West of Rome Read online

  I told my father I wasn’t being paid enough. “I want a raise.”

  Bent over the wall, he said nothing as he laid three or four more bricks. Then he straightened up, brushed the sweat from his face, and pushed back his hat.

  “How much do you think you’re worth?”

  “More than three cents an hour. Jeepers, you get two hundred cents an hour! It’s not fair.”

  He scooped a trowelful of mortar and laced it atop the new wall. “What’s fair, then? How much do you want?”

  Before I could answer, Frank threw his trowel down on the mortarboard, imbedding the tip. “Kin I say something?” he yelled.

  “Go ahead,” my father said, surprised.

  Frank glowered at me.

  “Look, punk. It’s none of my business, but who the hell buys your shoes?”

  I just gaped, taken aback.

  “My father.”

  “And who feeds you, and pays the doctor bills, and buys your haircuts, and puts a roof over your head?”

  I gulped and nodded toward my father.

  “Him.”

  “So now you want to reach in his pocket and rob him, like some cheap little crook!”

  Reach in his pocket? Rob him? Me, a cheap little crook? I couldn’t imagine such frightful things. My mother was right about atheists: they were horrible people, truly the spawn of the devil. Tears stung my eyes and I could feel an expanding, helpless sense of rage.

  “You shut up!” I said. “You’re nothing but a dirty, rotten, crummy atheist!”

  He smacked his thigh and exploded with laughter. I turned and ran away, along the scaffold, down the ladder, past the brick pile, over a mound of sacked cement, and down into the basement, huge and wet-smelling.

  I hated Frank Gagliano, the way my mother hated him, the way my dog hated him. Standing on a pile of brickbats, my hate ate me alive as I picked up chunks of jagged brick and splattered them against the fresh concrete wall. I wanted God to strike him dead and bring him cowering to the seat of judgment, and point a wrathful finger as he condemned him to the depths of hell. I hoped he would cook there, bubbling in a great cauldron of hot oil, with the gleeful devil dancing about, his red tail swishing as he speared his victim with a three-pronged fork.

  Then my hatred wore itself out, my arm ached from throwing brickbats, and my fingers were rasped and burning. I sat down in the corner and folded my arms. This was it. I was on strike. The “cheap little crook” would deliver no more water to the bricklayers. Let them see what it was like without me.

  For an hour I sat there, until the courthouse chimes struck twelve. Through the glassless windows I watched the bricklayers gather at the toolhouse and open their lunch pails.

  Then my father appeared, searching for me in the sunlit doorway. He saw me there at the other end of the long basement and came toward me, his footsteps echoing in the cavernous room.

  Standing over me, he looked down and asked, “You all right?”

  I nodded and he dropped to his haunches.

  “Don’t let Frank bother you. He just likes to talk.”

  “Can’t you fire him, or something?”

  “He’s a great bricklayer, one of the finest.”

  “He’s an atheist. He’s bad luck.”

  “Now you talk like your mother.”

  I looked at him.

  “Do you believe in God, Papa?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “You think God likes it when you hire somebody who doesn’t believe in him?”

  “Stop being a horse’s ass,” he said, rising. “Every man wants to believe in God. Don’t you know that? If he can’t, he can’t. But it’s his own business.”

  Frank Gagliano’s voice boomed out.

  “You there, Nick?”

  “Over here,” my father called.

  Frank came toward us, his boots crunching the rubble. I put my face against my knees so I wouldn’t have to look at him. It annoyed my father.

  “On your feet,” he said.

  I stood up. Frank smiled and held out his hand. “Sorry I upset you, kid.” His hand was out there between us, like a crawfish. “Sometimes I talk too much. It don’t mean a thing.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, shaking hands.

  He grinned and playfully rubbed his fingers through my hair, then turned to my father. “Did you tell him about the raise?”

  Papa smiled.

  “I’m boosting your wages to a straight 25 cents a day.”

  Arithmetic was my worst subject, but 25 cents a day had a colossal sound, and I said, “Gee, thanks, Papal”

  “Frank’s idea,” Papa said generously.

  I looked at Gagliano and smiled gratefully, guiltily. I had badly misjudged this man. Atheists could be nice people after all.

  “Thanks a lot, Frank.”

  “Forget it,” he scoffed. “What’s right is right. Like I told your father: you sure carry a helluva bucket of water. Best I ever tasted.”

  We laughed and started across the basement for our lunch pails. The others had already begun to eat. All through the lunch hour Frank was silent as the men talked of baseball and fishing. Not once did he introduce any of his favorite subjects: nuns, priests, the pope, or any of the scandalous monks who peopled his bizarre world.

  After lunch I used a pencil stub on a clean pine board to compute my raise in dollars and cents. The more I figured it, the answer remained the same: the sum total of my raise was exactly one cent a day. Instead of $1.20 a week, I now earned $1.25. I had asked for a raise and, thanks to Frank Gagliano, it had been given to me. But the new wage hike was hardly anything to secure my future. The truth was obvious. Frank Gagliano had conned me. I felt as menial and downtrodden as ever.

  THREE

  My father’s hodcarrier was a black man named Farley Vincent (Pat) Blivins. The full name was so printed on the business cards he passed around on the job. Beneath his name was the legend: MINING ENTERPRISES, and beneath this his address: GENERAL DELIVERY, BOULDER, COLORADO. But nobody ever addressed him as Farley, or Vincent, or Pat, or even Blivins. Everyone called him Speed.

  He was a tall, spindle-shanked, slow-moving man with the ponderous grace of a boa constrictor, never without a pipe in his mouth. In truth, his long greyhound jaws had clamped a pipe for so many years that a round slot had worn into his otherwise very white and flawless teeth.

  Speed Blivins was a loner. On and off the job, he isolated himself from the other workmen. In order to slack lime and prepare the mortar for the bricklayers, he always arrived on the job an hour earlier than the others. He traveled in style too, pulling up in a snazzy yellow Marmon touring car with red leather seats, whitewall tires, and glittering chrome accessories. His Marmon was an eye-catching wonder, drawing youngsters like flies. They asked the usual questions: how many horses, what was her rpm, how fast did she go, how much gas did she use. All day long in front of the J. C. Penney job Speed fielded these questions in a soft, pleased voice, and after the kids faded away he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped their fingerprints from the car’s jeweled surface.

  My father and the bricklayers always arrived on the job in their work clothes, but not Speed. He drove up wearing black leather gloves, a tailored suit, white shirt and tie, and polished shoes. Stepping from the Marmon, he tucked a leather portfolio under his arm and strolled to the toolhouse, where he changed into coveralls.

  By eight o’clock he had snaked up and down the ladder to the scaffolding a dozen times, artfully balancing hodfuls of mortar and brick to the masons’ work area. He was always well ahead of their needs, and this afforded him time for his mining enterprises.

  Opening the leather portfolio, he removed sheafs of stock certificates and spread them on a desk improvised from a mortarboard on four legs of stacked brick. Speed Blivins was a genuine speculator. He bought and sold mining stocks.

  “No money in packing a hod,” he told me. “It’s just a way of killin’ time till I hit pay dirt.”

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p; Every day he paid me a nickel for running down to the depot to buy the Denver Post, fresh off the train from Denver. Opening the paper to the market page, he checked the progress of his various holdings which were piled under brickbats to keep them from blowing away. They were penny stocks, worth from one to ten cents a share and sold in certificates of one hundred, five hundred and a thousand.

  I shared Speed’s excitement over his holdings. With clouds of aromatic Prince Albert puffing from his pipe, he would say, “Shasta Glory’s movin’, man. Up two points today. I just made myself eleven bucks.”

  The names of his holdings took my breath away. Golden Honey, John’s Folly, Colorado Boy, Molly Maguire, Silver Moon, Midas Touch, Lord’s Prayer. As often as his stocks rose, they declined too, some drifting down and down, from a half cent to a quarter of a cent and finally to oblivion.

  Not Shasta Glory, a neurotic and fractious stock, never quiet, always on the move, up or down. I was so enthralled by Shasta Glory that I opened the Post to the financial page the moment I bought it from the depot newsstand. If Shasta Glory was up, I sprinted the three blocks to the job, waving a paper excitedly as Speed came into view. If the stock was down, I walked back slowly and Speed knew the market condition before he even glanced at the list of mining stocks. He owned 20,000 shares of Shasta Glory, for which he had paid $200, his heaviest investment. Every time I saw her name—Shasta Glory—I had a trembling sense of the strange potency of that stock. Speed had told me what it was, a gold mine in Wyoming that showed great promise, like a giant imprisoned in the ground, straining to burst free.

  The other workmen winked in amusement at Speed’s enterprises. Moving ponderously along the scaffold with a hodful of mortar bending his back, he smiled good-naturedly when the bricklayers called him Mr. Rockefeller and asked how things were in the world of finance. If Frank Gagliano ran out of mortar, he’d shout down from the scaffold, “Hey, Moneybags, what’d you do—retire?”

  But my father always treated Speed with the respect due to a great hodcarrier, not only because he had served him loyally for ten years, but also because of an uneasy feeling that Speed might indeed strike it rich one day and quit, for good hodcarriers were hard to find.

  Papa defended Speed, too. Frank maintained that the hodcarrier’s passion for mining stocks was nothing more than a gambling addiction common to all Negroes.

  “He’d be better off blowing his money on something he knows, like shooting crap. What’s a nigger doing, playing the stock market? He’s crazy.” Frank opened his lunch bucket and tore into a salami sandwich.

  “I don’t see you driving no Marmon,” my father answered. “And while you eat out of a cold lunch pail, where do you think Speed’s at?” He nodded toward Pearl Street, jerking his thumb. “The Tuxedo Cafe, that’s where—having soup and the blue plate special. So who’s crazy, him or you?”

  FOUR

  One sultry August morning my father and I arrived on the job and were puzzled by an unfamiliar silence. Something was gone from the atmosphere, something was missing. With antenna always tuned in for any crisis, my father pushed back his hat and listened. The missing factor was the putt-putt of the concrete-mixer, not throbbing as usual in the early morning air. He crossed to the mortar-splattered little machine and looked around. Speed Blivins wasn’t there. For the first time in ten years, he had failed to arrive for work.

  “He’s sick,” my father said. “He’s got to be.”

  The courthouse bell sounded eight o’clock and, hodcarrier or not, Luke and Frank Gagliano mounted the scaffold to their places on the wall. They were union men, fulfilling their obligation, ready and willing to work. If there were no brick to lay and no mortar with which to lay them, it wasn’t their problem; they still got two dollars an hour.

  With a groan of resignation, my father took up Speed’s task and began screening sand. He worked furiously, his temper boiling. From the scaffold Frank and Luke watched idly as they smoked cigarettes. I picked up a shovel. I wanted to help.

  “Go away,” my father said.

  He turned his attention to the concrete-mixer, winding a rope around the starter wheel. But the engine would not fire. Twenty times he wound the rope and spun the fly wheel as the engine choked and gagged and kicked like a mule who took orders from Speed alone. For nearly a half-hour my father fought it, kicked it, cursed it, poked it until his hands were covered with grease and his anger reeked in the air like the stench of sulphur. I drew away in fear and hid behind the brickpile.

  But my father’s rage wasn’t directed at Speed, or the lounging bricklayers, or even at the concrete-mixer. It was God Almighty he accused, God who might have been no more than four feet away, bedevilling and mocking him, bringing guttural blasphemies from his throat.

  Even when the engine finally started—and it did so with a sudden and frolicsome burst of happy blue smoke—the fiendish smile of triumph on my father’s face was not his victory over the machine, but a sneer at the Supreme Engineer for once more failing to trip him up.

  But his ordeal of that hot August morning had just begun. Having loaded the mixer with the ingredients that churned into mortar, he began to fill a hod with brick. Alas, he was no Speed Blivins—an enormously strong man, tall, raw-boned and long-muscled. He was short and stocky, and his strength was in his arms and hands. I watched in dread as he moved perilously up the ladder with the dead weight of the hod and thirty bricks on his shoulder, his face blue, his eyes popping, the veins in his neck standing out like snakes. Midway up the ladder he paused, trembling, and I shuddered with him, pitying him, praying for him, loathing myself for being only ten and utterly useless.

  But everyone was useless, for my father’s determination was like the strength of ten men. He would prove himself to Luke and Frank or die trying. Unloading the brick, he came down and filled the huge mortar hod with mud and started toward the ladder again. I thought he would surely die. Even Gagliano yelled at him to stop acting like a fool and call it a day.

  “Please stop,” I begged. “You’ll get hurt!”

  He winced as his bruised shoulder pressed against the hod and stepped away, rubbing the ache. Indicating a pile of cement sacks, he ordered me to hand him one. Folding it several times into a pad, he laid it on his shoulder. Then he got under the hod and hefted it off the ground.

  ‘There!” he gasped. “Do your damndest. Try and stop me now!”

  He was not speaking to me, or the other bricklayers, or to himself. He was addressing himself to God. Up the ladder he staggered, like the Savior crushed beneath his cross. Now a small crowd gathered on Pearl Street to watch in grim fascination, their presence only adding fuel to my father’s tenacity, even pleasing him to prove the foolish point that a burro was almost equal to a mule.

  It was a long, interminable morning for my exhausted father. During lunch hour he fell asleep against the tool shed, snoring as though night had fallen and he slept in his own bed, a sandwich in his limp hand.

  At one o’clock Frank shook him awake.

  “Let’s call it a day,” he said.

  “What for?” Papa growled, staggering to his feet.

  “Get another hodcarrier, before you kill yourself.”

  “Speed’s my hodcarrier. You get up on that wall and lay brick.”

  Frank looked at me. “You know something about your old man? He’s nuts.” He and Luke climbed up to the scaffold.

  As discreetly as possible, I said, “Frank’s right, Papa. If God wanted you to be a hodcarrier, you’d be big like Speed.”

  “God’s a bum like everybody else,” he said, moving toward the concrete-mixer, his legs so stiff he limped. He stood before the engine as if afraid of it. Then he wound the rope around the starter wheel. Lifting his eyes to the sky, he implored, “Please. One time!”

  He jerked the rope that spun the wheel. The engine coughed, exploded, emitted a series of sucking gasps, and finally silence.

  As he wound the rope again, Speed Blivin’s yellow Marmon pulled up to the
curb. Seated beside the well-tailored Speed was a powerful Negro in overalls. The men got out and crossed to my father. Speed pulled off his gloves.

  “You’re late,” my father said.

  “I ain’t working for you anymore,” Speed said. He turned to his friend, taller and bigger than himself. ‘This is Terence Clipp. He’s ready and willing to take my place.”

  “Mud!” Frank Gagliano demanded from the scaffold.

  “Go ahead,” my father said to Terence.

  The big man stepped up the mixer, looped the rope around the starter like a kid winding a toy. He gave it a snap and the little engine burst into a hungry roar, demanding to be fed. Snatching a shovel, Terence began to feed the twirling, greedy mouth with its favorite delicacies: sand, water, cement and lime. My father watched approvingly.

  “Good man,” he said.

  “A rock,” Speed said. “He’s got nine children. He’ll never quit you, the way I did.”

  “What happened?”

  He winked at me. “Ask the boy.”

  Suddenly I knew. “Shasta Glory!” I said.

  ‘That’s my baby.”

  “Your stocks?” Papa asked.

  “She was down to four cents yesterday,” I said importantly, my knowledge surprising my father.

  “I sold at forty-three, about an hour ago,” Speed smiled.

  I said, “Wow!” and tried multiplying 43 by 20,000, but it wasn’t until three hours later, after filling several boards with figures, that I computed Speed’s wealth at $8600.

  “I got something for you,” Speed said to Papa.

  “You don’t owe me nothing.”

  Speed laughed. “Maybe that’s what I got for you.”

  He walked back to the car and lifted out his portfolio. He removed a folded document and handed it to my father. Mystified, Papa opened the pages and studied them, even turning them over and scanning the blank sides.