Fiction Attic

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

“Threads on the Mountain” by Pamela Schoenewaldt, copyright (c) 2003 by Pamela Schoenewaldt. First published in New Letters (summer 2003). Reprinted by permission of New Letters and the Curators of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

My family lives in Abruzzo, on the spine of Italy, and most of our men tend sheep. Still we’ve had our adventurers – every one of them unlucky. My great-grandfather left our town of Opi, walked down the mountain, and then north out of Italy to invade Russia with the Grand Army of Napoleon, but he died in the snow there. Eventually a package reached my great-grandmother with a letter from his captain: “Dear Madame, Your husband fought nobly for our cause, and in accordance with his last wishes, I send you his boots.” They were cracked and blood-caked, with pitchfork jabs clear through the soles where a Russian peasant, the captain wrote, had pinned my great-grandfather to the earth, then released him to bleed and freeze to death. Nobody would use them, not even in Opi where poor shepherds wound oiled rags around their feet in the wintertime.

My great-grandmother carefully cleaned her husband’s boots, wrapped them in her wedding veil and laid them in the carved chest that had been in our family forever. When she had to sell the chest in a hunger year, she pried stones from the wall to make a niche for the boots. Dying, she gave them to my grandmother, who put them in an iron box she locked against children, mice and thieves. My grandmother gave the box to Carmela, her oldest daughter – my aunt. Zia Carmela kept the box in a corner and showed me the boots only once, to explain how my great-grandfather died. I didn’t understand why he joined the Grand Army, even for a mercenary’s pay. It wasn’t our war, and who needs Russia when it’s cold enough here on our own mountain to freeze a man to stone if that’s the death he wants?

The next to leave Opi was my father’s uncle. He was clever and ambitious, sure he could find work in the factories of Milan, then send for his family and they would all live rich and happy in the north. Months later the news drifted home: highwaymen had robbed, then killed him two days out of Opi. I was a child in 1860 when my mother’s favorite brother, Emilio, enlisted with the great General Garibaldi and died in Sicily that same year. “His patriot blood nobly spilled so that our country might live united and free,” Father Anselmo read us in this captain’s letter. From that day on, my mother never once spoke the word “Sicily.” “That place,” she would say, “that place that took Emilio, that cursed island.” Dying, she gripped my hand and whispered, “You must never leave Opi. If you do, you’ll die alone.”

“Yes, Mamma,” I told her. The soft fog of our winter breath hovered over her bed. Father Anselmo had come; my father was there, old Zia Carmela who lived with us now, my older brother Carlo and me, Irma. Father Anselmo closed my mother’s eyes. Afterwards, my father rarely spoke of her except to say that I must cook and clean exactly as she had done, sing her songs and wear her clothes when my own wore out. I must do these things for respect. I was nearly twelve.

I was eighteen when all Opi gathered to hear Father Anselmo read a proclamation just arrived from Rome. We should stand tall in Opi because we were now citizens of the unified Kingdom of Italy. But unification changed nothing in our lives and we never saw the King. We were still poor. Even our name, Opi, is a shred, a bit-off rag-end of a name. It’s nothing next to Pescasseroli, a morning’s walk from Opi and the biggest city I’d ever seen. What pushed our ancestors up this mountain with our sheep and our tight little dialect? Beyond Pescasseroli, people stared at our men and ignored what they said, as if they spoke like beasts. I told Zia Carmela, “People ignore me no matter how I speak. I know I’m not pretty.” My Zia, already half-blind from lace-making, traced my profile with her finger and said, “Be proud, Irma; our family’s noses came from Greece before Rome was ever built.” I set down my needlework and stared into the fire, where the licking flames become high-prowed ships bearing warriors with our noses west to Opi. “You must be proud,” she insisted.

“I’ll try, Zia.”

But from behind us, Carlo spat in the fire and said, “Greece is a rock, old woman. They left one rock to come to another one? You think they had worms in their heads, like our idiot sheep? We were always here. Before there was Rome, we lived in caves like beasts.” My father smoked his pipe and was silent. He had never in his life thought about his nose. I knew this. You knew what you knew if you lived your whole life in Opi.

I knew every stone in the four walls and the floor of our house. I knew our streets, draped across the mountain crest like threads for lacework never finished, unraveling into shepherds’ trails. These threads caught and held me like a web. I knew which families had carved wooden doors and which had rough nailed planks. I knew the paved square in front of the church and where the dirt streets began, packed hard as stone. I knew the shapes of our people; by the sound of their footsteps I knew who was walking behind me. I knew the old women’s coughs, the old men’s stories, the children, the good husbands and the ones who came home stinking drunk from wine on market day. I knew our cripples, our two beggars, and why the mayor’s silent wife covered her bruises with a cape. If you wove a tapestry of Opi you’d see me: there, in the corner with my dull brown hair and my face turned away.

Opi was mine, but if I didn’t marry, how could I stay? I couldn’t be like Zia Carmela, who lived with her brother until he died and then with her brother-in-law, my father. In his own rough way, Carlo was good to me, but he was not a man to keep a woman, neither a wife nor a sister. They said I had a neat enough hand to sew for fine ladies, but where were the fine ladies? Some of our pretty girls found husbands in Pescasseroli. They met them in the markets or at dances on saints’ days. But I was not pretty and had no light foot for dancing.

“You can always go to a convent,” old women told girls with no beauty or too many sisters. We knew what they meant: if no man wants you, the Lord always will. They sent pockmarked Filomena to a convent in Naples. One year later her father went to visit and found her gone – to the streets, the nuns hinted darkly. He came back to Opi, tore up everything Filomena had ever sewn or knitted, and threw the pieces out the door. It was the week of high winds. Soon you could find shreds of Filomena’s work everywhere: bits of cloth on the bench near the baker’s shop or by the well, a scrap of red in a crevice between the church stairs. Even when I carried food to my father and brother in the fields, a bright thread snagged on a rock might be hers. But Filomena herself would still be in Opi if there had been men enough for all of us.

In those years, Opi had five young men my age. The two best ones were courting the light-haired daughters of the baker’s widow and would have them soon, for with their father dead, the girls couldn’t afford to wait. The next two men were imbeciles, twins born too soon and barely able to dress themselves. Gabriele, the fifth, beat his sheep and his bitch dog so she lost her pups, beat his crippled mother and beat the earth when he had nothing better. My father said, “Irma, don’t worry. It won’t be Gabriele.” But who?

“You can’t keep her forever,” Carlo told my father. “Find her someone in Pescasseroli. Then get yourself a wife to keep house. There’s got to be a widow who’ll take in an old goat like you.” But my father told Carlo to mind his own business and swore I’d never live in Pescasseroli. Last year men from there claimed my father broke into their fold on a dark night to breed his ewes on their best rams. “Idiot liars,” my father swore, “anyone could see my prize lambs came from Opi rams. Besides, not even the Good Shepherd Himself could move ewes in heat down our mountain and through that stinking town on a night with no moon.” Father Anselmo tried, but even he couldn’t bring peace. Afterwards I wasn’t allowed to go to Pescasseroli; my father said men would talk coarsely to me because of this problem with the sheep. But he didn’t know how the women talked once they heard about Filomena: “Our men don’t marry Opi sluts.” So Carlo took our goods to market. He didn’t care what people said.

Last November Carlo came back from Pescasseroli even more brooding and scornful of Opi than usual. He told us he’d heard a letter read aloud from the blacksmith’s son in America. Alfredo worked in a factory called Pittsburgh, making rails for railroads. Even farmers’ sons and shepherds found good work there. Alfredo rode on streetcars; he had two good suits and lived in a big wooden house with other foreigners and a woman who cooked for them.

“What does he eat?” snorted Zia Carmela, “American food? Peanuts and bananas like monkeys?”

“Or that Mexican fruit, tomatoes,” my father muttered at the fire. “My grandfather never ate tomatoes. Not my father either.”

Carlo exploded: “In Rome, in Pescasseroli, in Opi, you old fools, people eat tomatoes now. Only here, in this hovel, we eat like a hundred years ago.” My father kicked a log so hard the wood splintered and blazed. “Alfredo’s got a wooden house? When it burns down, see what he says then.” A week later, Carlo threw his sheepskin cloak on our table and told my father, “Here, take it, sell it, give it to a beggar. I’m not going around dressed like a sheep anymore, following sheep, eating sheep cheese, smelling sheep shit, holed up here in Opi – God’s drool on the mountain.”

“Hush now,” Zia Carmela snapped. “He hears you.”

“Not likely, old woman, not here.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Carlo,” my father said into the fire. But Carlo was already out the door, on his way to the tavern. Nobody touched the cloak all evening. At night I used it to cover Zia and me in bed.

In the morning Carlo followed me to the well. “I’m going to America,” he whispered. I kept walking. “Say something, Irma. Don’t you believe me?”

“If you leave here, you’ll die.”

“What did Mamma know? She never saw the other side of Pescasseroli. Listen, I have a friend with an uncle in Naples who runs merchant ships to Tripoli, in Africa.”

“Africa isn’t America.”

“I know that. Listen. We work six months for him, then he buys us tickets to America.”

“He says so, but he won’t.”

“He will.”

“Then you’ll go to America and die there alone.”

Carlo took my water bucket and put it down, then he put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my cheeks, which he never did. “Irma, believe me, it’s better than living here like a beast. Come with me, leave him, get out of that house.”

“No.”

“Then when I’m in America, I’ll send for you.”

“Don’t. I won’t come. But write. Tell us that you’re still alive.” He kissed me again and touched my face awkwardly. Carlo did not leave soon or the next morning, which would have been hard enough, but exactly then, walking away from me down the narrow street we had grandly named Via Italia. Not ten paces and his feet disappeared as the road dipped down. With each pace, more of his legs, chest, then his straight shoulders and finally the tip of his woolen cap went away. I could have run after him but why? Soon our domed rock would hide him, and then he’d pass below our cliff and be just a speck on the road to Pescasseroli, Tripoli and America. I never saw Carlo again and he never wrote. My father asked everywhere but nobody knew which family had the uncle in Naples.

With only Zia Carmela, my father and me in the house, there was no fighting, but scarcely any talking at all. The baker’s daughters married the two good men. We lost no lambs that summer and the ewes were full of milk. Even paying a man to bring our cheese and wool to market in Pescasseroli, we made a little money. Father Anselmo hired me to make an altar cloth with embroidery and lace and gave us beeswax candles from the church. With more light Zia Carmela could see enough to knit for merchants’ wives in Pescasseroli and I could work past sunset, but now our silent evenings were very long.

The winter passed slowly. On days too cold to work outside, my father sat and watched me sew. Sometimes he said, “Sing your mother’s song about the moon.” Sometimes he even called me by her name, Rosa, and Zia Carmela snapped: “She’s Irma. Don’t go soft in the head, old man.” Aside from these sudden sparks, the click of our needles and the crackle of fire, there was only the swish of my sweeping, the knock of our wooden trenchers when I washed them, and the thud of the big fresh loaf I brought from the bakery each week and set on the table. At the end of the week came a new sound: the rattle of dry crusts in our trenchers.

When Father Anselmo came to inspect my work, he said he’d heard another man from Pescasseroli had left for America. “Perhaps he’ll meet Carlo.” “He won’t,” said Zia Carmela. Nobody spoke.

Father Anselmo watched me work, my head bowed over the altar cloth. “Irma needs a husband,” he sighed. “But there’re so few young men left. Did you hear? The mayor’s daughter is marrying Old Tommaso.” I gripped my needle. So it was true what the women were saying: no decent man would take her now with that swelling belly, but if Old Tommaso married her, the mayor would forgive his debts.

“Don’t worry,” said my father gruffly, “Irma’s fine.” Just then, I realized that since Carlo left, there had been no more talk of a husband for me. Could I not marry? Was this possible? Perhaps, if the altar cloth was fine enough, Father Anselmo might recommend me to other priests. I could buy enough candles and lamp oil to keep my sight and work at night. Ah, but when my father died, what then? I couldn’t sew and also tend sheep, and no woman I knew, even in Pescasseroli, lived by her needle alone. If I didn’t marry when I was young at least, who would want me when I was ugly, old and poor, still in my mother’s clothes?

The winter crept on silently, my needle flying. At least each day brought more light. Yet with more light, I began seeing my father’s eyes follow me as I moved around our little room. When Carlo was home, my father stared at the fire. Now his gaze pulled at me, like ferns in a wet forest. The pull was slight but very constant.

One evening early in Lent, I had finished the lace and was pressing the altar cloth on our board while Zia Carmela dozed in her chair. My father came in from the tavern and silently stepped behind me. Without speaking, he took the warm cloth from the board and wrapped it around my shoulders, his rough hands grazing my breast. I stepped back against Zia’s chair.

“No, come here, Rosa,” my father whispered. “Show yourself off like a rich merchant’s wife.”

I froze. Zia Carmela, groping in the dim air, found the altar cloth and yanked it from my shoulders. “Sacrilege! Leave her alone, old man!”

“Why can’t I see her in lace? She’s pretty.”

Zia’s voice cracked, shrieking. Her eyes were mottled gray but locked on my father’s. “Stop it! He’s watching you.”

“Let Him watch!” My father hit my board so hard the iron fell, ringing on our stone hearth. The fire spat wet wood. Lunging, he yanked the altar cloth from Zia’s lap and wrapped it around my shoulders again. His hands holding the cloth pushed into my breasts. He pulled me to our tin mirror that hung beside the fire. “Look!” he commanded. “See? You’re pretty!” My face in the mirror showed pale as frost on stone.

“She’s ugly!” Zia shouted, “Leave her alone!” Her voice freed me and I twisted away. The cloth fell at my feet. Dodging his grasping hands, I shoved open our heavy plank door and stumbled into the street where cold wind froze my tears.

Through the door I heard coughing and my father cry out: “All these years, Carmela. You think I’m not a man?”

Then I was running, my wood-soled shoes on the stone streets sounding: “Ugly, ugly . . . you think I’m not a man?” My chest ached in the bitter air; voices screamed in my head. I stumbled to the stone bench outside the bakery. The door was closed and the ovens cold, but the smell of bread still hovered and it steadied me. For a blessed minute I felt only the slow easing of my chest and the gathering cold. Then words came back like knives: Bread, how do I earn my bread? Ugly, how could I marry? Man, you think I’m not a man? Cold closed around me tighter than any cloak. I couldn’t stay here, but where could I go? All I knew was Opi and in Opi only home.

I started home, dragging my fear. I thought of my great-grandfather in Russia, stumbling and freezing through an enemy land. Before that pitchfork nailed him to his death, wouldn’t my great-grandfather have dreamed of coming home to Opi, his warm salvation? Yet here every house was shut tight against the cold; doors rattled in the wind. Sometimes I heard sounds from inside: talking, fighting, moans. I was not a fool; I knew what happens in houses at night, in the summer in the thick bushes or in the dark streets, even in the corners of the church between masses. I knew how the mayor’s daughter got her big belly. Outside our house I pressed my ear to the door and heard my father snoring. I slipped inside and into bed, still trembling. Zia Carmela held me all night like a little child, stroking me gently to brush the ugliness from my body.

By morning I knew what I must do, even if it cost me my own home. I went back to the bakery. “Good morning, Signora Assunta,” I told the baker’s widow. “Give me one of your loaves with a light crust, please. My father says with your fresh bread and his cheese, no rich man eats better.”

“Does he say so? Here’s a nice one, Irma, warm from the oven. Give your father my regards.”

“Thank you, Signora.” Now, I thought, do it now. “He was saying just last night what a good man your husband was.”

“Yes, he was that, God rest his soul.” We crossed ourselves. “But it’s hard being alone. And now with my daughters gone.”

“I know, Signora Assunta. It’s eight years since my mother died.” We crossed ourselves again. Assunta was not a bad woman, not grasping or sharp. She fed cripples and beggars with day old bread, not stale crusts like the baker in Pescasseroli. She would be good for my father and good to my Zia, perhaps, but she had two daughters already. Why would she want me? I pulled Carlo’s cloak tight around the warm loaf and held it against my chest.

A week passed in silence. My father stayed away whole evenings drinking. Our coins dwindled but at least we had peace. I worked hard on the altar cloth that was nearly done. The next bread-buying morning I stayed in bed. “What’s wrong with you?” my father demanded.

“She’s sick,” my Zia announced. “Women’s sick. You buy bread today.” He looked at me sharply. I had always bought the bread, and my mother before me. I had never been sick. “It’s early, there’s nobody there yet,” my Zia said quickly, handing my father his cloak. He looked between us and I saw his eyes stop at the tin mirror. He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll go,” he said gruffly, “this once.”

When my father came back with the bread, he and Zia ate in silence while I lay turned away in bed. When he left I got up, took out the altar cloth and went to the open doorway to work. There was only the fringe left to finish. Zia Carmela watched me, her knitting needles idle in her lap. “Are you sick, Zia?” I asked finally. “Do your eyes hurt?”

“No, no, I’m only tired. Go on. You could finish today.” Late that afternoon I added the last of the fringe. Together we cleaned our table carefully and laid the altar cloth across it. Father Anselmo would be pleased. But I felt I had finished my own shroud. Zia Carmela stroked the cloth, grazing the embroidered doves and crucifix with her fingertips, the laced border and the silky fringe. Then she said quietly, “Irma, close the door and the shutters and get me the box with your great-grandfather’s boots.”

“Why?”

“Just get it.” She folded back the cloth while I got the box. She had never undressed before me, so I never knew that a small brass key hung inside her skirts. She gave me the key and I opened the box. “Now take them out.”

I took out the boots I had seen once before, but never touched. The veil that wrapped them was moth-eaten and the boot leather frothed with mildew. What was the point of old boots now? Zia Carmela groped for one boot, then put it back and set the other carefully on her apron. “Watch,” she said as she moved her fingers gently to the heel of the boot and twisted the heel away from the sole. A small chamois bag fell out. I sat speechless on the stool beside her. Bent fingers teased the chamois open and I gasped at a gold glint – a stack of coins and two thick gold rings. “This was your great-grandfather’s pay and what he won in Russia. We knew someone would need it.”

“But what about the hunger years? Grandmother said once they had to sell their beds; they ate boiled straw.”

“If we live or die in Opi, it’s the same.” Zia Carmela scooped the gold and laid it in my lap. “This gold is for leaving; it’s yours. Go to America, Irma. You can’t stay here.” Lamp light caught the gold in our dark room.

“Carlo never wrote,” I began.

“No he didn’t, but you must go,” she said, pouring the gold back into the chamois bag. Then she hung the bag between my breasts. I sat in silence. Wait, cried a voice inside me, not yet, wait a month, a week, a day. But what would ever change for me in Opi?

“If I go, you’ll live with Signora Assunta?” I asked finally.

“Perhaps.” I folded the altar cloth and laid it on my Zia’s lap. She could bring the money from Father Anselmo to the bakery – it would be something.

“My father?”

“I’ll tell him.” A smile cracked her old lips. “Irma, remember, we’re only God’s drool on the mountain. Listen to me. You’ll go to Naples, find a good ship, buy passage and cross the ocean. You’ll find rich women and sew for them. When you are there, living in – that place,” her hands clasped mine tightly, “you will write to me.”

“Yes, Zia.”

“Now leave me Carlo’s cloak and go.” I packed my needles and samples of my work, my few clothes and a little stone pried from the wall of our house. I smoothed the cloak over our bed. Then I lit another candle and knelt down so my Zia could see me. She touched my face, my nose, and kissed my two hands. Then I left, the bag beating against my heart as I hurried down our mountain.

Pamela Schoenewaldt teaches fiction writing at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where she previously served as Writer in Residence at the University Libraries. Her fiction has been published in The Sun, Belletrist Review, Bianco e Nero, Carve, Cascando, Crescent Review, New Letters , Paris Transcontinental, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the Chekhov Prize for Short Fiction and her work has been nominated for the National Magazine Award. Her one-act play in Italian was produced at the Teatro Cilea in Naples, Italy.