Sons of Thunder, page 3
In the distance, thunder shook the heavens, and it began to pour.
CHAPTER 3
“Please, Mama, don’t make me do this.”
Markos stood in the stone doorway of his bedroom where his mother thrust his clothing into a battered suitcase. Probably the one she’d carried from Athens.
This morning, with the storm clutter on the shore, the skies clear, the stench of death marinated their tiny stone house. No one came to visit, to stand vigil in the Stavroses’ grief, as if fearing the family, by one passionate act, cursed themselves and all at the wedding. In Zante, death had never arrived so abruptly, with such violence or arrogance.
Theo. Kostas. Galen.
And, if Yannis made good on his threats, Markos and Dino.
“You will go.” His mother walked over to the stack of books on the rough-hewn mantle, swept them off—classics he’d never read for himself, but the kind that would make his little brother, the one who actually listened to Mama’s readings, wise. The writings of Homer, including his poetry, a book by Aristotle, which always seemed to Markos to be a textbook, a history of Greece, the binding frayed and gray, and finally her holy book, a Bible she’d brought with her into marriage.
“Mama, you’re not listening to me. I’m not afraid of Yannis.” Although, the memory of his scrabble through the dark sand, a mutinous Dino in tow, curdled Markos’s words. Yes, last night, with the stench of Kostas’s blood on his hands, Yannis’s chilling threats chasing him into the storm, he’d been afraid. He had reacted on instinct, dragging Dino toward the safety of the docks and into the water, pinning him under the moorings of the fishing boats as a rabid Yannis searched for them, vowing his revenge until the storm drove him inside.
Hidden in the sea, Markos had gripped the legs of the pier, arms around Dino as the waves crashed into them. Lightning crackled against the pane of night, the thunder shaking his bones until, exhausted, he let the troughs sweep him to shore. There, they found shelter under an overturned skiff.
Morning burned him awake, and they’d skittered back to their house under the cover of dawn to find his mother packing their belongings.
“You may not be afraid—” His mother rounded on him, her eyes flashing, her face reddened with grief. “But I am. I—am.” She shook her head then, as if freeing herself from the darkness he’d seen flash in her eyes. It hollowed him out to see her like this.
Mama wasn’t fragile.
She dumped the books into the suitcase, grabbed the knitted blanket from his bed, wadded it, and threw it in on top.
“I don’t need a blanket—”
She turned and caught him, her strong, village-woman’s arms around his neck, bowing his head down to her bosom. Her chest heaved, as if she might be weeping, but she remained strangely silent. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around her waist.
She always smelled of olives and feta cheese, of cucumbers and roast lamb. He savored it.
Then, abruptly, she pushed him away. Found his eyes with hers, a power he’d never escaped. “You will go. You will take Dino, and you will be away from here and this place of grief. You will find my brother in America and you will start a new life—”
“What about you?”
She turned, closing the suitcase, shaking her head. “I will live with Zoë…on Ramone land.”
With Zoë’s widowed father? Markos said nothing about the strange taste in his mouth as he lifted the bag, followed his mother down the stairs.
Dino perched on a chair in the living room, his legs knotted to his chest. He’d said nothing—not a word—since Markos dunked him under the frothing black water. Since Yannis had marched down the pier shouting their name. Stavros! You will die, I swear it.
The worst part was the lingering fear that the village might agree with Yannis’s vengeance. After all, Theo had stolen Kostas’s bride.
And Markos had killed Kostas.
Markos pushed the thought away, fearing the swell of dark, rabid satisfaction.
Killed. He’d killed a man.
And death, in the crisp light of a summer morning, was not pretty.
Even when laid out on the kitchen tables in wedding clothes, faces cleaned, boots oiled. Theo’s head bore a clean white bandage, covering the debris of his wounds. Whoever said a dead man appeared as sleeping should take a closer look at the sagging cheeks, the sunken stomach, the whitened skin.
Markos looked away before he became sick. Again.
He had stumbled up the seaweed- and shell-strewn beach, past the taverna, past the blood on the stone floor, now dried nearly black, past the shattered plates and rancid lamb. Past the redolent casks of wine, and through the kitchen, to his home.
Stepping down into the main room, he had spotted Theo, still in his wedding clothes, his mouth open, as if in a silent scream, his body tossed onto the floor, disposed of by one of the village men. Zoë bent over him, shaking with grief, her moans almost guttural.
It was then Markos emptied his stomach for the first time onto the stones.
Now Markos glanced over at Dino, at his gaunt expression, and knew that to escape might be the only way to survive.
Either that, or allow the rage to pour into his empty spaces, to nourish. To rule.
His mother picked up a bag of food from her stone counter, shoved it into his hands. “This should keep you until you get to the ship. Your passage money is there—”
“Where did you get the money—”
She tightened her lips, gave a shake of her head, and he knew. Ramone. Still, he buried his words, seeing the pain furrowed into his mother’s face. Her cheek bore the blush of a bruise from Yannis’s hand.
Markos took the bag.
“Gaius Frangos will meet you at the pier. He is there now, waiting. And God bless him for his generosity.”
Gaius— “Sofia’s grandfather? Why?”
“He will go with you—he and Sofia had already arranged passage. He will stay with you until America and help you find the train to Chicago.” She turned and shoved an envelope into his hands. Stained, yellowed, the edges fraying. “This is from my brother, Dmitri. Find him, and he will take you in. I will try to send a telegram but…”
She shoved the envelope into his shirt pocket. Then she cupped her hand to his chin. “You will return, one day, Markos. I promise.”
She held his gaze, again, as if daring him to argue. He nodded, albeit caught on her words—Sofia had already arranged passage.
So, that was Sofia’s message—that she would leave him. He refused to recall her soft hand in his.
“Dino.” His mother’s tone softened. Dino looked at her, unwinding himself from the chair, moving toward them as if ill. He didn’t even look at their father, at Theo. Or, indeed. Markos, as he came to stand, lifeless, beside his older brother.
Mama swept him into an embrace. “You will listen to Markos. And you will read.” She let him go, wrapped her hands around his shoulders. He stood eye to eye with her, but even Markos felt tiny under Mama’s gaze. “You will become something—a doctor, or lawyer. A judge. You will be someone great, and leave your mark on the world.” She kissed him hard on his forehead.
He barely blinked.
She stepped back, nodding, her eyes back on Markos. “You are the eldest Stavros now, and it’s up to you to take care of him. Don’t let me down.” Her gaze turned fierce. “And learn how to write so you can send me a letter. I want to know you’re safe.”
“Yes, Mama.” His voice emerged as if from far away, and like Dino, he couldn’t move.
“And—oh, I nearly forgot. Wait—” She left him and disappeared into her room.
Wait. The word boiled inside him. Wait. Wait! Stop—he couldn’t leave, not with his brother’s body hardening on the table, his father’s fishing nets empty, his mother forced to leave her—
“Take this.” She shoved a coat into his hands. His father’s coat, worn on the cuffs, with the hand-carved buttons and salt dried into the wool. “He’d want you to have it.”
“Ma—”
“Please, Markos.” Only now did her voice break, just a crack, and perhaps it was this that made him take it. Then, her fingers still dug into the cloth, she stepped close. “Keep it, as if it were your life.”
He nodded, shot a glance at Dino. He hadn’t moved.
“Now go. Before Yannis sobers up.” She pressed her hand to his cheek, tears flush in her eyes. “Go, Markos. God will deliver you.”
She swept another kiss across Dino’s cheek.
Markos pulled the boy out after him.
The sand seeped into his shoes, hot and gritty as he plowed toward the pier, the suitcase banging against his knees. Dino stumbled beside him as if on a tether. Markos’s chest boiled, tears clogging his throat. He would not cry, would not turn back. Nor would he spare a glance to the sea, calm now after spending itself on their village.
No, he looked ahead, to the long wooden pier, jutting out like a gangplank into the sea. A seagull dove, chiding him, or perhaps he heard the cry that he longed to release.
The air smelled of a thorough scouring, raw and empty.
Beside him, Dino tripped. Markos grabbed him around the shoulders.
Sofia stood on the pier, her hair untied, the wind molding her dress to her body. Her blue eyes stayed expressionless as she watched them approach. He wanted to look away, to hate her for her omissions.
She had planned to leave him.
She held his gaze all the way up the dock to the very end, where the ferry to the mainland warned of its departure. He approached her silently until he thunked his case down next to hers. Only then did she look away. “I was going to tell you.”
He nodded, but nothing would emerge from his raw, stripped throat.
He’d never ridden the ferry to the mainland, always watched it motor up to the long Zante dock, park at the end. Two decks, with tall dark masts that speared the sky, the ferry resembled a great shoe, like a rhyme Markos had once heard. Travelers huddled on long open-air benches, or hung over the rails, their faces to the wind.
Gaius Frangos, gaunt, white-haired against his black wool fishing cap, his face saggy with years, approached him. “You won’t make any trouble.”
It wasn’t a question so much as a promise. Or an agreement. Markos nodded. But Gaius’s dark eyes darted to Sofia, then back.
Markos nodded again, swallowed.
He carried all their cases aboard then settled Dino on the top deck. Dino again drew his legs up, a fetal gesture.
The ferry whistled again, and only then did Markos surrender to the urge to look back.
Zante, with its blue-painted roofs, its whitened nest of buildings climbing a rocky slope to the Ramone olive grove above the town, glistening black and silver in the sun. The tinkling of goats, meandering out to the hills. The sea, now again quiet, having deposited the froth of its anger on the shore. The fishing boats, red, yellow, blue, listless at their berths as if in repose and grateful for a day to exhale, sails strapped against masts. Orange buoys floated in the bay. His gaze went to his bedroom window, the tiny one overlooking the sea, next to the taverna. For a moment, he thought he saw a hand. He lifted his own—
“Markos!”
His gaze jerked from his farewell to find the voice.
Lucien. Markos pulled his hand back, everything inside him seizing. Lucien ran down the pier, both hands above his head. Not the cheerful, Markos, take me with you lopsided grin on his gaunt face. No, this Markos! reeked of desperation, his eyes wild. “Don’t go!”
The ferry whistled a final time, the engines churning up water as the ferrymen loosened the riggings from the pier.
Lucien stopped at the end. His eyes finally found Markos. “Please—Markos!”
Markos gripped the slick, cold rail of the ferry. Stared at his friend, at the bruises darkening his eyes, the body that could slip through the water like a mackerel, the hands that had rescued him from the stone floor. Run!
Run, because Lucien had known his brother’s, his father’s intentions. Run, because Lucien was a Pappos.
Something inside Markos ripped free, and he released himself to the dark boil inside. He clenched his teeth. Narrowed his eyes.
Lucien lowered his hands.
Markos turned his back to him, his shadow long in the morning light across the deck as he returned to his brother. He draped Dino in his father’s coat and let the ferry steal them away.
CHAPTER 4
Markos had become a foreigner in his own skin. As if he’d left himself back on the dock or perhaps sitting in his square, white-washed window, the shutters wide, watching the sun’s blush on the waves creeping over the fishing boats and charming him to sea.
But not this sea. This sea he didn’t know, with its endless caldron of jagged valleys, edged with spittle, and at night, so black, the wind over it an endless lament. At night, the sky appeared so immense, yet miraculously intimate, it seemed he could pull the stars from their moorings. And, he’d never been so cold. A kind of chill that he couldn’t flee pressed into his bones, turning him brittle. The wind from this black, sometimes green sea—never his Ionian blue—moaned in his ears, burned his throat.
Most days, he wrapped himself into his blanket—the knitted wool a mockery against the shearing wind—and traced the mischief of the seabirds. Markos watched as the birds dipped into the troughs between the waves and let themselves be lured to the stern of the boat by children offering biscuits and smoked herring smuggled from the breakfast table. Once he’d spied an albatross, and something about the great span of its wings, riding the gales without effort, lodged a stone in his throat.
Three times he’d seen a whale, once with a calf. He’d watched them in anonymity for a full ten minutes before someone—one of the nearby bull-board players—happened to the rail in time for the spray of water from the blowhole.
He lost the view then, as the crowd pushed to watch, most of them also attired in their long-coats and rented steamer rugs. Only then did he notice Dino, swallowed in his father’s woolen jacket, expressionless, perched on a barrel near the slanted, marked board of the bull-board gamers.
Dino lifted his eyes to him, held for a moment, turned away.
Around him, the foreign syllables gnawed at his ears. At first, he had strained to make out anything familiar from the cacophony that rose from the dining room, but his brain burned with the effort and, after downing his porridge or milk scones, he escaped to his third-class berth, or better, to the steel-edged winds of the promenade deck.
His berth smelled too much of mildew, a prison that muddied his lungs, snarled him into his thoughts—Lucien, begging at the end of the pier. His father’s body, bloating in the morning sun. Mama, her chapped hands grasping her apron to draw it over her head as he’d left.
And Sofia. Standing at the rail as the ferry puttered away from shore, her face a stone. He’d found her there, braced against the wind as they’d neared the port in Peloponnesus.
Somehow, the eight-hour trip to the main peninsula had boiled his anger down, and although it remained a hot coal in the center of his chest, he’d found he could finally breathe around it by the time the sun nudged the dark waters.
Sofia had stiffened as he’d slipped up beside her on the way to Peloponnesus. He wanted to take her hand then, to find if it might be as warm as the night before. Instead, he clutched the rail, his hand inches from hers.
“Why did you not tell me that you were leaving?”
She didn’t look at him, and he found her just as beautiful in the outline of twilight, the sun a pink halo at her back, her blue eyes unblinking as the lights of the port town winked at them from shore.
“My grandfather decided only a week ago. He received a letter from his brother’s son, with tickets for our passage. And—I didn’t know—how to tell you.”
She shot him a quick look—fast, as though she feared him.
And for a second, he saw himself launching at Kostas. He may have even heard his own feral scream in the wind.
She drew away, wrapped her knobby wool sweater around her. A strong gust just might toss her into the churning waves. “Grandfather is feeling ill. I should check on him.”
They’d found passage to London on a ship through the Mediterranean—the SS Adriatic—and he thought perhaps Sofia would come to him, sit with him on the deck. But she hid herself away in her cabin, leaving him to roam the ship as the coastline slid by.
He longed for her song.
When they’d reached London, Sofia appeared drawn, her grandfather fragile, as they’d disembarked. Markos had purchased the passage for America on an American shipping line.
He bought tickets in third-class steerage, hoping he had enough for the train to Chicago.
During the journey to London, he’d sounded out his uncle’s letter then managed to find a map of America. Such a large country, and Chicago seemed so far to travel.
Not until he reached London and stood in the shipyard did he understand his mother’s instructions. Around him, families camped out upon their worldly belongings, fatigue scrawled in the eyes of the women, the children chasing seagulls or playing games between the crates and coiled ropes, fishing gear, and oil slicks. Everyone seemed skittish, unsettled. Clinging to their own.
Yes. He would go to Chicago, to be with his uncle’s family. Because they spoke Greek.
Markos stared at the foreign letters over the ticket counters, the same ball of heat in his chest that he felt every time his mother pulled Dino to her lap and they read aloud together. The fluency in their tones made him turn away, slam through the house, and out to the sea. It cooled him like nothing else could.
To live in America, he’d need family.
Just like in Zante.
The whistle for lunch blew, a high shrill that never failed to make him wince. He debated his hunger, then unwound himself from the deck chair. Dino had dug into their luggage and unpacked his mother’s books and now claimed a space in the shadow of an overturned lifeboat, The History of Greece in the nook of his up-drawn legs, the collar turned up on his coat. Markos nudged him with his foot. “Lunch.”
