______________________
Susan Anderson is a writer, mother, grandmother who has taught language arts and creative writing. She is currently at work on an anthology of short stories and the umpteenth draft of a novel, Serafina and the Brazen Serpent. Her fiction deals with migration in its various forms.
Susan Anderson
Dust
Sicily, 1901
On a late afternoon in July, two friends sat near the statue with the missing hand. The dust descended onto the broad backs of women who laughed together, onto the hunched shoulders of men who stood in groups and stirred the air with wild hands, onto the soldiers who slept on benches and dreamt of their last battle.
“I saw Donato today.”
“Uh-huh. How is he?”
“Like a mad dog. Eyes dart back and forth, feet shuffle, mouth twitches. Next month he leaves for good. Taking the whole family, even the mother-in-law. Says he has work when he arrives.”
Teo spat. “Wouldn’t catch me taking the mother-in-law.”
“She’s dead,” Cosimo said.
“You know what I mean. What Donato’s doing, not for me. If my business gets bad and if I go, I go alone. Just for work, and like you, come home with enough money to live for three or four years. By that time, it’ll be better here. I’ll have more customers.”
“What do you mean, ‘if my business gets bad’? When was the last time you fitted shoes to a pair of paying feet?” Cosimo asked.
Teo knew the answer but would not say the words. His savings? Gone. His two oldest sons? Sometimes they found odd jobs for a few coins—a day here, an afternoon there—but opportunities for steady work were rare and he wouldn’t let them leave home for the factories of the north. Families sleep under one roof.
Of course there’s the money from Maria’s midwifery—that is, when she’s paid with coins, because mostly now she’s paid in tears of gratitude or with wheat or fish. All right, he’d eat the fish. But he’d never stoop so low as to use her money, not even if it meant they could stay. That would put a curse on his family for generations.
Bad enough she works. Although come to think of it, the work’s kept her from nagging. Well, something’s kept her from the nags. And she’s beginning to come out from under that great rock of a mamma. Maria, not at all like her mother: rat-a-tat-tat all day long that woman’s mouth flapped, like the back end of a donkey. But Maria, she keeps to herself, a good wife, quiet, obedient. And when she plays the piano—well, now, he listens.
Teo looked beyond the piazza, careful not to focus. More customers, that’s what he needed. He could ask for help from . . . but, no, never. He pushed against the thought until his jaw became stretched skin over bone. He knew they’d never go away, that he must pay the don grudging respect once a month when that bloated thug of his came into the shop to collect, scratching his pants and picking his teeth.
‘Sleeping dogs,’ his father called them. ‘Don’t get close to them and never ever ask for their help.’ Candlelight caught the sides of the old man’s bent finger as he spoke the words, ‘Their help comes with a hook.’
Teo’s brother had laughed. ‘Don’t listen to him, you’ll grow teats. If you want to make money, go to Don Tigro. All he wants is for you to call him friend.’ He moved closer to Teo, tapped the side of his nose, whispered, ‘He’ll get you paying customers, lots of ’em. Life’s simple when you follow the rules.’
Yesterday evening, he felt Maria’s sudden silence like a slap as he opened the door, saw his children lower their eyes. Later she reminded him that they needed clothes. Last week, tax officials knocked on the door. Money for the government, money for the house, money to wet the don’s beak. The fist in his stomach twisted.
As he sat with Cosimo, Teo smelled the hides and heard the shop’s silver bell. They haunted him, triggered gloom long after he migrated to America and prospered. He put on his fedora, shut the door, sat in a corner of his bedroom. His ‘hat days,’ Maria called them. She played Brahms; he brooded. Days passed and Teo’s darkness raged, but Maria’s piano filled the neighborhood with the composer’s unmistakable transitions; not his waltzes or lullabies, but the Brahms of churning middles and desperate ends. The chords crashed until his spirit lifted and he took off his hat and opened the door.
Teo said, “Customers waited, we were so busy. They came from all over, Termini, Cefalù, even as far away as Messina. My father had three helpers, one to wash customers’ feet, another to measure them, a third to do odd jobs—sweep the floor, keep the windows clean, polish the silver bell.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fine hides I bought from Palermo. You remember the smell, don’t you?”
Cosimo nodded.
“Made some of my fancy shoes with those skins. Sold them in Palermo, Rome, but that’s all gone now. People like me can’t afford to buy. Why should they? The soles of their feet have become tougher than the shoes I make.”
Cosimo picked up a straw and began to chew.
“What’s worse, Tasso loves the shop, I see it in his eyes. After school, he comes in to sweep the floors, feel the hides, oil the tools. He’s got the cobbler’s gift, that one. And me? I, who inherited the Pandolfina shop, busy for centuries before me, I have no work for him. I sit in an empty room and the bell never rings.”
“Trip’s easy enough, takes ten days when the wind’s up. Engines belch steam. Men hoist the sails. They unfurl with a snap and a rush of salt air slaps your face and the ship skims on top of the waves.” Cosimo made a sail with his body.
Teo shrugged.
“The sun kisses the sea. Dolphins jump in the ship’s wake.” Cosimo gestured the gliding arc of a long-nosed fish.
Teo scowled. “Don’t try to fool me. Three years ago when you came back, you said the air in steerage was thick with smoke, the stench of urine curled your hair.”
Silence. The sun looked like a sore in the sky.
“You told me that when the ship enters the harbor, if you push and elbow hard enough to get close to the rail, you might catch a glimpse of the green lady. And when you arrive at whatever the name of that island is, mean doctors stick long needles into your behind and make you show them what’s inside your pants.”
“Nurses are pretty, though. I may have exaggerated the hazards of the voyage a bit,” Cosimo spit the straw out of his mouth. “Filled with people, La Merica. Air smells like dirty socks. Last time I rented a small room without a window, climbed fifty-two steps up a blackened stairwell to the top floor. Toilet in the back yard. Cold there in winter. Better shit quick or your ass freezes and turns green.”
“Go on.”
“From first light to dusk, men, women, even children with pushcarts line the streets. They sell meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, fruit, eggs, breads in different shapes and sizes, men’s suits, women’s dresses, straw hats and flowers, underwear, stockings, cheap shoes with soles made of cardboard, blankets, school books, pencils, erasers, paper, pots, pans, even furniture, toys, candy, the latest medicine said to cure anything, even diseases of the lungs. Lots of people have sick lungs, Teo. Watch out. If they cough in your face, you get the sickness, too, and they put you on a train and send you away to a cave high in the mountains where no one visits and you cough yourself to death.”
Teo cleared his throat.
Cosimo continued. “Crowds everywhere, from all over the world gather around carts. Neighbors stand in the streets and talk to one another. Children play in and out of the throng. People speak different languages, wear strange clothes. Groups of men with curls and furry caps and sewing machines talk fast and laugh and wait for work. Horses pull heavy wagons filled with produce, clothes or ice and when it’s time for the animal to die, the beast drops right in the street, mid clop. Soon a rackety guy appears out of the crowd to sell the driver another horse and the people walk around the dead one or help to move it to the side of the road and children sit down, right on top of the carcass and play cards or throw bones. In a day or so when the stink is so bad it chokes you, two or three brutes come in a wagon to haul the dead horse away and sell it to the glue maker or the butcher or the tanner or the cobbler.”
“Cobblers don’t buy dead horses,” Teo said.
“But they need cobblers. Everyone wears shoes there.”
“C’mon,” Teo said, “not everyone. There you go again with talk of a golden land.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. Some don’t wear shoes. Gangs of kids use their callused feet to kick an unsuspecting passerby, rob him blind. Watch out for them, they’d steal from their mothers if they could find them. They live on the streets, filthy urchins, travel in packs on Mulberry close to the Bend or in Five Points, rough places. Don’t go near them—they’ll slit your throat and throw you into the river, not even bother to wash the blood off their hands. No one’s gonna find your body because the sharks’ll eat it. There are thousands of these boys, girls too, snot-nosed, hungry, quick, mean. Now, they don’t wear shoes. Nor do the puttane on Allen Street. But almost everyone else does. Too cold most of the time to go without. Besides, if you don’t wear shoes, you never know what your bare feet are going to step in.”
Teo smiled.
Cosimo kept talking. “Too much life going on to keep the streets clean. When it rains, your pants get soaked up to the waist crossing the street and your shoes stay damp for three months and your balls grow mold. A horse car ride is a nickel, more than a good day’s pay, so most people walk everywhere. In foul weather, a man goes through a pair of shoes in a month.”
“Go on.”
“Believe me, they need shoes. Good ones. You can make shoes in your room, sell them on the street. And if you decide to stay, you can start your own shop. Or bring Tasso, he can run it while you go home, sit in the piazza and grow fat. And if you take two of your sons with you, they’ll get jobs right off the boat. It’ll be hard, back-breaking labor. There’s a plan to run a train underneath the streets. You heard about it?”
Teo put his face close to his friend’s. “You think I’m stupid? I read about it years ago. You think you’re the only one who knows how the planets spin? Well, you’re wrong.”
And then, something rare happened: Teo grinned. He felt it spread across his face. It stretched his mouth. It puffed his cheeks. It crinkled the skin around his eyes.
Cosimo laughed. “So they need to dig up the streets and build a tunnel and haul away earth and rocks and lay tracks and put in platforms and stations from one end of the town to the other. They’ll call it the ‘Sub Way.’ And the people will go down into this tunnel, get on the trains and the trains will take them wherever they want to go. My friend wrote to me last month. He said they printed the plans in the newspaper. It’s approved. Soon they start.”
The setting sun spilled its blood across the piazza. It creased the one-handed statue, slashed the bodies of the two friends.
Minutes passed before Teo spoke. “Maybe.”
“Maybe? That’s all, just a maybe?”
Teo shrugged. Not an ordinary shrug, either. It was a Sicilian shrug, the kind that starts in the toes, goes up and up, way beyond the top of the head until it almost touches the heavens. “What do you want from me, a signature in blood? You don’t know the future. No one does. Tomorrow I could have a crowded store. I said, ‘Maybe.’ I mean ‘Maybe.’ That’s it.”
* * *
The day Teo booked passage to America, a hot wind blew over from Africa and filled his town with dust. The wind howled, the palm trees moaned and the dust touched everything.
Grandma Colletti sat on her front porch facing the piazza and her eyes squinted against the wind. She watched the fountain with its statue of St. Benedict—his mouth agape, one suppliant hand raised to heaven—and saw his eye sockets and open mouth and stone garment folds fill with dust. She heard the soughing of the palms and the tolling of the church’s cast iron bells, the braying of the mules in their stable. She saw the wind take the priest’s biretta as he headed to say morning Mass, saw it puff the lace sleeves of his alb as if he were a bird about to take flight. She saw Concetta whisk up her flats of drying tomatoes and run inside, and Beppe dance and twirl and fling his arms wide and high as the wind took up his wildness.
With that, Grandma C. thought of going inside and just in time, too, for it took her body several seconds to move after her brain had made its decision to do so. The dust stroked the expanse of her bosom packed into a dress, faded now from what was once black to bilious green. As she bent against its force, the wind lifted the back of her skirts so that she mooned the square and the statue and the mighty world as she knew it—even the sun and the planets in their orbits around the shimmering face of the universe.
The wind slipped inside the town’s basilica with its arches and dome and statuary and nipped at the skirts of the priest as he bowed before the altar. It snaked around the statue of the Virgin and the crucifix and the stained glass. It kissed the body and blood of Christ as the priest elevated chalice and host and swallowed the sound of the altar boy’s chimes. And the dust turned clear morning light into milky glaze.
* * *
On the road to Palermo to buy his ticket, Teo noticed the tops of trees beginning to sway. Ahead he saw swirls of dust and heard the wind crack in earnest across the hills. He took a bandana from his neck and tied it around his mouth and nose and pulled his cap down tight, so that the visor sat just below his eyebrows.
“Don’t worry, Largo. This will blow over soon.”
The storm thickened. The wind howled. The dust bit into his hands. Soon he could see nothing in front of him except the tips of two long ears.
Then Largo stopped.
Teo coaxed and kicked but the mule would not budge. He got off and pushed the mule’s rear. When Largo’s hind legs nearly kicked Teo’s genitals, the man got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the animal’s front. The dust seeped into his clothes and mouth. It stung his eyes. He yanked the tack.
“Dammit, brute. Go.”
The animal brayed in Teo’s ear and sat down.
With that, Teo slammed his cap to the ground. He threw off his bandana, raised his arms and put his face up to the roaring blackness. He did not care if the wind tore the sound from his mouth. He only knew that his words choked him and he needed to spit them out.
“God, what are you doing? First you made me fall in love with the daughter of that bleating hippo, the mother-in-law who gave me a constant misery for over twenty years. Then you desolated our people who are too poor to buy the shoes I make. Never mind that for twelve generations before me, Pandolfina cobblers made a good living. No, you waited until I took over the shop to send the pestilence.
“In desperation I’m going to work in a cold country filled with cutthroats who stand on piers, sharpen their knives, wait for me to arrive. And today, when I’m on the way to buy a ticket, what do you do? You send a storm to suffocate me with the soil of my own land while this good-for-nothing sterile animal sits in the middle of the road and my children die of hunger.”
He beat his chest and screamed at the sky. “God, are you listening? Have you ever listened? If you can hear me, stop it. Stop this wretched blowing.”
Teo had used up all his words. He sank to the ground, rolled around, moaned every time his body hit another rock.
He lay with his face to the earth for what seemed like days, took careful breaths. Dozed, woke, dozed again. The dust and the wind whipped his body. He smelled the hides, heard the silver bell, remembered the deepness of the sky on the day he met Maria. Her image floated into his head, smiled, disappeared. His limbs felt like rooted tree trunks. The storm raged.
He woke to an absence of sound, scratched his nose, turned around and saw a cobalt sky, so pure, so still, it looked newborn.
Largo brayed.
Teo patted the mule’s neck, shrugged, continued on his way.
