There could be no reasonable objection after that. They would marry when Serafino had regained his health and had purchased some land that would soon be put up at auction.

As for Umbertina, when Serafino’s offer was announced to her she never considered not accepting. She knew that if she had strongly objected her father would not have forced her. But why should she object? What was important to her was that Serafino represented something new in her life. He had been to America, he knew the way.

In life there were few choices. In the hills and woods and village that were the only world she knew, she grew up with gravity already in her spirit; she observed the hardness of life with seriousness; and if it ever should happen, as it had to Serafino when he went to the New World, that she be given a choice of things, she would make the best choice and not repent afterward. And so she accepted her betrothal to Serafino.

Besides, she liked him. She liked his blue eyes and mild ways. She trusted him and she understood, too, the advantage of marrying l’americano, as Serafino was now known in the village. He was a man who had gone beyond the confines of his country and had learned something of men, and the world beyond. And he had brought back savings.

When she next saw Giosuè she said, “It is my father’s wish that I marry Serafino Longobardi.” She wanted to give back the tin heart, but Giosuè made an angry gesture with his hand, stopping her. She respected his anger and turned away. In his eyes mixed with the anger was the resignation of those who have nothing to hope for.

Umbertina looked ahead. She went to Nelda, the priest’s housekeeper, who had a loom. “I want a coperta matrimoniale for the wedding bed,” Umbertina said, “such as I have seen hanging from balconies in Soveria Mannelli on Corpus Christi day.” The bedspread was the one thing she would bring to her new home and she wanted it beautiful and strong, to last forever. It was to be the traditional design of the countryside: brightly colored yarn embroidered in bunches of grapes, fig leaves, twining ivy, flowers, and the stylized hearts on the bright yellow-orange ground of thick homespun.

She went to visit Nelda every week, to see how the spread was coming. She liked going to Don Antonio’s home, which stood next to the church beneath a giant and ancient tree that spread its branches over the whole of the tiny piazza overlooking the valley. Don Antonio’s garden was filled with rows of tomatoes, beans, eggplant, basil, and bushes of fragrant rosemary that bloomed with a blue flower in the spring. Sheltered against the wall were fig trees and lemons. He had flowers, too, which Nelda picked each Sunday for the mass. He ate well, for he kept chickens and rabbits, and even his chickens ate well. Umbertina had seen Nelda scattering crusts of stale white bread from the priest’s table—a bread she had never tasted—on the gravel around the house in which the chickens scratched. Nelda baked fresh loaves of white bread once a week, and Don Antonio was given wine by the peasants as payment for baptism. He had books in his rooms and he gave lessons in Latin to the sons of those who could afford it, like the pharmacist or tobacconist. Don Antonio was the highest person in the village and next to him Umbertina’s father was nothing. Not so Serafino. Though he was illiterate and had been a poor shepherd, the pittance of money he brought from America made a difference.