and his dog-eared copy of Bleak House resting against his chest. Fine strands of his hair have fallen forward onto his forehead, and shake with the movement of the carriage. With his eyes shut and his mouth drooping slightly open, she can still see the child he was. The little, lonely person she first met. His face is more angular now – the jaw stronger, the brows heavier, the nose slightly longer and more pointed. But his light brown hair is as flyaway as ever, and he doesn’t need to shave yet. Clare looks closely, checking. There’s no shadow of whiskers on his chin or top lip. Her relief at this is profound, and makes her uneasy.

She turns to look out of the window. The landscape is unchanging. Mile after mile of farmland; wheat fields, for the most part, interspersed now and then with orchards of faded olive trees, and gnarled almond trees with their trunks twisted and black. When Pip is a man, an adult, when he finishes all his schooling, when he leaves home for good … Clare swallows, fearfully. But she can’t prevent it, of course. She can’t cling on to him. She won’t let herself. Perhaps this is what has changed, this time: he’s become enough like a grown man that she can no longer deny it’s happening, and that one day soon he will separate himself from her, and start his own life. She’s not his mother, so perhaps she should feel the wrench of this a bit less. But a mother has an unbreakable bond, the bond of blood and heritance, of knowing that her child was once a part of her, and in some ways always will be. Clare doesn’t have that. Her bond with Pip feels more breakable, more delicate; perhaps every bit as precious, but also with the potential to melt away without trace. She fears that most of all. He is only fifteen, she reassures herself. Still a child. The train gives a lurch to one side, and Pip’s head bangs against the glass. He starts awake, snapping his mouth closed, squinting.

‘All right there, Pip?’ Clare says, smiling. He nods affably.

‘We must be nearly there.’ He yawns like a cat, unashamedly. His teeth are just starting to crowd at the front, jostling for space.

‘Pip,’ she protests. ‘It’s like staring into the abyss.’

‘Sorry, Clare,’ he mumbles.

‘We are nearly there.’ Clare gazes out at the bleached grass of a field, blurring past. ‘We must be nearly there.’

Her mouth feels as stale as her crumpled clothes and her sticky skin. The train is stuffy, airless – it’s no wonder Pip keeps nodding off. She might have done so herself, but Boyd cautioned her about the Italians and their light fingers, so she’s too worried about their purses and possessions, and what Boyd would say if they were robbed after he’d warned her. She wants to stretch her legs and wash her hair, but at the same time, as a few scattered buildings come into view, she suddenly doesn’t want to arrive at Gioia del Colle. There’s something wonderful about travelling – about being moved across the long miles of the earth with no sense of responsibility, their aim achieved purely by waiting patiently. And, because she and Pip are alone in the compartment, there’s only the ease and pleasure of his company. No manners to be minded, no struggle to find small talk. Their long silences are thoughtful, companionable, never uncomfortable. And she’s also nervous about what waits at the end of the journey.

Boyd has committed them to spending the entire summer with people she has never met, and knows precious little about. No amount of protest would sway him from the plan; and she couldn’t even write down her reluctance in a letter to him, as she preferred to – to make sure she kept her argument straight and her tone of voice even. Not when he was already out in Italy, and the instruction for her and Pip to join him came faintly down a rustling phone line. In desperation she’d suggested a fortnight, rather than the whole season, but Boyd hadn’t seemed to hear her. And just like that, the restful summer at home she’d been looking forward to – alone with Pip, watching the sweet peas climb their bamboo canes and playing whist in the shade of the high garden wall – had vanished. The Italians who will be their hosts are clients of Boyd’s; Cardetta, an old acquaintance from New York, and his wife, who is charming. Beyond that, she knows only that they are rich.

The train has passed cone-shaped huts built of rock, like strange hats discarded by stone giants. It has passed fields full of working men, swinging scythes; dark, thin men who did not look up as the train clattered by. It has passed small carriages pulled by donkeys, and farm wagons pulled by oxen, and not a single motor car. Nothing, beyond the train itself, to betray that the year is 1921, not 1821. Clare is struggling to picture what rich might look like, this far south; it worries her that there might not be electricity, or indoor plumbing; that the water might make them sick. In the north they say that the country south of Rome is best avoided, and that the country south of Naples is a barren no-man’s-land, peopled by sub-humans – a godless, under-evolved race too base to drag itself out of poverty and dissolution. Pip’s school had been happy to release him early for the summer break when she wrote to say that they would be taking him to Italy. What better way for Philip to finish the academic year than by visiting the very treasures of art and civilised thought he has spent the recent months studying? wrote the master. Clare let him picture Rome, Florence and Venice, since that was the conclusion he’d leapt to, and left it at that. She herself has never heard of any of the major towns here in the south: Bari, Lecce, Taranto. And the town where they are headed, Gioia del Colle, was difficult to find on the map.

Just half an hour later the train creeps into the station, between two near-deserted platforms. Clare smiles at Pip as they stand and stretch and gather themselves, but it’s she who wants reassurance, not Pip. Hot, heavy air is the first thing to greet them, and it has the smell of blood on it. The unmistakable metal reek of gore. The deep, fortifying breath Clare had been taking sticks in her throat, and she looks around, repulsed. The sky is an immaculate blue, the sun low and yellow in the west. They move away from the hissing train, and the buzz of insects fills their ears.

‘What’s that smell?’ says Pip, holding the creased sleeve of his blazer to his nose. But then they hear a shout, and see a figure waving from the window of a car.

‘Ahoy, dearly beloveds!’ Boyd’s voice is tight with excitement. He waves his hat and laughs, and when he emerges from the vehicle it’s with an unfolding of long limbs, the unfurling of a long spine. He is tall and narrow and, ever fearful of appearing clumsy, he moves with exaggerated grace.

‘Ahoy!’ Clare calls, relieved. She has brought them this far, and has the soothing feeling of handing control back to her husband. She and Pip cross quickly to the car, and Clare turns to wave the porter over with their luggage.

‘Make sure you’ve all your bags. I wouldn’t put it past them to miss one and carry it all the way to Taranto,’ says Boyd.

‘No, this is all of them.’ Boyd hugs Clare, hard, then turns to Pip and hesitates. This is new, too – this slight awkwardness between them. It tells Clare that Boyd can see his son’s encroaching adulthood just as clearly as she can. They shake hands, then smile, then bashfully embrace.

‘Philip. You’re so tall! Look – far taller than Clare now,’ Boyd says.

‘I’ve been taller than Clare since the Christmas before last, Father,’ Pip points out, slighted.

‘Have you?’ Boyd looks troubled; his smile turns strange, as though he ought to have known or remembered this. Clare is quick to deflect him.

‘Well, you do spend most of your time sitting in a chair, or on a bicycle, or in a boat. It’s hard to tell your height,’ she says. Just then the breeze blows and brings the tang of blood and violence anew. Boyd pales; what’s left of his smile vanishes.

‘Come on, climb in. The slaughterhouse isn’t half a mile south of here, and I can’t bear the smell of it.’

The car looks brand new, although there’s a fine veil of dust dulling its crimson paintwork. Pip examines it at appreciative length before they climb in. The driver, dark and inscrutable, barely nods at Clare as he and the porter secure their bags, but his eyes return to her, again and again. She tries not to notice. He would be handsome but for a harelip; a neat divide in his upper lip, and in the gum behind it, where his teeth are twisted and uneven.

‘You might get a few looks, dear girl,’ Boyd tells her in low tones, as the car pulls away. ‘It’s the blond hair. Rather a novelty down here.’

‘I see,’ she says. ‘And do you get looks, too?’ She smiles, and Boyd takes her hand. His hair is also fair, though now it’s filling with grey it looks more silvery, and seems to have an absence of colour. It’s thin across the top of his scalp; his hairline has crept back and back from his forehead and temples, like an ebb tide slipping from a shore. This is what Clare notices about him when they have been apart for a while, though this time it has only been a month: that he is growing old. He asks how their journey was and what they saw, what they ate and if they slept. He asks how their garden in Hampstead looked, before they left it, and when Pip’s school report is due. He asks all this with a strange desperation, a kind of manic neediness that immediately puts Clare on edge, at some bone-deep level where memory and experience reside. Not again, she begs silently. Not again. She sifts hurriedly through her mind for something she’s missed – some sign, something he might have said on the phone, or before he even left; some hint of what the problem might be. She has done as he asked, and brought herself and Pip all this way to him, and yet there’s something wrong. There’s clearly something wrong. They leave the station behind in a cloud of pale dust, and though fresher air comes pummelling in through the windows, Clare is certain she can still smell blood.

Chapter Four

Ettore

Piazza Plebiscito is full of men dressed in the typical black. These are the giornatari, the day labourers; men with nothing to their name, and no means to feed themselves but the strength of their backs. In the shadowy dawn they are a dark scattering against the pale stones of the pavement. The murmur of voices is low; the men shuffle their feet, cough, exchange a few low words. Here and there an argument starts, shouts ring out and there’s a scuffle. Once he and Valerio are in their midst Ettore can smell the grease in their hair, the sweat of all the days before on their clothes, the hot, stale fug of their breath. It’s a smell that has been with him, all around him, since the first days he can remember. It’s the smell of hard work and scarcity. It’s the smell of men as animals, muscle and bone made hard by graft. The overseers are there, on their horses or standing holding them by the reins, or sitting in little open-topped carts. They hire five men here, thirty there; one shepherd wants a pair of men to help trim his flock’s feet. It’s easy work but he can pay next to nothing, and the men eye him in disgust, knowing that one or other of them will have to take his low wages.

This is how it was always arranged, until the Great War. Those that want work come to the piazza, those that want workers meet them there. A wage will be offered, and men selected. There is no negotiation. Then, after the war, things changed. For two years, things were different – the worker’s unions and the socialists won some concessions, because during the war men like Ettore and Valerio, who had so little cause to fight, were promised things to keep them in the trenches. They were promised land, better wages, an end to the unending hardship of life, and afterwards they fought to make the landowners and proprietors keep those promises. For a few febrile months, it seemed like they might have won. They established a closed shop of labour, in which only union men could be hired, and no one from outside the county. Wages and hours were fixed. The labour exchange kept a roster to make sure each man got his fair share of work, and there was to be a union representative on each farm, to make sure conditions were met. This was only the year before, towards the end of 1920. But somehow it’s all coming unravelled again. The tide in this simmering feud, which is generations – centuries – old, has turned again.

It’s a strange conflict – one around which everyday life keeps moving like a river around rocks. It has to, because the men must eat, and to eat they must work. So life must go on, even when the rocks in question are things like the massacre at Masseria Girardi Natale, the summer before, when workers armed with only their tools and their anger were shot down by the proprietor and his mounted guards. Now the contracts all the proprietors signed are being ignored, and men who protest aren’t hired. There are rumours of a new type of brute squad: teams of thugs led by veteran officers – captains and lieutenants tainted by the madness of the trenches, who remember the peasants’ reluctance to fight, and despise them for it. The peasants are used to hired gangs – mazzieri, named after the mazza, the cudgels they carry – but these new ones are something else. They are being armed and abetted by the police, unofficially of course. And they have a new name – they are the fasci di combattimento. They are members of the new fascist party. And they have a single-mindedness that’s scaring the men.

Some nights Ettore goes to a bar and reads the newspapers out loud to the unlettered. He reads from the Corriere delle Puglie, and from La Conquista, and from Avanti!. He reads of attacks on syndicalist leaders, on chambers of labour, and on socialist town halls in other towns. In Gioia del Colle, the old way of recruiting has slowly crept back into the piazza, and the two sides stare at one another across this bitter divide – workers and employers. Each waiting to see who will blink first. In February there was a general strike in protest at the massing and arming of the new squads, and their brutality, and the breaking of the contracts. The strike held for three days but it was like a finger pressed to a widening crack in a dam; a dam behind which the tide is rising inexorably.

Ettore and Valerio push their way towards the overseer from Masseria Vallarta; a man well into his sixties with drooping white moustaches and an immobile expression, as solid and unreadable as the trunk of a tree. Pino is already there; he catches Ettore’s eye and jerks his chin to greet him. Giuseppe Bianco; Giuseppino; Pino for short. Pino and Ettore have lived shoulder to shoulder since they were in the cradle. They are the same age, have seen the same things, suffered the same hopes and hardships; they’ve had the same patchy, soon-curtailed education, and had wild times at Saint’s Day festivals more pagan than holy. They’ve been to war together. Pino has the face of a classical hero, with enormous soft eyes, warm and brown rather than the usual black. He has curved lips, the upper protruding slightly over the lower; curling hair and an open expression far out of place in the piazza. His heart is open too; he’s too good for this life. There’s only one thing the two men do not share, and it’s driven a wedge between them this year: Pino is married to his sweetheart, but Ettore has lost his. All the girls used to quarrel to catch Pino’s eye. They knew a soft touch when they saw one, and fancied waking up next to that face for the rest of their lives. Now that he’s wed some of them try just as hard, but Pino is faithful to Luna, his wife. Little Luna, with her buoyant breasts and her hair hanging right down to the broad spread of her buttocks. Pino is the only man Ettore knows who can find a real smile before dawn in the piazza.

He smiles now, and thumps Ettore’s upper arm companionably.

‘What’s new?’ he says.

‘Nothing at all.’ Ettore shrugs.

‘Luna has something for the baby. For Iacopo,’ says Pino, and looks proud. ‘She’s been sewing again – a shirt. She’s even stitched his initials into it for him.’ Luna works in fits and starts for a seamstress, and carefully collects whatever scraps of thread and fabric she can spirit away. There’s never enough to make clothes for adults, but Iacopo now has a vest, a hat and a pair of tiny slippers.

‘She should be setting such things by for when you have your own baby,’ says Ettore, and Pino grins. He longs for babies – a herd of them, a flock. How or whether they’ll all be fed is not something he lets worry him. He seems to think they’ll be self-sustaining, like hearth spirits or will-o’-the-wisps, like putti.

‘Iacopo will have outgrown them by then. I’m sure Paola will lend them back.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘You mean she’ll want to keep them, to remember how little he was?’ says Pino. Ettore grunts. What he’d meant was that he’s not so certain Iacopo will outgrow the little things so soon. His nephew is reedy and too quiet. So many babies die. Ettore frets about him, frowns over him. Whenever Paola sees this she shoves him away, and curses. She thinks his anxiety will coalesce and bring some grim prophecy down on her son.

The man from Masseria Vallarta takes a sheaf of paper from his pocket, unfolds it. The waiting men focus their attention on him, watching with steady expectation. It’s a strange ritual – the farm has a harvest to bring in and the men all know it, but even so, they do not trust the man. They do not trust that they will have work until they are standing in the field, working. They do not trust that they will be paid until the bailiff puts the coins into their hands the Saturday after. The overseer catches Ettore’s eye and gives him a hard stare. Ettore stares right back at him. He is a union man, and the overseer knows it; knows his name, and his face. Some have led the strikes and the demonstrations while the others followed, and Ettore is one of the first kind. Or he was – in the six months since he lost Livia he’s done nothing, said nothing; he’s worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, ignoring his hunger and his exhaustion. In all that time, he has spared not a single thought for the revolution, for his brothers, for the starving workers or the ever-present injustices, but th