Tags:
Fiction,
Literary,
General,
Fiction - General,
Psychological,
Fathers and sons,
Irving,
Teenage boys,
American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +,
Fugitives from justice,
John - Prose & Criticism,
Loggers,
Coos County (N.H.)
cook nor his mom trusted was fresh enough in the north country. Shrimp, frozen in chunks of ice the size of cinder blocks, arrived unthawed in trains from the coast; hence Dominic trusted the shrimp. And the pizzas made more use of his beloved marinara sauce. The ricotta, Romano, Parmesan, and provolone cheese all came from Boston—as did the black Sicilian olives. The cook, who was still learning his craft, chopped a lot of parsley and put it on everything—even on the ubiquitous pea soup. (Parsley was “pure chlorophyll,” his mother had told him; it offset garlic and freshened your breath.)
Dominic kept his desserts simple, and—to Nunzi’s vexation—there was nothing remotely Sicilian about them: apple pie, and blueberry cobbler or johnnycake. In Coos County, you could always get apples and blueberries, and Dominic was good with dough.
His breakfasts were even more basic—eggs and bacon, pancakes and French toast, corn muffins and blueberry muffins and scones. In those days, he would make banana bread only when the bananas had turned brown; it was wasteful to use good bananas, his mother had told him.
There was a turkey farm in the Androscoggin Valley, roughly between Berlin and Milan, and the cook made turkey hash with peppers and onions—and a minimal amount of potatoes. “Corned beef isn’t fit for hash—it must be Irish!” Annunziata had lectured to him.
That alcoholic asshole Uncle Umberto, who would drink himself to death before the war was over, never ate a meal cooked by his not-really-a-nephew. The veteran lumberman could scarcely tolerate being a foreman to the ever-increasing numbers of female mill workers, and the women refused to tolerate Umberto at all, which only served to exacerbate the troubled foreman’s drinking. (Minor character or not, Umberto would haunt Dominic’s memory, where the not-really-an-uncle played a major role. How had Dominic’s father been Umberto’s friend? And did Umberto dislike Nunzi because she wouldn’t sleep with him? Given his mother’s banishment from Boston, and her situation in Berlin, Dominic would often torture himself with the thought that Umberto had wrongly imagined Nunzi might be rather easily seduced.) And one winter month, some years ahead of Asshole Umberto’s demise, Annunziata Saetta caught the same flu all the schoolchildren had; Nunzi died before the United States had officially entered the war.
What were Rosie Calogero and young Dom to do? They were twenty-four and seventeen, respectively; they couldn’t very well live together in the same house, not after Dominic’s mother died. Nor could they tolerate living apart—hence the not-quite-cousins had a quandary on their hands. Not even Nunzi could tell them what to do, not anymore; the young woman and noticeably younger man only did what they thought poor Annunziata would have wanted, and maybe she would have.
Young Dom simply lied about his age. He and his (not-really-a) cousin Rosie Calogero were married in mud season, 1941—just before the first big log drives of that year on the Androscoggin, north of Berlin. They were a successful, if not prosperous, young cook and a successful, though not prosperous, schoolteacher. At least their work wasn’t transient, and what need did they have to be prosperous? They were both (in their different ways) young and in love, and they wanted only one child—just one—and, in March 1942, they would have him.
Young Dan was born in Berlin—“just before mud season,” as his father always put it (mud season being more definitive than the calendar)—and almost immediately upon his birth, the boy’s hardworking parents moved away from the mill town. To the cook’s sensibilities, the stench of the paper mill was a constant insult. It seemed plausible to believe that one day the war would be over, and when it was, Berlin would grow bigger—beyond all recognition, except for the smell. But in 1942, the town was already too big and too fetid—and
D M Midgley
David M. Kelly
Renee Rose
Leanore Elliott, Dahlia DeWinters
Cate Mckoy
Bonnie Bryant
Heather Long
Andrea Pyros
Donna Clayton
Robert A. Heinlein