Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (19 page)

“He’s going to see a drowned man?” Isola said.

“Got to see who he is, bring him back to bury him if he from here. Nobody know yet. I’m mad he won’t take me.”

Isola tried to imagine a drowned man. She knew the river was dangerous: nobody ever went in the river, not even with a boat unless it was one of the big river boats. But the lake. Everybody went fishing in the lake, and swimming sometimes too, and they all crossed the lake on Primo’s ferry, or in the priest’s rowboat.

“If we was in the woods,” Birdie said, “we could see when Daddy brung him back.”

“My Mamma told me I have to stay away from the levee,” Isola said. “She told me to check the chickens and get the eggs.”

“Woods ain’t no levee,” Birdie said. “Your dumb chickens okay.”

They listened to the quiet clucking coming from inside the shed.

“She told me to get the eggs. And I have to sew.” But even as she said the words to Birdie she saw a big dark figure in her mind, the swollen shape of a man being pulled from the lake and then him lying on the ground, his wet clothes plastered to his bloated body while she moved closer and closer to get a look at his drowned face. But all she could see was a man sleeping, and she saw his puffy closed eyes and his puffy black cheeks and the diamonds of water glistening in his black hair.

They cut through the damp weeds and over across to where the road picked up again. The road was muddy and warm. Heat rose up, like heat from the stove when the fire was just starting to burn—warm, but not too hot.

Besides Birdie, the water was about the only good thing about living on the plantation. Back home they’d had the ocean, but it was different. Even though the tides made the water move, it always moved in the same way. Here, the water was wild. One day it was quiet and sweet and low; the next day it was pulling down houses and carrying mules
away, or it was crashing from the sky in sudden, terrifying thunder and lightning storms, or it was seeping into everything through the ground that wasn’t the solid ground it seemed to be; or like with the puddles in the
bosc
’ a lake would form overnight where there’d only been dry land before. Even the air was full of water, humid, stifling in the summer. You could choke just breathing it, Isola’s father said.

The girls slowed down when they reached the SanAngelo house. Nina was their friend. Her mother had the fever and her father had gone off with some other men to try to find work in a mill while Nina and the rest of the family ran the farm. Mr. Gracey’s men from the store had gone after Mr. SanAngelo and the others to bring the men back. Everybody on the plantation was talking about it, wondering if they’d be shot, like the black ones who ran away, and wondering too what would happen to their families once the fathers were shot.

“You see her?” Isola whispered.

“I don’t see nobody,” Birdie told her. They walked slowly, craning their necks to see. The house was closed. The door was closed, and the window panes were closed, like you do when somebody dies. “I wonder if they’re inside,” Birdie said.

They stopped for a minute and peered at the house, listening. Maybe they were gone out in the fields working, since the land was starting to dry up, and they’d been working even harder than usual since the men from the store went looking for Mr. SanAngelo. Nobody had thought it was a bad idea to go away to look for work to pay off the bills. But once the boss sent his men out, it seemed like a terrible idea. Going away meant you were trying to cheat the boss.

The SanAngelo house was a little shack, like everybody else’s, weathered boards built up on tree stumps in case of floods or snakes, not that it kept the snakes from getting in. Two windows and a door, no screens. A stove pipe jutted out
of the roof, the stove inside used to cook on and to heat all three rooms in the winter. A tree stump served as a step.

Near the house, the SanAngelos’ little vegetable garden lay flattened from the rain. Sticks that had held the tomato plants stood upright, twine still tied to them, while the plants lay on their sides in the sandy dirt. A few smashed red tomatoes lay in the heap.

They hadn’t seen Nina in a few days now, and they missed her. But it would be strange to see her, Isola thought, knowing her father had run off and that he was being hunted like an animal and that maybe he would be shot, too.

“Stay away from her,” Isola’s mother and father had told her. “Maybe the Americans will make trouble for us, too, if they see you playing with her.”

But her father wasn’t staying away from the SanAngelos. He’d gone to the priest to try to get help for Mrs. SanAngelo and to keep Mr. SanAngelo from going to jail or getting in worse trouble. But so far the priest hadn’t done anything. It was a secret. Isola wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, or else maybe the men would do something bad to her father if they found out. She couldn’t even tell Birdie.

“My Papa says we all have to watch out now,” Isola told Birdie.

“What for?”

Isola looked around. She moved closer to Birdie and lowered her voice. “That if we play with Nina the Americans will shoot us. Or maybe burn down our house.”

Birdie took a step back and looked at Isola. “Where you got such a crazy idea?”

“That’s what the Gracey men do,” Isola said. “That’s what my Papa told me.”

Birdie put her hands on her hips. “You dumb or something? White folks don’t shoot white folks.” She walked faster, so that Isola had to trot to catch up with her.

“But we’re not white,” Isola told her. “We’re Italian.”

They reached the corner field where, despite the recent rain, a few people were out working. It was the Titus land, Birdie’s cousins. The black people waded through the tall green plants checking for damage and chopping weeds. The plants that had been broken or knocked down had to be pulled out. Lud Titus called out to Birdie to get home, her Mamma wanted her to work. Birdie waved back to Lud, and then the two of them started running, not down the road that went to Birdie’s house but straight ahead toward the woods. They giggled as they ran, over the sight of fat Lud with hardly any hair on her head, and no teeth at all.

The woods was on the way to the lake. The road ran right past the woods, and if a wagon came, especially a wagon carrying a drowned man, they’d be able to run out to see. The water was up in the woods, and the ponds were back. A few fallen limbs, cracked from the storm, their white insides shining, dangled from the trees or lay strewn in the weeds and low grass. The girls ran to the big pond just inside the trees. The ground was spongy under their feet, and mud squished through their toes.

“I wonder if the fish is back this time,” Birdie said. She splashed her feet at the edge of the pond. Isola followed her, stepping into the water. It was cool. She rubbed her feet along the grass under the water and watched the mud swirl up, both from the earth and from the dirt on her feet. They found sticks to poke into the water to test its depth. Isola held the hem of her dress bunched in her hands as she poked with her stick in the shallow water.

“See any?” Birdie said. She waded a little farther and bent over, letting her dress get wet.

“There’s something,” Isola said, pointing. She jumped, but then stood still again. She was afraid of snakes, ever since she’d felt in one of the chicken nests for eggs only to find a big snake slithering through her fingers.

Birdie slapped at the fish with her stick and the fish disappeared. They were small, only a few inches long. Isola’s mother said the fish swam in the earth, in water underground, to get to the puddles in the
bosc
‘. But her father said they came out of the river and walked across the land at night and jumped into whatever water they found. Isola wondered why she never saw fish walking, since she’d been outside at night lots of times. Or why they never found dead fish on land, the ones that couldn’t make it to a piece of water. And how did they
walk
, since they didn’t have any legs? The fish looked like ordinary fish: thin and silvery and covered with scales.
Pesce di bosc
‘, the old people called them, though they said there was nothing like them back home, they’d only seen such things here in this strange country.

“I’m gonna catch one,” Birdie said. She was already walking through the water crouched forward, her dress dragging below the surface, plastered against her legs. She held her arms out, ready to grab the first thing that moved.

Birdie was probably the smartest person Isola knew. She had taught Isola and Nina, and some of the others too, a lot of English, even though Birdie couldn’t read and wasn’t allowed to go to the school. When Mr. Gracey wasn’t around her father let her drive the mule. And once, when Birdie and Isola were at the Company store and were hungry for a tin of crackers, Birdie took the crackers up to the clerk and told him she was going to buy them on credit. The man snatched the tin away from her and told them to get out of the store, calling Birdie a “crazy nigger.” To Isola, Birdie wasn’t being crazy, she was being smart. And brave. Isola would never have dared ask the Americans for credit like the grown men and women did.

“You gonna git in trouble, Missy,” Step Hall told his daughter. Sometimes he said it the way any father would, but sometimes, like when he heard about her asking for credit,
he said it in an awful, quiet way, and his face went darker than normal, and you could tell he was worried and there was nothing he or anybody else could do.

Two fish swam by and Isola shot her arms into the water to catch them. The hem of her dress fell, and the water soaked her dress halfway up. The fish got away.

“You got to sneak up behind ‘em,” Birdie told her. “You git over here, stir ‘em up, chase ‘em my way.”

“I’m going to get one myself,” Isola told her, but she stirred the fish Birdie’s way just the same. Birdie lunged for the fish, landing on her knees.

Isola knelt down in the cool water next to Birdie. They moved their arms through the water and watched the ripples travel slowly to the edge of the pond. She could feel the grass at the bottom of the pond swaying with the currents against her legs, and her dress lift and move with the currents too. Little silver fish swam around them.

“What they going to do with the man when your Papa brings him back?” Isola asked.

Birdie shrugged. “What else? Bury him.”

“I wonder if he’s somebody we know,” Isola said.

“Probably,” Birdie answered. “Listen to that. They be looking for me soon enough.”

A woman had started singing, far off. That meant more people were back in the fields working. A lot of times they sang while they worked, or they repeated funny rhymes that didn’t make any sense. Birdie and her people worked, but not like the Italians. Birdie could play, or “dawdle,” as her Papa called it, and she wouldn’t get whipped for it. Isola worried that she would get a whipping when she got home, or worse, that if her family went back in the fields to work and she wasn’t with them her father would get in trouble, maybe get put in jail like they were going to do with Mr. SanAngelo.

“I better go,” she told Birdie, and she stood up in the water.
“My Papa will be coming back and we have to go work.” Her dress felt heavy as she stood, and the water poured from the skirt. She looked down at it. The cloth unfolded and a long silver fish tumbled out. She grabbed it before it fell into the water. Birdie shrieked, then laughed.

The fish squirmed in Isola’s hands. It was cool and slippery and it gave her goose bumps to be touching it, but she couldn’t let it go. She had never held a fish that alive, fresh out of the water, before. She splashed out of the pond with Birdie following, and she threw the fish on the grass.

“Did you know it was in there?” Birdie cried. “Didn’t you feel it?” And she patted her own dress, as if a fish might be hidden inside her clothes too, and be ready to drop out and scare her.

“I didn’t feel it,” Isola said. “I didn’t even know there was no fish near me.”

They bent over and watched the fish. Birdie laid her hand on the fish’s side, then pulled back quickly. “Slimy,” she said. “Let’s make a puddle for it.”

They dug clumps of dirt and grass with sticks and started building a levee around the fish. Then they scooped water with their hands and splashed it into the levee but most of the water seeped into the ground. The fish flipped around and moved its mouth and stared out at the sky with its shiny eye.

“Fish pie,” Birdie said. “Like mud pie. Scoop faster.”

A few inches of water filled the mound they had built, and the fish moved around in the water, on its side. Its gill opened and closed. Isola poked a blade of grass into the gill, then pulled it out again. They splashed more water on the fish.

“A fish drowns in air,” Birdie told Isola.

Isola watched the fish, its mouth and gills opening and closing. She had never thought of it that way. She tried to imagine what it was like in the night for the black man whose boat had tipped over. Did he work his mouth in the
water the way the fish worked its mouth in the air? She took a deep breath, wondering what it would be like to have water come in and fill your lungs when you breathed. She couldn’t understand how breathing could kill a fish.

“A man drowns in water,” Isola said. She laughed, then stopped.

Her Papa had told them about a man drowning once, when they lived in Senigallia and he worked on a fishing boat. They had to pull him in with a fishing net, and there were fish in the net with him. The fish they brought home and sold. The man they brought home and buried. They couldn’t make money any more in Senigallia, that’s why they’d left. Things were bad. The government was bad, her father said. But things were bad here, and Isola knew that all those pennies her father saved were to buy them passage back to Italy, not to buy his own farm here like he’d said in the beginning. “I’m not gonna die in this place,” he told his family. “I’m gonna die back home.”

They heard a noise just outside the woods, a man’s voice, and a girl crying out. “It’s your Papa,” Isola said. “Must be they found out who the man is.” They stood away from the fish and looked at each other. They hesitated, then moved near the edge of the woods, toward the road, so they could hide and watch the wagon go by. Before they reached the road the man shouted out, closer. He sounded angry, and the girl cried. They ducked behind some bushes and waited.