ONIONS

by Anthony DiRenzo

 

"Life is an onion. You can't peel it without tears."

~~Sicilian proverb

From "Tears and Onions"

Located between Syracuse and Utica, Canastota, New York once produced most of the onions in the Northeast, but its legendary mucklands, primarily cultivated by Sicilian immigrants and their children, are not a natural phenomenon.  Like almost everything else in Onion Town, the rich soil is a product of the Erie Canal, which transformed Canastota, incorporated in 1835, from a backwards hamlet to a prosperous town with four railroad lines and factories that manufactured cut glass, coaster and dump wagons, and steerable sleds.  In fact, when the village was first settled in 1810, the mucklands didn’t even exist.  They were submerged under an enormous swamp stretching three miles north of the village, a Stygian tangle of trees, roots, and mud that flooded so often the settlers were obliged to build their first houses on stilts.  A year later, a plank path was built through the swamp to connect Canastota to Oneida Lake, followed by an Indian trail, but the Oneidas avoided the area unless the season was very dry.

Although some early Canastotans had the foresight to see agricultural potential in this slough, canal engineers made that dream a reality.  Gentleman venturers with a classical bent, they tackled the problem with the methodicalness of a Frontinius.  In 1850, Douglas Ditch was cut between the swamp and Oneida Lake and twice extended in 1867 and 1875 to form a line between Sullivan and Lenox townships.  Twelve years later, State Highway Commissioner Charles Foster decided that the whole area should be drained and converted into productive farm land, a project more ambitious than the Emperor Claudius’s draining of the FucineLake.  After winning the skeptical town’s approval, he began constructing what was to become Onion Town Road.

The incentive to cultivate the land, however, was spurred by the depression of 1893.  After the local economy collapsed, Canastotans sought other ways to make money, so they sluiced, cleared, and tilled the bog north of the village, between Main Street and SouthBay, and constructed houses and barns.  The work was backbreaking and frustrating, so it is no surprise they had put if off for fifty years.

Since horses were helpless in the swampy land, ditches had to be dug almost entirely by hand.  Thick patches of trees, small bushes, and tangled roots still remained, and stumps had to dynamited.  Even then, many patches had poor drainage, and during the wet season, some crops were always under water.  The first muck farmers were Americans, who would not stay the course.  The work seemed dirty and a degrading, a comedown from the village’s recent glory days.  But for the Italian immigrants who succeeded them, working the muck was like clearing the Promised Land.

First came the Genovese.  Domenico and Assumpta Cervasco moved to the village in 1886.  They operated a peanut stand on the banks of Erie off the Peterboro Street bridge and convinced friends and relatives to join them.  The Sicilians arrived a decade later.  As manual laborers for the LehighValley, WestShore, and New York Central Railroads, they dead-ended in Canastota and had nowhere else to go.  They lived in abandoned railroad cars on the edge of town and foraged for dandelion greens.  Factory work was scarce because of the depression.  Fortunately, the newcomers’ arrival coincided with the village’s push to cultivate the mucklands.

 While the Sicilians recognized this opportunity, they were reluctant to embrace it.  Most had abandoned agriculture, having become thoroughly disillusioned with the soil.  “Who tends the earth tends his grave,” they said.  Back in Sicily, they had not been contadini, peasants who owned and worked their own fields and vineyards, or fittivali, tenant farmers, or even mezzadri, sharecroppers, but cafone, unskilled farm hands and migrant pickers.  The equivalent of white trash, they had lost all love for the land.  It was the ancient curse of Sicily.

           Twenty-five centuries of colonialism had transformed Ceres’ island from the garden of the Mediterranean, where even the keenest blood hounds would lose a scent because of the abundant flowers and herbs, into a lunar rock.  The Carthaginians, to punish the Sicilians for their loyalty to the Greeks, burned wheat fields and sowed salt in the earth.  The Romans, who conquered the Carthaginians, overworked the soil to feed their gluttony.  The Arabs, their successors, introduced irrigation and citrus farming but also brought goats, which munched their way through the greenery.  The Normans, who expelled the Arabs, deforested the island to create their fleets and composed chivalric epics while the topsoil washed away.  The Spanish, who kept the best fields for themselves, were worthless, irresponsible landlords, but the Bourbons, at least, would not tax livestock, produce, and draft animals.  After the revolution, however, the new Italian government taxed all three, wrecking Sicily’s agriculture and sparking the Fasci riots of the 1880's.  In the wake of this chaos, Sicilian peasants were faced with a stark choice: emigration or starvation.  Little wonder, then, that most of Canastota’s newest arrivals had sworn off farming.

But the vast mucklands seduced them.  They were a return to the Golden Age.  Never before had the Sicilians seen such miraculous soil.  Black, rich, moist.  Anything could grow in it: cabbage, chicory, celery; above all, onions.  The onions tantalized them.  Back in the Old Country, the man who owned an onion patch was a king.  What were the glories of Segesta and Agrigento, those Grecian temples and peristyles, compared to a fertile onion patch?  This attitude still prevails in Sicily, where as recently as 1975 an outraged farmer near Palazzalo Acreìde defaced a priceless Attic frieze on his property because tourists and archeologists would trample his onions to see it.

The Americani had their priorities straight.  No ruins, just onions.   And such onions!  As big as your fist.  Hell, bigger than the head of your first born!  The Canastotans were rightly proud of them and gave them the sonorous names of race horses: Bronze Fiesta, Ebenezer, Golden Beauty, Southport White Globe.  A carillon of bulbs in a paradise of onions!  And if the Americani, with their haphazard, heavy-handed methods, could work such miracles, what might the Sicilians do, with their thousand tried-and-true, subtle techniques of coaxing crops from the dust?  They gladly became sharecroppers in the American onion fields. . .

***********************************************************

Anthony DiRenzo is an Associate Professor of Writing in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY.

Tags: Anthony DiRenzo, onions, food writing,

THE THIRD CANDIDATE - Excerpt One

For over six months now there have not been any of those sensational stories in the media speculating on his whereabouts, or the varied reasons for his disappearance. If you recall, John S______ went missing on the very night he won election to the United States Congress. Despite the massive search that was conducted for him, not a trace of what may have happened to John has ever been found, or if it has it has not been revealed to the public.

            I was, according to the New York City police, the last person to see John before he vanished. Although I was interviewed by their detectives, who dragged me out of my workplace on the next day and treated me with suspicion, no one has been in touch with me since then. My reluctance to tell what I believe to be the full truth behind John S______’s bizarre story could possibly be attributed to my bewilderment at what I have learned. Or should I more accurately say my fear, and a shade of helplessness, at what might happen to me because of what I now know.

            I have transcribed most of the material you are about to read from text I found saved on a computer flash drive apparently left behind by John himself. Although I do appear as a character in the story, near the very end, I was by and large only an incidental bystander. No accumulation of words can adequately convey my wonder at what has supposedly happened. All that I can do is to begin, straightforwardly, and hope to communicate my message, without the reader thinking I have winked my eye. The time these events take place in is the recent past, or perhaps in the near future.

 

            John S______ was born and grew up in a small, former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, a forlorn place of fallen-down collieries, culm banks, abandoned strip mines, boarded over storefronts, and empty houses. His hometown, by coincidence, lay in the same valley that held the birthplace of John’s boyhood hero; a Hollywood film star recently deceased. This actor fraught, or perhaps blessed, with an extremely hard face, had achieved great fame, and fortune, from his portrayal of tough-talking bad guys in grade B Western movies. John had been not so much impressed by the actor’s reputation as by his origin, having paid little attention to the man’s career until he learned where the cowboy actor hailed from. This knowledge had given John hope that he too might someday act his way out of this depressed, and lackluster area that he lived in.

 

            “So what’s so big about playing a cattle rustler in a movie?”

            “But Dad, the man was born in this valley . . . who else from around here has ever amounted to anything?”

            “There are a lot of important people that were born in this very town.”

            “Like who?”

            “What about your Uncle Eddie. . . .”

            “What about him?”

            “He was a bomber pilot in the war.”

            “And got shot down . . .  and taken prisoner.”

            “But he escaped.”

            “Then came home only to spend the rest of his life driving a school bus.”

            “So he’s got his name on a memorial in front of the town firehouse, doesn’t he? That’s pretty famous . . . at least for around here.”

            This conversation with his father was as John wrote it down. Just why he includedit in his notes I am not exactly sure. He did not record that his father ever wrote him anything, like a letter perhaps. Of course, John lived at home for the first twenty-six years of his life, so his father would have had no need to write him. But they did not correspond when John lived in New York City either, or at least John never mentioned any letters in the material I later found.

             

            Throughout most of his school years, planning to follow in his actor hero’s footsteps, John applied himself rather casually to his studies. Instead, he devoted his time and energy to the stage. By the age of nine, he had set up a theater in the basement of his parent’s home, where young John starred in plays he had written, produced, and directed. Unfortunately, this venue was quickly shut down by his parents when they discovered he had convinced a young girl from his third grade class to dance naked for one of his productions.

            As John’s performances in his high school plays displayed considerable potential, his drama teacher suggested he might try out with the local amateur theatrical group, who needed a young boy for a role in a play they were putting on. Dressed in what he considered his most sophisticated clothes, and wearing his Sunday shoes, John S______ walked the three miles to their theater in town to save bus fare. The summer heat did not dissuade him as he strode confidently over the War Hero’s Bridge, imagining how he would strut before his high school classmates when he announced he had been selected for a major role in a production by the regionally famous “Valley Players.”

 

            “And so who is this handsome young fellow? And what does he want?

            “My name is John S______, and I’m here to audition for a part in your next play.”

            “And I’m Jake Hemlock, the director of this theater. . . .”

            “Pleased to meet you Mr. Hemlock.”

            “I see you’re from the other side of the river. . . .”

            “Yes. How did you know that?”

            “By the way you’re dressed.”

            John’s face flushed. He heard a faint titter from the three other boys who were sitting there, apparently also waiting to read for the part.

            “Dressed?”

            “And the way you speak. . . .”

            “The way I speak?”

            More laughter came from the other boys, this time louder and not suppressed.

            “Never mind them. Let’s start with you. Here’s the script. Turn to page 27, at the top, you are Guy, I’ll be your father, George.”

            “I’ve got it.”

            “Okay, then come over here and sit on my lap.”

            “Sit on your lap?  I’m a little old for that. . . .”

            “Yes, but you’re playing a young boy, a bit younger than you must actually be, however,  that will be all right . . . and you’re sitting on your father’s lap just talking to him.”

            “Okay. . . .”

            John began to read. Hemlock had his free hand on John’s knee, gently stroking it. He could feel a warm lump under his bottom side growing larger and harder. John jumped up.

            “What’s the matter? You were doing fine. . . .”

            “I don’t think I want a part in this play,” John announced. “I’m going home.”

            What would John tell his friends about why he didn’t get a part in the play? On his way back across the bridge John thought about the reasons he could give. He had never told anyone he was coming to this audition. Or did he? Wait! That’s it; he said to himself suddenly coming up with an idea; he was too old. It wouldn’t even be untrue, John rationalized. The director had said the character was much younger than he was. At that young age John had not yet learned to lie.

           

            Having barely achieved the minimum grade average in high school, John found the only institution of higher learning that would accept him was the nearby community college. Not that John S______ was dumb, or lazy, he had just been very preoccupied with theater. It was also a matter of money. His father, though never well off, was too proud to allow his son to, as he put it, “beg for financial aid.” He could afford to pay for his son’s education if the boy lived at home, and worked in an automobile repair shop after classes and on Saturdays.

Being around rough, working people made John suspect intellectuals. Devoting one’s life to abstract ideas seemed wasteful to him. He respected the men he worked with in the automobile shop for their practical knowledge and common sense even though they tended to curse and swear too much for his liking.            Often the butt of his co-worker’s jokes because he was a “Joe-college,” John usually took his breaks, and ate his lunch from the paper bag he brought it in, sitting alone in a quiet corner of the paint shop.        

Despite a total lack of interest in his studies, John managed to graduate from college within the allotted four years, albeit without distinction, but with a strong local reputation as an actor. He had starred in the college theater group’s plays, and even earned bit parts in a small summer stock theater in the nearby mountains that sometimes featured professional talent from New York.

            After graduation, when no other employment prospects presented themselves, John’s father, who ran his own used car lot, offered him a job. This secretly had been the man’s plan all along. The father, also named John, hoped that his son would eventually take over the business when he became too old to manage it.

            The elder John had opened his lot with money he received as a settlement from a mine accident that had cost him both his legs. Although he was now a cripple who got around in a wheelchair, he was happy he did not to have to go down into the pits anymore. But then there were few mines still in operation by that time, and he probably would have been out of work anyway. John’s father went to church regularly, and thanked God for his good fortune.

            Unfortunately his used car lot was not one of the valley’s premier operations. It had the unenviable reputation of selling the shabbiest vehicles in the area, ratted out clunkers that other dealers at the automobile auctions would not even bother to place a bid on. A wash job was about all these cars got before being placed out for sale.                

            And so young John began what he hoped was his temporary life.

****************************************************************************************

The Third Candidate

by Stephen Poleskie

 http://www.amazon.com/Third-Candidate-Stephen-Poleskie/dp/1600472095/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211395963&sr=1-2

 

                      

 

BOOK BURNING

UNESCO Admits Destroying 100,000 Books

IT'S NOT 1938, and we are not talking about the Nazis, and the books were not actually burned, rather they were pulped, but the result was the same. The books are gone. According to an article in THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY dated 18.04.08 an inquiry has been launched into why UNESCO paid to pulp nearly 100,000 books.

The destruction occurred between 2004 and 2005, when UNESCO's overflowing book storage warehouses in Paris were relocated to Brussels. Rather than pay the cost of moving 94,500 books UNESCO officials ordered all copies destroyed.

Nino Munoz Gomez, director of UNESCO's Bureau Chief of Public Information and chief of the publications division, claims that at least half of the volumes were outdated and contained obsolete data. While the auditors did acknowledge that some of the publications were out of date others "on historical or purely literary themes were not at all affected by obsolescence." It concluded that a "solution other than destruction" should have been considered, "such as free distribution to libraries."

Munoz Gomez, who assumed his post in April 2005 and was chief of the publishing section for nine months while the book destruction was taking place, said that he did not learn of it until 2006, when a new employee showed him thousands of dollars of bills charged for the pulping. He claimed that while he had authorized the payment of these bills, he did not realize the magnitude of the operation. When he became aware of what was going Munoz Gomez attempted to halt the pulping, but by then there were no more books left to destroy.

SG

******************************************************************

Thank you for logging on. We are sorry that we have been away for so long. We are still looking for new material. If you have stories, poems, essays, or book reviews, please send them to me, Sidney Grayling, via e-mail at: OnagerEditions@aol.com.  

Tags: Book Burning, UNESCO

King For A Minute

Thaddeus Rutkowski

 

KING FOR A MINUTE

Thaddeus Rutkowski

 

"Are you the oldest in our house?" she asks.

"Yes," I say.

"When you're the oldest in the house," she says, "you're like a king."

I look around our place. It doesn't look much like a castle or palace. There are no throne rooms in which to conduct business, no slotted windows through which to shoot arrows from crossbows, no suits of armor with which to protect ourselves in battle, no chapel in which to pray for our souls.

"What does that mean ?" I ask.

"When you're the king, you can get mad and say bad words. When you're not the king, you'll get a time out."

"How do you know about kings?" I ask

"Henry the Eight was a king."

"What did he do as a king?"

"He told the beautiful women they had to die."

"Am I like that?"

"You're more like a teenager. You didn't grow as much as a king."

"Do I look like a teenager? Is my hair too long?"

"Yes."

I realize then that our castle is close to the shop of an artisan who cuts hair. I don't need to send a messenger, pick up a broad ax or saddle a steed. I can just walk and get a trim. 

 

                                    *************************

 

 

Thaddeus Rutkowski's second book, Tetched: A Novel in Fractals, was published recently by Behler Publications in California. His first novel, Roughhouse (Kaya Press), was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

You can find Thaddeus's web site at www.thaddeusrutkowski.com.

Tags: Thaddeus Rutkowski

CRAZY JOE

a short story by

Jeanne Mackin

We weren’t scared of much, but Crazy Joe scared us.

We rough, small-town kids, a gang of six, all the same age, could chase each other with oozing blood suckers, put flashlights under our chins and tell ghost stories at midnight, ride bicycles down steep hills, hands overhead, not on the handles. But when Crazy Joe moved to the neighborhood we huddled in a quiet circle, aware of an unpleasant new sensation: fear of the unknown. But then, what is fear, if not
awareness of the unfamiliar?

Crazy Joe wore a torn, faded military jacket, a peeling leather helmet with goggles, and boots of no lingering color, held together with ragged cloth. His scanty hair, visible at the back of his head and the sides where the helmet did not reach, was gray and lank. Everything about him seemed gray and shrunken, as if he were a nighttime creature ill at ease in the light. His eyes were the grayest thing of all, and they never seemed to focus on anything, least of all us.

“Don’t go near him,” my brother ordered. He was older and not part of the gang of six.

“Why?” I resented orders from one born just a year before myself, but knew he was right.

Crazy Joe inhabited the thin edge of the known, the place where you don’t want to step off of. He wasn’t part of our known world of pretty mothers who slept precisely on bouffant hairdos that never stirred, of home-from-the-war fathers who drank martinis at dinner and built rec rooms in the basement of their new ranch houses, then later converted those rec rooms to home bars, and then to bomb shelters...just in case.

Crazy Joe lived in his own world, cut off from our reality, amputated from us by thesurgery of his madness: he came out of his sister’s gray ranch house every morning at seven-thirty and without so much as a quisling glance at the sky would charge up the graveled hill that was our street, running as quickly as his thin, uncertain legs could carry him. As he ran, arms held askew in front rather than swinging at his side, he would screech incomprehensible things at enemies we couldn’tsee. At the top of the hill he would stop, catch his breath, then run screeching back down. He repeated this crazed charge dozens of times, stopping only when his breath was so ragged it exploded from his lungs in broken gasps. Exhausted, he would retreat to the lilac bush in his sister’s front yard and crouch there, waiting. He would still be there, gray and gasping, when we came home from school in the afternoon. We crossed to the other side of the street rather than pass directly in front of that lilac bush.

Buddy O Brien, born during the war rather than after and so older than us, said that Crazy Joe’s clothes were from the Great War, the war before. Buddy was a history enthusiast and knew such things. Crazy Joe, he said, was a war vet, just like our dads.

“Is not!” we screamed, horrified at that dangerous connection. Our fathers did not screech up and down the hill or crouch under bushes. Our fathers, if they spoke of the war at all, spoke quietly, made light of it, turning it into the stuff of Saturday night cocktail hours.

“He’s a war vet,” Buddy insisted, changing our world forever.

My brother and Buddy made eye contact; Buddy blinked first. My brother didn’t like him, thought he was weird to want to hang out with kids younger than he was, even to just talk war talk.

After Buddy’s history lesson, the gang went on the offensive. When Crazy Joe came out of his house in the morning we waited in ambush across the street. “Crazy Joe! Crazy Joe, come get us!” we taunted, braced to run. He giggled, saluted, and then began his tour of duty, up and down the hill, screeching, arms cocked under the weight of an invisible bayonet.

We tired of the game and grew into other distractions. I don’t know when Crazy Joe stopped waiting under that bush. When I was twelve the hill was paved into a real town street, with layers of gravel and tar smoothed over the rutted dirt of our bicycle paths; one morning I realized that Crazy Joe no longer defended that area.

But sometimes, freed from his real presence, I could imagine his history, his private story of madness. I borrowed some of Buddy’s books and learned new vocabulary: trenches, mustard gas, voulez-vous, foot-rot, Sarajevo, Verdun, shell-shock; I could imagine burning lungs, sleeping in water filled trenches, bayoneting blue-eyed Germans.

Crazy Joe disappeared from the hill, but took up residence in my memory, becoming the soldier who survived the war, who came home, who brought his never-ending war with him.

My brother did not survive Viet Nam, although he never really went there. Forty years after my last encounter with Crazy Joe I sit in my brother’s new ranch house in Florida, trying to celebrate Christmas. The remnants of a family who have gathered more for funerals than weddings, we have migrated to this warm place where snow never falls. It is past midnight and my sister-in-law, niece and husband are asleep
in their beds. My brother, father and I, insomniacs, wilt and yawn in front of the television. Christmas tree lights compete with the neon glare of the large screen.

My father thumbs through a year-old issue of National Geographic. I shuffle the cards for another round of solitaire. My brother rewinds the tape in the VCR and begins to watch “A Christmas Carol” for the third time that day. Dickens’ story is one
of regret, and what is regret if not needing to live the past again and again? My brother especially likes the part where the ghost of Christmas past shakes his chains at Scrooge and menaces him with what might have been. There is a half-empty tumbler of whiskey in my brother’s hand.

My brother drinks too much. If I were still the seven year old child who taunted Crazy Joe I would use other words to describe my brother, but because I am older and have learned to fear the knife-edge of truth, I merely say, “My brother drinks too much.”
We don’t speak often. Once a year we hug and say ‘Be well, take care, be happy.” And between those well wishes there is much silence. A long time ago, I lost him. We lost each other. Our childhood closeness disappeared as surely as Crazy Joe had - it just wasn’t there one day.

On the screen, Scrooge trembles and screeches in high-pitched horror. I lose another round of solitaire. My father picks up a different issue of National Geographic and yawns again. When the movie ends, the VCR switches itself off and a tv movie fills the screen. It is a war movie, filled with images of John Wayne aiming his rifle, carrying a
wounded buddy on his shoulder, enjoying intimate if prickly conversations with a pretty nurse.

My brother’s eyes are fixed on the screen. He has seen this movie more times than he has seen “A Christmas Carol,” and it holds him spellbound. He pours another glass of whiskey.

My father throws down the magazine and clears his throat. “It wasn’t like that,” he says, glaring at John Wayne. “It wasn’t like that,” says my father who, fifty years later, still rarely speaks of his war. “We weren’t grown men doing brave things,” he says. “We were scared little boys doing what we were told we had to do.”He gets up and disappears down the dark hall, dragging his left leg a little from the stroke. I
hear him in the bathroom, gargling.

My brother is not a war vet. When the other eighteen and nineteen and twenty year olds of the town were going off to Viet Nam, he was left behind. His National Guard regiment went. He did not. My mother did that. She performed miracles for her son, her only son. I do not know what officials she talked to, what words she used that other mothers did not, but she kept him home, kept him out of Nam.

Naive about war, I had always assumed he had been pleased about this, happy to have been spared the napalm, the rat cages, the loud speakers blaring Rolling Stones into a blackened jungle, the drugs that helped the soldiers through another day. But when I look at my brother, there are tears in his eyes.

“I should have been there,” he says. His words are slurred, his eyes
still fixed on John Wayne.

“Where?” I ask, confused.

“In Nam. My best buddies died there. I should have gone with them.”

“So you could die, too?” I say. It is what my mother would have said.

The powerless of the words numb me. The wall between us grows thicker. We no longer share a common language, when survival to one person looks like guilt to another. I have no words to understand his pain. We retrofit the past to give it an innocence it never possessed. I am, even at this moment, romanticizing my memories of my brother, in my mind’s eye the light falls more gently on his stricken face than it did in reality at that moment. But my other self who still lives in that moment does not know this. I am part of the dream, not yet the dreamer, so I look at my brother whose eyes are red with longing for a war that excluded him. I say the only thing that comes to mind. “Remember Crazy Joe?”

He grins at me. “Good old Crazy Joe,” he says.

*********************************************************************

Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels including The Sweet By and By and The Frenchwoman. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Goddard College. You can find out more about her books on her web site http://www.jeannemackin.com/.

Crazy Joe is copyrighted 2006 by Jeanne Mackin

Thank you for logging on. We post regularly, so please check back again.

Tags: Jeanne Mackin, Vietnam War

THE RIGGI

a short story

Stephen Poleskie

WE LIVED IN THE third floor apartment because my father had been left the building by his mother, and we could rent out the second floor for more money to pay the mortgage. The store on the ground floor, which had been my father’s mother’s bar until she died, and her third husband ran off with whatever money was in the bank, was rented to Mickey the barber.

From the window of the bedroom I shared with my Uncle Edward, I could see the coal mine just across Grove Street. The breaker had a tower made of iron beams, with two massive wheels on top. Steel cables went around these wheels, and when they turned a cage was lowered into the mineshaft. If I got up early enough, I could watch the miners go down. In the summer I saw them come up, their faces blackened from coal dust. In the winter the miners never came up before dark, so all I ever saw was the bobbing glow from the lanterns on their helmets as they wended their way home through the snow.

The two rear windows in our kitchen had a view of our small yard, in the center of which stood the tiny spruce tree my father had planted the day I was born. I would come back years later to find it higher than the house; and still later gone, cut down by the new owners to make way for a clothesline. A picket fence separated one side of the yard from the sidewalk and street. The back border was formed by a row of chicken coops and a garage. A wire fence ran down the other side, dividing us from the people next door. Their house was as tall as ours, so I could see nothing out that way but a wall. As work at the mine was slow, most of the bars on Grove Street had closed, the one underneath the neighbors being one of the few remaining. Its sign, which was lit up at night, cast a red glow on the walls my bedroom. In the morning huge trucks would come by and wake me up with a great racket, as they unloaded huge barrels of beer that were rolled down a ramp into the bar’s cold cellar.

Mostly, I stayed in my room all day and watched the activity on Grove Street out the window. I don’t remember going down to the street much until I was at least three years old, although I must have. I had long hair, which my mother set in curls. People who didn’t know me used to say: “Oh what a beautiful girl!” Then my sister was born, and I was changed back into a boy. I had my hair cut downstairs at Mickey’s. I remember crying because I was afraid it was going to hurt. My mother said: “If you don’t stop crying, I am going to give you to the riggi.”

I don’t know why he was called “the riggi,” or even if this is the correct spelling. I do remember he had a horse and wagon. His gray mare was the first large animal I had ever seen, except for the mules they took down into the mine that never came back up until they died. I saw them bringing a mule out once. It was lying on a cart. I asked my uncle if the mule was sick. “No, it’s dead,” he said. At the time I didn’t understand what he meant, and he didn’t explain. In my inchoate mind I could not yet distinguish the difference between what is from what is not.

My mother was always threatening to “give me to the riggi,” if I didn’t do something or other; go to sleep, eat my dinner, wash my hands. This made me feel especially worthless, as everything else she didn’t want she “sold” to the riggi; rusty pots and pans, broken sewing machines, anything that had outlived its usefulness. Was I not even worth as much as my mother’s junk? I wondered. Now my father, who had never been home much anyway, had gone off to fight in the war, leaving me here with mother, and my baby sister, who always cried to get everything she wanted given to her.

Before my mother began her threats I had waited in excitement for the riggi to appear, listening to the bellow of his horn as he made his way down Grove Street. Warm days found me hanging out my window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the treasures he had stowed inhis cart. On those infrequent days when mother, or the lady from downstairs, would rush out with some small item to sell and the riggi would stop on our corner, my eyes would enjoy a special treat as they inventoried the contents of the rickety cart.

Now I no longer waited for the riggi with pleasure but with fear. Was today the day he would come for me? Had my mother made some secret pact with the gnarled old man to take me away as a punishment for something she perceived I had done wrong? At the first sound of his horn I interrupted my play and took flight, diving under the spruce trees, then crawling behind the peonies.

Small bugs circled my blinking eyelids as I peered through the picket fence. The riggi’s once cheerful horn had become a mournful dirge, a sound I remembered from my Aunt Beatrice’s funeral, the day I learned what “to be dead” meant. The horse and wagon was in front of our house now, but I wouldn't see the riggi until he passed the corner. I squatted lower in the flowers, making sure I had a clear path to the chicken coop. I planned my escape; run across the open yard, jump onto the water barrel, scramble on the coop, then over the garage roof, and get away by the back alley. My grandma lived at the end of the alley. She baked me cookies when I went to visit her, and would never allow me to be taken away by the riggi.

I could see him now. The old man had stopped on the corner and was just sitting silently on his wagon, waiting. My heart was pounding with horror. I had never seen the riggi’s eyes look so beady, so full of evil. He took out a red handkerchief: was this the signal? I prepared to flee. But my mother did not come down. The old man blew his nose in the handkerchief, and then put it back in his pocket.

“Giddy up!” he growled, giving his horse a crack with the reins.

Still crouched in my hiding place, I felt a sense of relief come over me. I listened to the bellow of his horn, and the clip-clop of hoofs, as the riggi slowly disappeared down Grove Street.

*************************************************

Stephen Poleskie is an artist and writer. His artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. He has published numerous short stories, and his biographical novel on the Civil War Balloonist T. S. C. Lowe is forthcoming from Frederic C. Beil, Publisher in 2006. Twelve of  Poleskie's short stories have been published as pamphlets by OnagerEditions.

The Riggi is from a collection of stories called Leaving Grove Street. The Riggi is copyrighted by Stephen Poleskie 2006.

Thank you for logging on. We post regularly, so please check back again. OnagerEditions can be reached by e-mail at OnagerEditions@aol.com.

      

Tags: StephenPoleskie, short stories

, Pennsylvania, coal mines,

TRUE CHAMPIONS

a short story

 

S. Francis Pringle

 

 

 

RRRRRROOOOaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

 

Yes, this was the year the Springboks won the Rugby Union World Cup. Lifting his glass, a rugby enthusiast in a Capetown pub expressed the nation’s view: “Damn, and we bloody well could have won it all in ’87 and ’91  . . . if they would have let our team play. Just because a country tries to keep its niggers in their proper place is no reason to ban their teams from competition. The bloody niggers never give a damn for the game anyway; they all want to be footballers, or the uppity ones try a go at cricket.” The 60,000 plus fans in the stadium did give a damn, however.

 

RRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOaaaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRR!

 

The loudspeakers blared the home teams national anthem during injury breaks.

 

Wearing a Springbok’s captain’s shirt, the head of state visited the home team’s dressing room just before the match began and exhorted: “This game is not just in pursuit of victory, but a national crusade.”

 

Overhead, a jumbo jet from the national airline circled the stadium at rooftop height, a giant-sized good luck message to the Springboks lettered on the underside of its wing.

 

RRRRRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

 

Standing in the shade of the shanty house he shared with his mother and grandparents, Mulo squinted at the huge airplane banking low in the bright sky, its wing tips seeming to almost touch the ground. There was writing on the underside of the wing. He could see it clearly, but did not know what it said. Although Mulo was nine years old, he could not read. He had never been to school, not even for one day.

 

“Momma . . . why is the great airplane flying so near to the ground?”

 

His mother did not know, nor did anyone else among the groups of people who had come out of their jerry-built shacks to watch.

 

Mulo loved airplanes. Three years ago Mulo had seen the place where they came to “walk on the land” when he had gone in a truck with his mother to try to find his father. The man had disappeared after being arrested for participating in a demonstration. The boy had been more excited at seeing the airplanes than distressed by the thought of what might have happened to his father. But, he had only been six years old then. Mulo asked his mother if he would ever be able to go up in an airplane.

 

 Squeezing his hand as the truck bounced along, Murlo’s mother had replied: “Someday, maybe. . . .” She had inquired once, in secret, about the price of airplane tickets. This was when she planned to run away from her husband – who beat her regularly – and live with her sister in England. She knew now that, unfortunately, the price of even the shortest flight onan airliner was more than she earned in a year.

 

RRRRROOOOOAAARRR . . . rrroooaarr. . . .

 

Down in the stadium, the whine from the jumbo jet’s four Pratt and Whitney turbofans drowned out even the crowd’s noise.

 

The Springbok’s opponents, New Zealand’s All Blacks – who were neither all black, nor all from New Zealand – took the aerial diversion distorting the sporting nature of the contest stoically. They also chose not to make an issue of, nor publicize, the fact that 18 members of their team, including 10 starters, suffered food poisoning after a lunch at their hotel two days earlier.

 

RRRRoooooooaaaaarroooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrr. . . .

 

The people from the shanties had all gone back indoors. If they had windows, or shutters, they closed them. However, the sun on the tin roofs would soon make it too hot inside. The jumbo circled for another pass at the stadium. The black exhaust, from having to run the engines at a rich mixture because of the low altitude, was coating the neighborhoods with a thin film off oil. Those who came back out soon found the oil clogging their nostrils, and a petroleum taste on the insides of their teeth.

 

Covering his ears with his hands. Mulo tried to hide under his bed, as he had done when his father used to come home in a drunken rage. “Make it stop, Momma . . . make the noise go away!” he cried. Coughing in the dust under the bed, Mulo decided he did not like airplanes now.

 

RRRRRRRROOOOOOOAAAAAAArrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. . . .

 

One of the All Black’s star players, still suffering from food poisoning, and passing gas all through the first half, had retired to the lavatory at half-time, and did not return for the rest of the game.

 

RRR . . . OOO . . . Aaaa . . . rrrrrrrrr. . . .

 

Crouching in the corner of their shanty, Mulo’s grandfather contentedly smoked a cigarette. He had gone deaf some three years ago, just after his son disappeared. He took a deep drag, the light from the cigarette stabbing at the darkness of the hot room. If he closed his eyes, and held the smoke in his lungs long enough, it seemed as though he did not exist.

 

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. . . .

 

Despite the distracting circumstances, the All Blacks were playing well. A team that offered neither tactical innovation, nor outstanding flair was nevertheless, beating them. The Springboks favored orthodox rugby, based on the avoidance of risk-taking, and a willingness to tackle everyone in sight.

 

“Fuck, that Lomu has got the fucking ball!”

 

“What the fuck! . . .”

“Grab the black son-of-a-bitch!”

 “Fuck the bloody bastard . . . kill the fucker!”

Springboks converged from every angle, hitting the runner, with a crunching of bones, high, low, and somewhere in between – spirit counting for more than finesse.  Waving his beer and shouting, “Bloody good show! Scragg the fuckin’ nigger!” a fan from Johannesburg voiced his approval of the play.

 

Normal time ended with the teams tied at nine.

 

RRR   OOO   AAA   RRR RRRooooaaaarrrrrrrrrrrr!

 

During the break, the unstoppable 6 foot 5 inch, 20 year old, Johna Lomu, one of the All Blacks premier runners, sat on the bench, isolated in his headset, farting, and listening to a Bob Marley tape.

 

RRRROOOOOOOOOOOaaaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRooooooAAARR!

 

“Make it stop Momma, make the noise go away!”

 

“I don’t know how Mulo . . . I don’t know how!”

 

“Make it stop, Grandpa, make the noise go away!”

 

“I cannot hear you, Mulo . . . I have gone deaf.”

 

“Make it stop, Papa, make the noise go away!”

 

“I cannot help you my son . . . I am not here anymore.”

 

The shape of the match changed dramatically during the extra time, going from a traditional running game to a more modern, tactical kicking game, with the Springboks finally claiming victory by 15 to 12.

 

Lifting a glass of Champagne at the banquet held to mark the end of the World Cup, the country’s rugby president, in a stumbling speech that resonated with the old Afrikaans arrogance, proclaimed the Springboks as the first “true” world champions. “There were no true world champions in the 1987 and 1991 World Cups because South Africa was not there,” He declared.

 

At this remark, the captain of the defeated New Zealand team got up and led his players from the room. The All Blacks were quickly followed by the French and English teams.

 

 

******************************************************************

 

S. Francis Pringle was born in New Zealand, and educated in England. His stories have been published world wide, and he has won the Kiwi Prize. One of the foremost experts on the Ojibwa language, Pringle currently resides in upstate New York where he translates textbooks on casino gambling methods into Native American dialects.

 

**********************************************************

 

Thank you for logging on.We post frequently, so please check us again. We accept submissions by e-mail only. Send to OnagerEditions@aol.com.

 

SG  

 

 

             

 

Tags: S.Francis Pringle, Rugby Union World Cup, Springboks,