Umbertina reddened; her desire for the rosemary was something else. She had heard Nelda say that she seasoned Don Antonio’s roast chickens and rabbit stews with it, and so, proudly, Umbertina had wanted some, too, for the day when she would have chicken just as the priest did.

Nelda told the story at the fountain the next day, and the women laughed and said Serafino was not getting a wife, he was getting another man in the family.

When the words got back to him, Serafino was unconcerned. “I am not worried,” he said. “My land will need all the men it can get.”

The parroco married them in the village church, and their wedding feast, paid for by Serafino, was held alfresco on his new land. They drank the thick red wine of the region and had pasta served with ricotta, hare stuffed with chestnuts and roasted over the hearth, dried figs stuffed with almonds, and panicelli d’uva passato, the exquisite little bundles of grapes wrapped in leaves and slowly roasted in ovens until they became juicy raisins still filled with the taste of sun and now sweet and savory from their wrappings and the permeating smoke of the chestnut twigs.

Near the doorway of the dwelling Serafino had built for them, Umbertina planted her rosemary. That night she lay in her husband’s bed. For the first time she felt Serafino’s hands on her body. They were no longer the soft hands of a shepherd who has absorbed the oils of the wool he shears, but the work-toughened ones of a laborer. Yet they were gentle on her body, caressing. And when he took her as his woman, his bride, she felt his tenderness envelop her. Armed only with the notion of marriage as a state meant for childbearing, she had imagined sex as something as primitive and crude as the rutting of goats in her flock. But it was not only duty and submission to become the wife of Serafino. For the first time in her life, in her bridal bed, Umbertina felt gentleness and the warmth of affection that binds man and woman more than passion. She would never know another way. Though she did not experience what she had heard the women at the fountain describe, she was still content. It was enough to be with a good man.

In time Serafino found a market for his first crops and was able to meet his interest payments. In more time, two sons, Giacomo and Benedetto, were born to them.

Serafino now had home, family, and work. But his eyes at times clouded with bewilderment. He was a man who had thought of love often, alone in the mountains with his sheep and alone in the middle of America. And Umbertina puzzled him; her face was soft, her body was soft, but there was in her a separate will that was hard and unyielding to him. It was not that she resisted his embraces, but that she took them only as part of the marriage bargain. He was tender with her; he wanted to treat her as a girl-wife, to hold her on his knee as he had done when she was a child, to caress her, but she did not want this from him. She brought him her strength and loyalty instead.