No one spoke. The weather changed as they sat there—a sudden squall had come up and it began to rain. Wet and shivering they cloaked themselves in their coarse mantles and shawls and sat patiently among their bundles, knowing as always that they could do nothing against the elements. Patience had always been their lot.

Zeno Saccà wandered among the other groups, talking with the men. When he came back, he said to Serafino, “A priest is coming to give benediction before we leave.”

Cristina Muzzi was moaning and holding her head in her hands. “It is a sign, this storm. It is bad luck. I never wanted to go from my home. It is not right to be forced. . . .” She was frightening the children. “Will you go back to Castagna then?” Umbertina asked impatiently, constraining her to silence.

They waited while the dazio checked the discharged cargo and passengers from the Messina boat. The two boys dozed, huddled against Umbertina while she sheltered the baby against her heart beneath the protection of her shawl.

They stayed there in the growing dark, the whole group of them huddled together with their children clutching them, their few sacks of belongings at their feet. A few children whimpered, many slept in their mothers’ arms. They were waiting for the priest and his voice of reassurance. It was somehow fitting that they should leave at night, slipping away like shadows from the country that had not wanted to hold them.

Serafino squatted next to Umbertina. “Are you tired?” he asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders in a noncommittal gesture. The women of Calabria are not often asked how they feel, and again Umbertina was ashamed of her behavior, for Serafino was not like the other men. There was a cry from one of the groups: “The priest is coming!”

The priest was a simple unshaven man who looked almost as poor as the group on the beach. The rain had stopped, but the sea was turbulent and a wind was growing, making some of the men mutter with apprehension while the women shivered and moaned among themselves. A man approached the priest and said, “We would feel better about setting out from our land if it were not on a sea like this, which will frighten our women and children, who have, already, enough fears of what is beyond. Can you persuade the captain to stay over until morning?”

The captain had come ashore with the last rowboat to consign some papers to the officials. When the priest put the matter to him he answered roughly, “Tomorrow morning I’m expected in Naples and that’s where I’ll be.” Then he signaled to the emigrants to get into the boats that would take them to the steamer.

“You might add ‘If Gods wills it,’ ” the priest said quietly.

“If He wills it or not, I’ll be in Naples tomorrow,” the captain said curtly, and the people quickly blessed themselves and murmured at that defiance. They, in their lives, had never before knowingly defied fate; now they saw the journey itself as a great defiance of Providence.