Berto's World_Stories

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  “Doves, what else? I told you it was dove season.”

  It finally hit me: We were hunting. We were going to kill doves.

  “Okay, Johnny,” his dad whispered. “Throw the branch.”

  Giovanni flung the piece of dead tree back toward the woods. As soon as it landed, a flutter of wings rose from the ground, and gray-brown and whitish pigeon-like birds filled the sky like large, multihued snowflakes—life rising to meet the heavens.

  Now the heavens reciprocated with death. The shotgun blast reverberated once, and I saw several birds plummet back to earth like bombs out of a B-29 Superfortress.

  Giovanni’s dad quickly reloaded the shotgun and handed to his son, who raised it at the remaining flying creatures circling overhead. He fired.

  I have several images of that scene embedded in my mind: the falling objects, those once-living creatures, their beaks hanging open, and their wings motionless; the proud look on the face of Giovanni’s dad, and Giovanni himself, his legs spread in wide stance, the shotgun taller than he was held in his conqueror’s hand.

  “Let’s go get our dinner.”

  I stood there, unmoving, as father and son fanned out, picking up the dead birds and stuffing them into a sack. Then I heard Giovanni.

  “Hey, Pop, this one’s still alive!”

  His dad moved quickly toward him and took the bird from the boy’s outstretched hand.

  “All right, son, watch carefully. It’s real easy. Grab the head here, twist and pull at the same time. Just like taking a cork out of a bottle.”

  It was fast, but I saw it as if in slow motion. Giovanni’s dad gave the creature’s head a sudden twist and pull, and it popped right into his left hand, the neck and body remaining in his right.

  “Wow, Pop, that’s neat!”

  Giovanni became so excited he nearly jumped up and down.

  They continued picking up birds, and then Giovanni called to me.

  “Hey, Berto, here’s another live one. Wanna try it?”

  I walked over to him and saw the bird, its chest still rising and falling rapidly, its left eye seeming to stare out toward where its nest was. Giovanni grinned, grabbed its head, and performed the simple maneuver his dad had just taught him.

  I stared at that head and watched the eye facing me slowly dilate then cloud over in death.

  “Here, Berto, catch!”

  He laughed as he threw it at me.

  I caught it easily and stared at it then turned and walked back toward the woods. I heard Giovanni call, “Watch out for poison ivy!”

  I found a spot under a tree where the ground was soft and easy to disturb with another fallen tree branch. I dug a hole, placed the dove’s head in it, beak pointing toward its nesting site, covered it with dirt, and placed a moss-covered fieldstone on top. I kept walking in what I thought was the direction of the farmhouse and, after a short while, it came into view. I sat on the porch bench, watching the tree sparrows and blue jays land on the pump handle and stare at me as an outsider. I could hear the echoes of more shotgun blasts.

  I must have fallen asleep. I found myself being shaken, and I looked up to see Giovanni pushing my shoulder.

  “What happened to you? We thought you had gone in the woods to take a piss, but when you didn’t come back we started to look for you. Pop wanted to teach you how to shoot the shotgun.”

  I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth. This called for what I later learned was termed a “white lie.” I smiled weakly at him and said the chicory must not have agreed with me—that I had “the trots.”

  Giovanni seemed to understand and said he didn’t know how his dad could drink that crap. I laughed weakly.

  The rest of the day we wandered around the farm, while his father cleaned and dressed the day’s kill. That evening I begged off eating any of the birds. I just munched on more sourdough bread to “settle my stomach.”

  Sunday morning, Giovanni’s dad stuck his head up in the loft while we were still in bed and said we had to leave early. He had gone into the local town to call the foundry and was told he needed to return right away.

  Giovanni was disappointed, and I faked feeling the same. He said he had wanted to teach me how to hunt.

  We left an hour later.

  Giovanni invited me once more to his farm, this time for deer season. I lied and said Papa wouldn’t let me go because he had work for me to do.

  That weekend passed quickly, and I expected Giovanni to come by when he got home. No one showed.

  I went to school Monday, and none of us saw him.

  Then Papa came home from his shift at the foundry. He couldn’t look at me. He went into the bedroom and Mama followed. I heard her gasp. They both walked back out, and Papa told me to sit down at the table. He looked at me then lowered his eyes. Mama put her hand on my shoulder as Papa spoke.

  Giovanni and his father had been killed in an auto accident. They were driving back home from their farm, when a deer bounded into the road. Its antlers entered the car through the open, driver’s-side window. The car swerved and crashed into a tree, throwing Giovanni through the windshield. The antlers had decapitated his father.

  I have seen many things since then. I have seen life enter the world and death take it away. In the name of self-defense, I have even assisted death, both as civilian and on the battlefield. But in the winter of my own life, I remember that October day, the day I stared into the eye of a dying dove, and I wonder:

  In their last moments, did the eyes of Giovanni and his dad look the same?

  The Candy Lady

  Daddy, do you love me?

  Of course I do, dear.

  Would you jump off a bridge with a defective bungee cord for me?

  You know I would.

  Daddy, would you get a colonoscopy?

  Uh, kid, I think I hear your mother calling you.

  Omigod!

  Sister Mercy Grace was going to give me a colonoscopy!

  Well, not really. It wasn’t “Sister No,” as we had nicknamed her in seventh grade. But the young, colorectal surgeon sitting behind her desk for my pre-colonoscopy interview sure as hell looked—and acted—like her.

  Only those who have not suffered the indignities of frequent prostate checks, mammograms done by Ernest and Julio Gallo, and engine tune-ups with stents in the heart can claim that old age grants dignity. And for those of us over fifty—in my case way over fifty—there is the ultimate degradation: having the privilege of lying naked and unconscious on an operating table with one’s butt exposed to amuse and bemuse the OR staff.

  What follows is the piece de resistance. That involves having a length of fiber-optic garden hose jammed up the rectum and into the colon like a perverted plumber’s snake. All this after doing a “bowel cleansing” that would make water-boarding seem like a visit to a massage parlor.

  Regarding massage parlors, as in so many other lightly touched-upon topics, that is yet another story.

  The only good thing is that you are unconscious—or supposedly so—after having a large-bore needle jammed into a vein in your hand and seeing the lights go out with a gentle push on the syringe that contains the knockout drugs.

  So, there I sat with my ward, Antonio Hidalgo. He had convinced me that the off-and-on aches in the left-lower quadrant of my abdomen should be checked out.

  Lest you think that doctors are smart and courageous regarding their own health, especially one who is approaching eighty, let me dissuade you of that illusion. Doctors are, by nature and by training, big chickens when it comes to having procedures performed on them.

  My doctor was tall and well-proportioned, her white lab coat the opposite of Sister Mercy Grace’s black habit. But like the good sister, she had piercing eyes shielded by round, wire glasses, and her voice echoed a Gaelic ancestry. She looked at me as a relic of past medicine, but she was courteous and relatively straightforward in her discussion of what was, to me, nothing new. I understood the risks of the procedure. As a young resident I actual
ly had worked with some of the pioneers in fiber-optic scoping of the GI tract.

  I had brought Tonio with me for several reasons. One, I needed a driver. I no longer trusted myself to get behind the wheel with the incipient cataracts developing in my eyes. Another was the boy’s—I should say young man’s—interest in medicine as a career.

  Antonio Hidalgo was the youngest of three Cuban boat children my friend Edison and his wife Nancy and I had rescued years before. Now, Tonio was approaching a decision point in his life. He was a junior in college, and the time for medical school applications was drawing near.

  The boy was not my genetic stock, but he was as close to being a son to me, in both temperament and ability, as any sperm-egg union could have produced. An old man seeks immortality through his children, and that boy would carry on my life’s work. I had taken him on rounds, and the kindness of my colleagues had exposed him to what life as a doctor would be like in different medical and surgical fields. Now it was up to him. Would Apollo’s son Aesclepius grant him entrance into the healing arts?

  As the pre-procedure interview drew to a close, I looked directly at the young doctor and asked a favor.

  “May Tonio suit up in scrubs and observe the procedure you’ll be doing on me?”

  That’s when the voice of Sister Mercy Grace echoed down through the years, as she assaulted my ears with a loud and very emphatic, “No!”

  Yes, I wanted him with me, but not only to observe and learn. I admit that my fear of the partially known also drove that request.

  Age has smoothed the rough edges in my volatile temperament. I was initially shocked by the seemingly irrational refusal. My mind scanned the potential reasons why she would refuse a colleague’s simple request. And being temperamentally volatile I fought for control by pressing my fingernails into my palms. I would not be angry or confrontational. Neither would I beg in front of my adopted son. I explained Tonio’s background and interest in a medical career, and his prior experience in hospitals and ORs. It made no difference.

  I said nothing as she scheduled the procedure time, and then Tonio and I left. I said nothing as he drove me back to Safehaven, my adopted home in the north-central mountains of Pennsylvania. He looked at me from time to time but had the wisdom to remain silent.

  That night I sat in my study trying to distract myself by reading some recent medical journals. I must have fallen asleep at my desk.

  Did I dream, or was what happened next a memory?

  “Sister Mercy Grace may I be excused?”

  My friend Salvatore—always Sal to me—was already in the throes of puberty and was somewhat out of place by seventh grade. The rest of us were barely noticing the soon-to-be devastating changes wrought by surging levels of previously non-existent hormones. But Sal? Well, he already sported a five o’clock shadow—and this was 8:30 a.m.

  Poor kid. He was built like a rock but nevertheless experiencing loss of bladder control from his drunken father’s numerous kicks to his abdomen as a young child. And when Sal actually sounded polite as he raised his hand—no antics, no smiles—we knew he was hurting.

  Sister Mercy Grace stared at him, a mere larva in her scheme of things, and pronounced sentence.

  “No!”

  To this day I will swear on my parents’ graves that an ephemeral smirk crossed her face.

  God bless Sal. He said nothing. He arose, walked to the classroom door, turned around once to give that woman a look that sent shivers down our spines, and then opened the old mahogany-stained door and left. The hooded she-devil called his name once then smirked once more, as she picked up her ruler and waited.

  We held our breaths.

  Less than three minutes later he returned, legs uncrossed, and walked past Sister Mercy Grace’s desk.

  “Salvatore, come here.”

  He turned to look at her once more, and this time we all knew—it was war. He continued to his desk and squeezed his muscular body into it. He looked up at her but said nothing. Then, still focused on the nun, he picked up a thick black pencil, held it in one hand, and easily snapped it in half.

  She put the ruler down and started lessons for the day.

  It wasn’t over.

  From then on nothing Sal did was right. Whatever he did, whatever he said, it was wrong. It got to the point that the entire class—after hearing him answer her question correctly and then being scolded for being wrong—actually hissed the black-habited tyrant under our breaths. Numerous hands, including mine, felt the sting of that damned ruler—but not Sal’s. She was lucky that Sal, despite his size and great strength, was the gentlest kid in class.

  That afternoon I witnessed something surreal. Sister Mercy Grace stood in the hallway after school, and one of our prior teachers, Sister Grace Roberta, was engaged in an animated conversation with her. I liked Sister Grace Roberta. She was strict but had always been fair. Now I saw her become highly agitated with a fellow nun to the point of shaking her finger in the taller woman’s face. It was only the site of my friend Angie and me walking down the corridor that stopped Sister No from striking the much shorter Sister Grace Roberta.

  Eight years later I finally learned why that wonderful doll-sized woman had become so involved in “L’Affaire Salvatore.”

  Need I say it? Another story.

  Seventh grade wasn’t all whacks with a ruler. Catholic grammar schools—in their great wisdom—separated the boys from the girls in what is now called junior high. Each had his or her own homeroom. It was an attempt by the celibates to control the rising libidos of their charges. It didn’t really stop guys from noticing the developmental changes in the girls who had shared a classroom with them before seventh grade. It also didn’t stop the girls from noticing the boys grandstanding out on the playground—all calculated to impress the strange new species that had evolved from former tomboys. Both sides stared at how the other filled out formerly flat blouses and/or slacks.

  I was no different.

  I had my eye on a couple of the “chicks” who used to hang out with Angie, Tomas, Sal, and me before the pubertal putsch. And then I saw the new girl: She was stunning!

  To this day, now bordering on the edge of becoming plant food, I fondly remember Bernice—Bernice Johnson. Long-legged tall, she could run almost as fast as Tomas. Her face like Nefertiti, she flashed a smile lit up by porcelain-white teeth and sparkling brown eyes, and she could outtalk Angie.

  Of course, it was her mind that attracted me. Yeah, right.

  No kidding, that girl could get me into near-violent debates on just about anything. Neither of us won—we always battled to a draw—though I suspect she could have bested me easily. But she exercised that amazing sorcery all women have, and which more than a few choose to use, and she would let my ego remain unbruised and let me think I had gained the advantage.

  Oh, I forgot to mention, Bernice Johnson was, as the politically correct say today, an African American. Every time I see a shimmering, golden-brown piece of Godiva chocolate, I still think of that gorgeous, unbelievably talented girl.

  As my father would say when he talked about seeing Mama for the first time, I “had the horn” for Bernice.

  I was lucky. She had to walk home each day past my apartment building, so I always managed to be out on the sidewalk at the same time. My friends teased, but I had seen the pairings off of Angie and Yvette, Tomas and Monica, and even bewhiskered Sal and Cynthia, so it really didn’t bother me.

  My neighborhood was a hotbed of ethnicities, each with its own unwritten but well-delineated territory: Italians, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, some scattered Central and South Americans, and African Americans, all within spitting distance of one another. You had to be careful where you walked, although my reputation as Dottore Berto allowed me entrance and egress without interference.

  I had it all figured out. Bernice had to walk past some of the small shops just outside the tenement complexes. One in particular fit my scheming little mind: old Mrs. Donnelly’s candy store. T
hat’s where I could really impress her.

  But first I had to consult my consiglieres.

  Primo consigliere: Mama.

  “Mama, can I ask you a question?”

  She was sitting in the old rocker that once had belonged to Mrs. Flaherty, the boarding-house owner who had taken in Mama and Papa when they arrived from Ellis Island. On her deathbed from the pandemic flu the old landlady had given it to Mama. Now she was quietly darning the constantly appearing holes in Papa’s and my socks and pants.

  I must admit, just like any early adolescent, I was reticent to talk about my budding courtship. Oh, it wasn’t that Papa and Mama—especially Papa—hadn’t talked to me about girls and … well … you know. I was a typical thirteen-year-old boy.

  “Si, Berto?”

  I think she knew. Mama and Papa had spotted Bernice and me one day just hanging out on the steps of our tenement, and when I entered our apartment both showed those embarrassing, all-knowing grins that tell you they have deduced your secret.

  “Uh…”

  I was still grasping for the right words and the courage to speak.

  “Mama, how did Papa impress you? Did he give you flowers or candy or what?”

  I actually blushed from her gaze. Then she rose and threw her arms around me, rocking me like she had done when I was little and had stubbed a toe.

  Then, after emitting a memory-inspired sigh, she whispered in my ear.

  “Your Papa saved me from the cows!”

  She smiled, her rounded face lighting up from that recollection, and then delved into my soul.

  “Berto, what is her name?”

  I stared down at the floor.

  “Bernice,” I stammered.

  “Is she nice?”

  “Oh, yes, Mama! And she’s smart and a fast runner and…”

  She put her index finger on my lips to stop the outpouring then reached into her apron pocket and took out three pennies.

  “Here, Berto, a girl always loves candy.”

  I hugged Mama and ran outside.