The Family Corleone by Ed Falco

she’d make a little dish for him and their guests. Carmella would join him often, with the kids sometimes, and while the kids played in the yard, she’d listen as if once again fascinated while he explained to his neighbors how he carefully wrapped the tree in burlap and covered it with a tarp after each September crop of figs, bundling it up for the coming winter.
    Often, after work, even through the fall and winter, he’d stop by the courtyard to check on the fig tree before going up to the apartment. The courtyard was quiet, and though it belonged to the whole apartment building, the neighbors had ceded it to him without his asking. Not once in all the years he’d lived in Hell’s Kitchen—with the clatter of the freight trains rumbling down the streets, and the noise of car engines, and the ragman and the iceman and the peddlers and knife sharpeners shouting up at the buildings—not once in all the years he lived in that noisy part of the world had he ever found someone else sitting at his table, next to his fig tree. In August, when the first crop fattened and dangled under green leaves, he’d place a wooden bowl full of juicy figs on the first-floor landing in the morning, and when they were all gone by midmorning, Carmella would bring the bowl back up to her kitchen. The first fig of the season he kept for himself. With a kitchen knife, he’d slice through the mahogany-colored skin to the light pink flesh. In Sicily, they called this kind of fig a Tarantella. In his memory there was an orchard of fig trees behind his home, a forest of them, and when the first crop came, he and his older brother, Paolo, would eat figs like candy, stuffing themselves on the sweet, juicy fruit.
    These were some of the memories from his childhood that Vito cherished. He could close his eyes and see himself as a boy following in his father’s footsteps in the early morning, at the first light of day, when his father went out hunting, the barrel of the
lupara
slung over his shoulder. He remembered meals at a rough-hewn wood table, his father always at the head of the table, his mother at the other end, he and Paolo across from each other, facing each other. Behind Paolo there was a door with glass panes, and beyond the glass, a garden—and fig trees. He had to struggle to recall the features of his parents’ faces; even Paolo he couldn’t completely recall, though he had followed Paolo around like a puppy all the years of his life in Sicily. Their images had faded over the years, and even if he was sure he would recognize them instantly were they to come back from the dead and stand before him, still he couldn’t see them distinctly in his memories. But he could hear them. He heard his mother urging him to speak,
Parla! Vito!
He remembered how she worried because he spoke so little, and shook her head when he explained himself by shrugging and saying
Non so perché
. He didn’t know why he spoke so little. He heard his father’s voice telling him stories at night, in front of a fire. He heard Paolo laughing at him one evening whenhe fell asleep at the dinner table. He remembered opening his eyes, his head on the table next to his plate, awakened by Paolo’s laughter. He had many such memories. Often, after some brutish ugliness required by his work, he’d sit alone in his tiny courtyard, in the cold of New York and America, and remember his family in Sicily.
    There were also memories he wished he could banish. The worst of these was the picture of his mother flying backward with her arms flung open, the echo of her last words still alive in the air:
Run! Vito!
He remembered his father’s funeral. He remembered walking beside his mother, her arm around his shoulder, and the gunshots that rang out from the hills as the pallbearers dropped his father’s casket and scattered. He remembered his mother kneeling over Paolo’s dead body, Paolo, who had tried to follow the funeral procession looking down from the hills, and after