The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner Page B

Gesuina announced, “but it’s plain this island can’t be left without a proper physician. Why, only a devil would try to drive you away!”)
    “We must lodge an appeal,” said Father Ignazio. Passing the baby between them in the dim lamplight of the cavernous kitchen, they drafted a letter to the government in Rome. Father Ignazio folded it in an envelope and put it inside his soutane to be sent with the fisherman Pierino, Pina’s cousin, to the mainland post the next day.
    —
    SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just after nightfall, there was a tapping on the window. It was Signor Dacosta, his hat in his hands. “
Signor il dottore,
little Agata is sick again,” he said, “and the new doctor says it’s nothing but croup. But she’s had croup already—you remember—and it wasn’t like this.”
    After some deliberation over the morality of his position—for he had been clearly forbidden to practice—Amedeo fetched his coat and hat and followed Dacosta out into the night.
    The Dacostas’ farm was the poorest on the island, between the dry southern side where nothing grew and the recently drained swamp. He found the child tossing drily in her tangled bedsheets, beside her sleeping brothers and sisters. He had suspected for some time that the girl was afflicted with asthma. He ordered a bowl of hot water to be brought, and made a tent of damp sheets over her head. “Lean forward on your elbows,” he exhorted her. “Breathe.”
    Gradually, in his arms, Agata gained her breath again.
    “I’ll not call that new fellow a second time,” said Dacosta. “He didn’t know anything about that trick with the sheets.”
    “She would have been fine either way,” said Amedeo. “Just frightened.”
    “That damned
cazzo
of a new doctor, frightening my child!” raged Dacosta. “I won’t stand for him. Thank you,
dottore
—I knew you could be relied on. And I don’t care whether you’ve been screwing with every woman on this island,” he added.
    —
    IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, he began to feel the tide shifting once again in his favor. For, confronted with this new outsider, the islanders now began to see Amedeo as one of their own. Others broke ranks and came secretly, by alleys and back ways, to summon Amedeo for their sick relatives. But these were the island’s poorest, the costs of whose treatment had been paid always by Amedeo’s salary from the
comune,
not out of their own pockets. These patients could not afford to pay him in money. And their gifts of vegetables and spindly chickens were not enough to keep any man’s body and soul together, never mind a wife and child.
    “We could go to Firenze,” Pina said. “We could live in an apartment in the city, and have hot running water and a newspaper seller just down the street, and listen to the bells from the Duomo every morning, and later we could send the baby to a proper school, and a university. No one from Castellamare has been to a university. I don’t know if it’s right, to bring up a child on this island. Won’t he just leave us? Won’t he go away to some city or some war, and we’ll never see him again? I would have done,” she concluded bitterly, “if I had been a boy.”
    “Give me time and I’ll make everything right,” Amedeo said, to distance himself from the day when he would have to think about leaving the island.
    —
    ON THE FIRST NIGHT in October 1920, he began to consider the house. It had been a bar; it could be so again. He summoned their friends. “What about the House at the Edge of Night?” he said. “It could be reopened. I could reopen it. I could make a living that way.”
    Rizzu spoke up: “But the place is falling down.”
    “It could be restored,” said Amedeo. “I could restore it.”
    “Ai-ee,”
said Rizzu. “No one would come to this old place.”
    Father Ignazio had been considering; now he spoke. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s an idea. D’Isantu is trying to drive you off the island. You’ll not get