Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (3 page)

“
I will find the grave,” Serafino announced to his mother as they clung to each other. “And you will come with me to help me find it,” he asserted to Vincenzo.

That was the only response for which Vincenzo was unprepared. Slowly, he nodded in assent.

Several weeks later, Serafino was working with a group of men in a harvested field, threshing wheat for the winter while gathering tips about traveling to America. He didn’t need to look far for a diversity of opinions on the matter. About half the people who sailed from Italy to the United States in those days eventually returned to Italy. Some returned triumphantly with their wages. Others, like Vincenzo, returned disillusioned or lonely or both.

“
Sonuvabitch!” Vincenzo swatted his donkey while plowing an adjacent field. “Sonuvabitch!” he cursed louder above the complaining brays.

It was the first English word that Serafino ever learned. “Watch this,” he winked at the men around him. “Ay, Vincenzo!” Serafino hollered across the field, cupping his mouth like a megaphone and egging on his irate friend. “What’s it like in A-me-ri-ca?”

“
Money!” Vincenzo spit and sneered for everyone in the fields to hear. “It’s all about the money!”

The group of men laughed, but Serafino saved his money for three and a half years, tending the vineyards around Farindola and selling his wine. Vincenzo saved his money, too, for he had promised to accompany Serafino and to retrace the path of his father through eastern Pennsylvania. When the two accumulated enough money to pay for their roundtrip passages, they persuaded five other men from the village to join them.

“
Promise me you’ll come home,” Angelade begged Serafino on his day of departure.

“
Of course, I’ll come home, Mama.”

“
I don’t want to lose you, too,” she buried her face in his warm embrace.

“
You won’t lose me, Mama. Don’t worry. This is something I have to do for Papa.”

Serafino and his companions boarded the SS.
Il Piemonte
in Naples in May 1906. At 20, Serafino was the youngest. At 46, Vincenzo was the oldest.

Upon their arrival in New York City 23 days later, the seven men split off in different but interconnected directions. Just one of the men remained in the hub of New York City, joining the previous migrants from Farindola already there. Serafino and Vincenzo headed north to Harrison, New York, where a distant cousin would share tips about rail routes, coroner’s offices, and churches. The other four men traveled south to Philadelphia, where they would ask others from Farindola for ideas about finding the grave and await the arrival of Serafino and Vincenzo. The network of Farindola migrants would track the progress of the two men from state to state, hoping to secure their safety on an unpleasant quest while guiding them toward people who might know something about the final resting place of Nicola. It was a durable web of communication and consolation constructed by seven men who had arrived in an otherwise alien land.

But as with any network, it could tie together only so many loose ends. In all of their searches, Serafino and Vincenzo found no one who could pinpoint an exact location of the body. Nor did they find any death record for Nicola at any government office or church.

“
Your father must have been buried in a pauper’s grave,” the most knowledgeable authorities in Pennsylvania told Serafino.

“
But who buried him?” he pleaded, struggling to understand.

“
It could’ve been anyone, maybe someone else who was riding the rails four years ago. Whoever it was could be long gone by now. But the grave must be somewhere near White Haven. It’s a small town where two rail routes converge along the Lehigh River.”

Serafino turned to look into the eyes of Vincenzo, who then dropped his forehead.

It was a bitter harvest for Serafino. He suspected that the explanation from the authorities was a generous one. “Maybe the body was never buried at all,” he speculated, wincing at the thought of what fate might have befallen his father’s scattered remains in the wild. “What good is it to torment myself?” he fought to arrest his imagination, telling himself that he had done his best. But his mind could not console his heart. Nor could he alleviate the sting of failure. And it only intensified his grief to wonder if he had poured years of sweat and heartache onto the barren soil of a misguided hope.

By piecing together the bits of information gleaned from those who had helped him in his improbable pursuit, Serafino could pinpoint only a date. He concluded that his father must have died and disappeared on July 2, 1902.

The search was over. Serafino and Vincenzo returned to New York in the late summer of 1906 and boarded a steamship home to Farindola. While sailing back across the Atlantic, Serafino had several days for contemplation and—at last—mourning. At some point along the voyage, as he pondered the infinite expanse of ocean all around him and allowed its gusty winds to stroke his face, the 20-year-old man realized that preserving a concrete connection to his father was not the only way to pay him proper tribute. Instead, Serafino decided, he would have to find some other way to keep the spirit of his father alive, to give him the respect and dignity he deserved, and to make sure that he was not—and never would be—some kind of forgotten soul.

Farindola was, in many ways, as far away from America as anyone could go.

It was difficult for outsiders to reach Farindola. In winter, it was almost impossible. Perched in an Apennine mountain valley, Farindola was not geographically remote. Located near the center of the Italian boot between Rome on the Mediterranean Sea and Pescara on the Adriatic Sea, Farindola was as close to major population centers as any Abruzzi hill town. In fact, it was surrounded by the cities of Abruzzi: Pescara to the east, Chieti to the south, L’Aquila to the west, and Teramo to the north. But Farindola clung to its mountainous isolation. The only “roads” leading to the village were rutted dirt switchbacks that climbed for miles into the hills at treacherously steep angles. Two-legged and four-legged creatures traversed the trails in dry weather only.

Farindola remained largely unfazed by the outside world. Communication from beyond the valley came mostly in the form of personal reports from villagers who occasionally ventured beyond the switchbacks. When the villagers spoke to one another, they used their own clipped Italian dialect, chopping off the final vowels of nouns and adjectives and thus avoiding the trouble of having to make them grammatically agree. The few hundred souls in Farindola could easily behold, on a clear day, the ageless Adriatic Sea to the east. But the view of the bustling coastal city of Pescara remained forever blocked by the tiers of mountain ridges that tumbled to the sea.

For adventurous outsiders who managed to ascend the mountain crest on the way toward the hidden village, Farindola emerged as a land rooted in its timeless patterns. Each summer, wheat stalks grew up the sides of the valley and obscured the view of the town. Fields of hay and rows of grapevines stretched from within the little valley to beyond its perimeter and over the undulating hills. Farther on the horizon in three directions, the open pastureland bumped up against the sky. As summer faded into autumn, the soft light from above reflected the crops from below as they turned hues of gold before the harvest. The smell of ripe earth suffused the crisp air. All the world was hills and sky. For centuries, the agrarian rhythms of the village had proceeded unabated. Successive generations of families had established an essentially tribal, subsistence society of farmers, vintners, shepherds, and goatherds.

The buildings in the town center were said to be at least 500 years old. Most were small, white, two-story structures huddled very closely together. Some of them were two-story homes for the farmers and herders. Other buildings contained first-floor shops and second-floor homes for the tailors, cobblers, and carpenters who catered to the farmers and herders. The ground level had dirt floors.

Despite the rustic beauty of the land, it could not always yield enough surplus to keep pace with the rapidly expanding population of people at the turn of the 20th century. As the population swelled, therefore, so did the number of emigrants. All of the people in Farindola, whether they worked in the village or in the fields, were in a similarly precarious predicament. The tailors, cobblers, and carpenters knew that their fate was ultimately tied to the land as well. If the farmers had a bad year, so did everyone else.

Fortunately for Farindola, the village was unusual even for Italy in the early 1900s. In most agricultural parts of the country, absentee landlords dominated large estates. Attempts to break them up and to replace them with small peasant farms had failed, only worsening the prevailing poverty and hunger. But in the inaccessible Farindola, small family farms of less than ten acres were still the norm. Thanks to the rugged terrain that isolated the mountain valley, Farindola retained its self-sufficiency, at least among those who remained behind. The people were peasants, but nobody starved.

To the outside world, almost everything about Farindola appeared to be small and insignificant. There were small plots of land with small homes with small rooms with mostly small furniture. The only things big about Farindola had to do with food: dining tables so large that they barely squeezed inside the homes; pasta platters so prodigious that they had to be carried with both hands; and logs of goat cheese so ponderous that they had to be cradled like babies, which made sense, given how much the cheese was cherished.

The people of Farindola came in all shapes and sizes, but nearly every grown man and woman shared one common distinguishing physical characteristic: hands so huge that they seemed out of proportion to their bodies. Each finger a bulky sausage of gnarled muscles coiling around thick knuckles. Each palm a vast callus-covered plain. Each back of the hand a cluster of bulging sinews like tree roots breaking free from the earth. The fingers were not unusually long, but they were extraordinarily thick and strong. The hands resembled gloves more than hands. They seemed uniquely adapted to lives of hard labor of working the mountainous terrain.

The people routinely relied on each other. They had little choice. Their very existence was at stake. Once a week, the whole of Farindola baked bread together in the community wood-burning furnace. They brought their wheat, flour, and yeast to the sole furnace in the village and cooked their bread on the same day. That way, they limited the cutting of trees from the land, thereby preventing the rich topsoil from washing away. For the sake of mutual survival, everyone had to take responsibility for everyone else.

Nearly everyone in the village was Roman Catholic, but church doctrine didn’t dictate their faith. Most villagers couldn’t read church doctrine. If they were spiritually enthralled, they were enthralled most typically with the stories of the local heroes who had been canonized as saints and whose feast days were celebrated regularly.

Some of the biggest celebrations in and around Farindola were those for Saint Francis of Assisi and one of his closest friends, Saint Anthony of Padua. Since the early 1200s, Saint Francis had been one of the most influential cultural and religious figures in the region. He hailed from the province of Umbria, just northwest of Abruzzi. He became wildly popular for doing peculiar things: stripping himself naked of fancy garments in front of the religious authorities in the public square, giving away his belongings, chatting with birds, bargaining with an angry wolf, and calling the sun and the moon his brother and sister. He became recognized, inside and outside the church, as the patron saint of animals, birds, peace, and the environment.

His friend Saint Anthony had prodded the northern Italian municipality of Padua to pass a law allowing debtors to avoid prison by selling their possessions to creditors. The law became the forerunner of modern bankruptcy laws. Saint Anthony became the patron saint of the poor, of oppressed people, of protection against starvation, and—most celebrated of all—of people who were looking for lost things.

Serafino kept a picture of Saint Anthony in his home. Like many Farindola farmers, Serafino couldn’t read scripture too well but found a fertile source of inspiration in the earthy, populist faith of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony.

“
I’d cut my tongue out before I give up my religion,” Serafino used to say. He didn’t necessarily attend Mass every Sunday, but he was devout in his own way. As far as he was concerned, the theology of Farindola could have been summed up in ten little words: “Look after each other, and take care of the earth.”

The village priest once asked Serafino why he had failed to show up at church.

“
Church is right here,” Serafino thumped his chest, having learned to look beyond monuments and shrines. “If it’s not in your heart, it’s nowhere.”

The priest never asked again.

At the age of 23 in the autumn of 1909, Serafino stood atop a hill overlooking one of the wheat fields that constituted the core existence of Farindola. His fingers stroked his handlebar moustache, thick as a carpet and full as a new brush. Many girls were working in the field on that warm morning, but he always sought out one in particular.

He spotted her in a potato patch adjacent to the wheat field. As she bent to her task of scooping away the dirt and uprooting the hearty spuds, her body swayed with a methodical cadence, each motion deliberate and yet done with familiar ease. Every so often, she stood and wiped her forehead with the hem of her apron. Sometimes, she lifted her long, dark hair and dabbed the sides of her neck free of the sweat of her laboring. When she did that, the sight nearly took his breath away.