Donato Palmieri left Galatina before the sun came up.
The road south was straight and dark, the olive groves beginning immediately beyond the verge on both sides, the trunks dark in the headlights and the canopies invisible against the pre-dawn sky. He had driven this road to the grove every morning of every harvest since he was eighteen and he was fifty-two now, and the road had not changed in any way that he had noticed. The bridge over the drainage channel. The track that turned right toward the Mauro farmstead. The white stone wall where the road lifted briefly over the limestone ridge before dropping back to the flat.
He turned onto the unpaved track that led into the family's grove and stopped the truck at the iron gate. The gate was painted green, the paint worn at the latch where he lifted it each morning. He lifted it now, swung it open, drove through, and got out again to close it behind him. His father had set this gate in the wall when Donato was twelve, replacing the wooden gate that had finally rotted through after many decades of wet winters. The iron gate had been here for forty years and showed no sign of following its predecessor.
The grove was twenty-two hectares and the trees were old. He drove the track slowly with the window down, listening to the familiar sound of the tyres on the compacted dirt. The headlights swept across trunks as the track curved. The oldest trees were on the eastern edge, the section he would work last in this harvest because the terrain there was rougher and the trees larger and required more time.