by John Fante
“Yes! A big gun! With a pearl handle.”
“And he was riding a black horse.”
“Oh,” she said, “I shall never forget that horse. He was a beauty!”
“And you were scared to death, weren’t you?”
“Petrified,” she said. “Simply petrified.”
“You screamed for help, didn’t you?”
“I screamed and screamed.”
“But he got away, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he got away.”
“He took you to the outlaw cabin.”
“Yes, that’s where he took me.”
“You were scared, but you liked it, didn’t you?”
“I loved it.”
“He kept you a prisoner, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but he was good to me.”
“Were you wearing that white dress? The one in the picture?”
“I certainly was. Why?”
“I just wanted to know,” I said. “How long did he keep you prisoner?”
“Three days and nights.”
“And on the third night he proposed to you, didn’t he?”
Her eyes closed reminiscently.
“I shall never forget it,” she said. “He got down on his knees and begged me to marry him.”
“You wouldn’t marry him at first, would you?”
“Not at first. I should say not! It was a long time before I said yes.”
“But finally you did, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Finally.”
This was too much for me. Too much. I threw my arms around her and kissed her, and on my lips was the sharp tang of tears.
Bricklayer in the Snow
THOSE COLORADO WINTERS were merciless. Every day snow fell from the sky, and in the evening the sun was a depressing red as it went down the other side of the Rockies. Fog laced the mountains, so low we reached it with snowballs. The white deluge gave the trees no rest. The wind rushed the snow into swollen and dead heaps against fences and coal sheds.
The water was too cold for drinking. It seized your teeth like electricity and you sucked it timidly. Unless we left our faucets running all night, we had to wait until noon for the pipes to thaw. We burned lots of coal, which was expensive and put my father in a bad temper.
My father was a bricklayer. Because of the snow he couldn’t work. His mortar froze before it adhered, and his fingers were like clumsy sticks. But he was a man of ceaseless activity, he had to be doing something, and the long pull of white days exasperated him and made him a dangerous man around the house. He smoked one cigar after another, cracked his knuckles noisily, and paced from room to room like a man in an iron cage. When he paced that way we children were terrified and crept away as soon as his short, big-muscled body appeared on quiet feet. Everywhere we went was the strong aroma of his twisty Toscanelli cigars.
He tried to keep busy. He would spend time with his drawing. Huddled over a huge roll-top desk foreign to the rest of the dining-room furniture, he designed everything from ashpits to cathedrals. He forbade loud talking during these sessions. Sometimes he couldn’t find his T-square or his compass; then, God help us! Under his breath he would begin a mumbo-jumbo of horrible curses, and he would keep it up with increasing anger until my mother or one of the children found his T-square in the washing machine, or in the bath-tub, or in the ice-box, or wherever it is that children conceal T-squares and then forget about them. My mother always got the blame. If he did not accuse her outright of leaving the T-square in the bath-tub, he denounced her for bringing up children who would do such a thing. We kids, relieved of the blame, happily agreed with him, and frowned at Mother in silent accusation, as if to say: “See! That’s just what you get!”
It was great fun for us when my father sat idly and improvised with his pencil, drawing according to his whims. Then he usually drew satires. His favorite subjects were his brothers-in-law, my mother’s brothers. He would draw a donkey with the face of Uncle Carlo, or a pig that resembled Uncle Tony. These sketches made him laugh uproariously. He would hand them to us, and we would pass them around. We too would laugh. We didn’t really think the sketches were funny, but we laughed because he laughed. Our hearts felt free at last when he laughed, and sometimes my little sister Clara would begin in laughter and end in tears. He would urge us to take the sketches to the kitchen.
“Show them to your mother,” he would say.
My mother would look at them coldly, then hand them back, unimpressed.
“Shame on him,” she would say. “Tell him I said: ‘Shame on him.’” And we would troop back to him in the dining room.
“She said to tell you: ‘Shame on you.’”
He would grunt in amusement.
He drew faces of the children, always with great seriousness. Little Clara was his favorite. He would wind a dish towel or a scarf around her hair while she knelt with her hands in prayer. Everyone had to be perfectly silent at times like these. He forbade my mother and us three boys to enter the room. My sister would kneel with eyes lifted. He would sit comfortably, a cigar in one hand, a pencil in the other. Always as he drew he mournfully mumbled the words of that tune “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.” He knew only eight words of the song, and over and over he sang them:
In the shade of the old apple tree,
In the shade of the old apple tree,
In the shade of the old apple tree.
Pausing, he would smile at his daughter.
“Who’s Papa’s little Blessed Virgin?”
Tingling with happiness, Clara would point her forefinger at her own face and titter.
“That’s the way to talk,” he would say. “That’s what I call real talking!”
She would scream with delight at the picture, and my mother and all of us would examine it excitedly. My mother was always pleased. In all seriousness she would ask my father: “Why don’t you open a little shop and start a picture store?”
“Oh, God!” my father would despair. “That’s a woman all over.”
He never allowed his drawings to be kept, and my sister’s tears had no effect upon him. After an hour or so he would grow tired abruptly and begin crushing paper into balls and throwing the balls into the kitchen stove. He kept an accurate account of his sketches, for when we tried to conceal one he instantly missed it and demanded it, threatening to beat the four of us indiscriminately. The missing picture was always returned.
II
Every winter my father was brimming with firm intentions and new resolutions to get out of debt and improve his home. He would come home in the middle of the afternoon with a bucket of paint and begin doing one of the rooms. For two hours he would whistle and hum at his work. He was happy, and the spirit of his heart gave a song to the house, and everyone in it was happy. Then weariness would steal upon him. He would cover the paint bucket and sit at the window, brooding over the snow and over the money it kept him from earning. He was dangerous again. We could not go near him. Tomorrow he would finish the painting. But that tomorrow never arrived. In the end it was my mother who would complete the task, at odd moments from her usual work, a stroke at a time.
Conscience-stricken, he would protect himself from himself by criticizing her efforts.
“Look at it,” he would say. “That’s not the way to paint. Paint with the grain. Don’t let all that paint drip off’n your brush.”
“Then why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Too late now. You ruined it.”
He slept badly, with a body that demanded the exhaustion of the sun and the ache of quivering muscles. When idle his brain attacked him, breeding restlessness he could not master. Some mornings he would startle everyone by leaping from bed at four o’clock, dressing, and rushing outside. My mother knew his torment and made no effort to comfort him, for idleness and comfort were the very devils that tortured him. Upon arising later in the morning, she would see him through the window in the back yard, chugging on a cigar as he shoveled paths through the snow he hated s
o madly. His efforts were tremendous. Snow would be piled everywhere, the whole of the back yard stripped of it to the black frozen soil. Wearing gloves and a sweater, he would come to breakfast with a body exuberant and hot with perspiration and hands alive with the joy of pain.
He would wait patiently for my mother’s praise of his early morning efforts, continually glancing out the window at the white mountains of snow on either side of the yard, all of it done by his arms. At first my mother would say nothing, for she was never sure of herself. Eating ravenously, he would be so famished for her comment that finally he would say:
“Take a look at the back yard.”
Then she would pretend she saw it for the first time.
“Oh!” she would say. “Did you do that?”
A nod from him.
“All by yourself? All of that?”
“Of course.”
“You must be all tired out.”
“Me tired? I should say not!”
That day he would be happier, and that night he would be gentler, sleeping with his arm around her, perhaps even saying something to make her laugh.
He was an inventor too. His workbench was the living room. He brought home a cigar box and a fruit carton. With hammer and saw he shaped his mysterious invention. My mother and we children were curious spectators. None of us could make out what it was. There was no use asking, because you couldn’t make him talk. All that Saturday afternoon he worked on it. At last it was finished, whatever it was. It must have been finished, for he stopped working and held it up.
And what was it? Lord knows. Nobody knew. But what he said was this: he said it was a device for releasing automobiles when they became stuck in the snow. We thought differently.
“It looks like a violin,” my brother said.
“I thought it was a guitar,” I said.
My mother refused to become involved. Holding her breath, she retreated to the kitchen with an excuse about the potatoes burning. But he heard her laughing, and then all of us laughed except him. The thought that it might also be a guitar set him to scratching his head and wondering whether he had run into a double invention. Nothing ever came of the invention. It lay about the house, my mother moving it from one closet to another, but nothing was ever done about it.
III
One afternoon my mother asked him to carry in a bucket of coal. He took an empty bucket from behind the kitchen stove, and as he went out he told her to go easy with that coal.
“It costs money,” he said. “Burn newspapers.”
In a little while he returned with a loaded bucket and went out again. Presently he came back with a second bucketful. My mother watched him curiously. He said nothing as he went out again. Through the kitchen window she saw him almost running toward the coal shed. Now there were no more buckets. My mother saw him disappear into the shed and come out again, a big lump of coal in his hands. He brought it inside and placed it upon the two filled buckets. Then he went out again. He was in a kind of frenzy, and my mother was frightened. When he returned she protested.
“Don’t bring any more,” she said.
“I know what I’m doing,” he answered, hurrying out again.
In a little while he had piled up a mountain of coal nearly five feet high behind the stove. There was not an inch of space between the stove and the wall. The great black column tottered precariously, leaning toward the stove. He had to stand on tiptoe to stack the last chunk. Then he was finished. He backed away and surveyed the work with satisfaction. My mother was spellbound. He turned to her, his hands black with coal dust.
“There,” he said. “There’s your coal.”
“But why so much?” she complained.
He was deeply hurt, or pretended to be. “Now isn’t that just like a woman?” he asked an imaginary audience. “She asked for coal, didn’t she? And I brought her coal, didn’t I? And now she’s mad because I brought her coal!” He shook his head dismally, feigning hopeless puzzlement. Then he said: “Mother in Heaven, what can you do with a woman?”
My mother sighed. “Those lumps are too big,” she said. “They won’t fit in the firebox.”
“Get a hammer,” he said. “Chop them up.”
She tried to lift the top lump. He watched her.
“Why don’t you stand on a chair?” he said. “You might get hurt.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” she flared. “You’ve done enough foolishness, bringing all this coal into this small kitchen!”
He shrugged innocently. “I was only trying to help,” he said.
Bent over the sink, he washed the coal dust from his hands. As always, his hat was cocked on the side of his head; he had to be reminded of its existence or he never took it from his head. He stood with legs apart, washing himself noisily. One of his prides was his toughness. He used to boast that he never used soft bath soap. The best thing in the world for a workingman’s face, he said, was hard dish soap.
My mother struggled with the heavy clod of coal, drawing it carefully from the pile at the height of her head. The jagged surface made it almost impossible to grip firmly. The mountain crackled and creaked. It began to fall upon her. She leaped aside. The coal boomed against the floor, crumbling into a million pieces. The kitchen shook. The windows rattled. My mother was frightened and peevish.
“There!” she gasped. “There! What did I tell you?”
He was only mildly surprised, standing with his wet hands dripping soap suds. He clicked his tongue and shook his head at the mess.
“Don’t just stand there!” my mother said. “What on earth am I going to do with all this coal?”
“Didn’t I tell you to get a chair? Didn’t I tell you to get a hammer?”
“You make me sick!”
He looked at the black jumble and chuckled. His idea was that this was a very witty situation.
“Well,” he said. “You wanted coal, and there it is.”
“Heaven’s sakes, keep still!”
He was indignant. No woman could talk to him in that tone of voice. “Then keep still yourself!”
“But look at the mess. Look what you’ve done!”
“Me?” he gasped, shocked. “Me?” That hurt look came over his face. “I haven’t done a thing. I was standing here washing my hands.”
My mother closed her eyes wearily. Ah, well, there was nothing you could do with him. She took a long breath, token of resignation and forgiveness, and reached for the broom.
IV
It was mid-afternoon. We children were at school. My brother Mike came home. He tossed his cap some place and his books some place else and his coat some place else and came sniffing into the kitchen for something to eat. After school, if my father wasn’t home to stop us, we ate stacks of bread and jam, thereby ruining our appetites for supper.
My mother was sweeping the scattered bits of coal.
“Good gosh!” Mike said. “Lookee all the coal! Whatcha gonna do with it?”
“Burn it,” my father said. “What do you usually do with coal?”
“I know, but—”
“But shut up! Not a word!”
“Your father brought it in,” my mother explained sarcastically as she straightened up. “He’s so good that way.”
“He didn’t hafta bring it all in, did he?”
“Never mind,” my father said.
They were silent for a moment. Then my father thought of something. He turned suddenly and looked at Mike, then at my mother.
“Say,” he said thoughtfully. “Did this little devil get you a bucket of coal before he went to school this morning?”
Mike whitened. His eyes swelled. He hadn’t. That always meant trouble. He backed out of the kitchen, his hands pressed against his seat. My father followed slowly, threateningly. At the door Mike started running. My father leaped forward and let fly with his foot. Close enough, and yet a miss. Howling with relief, Mike ran outside. My father let out a streak of curses as he shook his fist toward the slammed door. My mo
ther touched his arm to quiet him.
“Please,” she said. “Why say those shameful things?”
“Shameful!” he said. “What did I say that was shameful?”
He went to the closet and got his overcoat. She watched him as he fought his way into it.
“Where are you going?” she said. “It’s nearly time for supper.”
“How do I know where I’m going?” he shouted.
He always left the house so violently that it made her helpless and drained her strength. She would make excuses to try to keep him home. But he was so tempestuous they had no effect on him.
“Shall I cook spaghetti tonight?” she smiled.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Cook anything.”
He was buttoning up the front of his overcoat. “Yes,” he said. “Cook spaghetti tonight. With lots of cheese.”
“I used all the cheese last time,” she said.
“Buy some more, then.”
She walked to him.
“I was going to ask you,” she said. “Have you got a half a dollar?”
“Where would I get a half a dollar?”
He took her by the arm to the window, sweeping the curtains aside and pointing at the snow.
“Do you see it? Snow! Now will you tell me where I’m going to get a half a dollar?”
She straightened herself petulantly, her petulance a fear of him. “I only thought you had it,” she said. “I don’t see why you have to get so mad about it.”
He slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand, shouting excitedly: “I haven’t got it! Hear me! I haven’t got it!”
“But don’t get so excited! I understand.”
“Ach! You women. You don’t understand anything.”
He took a cigar from his inside pocket and rammed it at his face, his mouth leaping for it. The cigar was his last. He lit up, extinguishing the flame by spluttering at it.
“When you go to the store,” he said, “get me some cigars.”
My mother sat down and covered her eyes. “I can’t charge any more cigars,” she said. “I just can’t do it. I won’t. If you only knew the way the grocer looks at me. I feel so embarrassed!”
