Under a Sardinian Sky by Sara Alexander

Author:Sara Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

On the following Monday, there was a hint of autumn in the sea breeze that swished the parched brush. Carmela took large strides, clopping downhill in her red leather shoes that scuffed against the white dust. Her uncle Raimondo, Tomas’s younger brother, had made them for her twenty-first birthday. He had let her choose the color and the style. She loved the smell of leather inside his narrow shop beneath the cobbled arches just beyond the piazza. When they had been young children, she and Piera would often hover at the back of his store where he kept the scraps. Raimondo would set down a small crate full of them and let the girls play. Sometimes he might give them some to take home to make garments for their dolls, only Grandmother Icca would confiscate them and put them in a large box above one of the kitchen cabinets to keep them safe. From what, Carmela never found out. As a child she succumbed to the belief that transparent elves hid beneath their high, metal-framed beds and snuck out at night to plunder their home. The same fate befell the candied delights cousins would bring over on feast days.

This morning, those shoes filled her with childlike energy. She felt light, expansive. The world was in her grasp. She and Kavanagh were to visit the last farm on their list, the Toiedda family, several miles away. She cast aside the little voice reminding her that after today she may never again ride beside Kavanagh in his rattling jeep, with the wind flying through her hair, while the high summer sun blazed down on them.

Instead, she remembered the numerous times she had walked past the Toiedda land with her family, during the annual pilgrimage to Castro, a medieval church that stood high upon a hill in the middle of the plains. The walk would begin before dawn. Hundreds of Simiuns would trek under the stars, come rain or shine, until the pink sun rose and the spring wind swept through the valley. When the pilgrims finally arrived at the summit, they would huddle in and around the church, most of them in the courtyard, for the stone sanctuary only accommodated a minuscule congregation. They would murmur the rosary in unison, as they had throughout the ten-kilometer pilgrimage from Simius. After celebrating mass, the women would unwrap packages of fresh bread and cheese. The men would eat and drink together on one side of the church. The women would sit and swap tales of past pilgrimages on the other, drawing inventories of how many elderly had perished during the arduous walk in the past, who had given birth upon the hill, and what kind of summer they could expect based on the direction of the wind that day, the blossoms, or the hue of the sunrise. The walk back felt shorter. Carmela’s sleep on those nights was always deep and dreamless.

These pictures replayed in her mind as she reached the main entrance to the base, once again a place of work, no longer ringing with festivities.

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