* The loosely-based story of my maternal grandparents

By Steve Day, written for,
Contact Literature:  Native American and Emigrant Stories, Final Project, Spring 2002, University of Maine 
 
 

 The bow of the Mercante came crashing down into monstrous fists of exploding foam and then came lurching upward, sucking high out of the sea again. The sea was angry and seemed to be punishing the clumsy steamer for being out on her on such a bad day. The horizon was nothing but black water with whitecaps. The slashing squall had let up and was now just a stubborn blow but the Mercante was still caught in the firm grip of the storm. Every plunge downward felt as though the hull might rip like paper and spill open the freighter.
  Shhussh-KRASH! Shhussh-KRASH! Shhussh-KRASH!
  Vito Salatino leaned his tanned forehead into the spray hoping the salt water would make his stomach and his head stop churning like the water below him.  He was short and lean, the build of a finessed and patient carpenter. He had thick bushy black hair and a thick bushy black moustache and years later people would tell him he looked like an old Charlie Chaplin or a young Albert Einstein.  He had a handsome scooped jaw and Roman nose. At the moment he had never been so sick or frightened. The side of the ship was smeared with his vomit like gull droppings. With his mother's crucifix pressed to his lips he whispered three Hail Mary's and a couple of Our Father's just in case. The Mercante was a freighter carrying marble to America but the captain had not been able to fill the hold and thus allowed a large complement on board. The steerage was full of Italians all with the same destination; America. But they were still only half way through the violent Mediterranean Sea and Vito was having serious doubts. He gripped the railing and fought to keep what little he had left in his stomach from going over the side. They were only eight hours into the trip and already his heart ached to back in Calabria sharing his brother in law's badly overcrowded tenement. The ship had seemed like a mighty bastion of freedom earlier that morning,  ploughing through the glassy calm of the Straight of Messina, but now it was a foundering ice water coffin.
  Shhussh-KRASH! Shhussh-KRASH! Shhussh-KRASH!
  Vito was seriously considering getting off at Spain. In ten hours they were going there anyway to re-fuel and get more supplies for the long voyage across the Atlantic. Spain. They were Fascist in Spain too so it wasn't anything Vito hadn't already known before. So he might have to suffer some government harassment here and there. At least he wasn't going to risk dying a frigid watery death surrounded by a group of total strangers.  And he wouldn't be so far away from home. He had left everyone he knew behind in order to pursue his dream. Nevermore would he look up to the majestic walls of the medieval Oriolo castle which looked out over the people like a protective parent. As the Mercante pulled away from the dock that morning at dawn and vectored toward Sicily he realized that he was never going to see his mother again. While he might see Paolo and Celia and Giuseppe, his mother didn't have very many years left. And this ate at him and hurt in a way and in a place that the crashing ship would ever come close. 
  Just as he was fighting another sharp pang of home and sea sickness one of the ship's crew pulled himself along the railing hand over hand, head down in the whipping wind. The crewman had to lean into Vito's face to be heard. He shouted in rapid-fire Italian:
 "You have to go below. The captain says it's too rough for passengers to be on decks."
 But Vito was extremely reluctant to let go. Steerage on Mercante was not fit for animals. Below everyone in the world was sick. Men were vomiting on their wives who vomited on their children who vomited on their dolls and shoes. It was hell on the deck of the ship but it was hell on a hot day below it. Vito shook his head and grabbed the railing tighter.
 "I don't care. I'm not going below. It smells like a cesspool down there. I'd rather be fed to the hammerheads. And I can't even swim."
 "That can be arranged. Seriously, friend. The captain is an irritable fellow. He's from Naples.. You know how they are - quick to anger, slow to repent. I saw him throw someone who was causing alot of trouble right over the side. We got him, thank God, but what a row. Please. I don't want to have to dive in after you."
 The crewman extended his hand. Just then the ship took another deep trough arcing downward like a missile and the two men had to cling to the railing and each other from going over the side. When the bow again rose up painfully, Vito got shakily to his trembling legs. And then he let the crewman escort him, miserably, toward the hold. Up close Vito saw that the crewman was actually an old man, the lines of age only showing in the upper reaches of his sad brown eyes. Yet he moved with the confident and deliberate power and grace of a man many years his junior. Vito hung onto the old man to keep from being washed over the slippery iron deck. When they got to the steerage hatch the crewman grabbed the massive handle with weathered hands and opened it. As Vito descended into the gloomy, putrid steerage the old man turned back toward the bridge and shouted over the
 gale:
   "Non lasci il mare ottenere voi, il mio amico!" [Don't let the sea get to you, my friend!]

 Eventually the sea relaxed and the ship's pounding oscillations lessened a bit. The steerage was jam packed with Italians. A few feet away an entire family of four was snuggled into one of the cargo netting beds that hung down from the hull like bat wings. Vito was amazed at how calm they all were. The husband's snoring matched the pitch of the steamer. His wife looked quite pale and drawn and she slept peacefully close up to him, her face buried in his chest and the two children clung to either parent oblivious to the smell and the rocking. Vito knew the man from Calabria as Santino. He was a cobbler, the only one for miles and his shop was always full of boots and shoes needing stitching and patching. Santino was a man who very much kept to himself and said very little to anyone other than his own family and it didn't seem like he said much to them either. Vito and Dominic once sat on a scaffolding repairing a frieze overlooking the city and saw Santino leading his family like baby ducks to the market. Dom said to Vito with nails between his teeth:
 "Here comes Santino. Pattino silenzioso. [Silent shoe.]." And they laughed heartily.
  Vito envied them; going to America as a family, starting a future, making a plan for a new life in the New World. They were rich of togetherness but quite poor of money for all of them had holes in their clothing and shoes and all of them had faces covered with grime as if the captain had assigned the man's family to personally stoke the massive coal furnace, a shovel for each child and one for the wife too. No matter, he thought. Once they get to America ( if they all get to America) they were going to be sleeping on mattresses of money. Everyone.
  The porthole just over Vito's head revealed a blue sky opening up to the west and the sight of it lightened his heart a bit. He put his crumpled felt hat over his eyes and tried to get some sleep for the first time.
 But before he drifted off he thought some more about the letter from his friend Dominic Spadea who had arrived in America a year ago. Dominic had written him saying that there was promise in the New World, so many wondrous things to see, he had said. His letter strongly urged his friend to make the voyage and join him. Dominic had settled in one of the American provinces called Maine. There were people from all over the world Poles, Czecs, Irish, Lithuanians and Asians but best of all, said Dominic, there were plenty of Italian girls from good families and more arriving all the time. Dominic had been there less than a year and he already married, built his own house and got a job in a huge paper mill called the Oxford Paper company. He was working as a general laborer and told Vito in the letter that there was plenty of work for skilled artisans like Vito. Vito was a carpenter. Years ago Dominic had helped him refurbish some of the tenements and cathedral roofs in Calbria. High over the southern port city the two men worked shirtless under the warm Mediterranean sun planing magnificent arch ways and cornices, strip by strip with their hands ninety feet in the air all day. They had been friends since they were children. But, like Vito, Dominic had grown weary of sharing his room with three siblings, one of whom was married. Dominic and Vito lived alike, poor and crowded with family in small rooms. When a merchant marine cousin of Vito's had told the two of them in the square about the America across the Atlantic, the streets paved with gold, the seasons all mild, the work plentiful and the pay limitless, Dominic hung on the man's every word. It was all it took. Dominic was hooked. Vito's large, red faced friend was already secretly planning a way to make the voyage. But he had never said anything to Vito about it. One day he just didn't show up for work. And so after Vito had framed in a seven foot stained glass skylight for Padre Filippo's rectory overlooking the sea, he walked over to Dominic's house. He found his mother sitting in the shaded yard sipping a glass of wine. She looked sad and angry at the same time. Vito cautiously approached her holding his hat and bowing a bit:
 "Scusilo, la signora Spadea. Sapete dove Dom è?" [Excuse me, Mrs Spadea. Do you know where Dom is?]
 The woman looked up and Vito could see that she had been crying and so he averted his eyes. It occurred to him just then that the courtyard which was normally bustling with children who loved to play with Dominic when he came home was strangely quiet. Everything felt wrong, dreadfully wrong. And it seemed as though coming here was a mistake. Dominic's mother spoke slowly:
 "È andato per sempre. È andato in America, Vito." [He has gone forever. He has gone to America, Vito.]
 And then bulbous tears came down her face although her lips didn't tremble and her body didn't shake. He started to say something to her and then stopped. He started to reach out to her and then stopped again. An Italian gentlemen should know when to keep his mouth shut, he thought. Out of respect he bowed again and quietly turned and left. He walked over the cobble stone roads, down the sloping paths and came to the edge of the sea. Over the bay sea gulls were feasting off the fishing boats fighting for thrown away, uneaten bait. The caws were like desperate voices echoing in a canyon.
  Dominic had gone to America.
  Vito tried to be glad for his friend, tried to be happy that Dominic was pursuing the good life, the road to riches. But laying like lead in his stomach was the realization that he was utterly alone in the world. Dominic had gone on an adventure without him, looking for a future, for a home of his own and a wife to share it with. As Vito thought about everything the faces of his mother and his three older brothers flashed in his mind and the thought of leaving them was unbearable. But although Calabria was home he was not happy much of the time. He had not experienced the pleasure of a woman's embrace, the comfort of living in a home that he built, or the freedom from the ruthless black shirt police. Across a sea and then an ocean after that Dominic had gone looking for freedom and happiness.  And now it felt as if two pieces of long thread pulled his heart in separate directions; one for America and one for Calabria. He plopped down on a flat rock and rested his chin in his hands.
 Other than an occasional gull overhead the bay was very quiet.
 It seemed ridiculous and futile for someone like Vito to live in a farming community in which nothing much could grow. Years of drought and deforestation and, thus, erosion had raped the soil of nutrients so all that  was left was rock and clay. Everywhere people were either starving or near starving all the time. Sometimes Vito would get dizzy and weak from lack of food and could not brings his arms up to saw or hammer anything. His father's famous tomato and vegetable patch, once bursting with carrots and peas and onions,  had not yielded anything edible in a few years. The sad truth was that his homeland was not fit for existence.
  His family had barely escaped the earthquake at Reggio. He still remembered that day. The earth had become angry and hungry that day for it swallowed up whole buildings and houses and spit out kindling. The ground shook and the buildings crumbled to sticks and dust one after the other. Vito was only a teenager then but for weeks he helped pull the dead from their broken homes. Shortly after the quake he got a job apprenticing under a carpenter named Vincenzo Lilli, a brute of a man who barked harsh orders all day long and was known to slap and swat his workers who were lazy or sloppy. It was there that he met Dominic. Vito and Dominic worked like dogs for Lilli, practically running through the work day, often out of breath to satisfy their red-faced boss.
 But even Lilli was afraid of the new wind blowing through the countryside, the Fasci di Combattimento - Mussolini's Black Shirts.
  They saw what the Black Shirts were capable of one scorchingly hot afternoon. Vito had been mixing cement in a wheel barrow on a roof while Dominic guided the concrete into a pilaster form for a ministry courthouse. In the street Lilli shouted for them to hurry up. The Mediterranean sun baked Vito in his skin and the sweat bled from him as if his entire body was crying. They were making a facade of columns and had just finished the first pour. The lime in the concrete burned and cracked their hands. Vito and Dominic stiffly climbed down the ladder into the square to haul more bags up to mix another batch. Suddenly there was a sharp crack of gunfire nearby. A small boy came around the corner a moment later crying hysterically, shouting unintelligibly. When he had calmed a bit he told them that the Black Shirts had come roaring in the courtyard in a shiny military staff car. The car came to a crunching halt, spitting loose gravel. Four lean, blank-faced men pulled their friend, Adolpho Agostinelli, out if his chair at a nearby ristorante. Adolpho had complained both privately to Vito and Dominic and publicly about elections and oppression and freedom for the past several weeks and getting more and more angry and brazen all the time. The day before the three of them had had wine on a second floor terrace overlooking the square.
 "I'm telling you there is a better way," Adolpho said. His clothes were dusty from going through the village trying to muster support. "There should be elections. We should have a say."
 "You should be careful," Dominic said gnashing his teeth into pan seared chicken breast. His lips and cheeks were greasy. Always known to be a wolfish eater, Dom ate so fast that Vito was sure that one day the man would eat one of his own fingers and not realize it until they were back on the job again.  
 "He's right Adolpho. If the Black Shirts hear about it there could be trouble."
 The little man looked hurt. He was very gaunt and his dusty clothes fit loosely on him as if he were a boy wearing his father's clothes. He had poor eyesight and could barely see without his glasses which were as thick as milk bottles.
 "I don't care. What kind of a life is this? No food for the peasants while the rich military bastards get richer and fatter every day. Everytime someone says something about it the bastards come and beat him. Or her."
 "You swear to much Adolpho. It is unchristian of you. Pass the bread," said Dom.
 "Madon! Food is all you think about Dominic," said Adolpho exasperated
 "It's not all I think about."
 "Yes," said Vito as a pretty girl went wiggling by below them carrying a basket of clothes. "Sometimes he thinks about clothes baskets."  
       
   They dragged the little man across the courtyard, his wire framed glasses dangling from one ear and stood him up against a stone wall where everyone could see, making sure everyone could see. Adolpho proudly composed himself and replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Then they shot him seven times, without a blindfold, without a cigarette, without a charge.  They left him there to bleed all over the stones. They hadn't said a word the whole time.
 Just after the staff car had disappeared into the hills, Lilli, Dominic and Vito followed the boy over to where Adolpho's body lay.
 "Lasci quel traitor là. Lo serve di destra [Leave that traitor there. It serves him right], " Lilli growled in disgust at the body.    But Vito and Dominic could hear the wavering of Lilli's voice - this had clearly shaken the man badly. He was afraid of the Black Shirts, probably as afraid as Vito and Dominic if not more. The left lens of Adolpho's glasses had a clean bullet hole in it. Vito gently folded them and put them in his pocket to give to Adolpho's wife, Isabella. Dominic gently picked up the man in his arms and carried him away. Vito and Dominic later dug a grave and buried the proud little man of Oriolo. Despite Lilli's earlier words and usual grumpiness, he followed the two and even helped dig some of the grave.
 As Vito sat there on the rock looking out over the bay his stomach groaned. He kneaded his stomach with his fingers to satiate the relentless hunger. Over the past two years his body had shrunken to skin and bones. The sun was going dissolving into the horizon and behind him, up into the hills, the people of the Ionion sea coast village of Montgiordano foraged for something to eat. 
 

 After ten arduous days the Mercante finally pushed into New York harbor like a pregnant donkey reaching a mountain summit. The green-hued Statue of Liberty towering over the American waters beckoned to the steamer with her torch lit hand. The sight of New York made Vito gasp on the deck. The buildings were monstrous and there were so many of them. These were not like the simple stone and mortar Italian buildings. These were shiny slender rectangular arms that reached into the heavens. Southern Italy was comprised of small villages and hamlets mostly. Even the larger Italian cities were really more like annexes of villages than actual cities, certainly nothing like this. It was like a different planet and a powerful feeling of awe filled the passengers as the Mercante chugged toward the barnacle encrusted pilings of Ellis Island.
 The trip had been awful.
  Two people had died; a little girl from somewhere further toward the rear of the ship, and Santino's wife. Her death had shocked everyone. What Vito had thought was exhaustion was really dysentery. It drained her body of everything in a few days. She was unable to keep anything in her. It had attacked the poor woman shortly after embarking on the journey and she never fully recovered. Finally it was as if she simply gave up and died there in the cargo net. Santino quietly carried her away to another part of the ship while another man's wife looked after the frightened, hysterical children. Santino came back without her shortly afterward, his face was full of strained disbelief and profound pain. His children wailed when the ship's doctor pronounced her dead, she had died in the swinging cargo net bed they had snuggled up into for days like a cocoon. The little ones clung tightly to their father like a life preserver thrown into the maelstrom. Santino kept his composure for the two children but Vito could see the obvious bereavement he wore like a badge.  Vito tried to extend his condolences but the words came out awkwardly. In his heart he was ashamed he had laughed at Santino that day on the scaffolding with Dominic. Before they debarked and were herded into the white clapboard immigration wards to become United States citizens Vito gave Santino's children each a present. To the little boy he gave his own silver medallion of St. Jude for courage and strength in the New World. To the little girl he gave a small red doll that he made from the blanket his mother had give him. When Santino's wife passed Vito borrowed a needle and some thread. He took a pillow from steerage and then he found a quiet place in one of the life boats where he commenced sewing the fabric into which he stuffed the down from the pillow. When Vito presented the gifts the little girl managed a brief smile and the boy kept turning over the medallion in the sunlight appreciatively. Santino, tight-lipped, shook Vito's hand firmly once and the two parted ways.
  It was the last time Vito ever saw the cobbler of Calabria ever again. 

 There are more trees than I have ever seen , Vito thought as the train rumbled through the foot hills of western Maine.
  It was as if the forest swallowed up the tracks and threatened to engulf the train in an ocean of green. Every once in a while the tracks spanned a huge crystal clear river flanked with purple and green sumac and drooping willows and further off gigantic pines swayed in the warm August breeze. They could not afford seats in the passenger sections and so they sat on the hard trunks in the baggage car like human luggage. They were all Italians but only Vito was from Calabria. The Gacetta's were from Venice, the Chiccorelli's from Sicily. All of them were poor, all of them eager to start working, building homes, making babies, growing vegetables, going to a church, being free.
  As the train slowed the sickly sweet odor of cooking wood chips and lignen filled Vito's nostrils. It smelled like boiled cabbage only much much worse. Up ahead as the train hugged a curve huge black and white billowing smoke clouds rose up out of the air and Vito was sure that some village was burning to the ground up ahead. But as they slowed to a merciful stop there was a factory, a huge factory. A paper mill. Cord wood piling high into the sky, like the back of a sleeping bony dinosaur, towered over some of the factory buildings. As the Italian immigrants disembarked, grateful their exhausting journey was over, Vito stood looking in amazement at the size of the paper mill. From the train platform he could see the mammoth trucks being unloaded by a crew of stalwart men with pickpoles and hand picks. The men worked very efficiently snatching their hooks into the meat of a log with one hook stabbing the other end and flinging such that the log always came free and flew exactly into the dirty water of the flume. Pumped water sluiced the logs into one of the buildings, the debarking room Vito assumed because a rumbling thunder pounded from the black hole. Plus the overhead conveyor was laden with stripped oak and elm logs. Then Vito set off on foot to find the address on the letter from Dominic, it was time to find his friend.
 

 Theresa Papasadora stamped her foot in the cafeteria.
  She wasn't angry. And no one heard her stamp her feet over the clamor of teenagers in the Rumford high school. She was hiding two things; fritata and shame, things she hid every day at the high school. If she took even a small sized bite of the clumsy fritata sandwich that her mother made, huge chunks of fried egg would land on the floor with an obscene splat. If someone would see it they would make fun of her for being so poor, a poor Italian. So as soon as the egg fell to the floor she stamped her foot soundly on it. She was thirteen years old and spoke broken English. But she was working very hard at school to master English and took every chance she could get to read and write English into her new life in America. She had been here for six years and, so far, hated everything about American schools and American children. They made fun of her clothes and the way she talked and the fact that she was poor, very poor. She was one of ten children from a father that made pennies every week as a blacksmith. She longed for Italy, for her home, but when they had left she was so young that she didn't really remember much of Calabria. Only that they were hungry all the time and there was talk of policemen that were not good policemen at all. Mussolini policemen.  
 After the last bell rang Theresa gathered her homework books up to her chest and began the three mile walk home. The Rumford High School  was situated above Strathglass Park on a little hill and from there was the omnipotent view of the paper mill down in the island-made fork in the river. The wind was blowing from the north like it usually did and the acrid cooked scent of pulp logs wafted down river to where she lived with her family in Smithcrossing. But they all called it little Italy for nearly all the families that lived there were Italian. And there was good reason for this; most of the Italians could not afford homes upwind of the mill and were thus relegated to a hamlet owned by farmer Smith who rented, and sometimes sold, property to the Italians who, although they were poor, always worked hard and made their rent payments.
  For this he left them alone. 
 Theresa came to the lower Hancock bridge. Half way across she rested her books on the riveted steel beam and watched the mighty   Androscoggin river crashing down over the Rumford Falls. It had been raining off-and-on for the past three weeks and the high water shot foaming mist into the sky. Sometimes on her way home she would climb the Falls hill and sit on a rock outcropping mesmerized by the sheer power of the hydroelectric dam. The cooling mist felt good on her face and made a fine sheen glistening her brown features. 
 Like the rest of her family she was very short with long dark hair and a full European mouth. Her eyes were dark brown and  when she looked at things she had a habit of staring at them, like the Falls, for an inordinately long period of time. This quality helped alienate her from her American classmates. But she couldn't help it. The simple things about the world fascinated her. It may have been just a butterfly or a waterfall or the new dress by a classmate but whatever it was Theresa felt compelled to stare at it until the picture was framed in her mind's eye. This drew remarks, often cruel and mean-spirited, from the girls who lived in Sticky Town.
  They called it Sticky Town because two years ago there was a wagon accident. The wealthier people of Rumford, the ones whose fathers were big shots in the paper mill, were having a keg of molasses delivered to one of their in-town stores, when the wagon driven much too fast by a very drunk Chester McGuinness failed to negotiate a turn on a steep slope of the gravel road. The wagon wheel hit a rut and then, before Chester McGuinness had had a chance to react, the whole thing, horse, wagon and molasses keg went ass-end over tea kettle. The keg rolled sixty feet down the hill until it struck a utility pole and exploded. It was as if a volcano of brown sugar had erupted right smack dab in the middle of one of the towns busiest streets. Horses and wagons and pedestrians became mired in the slop and eager neighborhood children had to be pulled from the mess, lapping the molasses-mud up with their dirty fingers. Thus the upper Lincoln Street section of Rumford became forever known as Sticky Town. 
 It was getting late and her mother would be very angry at her for not being home to help out so Theresa gathered up her books once more and crossed the bridge. She went over the canal that fed river-driven logs into the mill yard and climbed another hill, the last uphill climb on her way home. After she was past the canal the familiar stench of the mill drifted into her nostrils. This was the part of the walk home she both hated and looked forward to at the same time. It meant that she as now caught in the embrace of the mill's foul wind but also that she was right around the corner from her home. Up ahead she saw the wood smoke coming the chimneys in the Crossing. A half mile later she rounded the corner past the recessed baseball field they called the Spaghetti Bowl where all the Italian boys played after school. Now she was in her neighborhood and the she didn't mind the smell of the mill at all for there was a new smell in the air; the rich scent of frying onions and peppers - the cooking of tomato sauce. 
 She set the books down in the porch. By the time she got home they felt very heavy, as if someone had made the pages from lead during the walk. Almost immediately her mother shoved an apron into her stomach and Theresa was slicing carrots and beets for the boiling water in the stove pots. That done she went behind their house and up into the woods about twenty yards to pull four pails of cold water from their hand-dug well. It took her two trips to do this, two pails clutched in her hands on each trip. She set all four pails on the pantry shelf. The pails were no sooner kissing the shelf when her mother shoved a basket full of dirty laundry and dirty diapers from her little baby brother Ralph. She took the laden basket behind the house near the wash tub and the drying hand rollers. Her mother had heated a pail of washing water while she was walking home and now it was hot enough to wash clothes and diapers. So as her mother prepared the dinner for all of them, Theresa took a stiff-bristled scrub brush and bar of lye based soap to the clothes. She was half way through the pile of clothes when her mother shouted for everyone to come and eat. And then her nine siblings came out of the wood work and waited for the sight of their father to come slogging up the road home from the mill. No one was allowed to so much as touch a fork or speak a word when he got home until he grabbed the first piece of bread and asked nobody in particular how their day was. And then everyone was fighting for a minute of their father's attention while their mother silently spooned out her home-made pasta, tomato sauce with pieces of sausage, cooked beets and carrots and, of course her mother's delicious Calabrian baked bread. Her family ate like starving wolves.
 After supper Theresa helped her mother wash the dishes and then she finished the laundry. By the time she was done it was dark and she still had to do her homework. All she had was math but the math was hard for her to understand since she struggled merely to understand the words let alone numerical functions. She had no sooner opened her book when she closed it again and rolled over in her bed and closed her eyes  but not to sleep. To dream. She dreamt about having her own home one day and doing her own chores, instead of taking care of a bunch of siblings who never paid any attention to her anyway, for a man she could love with all of her heart. She was exhausted and the lids felt hot on her eyes from the strain of everyday life.
 Yes. One day, she thought, perhaps a man, not a boy, will come around.         

 "I want a wife, Dominic. That's what I came here for," Vito said as they headed into the millyard together one morning. It was early September by now but the air was still warm.
 "You will have a wife. I promise you that. A wife's no problem here. It's a job you need. Without a job you're little more than a skilled bum. We need to get you into the mill. We need to talk to the foreman. He's a mic but he needs the help. I'll introduce you to him. But don't call him a mic. He'll call you a wop but don't call him a mic."
 "Why?"
 "Because he is the foreman, the boss. And he has a mean temper too. He's not as bad as Vincenzo Lilli but he's a close second."
 "Wonderful."
 "Relax, Vito. Like I said, he needs the workers so whatever it is he wants tell him you're his man."
 "Okay. 'I'm your man'.  And then we go find me a wife. Tell me again about her."
 "Her name is Theresa. Theresa Papasadora. She's very young and very beautiful. Skin like a ripe olive. She lives in little Italy. We'll go there tomorrow night after work and bring her family a blanket."
 "What blanket?"
 "The one you're going to buy tonight. It will be a gift for her father, Francisco. But don't call him Francisco. Call him 'mister.' "
 Vito agreed and then secretly he hoped that he could remember all these rules.
 "I will be no problem. I already discussed the matter with Francisco and he is agreeable to the idea of you meeting her even though she is quite young."
 "Well how young is she? How old exactly?"
 "I'm not exactly sure."
 "Roughly then."
 "Roughly fourteen."
 "FOURTEEN!!!"
 "Give or take a few years."
 "Are you crazy?"
 "Be quiet. Here comes the mic. But don't call him the mic."  

 "I don't need any cah-pentuhrs. I need masons. Can ye lay brick, boy?"
 Dominic nervously watched his friend. He bit his lower lip hoping Vito would be alright talking to the foreman, hoping that Vito wouldn't take offense to anything. His friend had come so far to fail now. Vito's English came out broken and 
 "Yes, sir. I-ah lay brick good for you. For you I lay-ah the bricks."
 Behind Vito a towering red-haired worker in rolled up sleeves laughed loudly:
 "Hey Charlie, you hear that?" The red-haired worker said elbowing another man. "He'll LAY BRICKS FOR YOU!! I always knew you wops were sick but I mean-"
 "Shut yer mouth Petie,' the big Irish foreman said, rolling a cigar stub between fingers as thick as cables, still looking into Vito's unblinking eyes. The red-haired man shut up quickly. Vito could see that the foreman was considering hiring him.  Vito realized that it wasn't merely Italians who feared the foreman but the Irish mics like him. Apparently it made no difference to the man who you were only that you could be of skill, of service. "Okay Vito. You work with Dominic. I want youse two to build the archway in bay 3 for the new wood room," he said stuffing one of the rolled up blueprints into Vito's hands. "Do that an' I'll see to it that ye get steady work. Okay?"
 "Sì signore. Grazie signore."
 A few hours later Vito and Dominic had scribed a circular curvature in a stone template to overlay the rounded brick lintel. They had done this before in Calabria with thick stones which were much harder to work with and heavier than these bricks so the job was going along smoothly. Although these materials were not nearly as beautiful as the Italian marble he had shaped and fitted it was certainly more manageable and so he and Dominic worked carefully to make the arch perfect for the foreman. Vito was very pleased to be finally working again after all this time of travel, miserable boats and lumbering trains. Vito was pleased to work hard for a man who clearly appreciated hard work done well. 
 Dominic had set up Vito in a small room with a friend of his, Frederico Buccina, in the neighboring town of Mexico. Over the past few days things were going very well. He now had a roof over his head that was his. There was the promise of Theresa Papasadora. There was the promise of settling down in little Italy with the other Italians and making a home and having lots of children. It was going to happen. He had made the right choice after all, coming to America.