Mary Fleck
Once, in another time, I traveled with my parents
In the 1951 Ford sedan to a distant part of the city.
You could call it a city, but everyone then
Referred to it only as a town.
Even in the far reaches of my dreams, the city
I inhabit had no place like this. I knew the place
By the sound of train cars connecting, the coupling of boxcars.
When a locomotive leaves the station, there is the sound
Of a chain, as one car pulls against another, and another,
Until the entire train groans to pull itself
Along the steel track. The railroad grade is a levee
To hold back the floodwaters from the west.
All night the diesel engines struggle to pull their loads,
Their miles of succession, off to other railyards
In places like Tehachapi, or Barstow, where cars are switched
All night, cars banging against each other, pulling away
Following behind locomotives spewing heavy black-smoke
Straining huge masses of metal battling inertia.
My father took me to the great roundhouse on the tracks
South of town, to see the behemoth railway engines
Parked. Steam-powered, oil-fueled, poised with fronts
Of light, great beacons to shine on the rails, pointed inward
To the one track leading out. The roundhouse, dark and damp,
With only the heat from the engines to warm the place.
Men wore striped coveralls and small caps. Their hands
Grown large and strong from the work of using wrenches,
Keeping train engines running, blackened by soot
And grease, lungs darkened by the engine exhaust.
I was too young to know where I was,
Or why. Yet I remember my father, his youthful wonder,
In the dark in the massive brick roundhouse
The same darkness mixed with gloom that he knew
As night, as a boy growing up, in an upstairs brownstone
In the Charlestown ghetto of Italians and Jews.
The great doors that released the trains were the same doors
That opened outward toward the light, and into the day.
To the cobbled streets from the darkened stables
Where his father hitched the dray horses to pull a wagon
Of coal to a hundred coal-chutes in basements, row upon
Wet, raw row, for a source of heat in winter.
The black dust, smudged faces, and soot covered from shoveling,
Coal to apartments where families huddled near radiators
For warmth. The wool coats they wore made them look like refugees,
Not twenty years off the boat from the old country,
Not leaving behind the thick accents, or abandoning
Old superstitions and rituals, in exchange for that one
Sunny morning when the sky is clear, light abundant, when a wind
Picks up from the Charles River and carries in the new day.
In the photograph, they've gathered at the train station.
The adolescent boys handle the baggage, all the belongings
Stowed and on board. The girls wear ribbons and heavy coats.
Pa is there, if you look deeply into his eyes, you see
The doubt, and same fear he knew when he arrived,
As this is the day when the family departs for California,
For his health. A warmer climate to stem the cough
And emphysema that wracks and debilitates his weakened body
From years of breathing coal dust. The year was 1945,
The older boys were discharged from the Army, and Air Corp,
Gone to a place in California, not really a city, a military base.
A three-day train ride, in narrow bunks and thick curtains,
Cramped, deprived quarters, little sleep or comfort, a scenery
That seemed unchanging. Mary came too, a single woman in her twenties,
A cousin, a distant relative from the village. When she arrived
In the west she quickly married a railroad man, who wore a suit
To work under his coveralls, a precisely tied tie, immaculately
Ironed shirt. His tweed three-piece suit he bought from a tailor
In the east. But his shoes betrayed him, they were oil stained,
Cracked, and worn, out of place with the suit, but fit
Naturally with his grease marked, soiled striped uniform.
Mary took in ironing to feed the children, four boys, three girls;
The boys, sneak-thieves, in trouble with the law, the girls,
Nuns yet to be, with their rosaries and missals.
The girls helped with the laundry, and cooked. When Fleck
(his first name and last) walked home two blocks from the railyard
In the dark for dinner, it was ready on the table and waiting.
When our car pulled up to the small house there were no lights,
As if no one at home, except one table lamp Mary did her work under.
But there were freshly ironed shirts hanging from the molding
Over the doors of the dark living room. The shirts were white flags
Signaling surrender to so much history that needed to be undone.
Something Out of Nothing
To my Italian grandmother’s credit,
My mother, that scrawny girl my father married,
Who, grandma said, was too skinny to bear children,
Used to say of her mother-in-law:
“She could make something out of nothing.”
Of grandma’s ability to feed a family of ten
Three meals a day, plus do laundry,
And run the household
With very little food, money, or support.
Her husband was a coal and ice man,
And by 1928, she had six sons, ranging in age
From eleven to newborn, a daughter
In the middle, a daughter yet to arrive.
They lived in a three-bedroom tenement,
In a Charlestown neighborhood of Boston,
All the boys slept in one room.
They came by the train
To Fresno, California, in 1945,
For grandpa’s declining health,
Suffering from emphysema.
Her four oldest sons gone off
To Europe to fight in the war.
Three children were living at home,
One was the sole support of the family.
She cooked three meals a day
In her pintsized kitchen,
For anyone who happened to be there.
“Mangia,” she would say. “Mangiari.”
Five years after grandfather died,
Grandma and her baby girl,
Aunt Theresa, the year she turned 18
And graduated from Fresno High School,
Got on an airplane and flew to Italy.
Spent the summer of 1955, visiting
Grandmother’s older brother and his family,
In grandma’s hometown of Rutigliano,
A suburb of southeastern Bari,
The Apula region, on the Adriatic Sea,
In the southern part of Italy.
That memorable summer,
Aunt Theresa fell in love
With a handsome young Italian doctor
Who wanted to marry her.
Grandma said No, no marriage
Unless he came to America to live.
Apparently unwilling to do that,
Aunt Theresa and the doctor parted,
She returned home from Italy
Unmarried at 18 and bittersweet,
With nothing out of something.
Uncle Jimmie remodeled the kitchen
While grandma was away that season,
Put down new linoleum on the floor,
New plumbing in the kitchen sink.
The decals of an ample fruit-basket,
And a horn-of-plenty, on the refrigerator
Door, was a reminder of the old kitchen.
When I stayed with her on weekends,
In her smelling of new paint kitchen
She would make stars and butter,
Star pasta, with clarified butter,
Salt and pepper; both delicious
And filling and came from nowhere.
That, I’ll always remember.
In Rimini
Signore Zambano, the pig castrator
Carried out essential work.
He was passionate and respected
In the Emelia Romagna region,
From the hillsides of Couragnano,
To the plains of Pandana.
Boar taint, a smell of roasted pork
Comes from uncastrated pigs,
And renders the meat inedible.
Holding the pig between the legs,
Testicles raised to the surface of the flesh,
He lobbed with a curved knife blade.
He was fast and made no errors,
Castrating up to 300 pigs a day.
At Piazza Tre Martiri, in the shadows
Of the Tower of Santa Colombia, after twilight,
Signore Zambano chose one girl of Rimini.
Escorted her over the bridge of Istria stone,
A Roman bridge, built in 20 A.D.,
On five semicircular arches, two emperors,
Augustus and Tiberius, in the town of Rimini.
And on the path to his rustic home,
Near the road junction of the Via Flaminia,
And the Via Aemelia, leading to Piacenza.
Where after crossing the Rubicon,
Caesar made his appeal to the legions.
King Pepin gave the city to the Holy See.
In the darkness of his singular room,
With the same surgical skill he used,
And light through an open window,
The philanderer took each one to his bed.
Once, he left a poor idiot-girl
From Hadrian’s Arch of Augustus,
Pregnant. Womenfolk of Rimini
Called the baby the “devil’s child.”