DOLLY'S HERO
Robert C Knox |
 |
( 1912, North Plymouth )
A BOY NAMED DOLLY SAT ON A STONE, A DISCARDED PAVEMENT BLOCK
whose presence in the unpaved, muddy lane had long been regarded by the immigrant factory workers who lived there as God's sly comment on their condition. They had been told they were coming to a country where the streets were paved with gold; but the street they lived on was not paved at all. The boy, too young for irony, had removed his new, too big shoes and was rubbing his feet. The house behind the stone was small and unpainted, and a jumble of low, seemingly unrelated buildings looked dully back from the lane's opposite side. The boy had dark hair and a soft, round face, and as the minutes passed by (and a stranger trudged steadily down Court Street toward the narrow lane where the boy lived) he seemed to be looking at nothing. Suddenly a dog appeared from between two low-slung sheds chewing the air with excitement and ran across the road, heedless of the puddles, straight into the Fiocchis' vegetable garden. Chasing something, the boy thought. Voices cried angrily from somewhere nearby, calling to one another in a language that made the town fathers strolling on the paved roads in the respectable part of town shake their heads with exasperated incomprehension: What's this country coming to? At first the excitement of the dog and the anger of the voices filled the boy with uncertainty, and he could not decide what to do. Then, making up his mind, he rose from his stone seat and ran after the dog, carrying his shoes in his hands.
The wanderer, a man with worn shoes and a rope to hold up his trousers, had walked all day, the heavy steps unspooling from somewhere inside him like the days of his life in this new land - his vast, new, wonderful, cold-hearted country. How many days had he spent just like this, he asked himself, one step following another, one road after another on his way to the next city, the next mill town; perhaps to a job, perhaps just a camp of vagabond day laborers? He had passed the night sleeping at the edge of a town whose name he did not know among others who were plying the same roads - or, as it seemed to him, the same road that unwound from the heart of the heartless land, leading everywhere and nowhere.
For five years, the wanderer reflected, he had worked where he could, wielding a pick and shovel to earn a pittance, acquiring the means to go on living; and at night pulling a worn book out of the bedroll he carried on his back to read beside a fire as long as his eyes held out against the shadows of eternity. Sometimes someone fed him. Sometimes he fed another man, tearing a loaf of bread in half. When morning came, he put on his shoes and started down his road once more. What tracks, he sometimes asked himself, would he leave behind when the long journey was over?
The sun was fading now, and the itinerant laborer was drawing close to the town he had been told of. He passed the last farm on the outskirts, the last lonely cow staring at the road from behind a fence of wire strung between leaning posts - an ugly, slovenly fence such as his father would never have permitted in the Piedmonte . The houses were drawing closer together. Soon, he believed, he would come to the great rope factory he had been told of.
When he reached Plymouth, the men in the camp had told him, he would find a good hard street crowned in the center so the rain ran down to the gutters, a street which was called (foolishly, to his mind) the Court Street. Do they have also the Police Street, the wanderer wondered. The Bank Street? The Street of the Bosses? What of Music Street? The Street of Mothers. The Street of the Great Literary Figures? In truth, he would forgive this street its foolish name if it brought him to the ocean, whose distant rumor had followed him all the way from the New York City, the great American city which had turned its back on him and the masses of the poor who had come there with hope and innocence in their heart - deaf to their cries, blind to their needs, careless of their humanity. And so, tired of working all day to make another man rich while he slept in doorways, he had rolled his possessions into a blanket, tied it on his back, and discovered an open highway that appeared to have no end. Perhaps, he thought, it would end at the sea.
This Plymouth, he had heard, was a town with a truly formidable maker of rope and a multitude of newcomers like himself who lived near the factory from which they drew their sustenance. He had been given the name of one of these factory workers, a countryman likely to open his home to a paisano when the time came to seek shelter. The wanderer glanced at the sky; that time would come soon. The kindness is everything , he thought. The love of the fellow man .
What else did a man need, the wanderer asked himself. His health was good. He had two strong arms. On nights when he had a candle and slept in the houses of men he stayed up all night reading the great Dante Alighieri (such torments! such a passion for justice!) and was still able to work all day in the fresh air with pick and shovel.
The wanderer paused, these thoughts dying away, not because he was tired, but to look calmly at the impressive sight which rose before him. A smokestack, very tall, fifty meters, maybe - he could not say - rising above a fortress-like compound of long brick buildings. And just beyond these buildings, some of stone, most of red brick, the water met the land, and a set of rails stitched the shoreline.
When he passed the gates of the factory, the air seemed to vibrate from the efforts of so many arms and legs and human hearts, beating like the wings of caged birds inside that mighty castle of desperate and exhausted labors. Putting the Plymouth Cordage Company behind him, he found himself among rows of tenements and other small houses for large families. He paused and peered intently down a narrow lane, attracted by a scent of cooking. Small, blunt buildings lined the muddy roadway. It was rutted and would fill with water when it rained. Outside a dwelling he saw a small boy sitting on a stone, trying to interest a yellow dog in a stick.
Not every boy had new big shoes, Dolly knew. Many boys did not have any shoes at all. Trying hard to keep the shoes clean, he played in the lane outside his house, a place which provided him with mud, stones, and dogs, but seldom horses and never a car. His real name was Beltrando, but he was called Dolly because little boys and girls were no different from one another. Because he was skinny and when he was still a baby his arms and legs flopped like a doll, and because it was an English word the Brini family knew.
Across the lane from the small wood frame house where he lived with his parents and sister was the clubhouse where the men would go when the factory whistle signaled the end of the day for the tired men (and some women too) who worked there, but for now there was no one in the lane but him. Dolly was old enough for school, but some days he did not go. He went when Lefevre went, because she made him. There were too many other children in the school, and many of them were rough and unkind. They filled all the benches in the classroom, sometimes pushing him to the hard, cold floor. It was better to sit by himself on the stone in front of his house, even when the hours grew long and he spent them alone.
He played with the sleek yellow-brown dog that belonged to the neighbors, the Fiocchis. He jumped when the dog jumped and chased what the dog chased. Sometimes he could get the dog to chase after the sticks he threw. Sometimes the dog had ideas of its own. It would mutter a rattling bark in its throat, like Dolly's father about to get mad at one of the children, wrap its tail between its legs and propel itself in a long loping gait after its quarry. It chased the twitchy gray rabbits which came down from their holes on Castle Hill to eat the greens in the neighbors' gardens, and then the big people were glad to see a dog running loose in the neighborhood. But the rabbits, Dolly knew, would not come out from their holes until the sun started to fade from the sky. Until then he had the mud of the street to shape and stones to throw, but now even the dog had abandoned him for other sources of amusement. Dolly sat on a stone in front of his house and scraped at the mud with his shoes, sometimes covering the toe of one of his shoes with a thin patina of dirt and making lines and shapes on the new leather. Brushing off the dirt; adding new mud to make new shapes.
That was the day Mr. Vanzetti came to live with his family.
You could not hear two feet walking alone down Court Street, no matter whose feet they were or how big their owner, but when all the men left the great rope factory together at the end of the day, you could hear a thousand feet - no , his father said, more than that - two thousand? - still more, Dolly! So many feet caused a rumble like a river of stones flooding down the Court Street past the stores where his mother bought food (arguing sometimes over the high price of the cooking oil, the sugar, the flour) to pour into the muddy lanes and sturdier side streets which swallowed them up, somehow, until early the next morning.
It was March, the end of winter, the light lasting longer. Less strain on their eyes, the men in the factory noticed, as daylight filtered through the ranks of tall windows set high in the walls. The frost still in the ground, but the men thought of their gardens as they flooded mechanically, bone tired, homeward. A tinge of pink in the dying light lit the places where a traveler could glimpse the sea (just before Castle Hill, and again, farther south, across the grassy field owned by Mr. Holmes), the reddish light tinting the ripples of the bay and flashing on the window glass of the old captain's house on the skinny strip of sand called Long Beach. But the men did not pause to gaze at the light on the water. They kept moving. They hoped they would find their houses warm.
The rumble of feet warned the boy that the factory workers were returning long before the first of the dark-clothed, dark-haired figures flickered into sight. Then the lane came abruptly to life, startling him with an earthquake of sound and motion that stunned his senses and made him forget his dirt-crusted shoes. A door opened. Someone exclaimed from inside a house. He could smell sharp kitchen smells as the fires were lit. The smells made him hungry and he thought hard about where to find a penny for candy at Sellers General Goods; and as he was thinking of the places he might look, a pair of tall figures loomed above his seat on the stone.
"Why are your shoes muddy?" his father grumbled. "Do you think shoes walk out of the store?"
Speaking the language, Mr. Vanzetti would explain to him, a day or two later, was not even the true Italian. It was a fine enough language in its own way - Bolognese, the family boarder called it - but the boy should know the true language of his people. Soon he would begin to teach it to Dolly and his sister. But that day Mr. Vanzetti said only " si si, figlio ," with a shy smile on his kind face. And then his father resumed speaking to the newcomer, a man with a big moustache and a small dark beard on his chin - "this is Mr. Vanzetti," his father announced gruffly to Dolly, "he will live here" - and the two of them entered the house together, leaving the boy once more alone.
But a few minutes later Mr. Vanzetti came back outdoors by himself and did a thing that Dolly would always remember. He bent and lifted the slender boy by the elbows from the rock on which he had been sitting - rather forlornly, his bare, beanpole legs splayed apart, wondering how he was supposed to keep mud off his shoes in a muddy lane - and set him standing on the stone's smooth surface. Then the stranger picked up the stick the boy had laid down and asked him to lift up his foot, " prego , figlio, prego ," and began cleaning off the mud from his shoe.
Apart from the few dollars he gave them each week, life was neither better nor worse for the older members of the Brini family of Suosso's Lane after Vanzetti came to live with them, but it was much better for Dolly. Mr. Vanzetti left the house early each morning to spend his day in hard labor like all the men of the neighborhood, but unlike the others he did not cross the lane after the work day to play cards in the Vespucci Club. Sometimes the men sang in the club, his father said. Sometimes someone played the fiddle.
And unlike Dolly's father, Mr. Vanzetti did the work he called, in English, "pick-uh shov-uh." He walked to the harbor of the old town, the Yankee town, where the workers were chosen each day, and as long as there was work to be done Vanzetti was chosen. As long as I have two strong arms - he would declare later, when horrible things were being said about him, terrible accusations (and Dolly would run away crying, inconsolable) - I can put food and drink on the table. Why would I steal? I can always go back to my father in the Piedmonte, who has land, who has olive trees and fields of grain.
For now he was regarded not as a criminal when he sought day labor work on the restoration of the Plymouth Harbor, but as a beast of burden. First they ask me to show my hands (Dolly heard the family boarder say) and sometimes even to open my shirt so they can look at my chest - like an animal! Do they think that I am sick? That I will fall down and die and cause the work to be delayed?
Mr. Vanzetti brought home his pay to Suosso's Lane, and Dolly's mother or sister would find it forgotten on the table or underneath the chair, fallen on the floor. Keep it , he would say, keep it for yourself . Little as he earned, working hours on end with the strength of his back, he could not be bothered to hold onto his money. He could, however, find time to attend to Dolly's efforts to play the violin.
Dolly was smaller than the other boys on the lane, except for the babies, and perhaps that was why they so often left him alone. One day a boy named Primo taught him to play the game in which a stone, wrapped in the cloth of old sacks until it became large and somewhat soft, was kicked by the feet. The boys chased after the ball Primo had made, kicking it with their feet toward the thick tree at the end of the lane which Primo called the "goal." The other boy had longer legs and so Dolly chased after him, occasionally getting in Primo's way and tangling his feet, until Primo pushed him and he fell in the mud and cried. Primo laughed and kicked his ball away.
After that Dolly did not play football, but thought only of playing music. And after the parade that summer on the great American holiday, his love of music grew inside him and flowered into a voluptuous adoration too vivid for his mother, Alphonsina, and his father, Vincenzo Brini, to ignore.
On the day of the parade the band of the Plymouth Cordage Company marched down Court Street in their clean white uniforms, wearing hats with brushes sprouting from the black hatbands. They were Cordage men, German and Swedes and Yankees, not so many Italians, playing the cheerful band music of the new world on their shining instruments. It was a day of no work for the factory, a holiday, and the families who lived in the lanes gathered along the main street to watch the parade. Dolly heard his parents discuss with the others the reason for the parade. The Fourth of July , a man explained. It is a holiday. An American holiday. The day of independence .
"Independence?"
" Indipendenza! "
"But who are these independent ones? The ones who march in this parade?"
"It is a beautiful country," his father put in then, "with a beautiful holiday. But this thing of the indipendenza ? Who has it? The factory owner? Let him celebrate this indipendenza he is so proud of. It is not for us. For us there is the slavery of the factory."
Some of the others clicked their tongues disapprovingly at these words, but then another of the factory workers, Primo's father, began to tell a story about leaving the old country for America.
"In the old country they told me that in America everything was beautiful, all the people were wealthy, and the streets were paved with gold," Primo's father said, opening his hands to evoke the beauty of this vision. "But when I crossed the ocean and arrived in this new country, I learned it was not so. Not only were the streets not paved with gold, they were not even paved" - the storyteller timed the hesitation to draw all eyes to him - "and I was expected to pave them."
Dolly's father laughed with the others, but like a man who had been poked in the stomach, and began to tell a sad story of his own expectations of this new country to which all had come filled with hope. But some of the other people told him they had not come to the parade to hear his sad tale, but to listen instead to the music of the beautifully dressed band in their clean, white uniforms.
The music of the company's brass band so inflamed Dolly that for days afterwards he pestered his wise older sister, Lefevre, for the names of the songs they had played. "Yankee Doodle Dandy," she told him. "Everyone knows that one."
"Doodle dee! Doodle dan!" Dolly sang afterwards, marching up and down the lane in front of the house.
"What is this foolish singing, figlio ?" his father demanded, coming home from the Cordage factory the next evening. "Do you call that music? I will show you music."
Reaching underneath the narrow bed where he slept with his wife, Vincenzo Brini withdrew an old violin. He promised to show his son what music should really sound like, but the instrument was badly out of tune, and after drawing the bow across the strings a few times and muttering to himself, Vincenzo exclaimed that the sounds of bella Italia could not survive in the cruel American climate and (to his big-eyed son's great disappointment) wrapped the instrument carefully back up in its casement of worn cotton rags cut from his late mother's dress and returned it to its hiding place beneath the bed.
But Dolly could not stop thinking about the beautiful wood and subtle strings of the old instrument which had traveled across the ocean with his parents. Alphonsina, who worked in the woolen mill by the harbor when the orders came in, found him fishing it out from underneath the bed so many times that eventually she permitted him to handle the violin and pluck its strings at will. One day Vincenzo caught him drawing the bow over the tired and loosened strings of the instrument, and Dolly feared his father would be angry. Instead, he took the instrument from the child's hands, sat down on the bed and spent an hour tightening the strings and seeking to tune them one to another, muttering to himself disdainfully while he worked. He showed Dolly how to grasp the wide bell of the violin between his shoulder and chin, and how to bow with a steady stroke to keep the strings from screeching with the tormented voice of a wounded animal.
And yet despite this gesture of kindness and generosity, it appeared to Dolly that his father could not bear to listen to his attempts to play music on the violin. He would leave the parlor when Dolly began to play or sink down in his chair and draw his newspaper tightly in front of his face.
Nor did his father wish to play the violin any more himself. He played cards instead, walking across the muddy lane after supper and opening the battered brown door of the Vespucci Club. The national society had been named after a great man of his own people, his father had explained, so why should he not go inside those doors to be with the other men? Inside, the men drank wine, smoked, played cards. They did not fight or become disorderly or shout angrily in their cups, his father said, frowning and waving his arms in the air to illustrate the bad behavior of other people. "What people?" Dolly asked, but was ignored. His father would not say, at least in front of him, who these bad people were, but for years after his father's imitation of their violent conduct the boy was frightened by the prospect of encountering these angry fighting men. Were they the men who ran the factory, the boy wondered. Was there fighting inside those great ropemaking buildings where his father worked behind a machine all day? Anger and shouting upset him. He did not like loud noises. He wanted song, harmony. Eight years later people said that the man he regarded as his greatest friend was a killer and a robber - but they were wrong, he insisted. They understood nothing of the man who had come to live with his family.
It was Mr. Vanzetti, the family boarder who had no children of his own, no wife and no home of his own, a gentle man with dark eyes and big moustache who sat in the evening at the kitchen table bent over his papers, who proved to be the one member of the household to find time for a boy with thin legs and dirty shoes. He listened carefully as Dolly struggled to play a tune on the old violin, sitting at the table with his hand in his lap, and not overlooking the papers (as other grownups did) which he had folded and put down when the boy began to play. When the boy finished, he nodded and clapped his hands softly with pleasure. "Bella," he said. "Your name is Bel -trando and your music is bella."
One evening when the men had come home from the factories, Dolly listened while Mr. Vanzetti told the story of why he came to America. He had not been born a poor man, he said. His father owned land in the hill country to the north, the Piedmonte, and many families leased their land from him. His father was an important man, a padrone . He owned an old stone house, fields, many animals, orchards.
"My poor mother," Mr. Vanzetti began, but shook his head and took a moment before he continued, by which hesitation the Brinis understood that a tragedy had befallen her. "My poor mother," he began again, "always intended for me to have the education."
"Of course," said Alphonsina. "Many mothers want their sons to become priests - I mean, scholars," she added quickly, remembering Mr. Vanzetti's view of the church.
"But my father," the family boarder said, in a darker tone, "he did not believe in the education, because he had not needed it in his own life. He believed in hard work."
Dolly listened, sitting with his legs crossed underneath the table, because no one told him to go to bed. There was much of this talk, of course, he did not understand. But some parts he would always remember.
"I was sent to work for a pastry chef in Milan. The Star of Milan, his shop was called, and I believed it was named for the star you would see in heaven, because they worked me almost to death." He paused, but the others did not laugh. "I was just a boy," he resumed. "We worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Work on the feet all day, hour after hour, then fall asleep exhausted - that was my life. But you could not properly call it a life. It was a hell. The oven room was hot, sometimes the smoke from the ovens would fill the shop. The old man who ran the bake shop, Enrico, would yell at me all day. I was a good boy, a good worker, I worked as hard as I was able, and still they would tell me to work harder. At night I would lie alone and think of my home, my mother, and wish to run away. But my father, he was a hard man. Life was a test, he thought..."
"Si." The Brinis filled his pause and nodded their familiarity with this way of thought.
"So. You proved yourself worthy, or you went to the wall. I knew I would only be sent back to work again. At the age of sixteen, I fell ill, very ill. They sent me home at last, thinking that probably I was to die. Perhaps my father thought again of that decision of his to send me to apprentice in a workshop. But I don't know. We never spoke of it. My father, he was not a talkative man.... My mother -" he broke off.
His listeners were silent.
"My mother," he resumed, "nursed me every moment of every day, and every night - what devotion!" Vanzetti shook his head, in wonder. "What kindness! Dolce vivere e morir! " he recited. " E non lasciarci piu! "
The Brinis nodded at this passionate embrace of the sweetness of life and death ("don't ever leave us!"), though the appearance of these words in the opera by Puccini was not familiar to them.
"It was winter when I sickened," Vanzetti recounted, "and spring when I began to show some signs of recovery... One day I woke at dawn in the room where I slept, my mother was asleep in her chair, the place where she spent all those nights, and I saw the blossoms on the olive trees and knew for the first time what it was I was seeing, and remembered that was how life had been all the years of my childhood, that life existed outside the workshop of the pastry factory, and my mind was no longer trapped in an evil dream of pain and tedium and the endless labor of the oven room... the flour and the sweat and the smells -"
His listeners nodded their heads, knowing this nightmare of exhaustion and tedium very well.
"--the hauling of the heavy metal trays of the crusts and the pastry shells for the tables of the bourgeoisie onto the flat tongues of the wooden paddles to slide inside the ovens, and then pulling them out of the ovens; pushing in the heavy paddles and once more hauling them out, like galley slaves chained to their oars... But instead of all that suffering I saw the blossoms on the trees and heard the voices of the birds. And after that I realized I was going to live after all. And that it was good...
"And so I was alive, and at home once more. But I was no longer a child. And after you have nearly died, you are a different person. I knew then I would not go back to the pastry shop or to any such shop in the city of Milan, no matter what my father said, and I was not even surprised when he did not say any such thing to me at all. Nor did I wish to work on my father's farms either. He had the olives, the tomatoes, the onions, the pecan trees, the apples, the chickens in their roosts - but that was not for me. For months I did not have to decide anything while I recovered my health. Then, in the high summer, something else - something terrible - happened, the kind of thing from which no person can ever really recover. My mother - my wonderful, gentle mother! - suddenly fell ill. Her love had sustained me, always. I was the oldest; there was my sister too, who was still then a little girl. But my mother was the keeper of my soul. We would walk along the grassy pathways of my father's land in the early mornings, in the cool early hours of a childhood's summer day, and she would teach me to tiptoe without making a sound and to speak only in the softest of voices, so quiet were we that the hare nibbling on the new grass would let us pass without moving; and the deer in the apples, and the blackbird in the trees, and the swallow waiting for the insect to dry its wings from the dew and to catch them in their flight, the hens asleep in the tall poplar trees..."
They were all silent, seeing these things in their thoughts or wishing they could and hearing the creak of the cooling kitchen stove.
"But my poor mother - she was too ill for medicine. When my father accepted that her illness was not just some woman's weakness, he called for the doctor to come up from the town. My father did not trust doctors. But it would not have mattered if he had called sooner. After the doctor examined her that first time, he took my father aside and told him that something was growing inside her and he held little hope for her recovery. I overheard this. I -"
He could not continue. His listeners dropped their eyes.
"Of course," he said at last, after a pause, "I wondered if my own illness, her constant attention to me all those months, those days and nights at the bedside, had weakened her, opened the door to this illness... Though the doctor said no, it was some defect in her nature. So now I nursed her, though in the end there was so little I could do..."
He raised a hand. "I can speak no more of this."
"We understand," Alphonsina said.
A shadow passed over his gentle features, then lifted by degrees. After a moment he continued with his own story. "I decided to go to America. Well, it was the new country, a land of freedom, the hope of the suffering mankind, the land where they dug the gold from the hills - why should I not go to America? My father neither opposed nor approved of my decision. We spoke little after my mother's death, but lived in his big old house like strangers... So I came to a new country, to start a new life, with almost nothing in my pocket, like any poor man. I was like all of the poor ones in this suffering condition, crowded together in the lower berths."
It was Vincenzo's turn to lift a hand. "We know this business well," he said. "I was afraid for Alphonsina, who was carrying our first bambino, our Lefevre, on the boat when we came here."
"Si." Vanzetti nodded. "And so, like so many others, I took up the life of a poor foreign workingman, with only his labor to sell in a new country - a country where the streets were made - "No, no," Alphonsina interrupted, "not that again!"
"--of mud."
All three laughed, but not merrily.
One day Mr. Vanzetti came home without his shoes. He said nothing of his bare-footedness, merely "bon giorno" and "scusi" as he passed into the house and went to wash at the kitchen sink, cleaning some of the dirt of his pick and shovel work at the harbor from his hands and face. Mother and daughter stared in amazement and thinly veiled horror at Vanzetti's shoeless feet.
Unable to endure her ignorance of what had happened, Alphonsina pushed Lefevre out of the room before opening the subject. "But what is the matter, Senor Vanzetti?"
"The matter?"
"The trouble!"
"There is no trouble."
"Your shoes! What has happened to your shoes, Senor Vanzetti?"
"Ah, that." He shrugged. "I gave them to a working man. He had no shoes, and I could see his feet hurt - oh, the bandages! Terrible! He has little ones at home, I know, so..." He shrugged again, embarrassed by her questions. "It is no matter."
"No matter!" Alphonsina gazed a moment in silence at her lodger's bare feet, before excusing herself and turning to leave the kitchen.
"Mamma!" Lefevre hissed under her breath when her mother appeared. "Why does he have no shoes?"
Alphonsina drew her daughter close and whispered the account of the matter she had just heard, which led to stifled exclamations, whispered instructions, and Lefevre's flight out of doors and down Suosso's Lane to the home of the Christophori family.
Dolly tugged on her skirt before she got far. "Is Mr. Vanzetti sick?"
"No, Dolly," Lefevre told him. "Nothing bad has happened to Mr. Vanzetti. He has given his shoes away to another. To a poor man. A man who had no shoes ."
Dolly stared sadly back at her.
"A man who has a family," Lefevre explained. "Little ones."
"The little ones need the shoes?"
"No, Dolly - the man!" What a child this boy is, she thought. "The man needs the shoes to work. He works besides Mr. Vanzetti with the pick and shovel all day long."
Dolly understood, but was not reassured. "What will Mr. Vanzetti do," he asked, "without his shoes?"
"He is a generous man," Lefevre told her brother, but she wondered the same thing and his words reminded her of her errand. She gestured for silence and ran down the lane to Court Street.
Dolly thought of the barefoot boy, Primo, who lived in his lane. Some days, when Primo had no one else to play with, they ran up and down the street together, chasing the yellow dog, climbing up Castle Hill. Dolly looked down at his own new shoes, which already were not so big, and not as new, as they had once been. Should he give his shoes to Primo?
Lefevre told her tale of the fecklessly generous boarder Vanzetti to Mrs. Christophori, as her mother had bid, who in turn passed it on to a neighbor of hers. By early next morning, before he set off to work on the new embankment for Plymouth Harbor, an old pair of work boots, freshly greased with lard, had been found for him.
That afternoon when Primo came down the lane, tossing stones in the air, Dolly felt no desire to offer his own shoes to the bigger, stronger, bossier, though conspicuously barefoot boy. Primo tossed small stones into the air and swung a piece of broomstick in their direction, occasionally striking one with a sharp, wooden crack. When Dolly asked what he was doing, Primo began to expound to him the rules of the new American game he had learned from some older boys, a sport which involved hitting a ball with a stout stick called a bat. His father played this ball game for the team of the Plymouth Cordage Company, Primo bragged. They will play the Russell Mills men this Sunday in the sport of baseball, he said, and his father will bat number four.
"My father has a bat this high," Primo said, holding his hand over Dolly's head.
"He does?"
"But he is not my hero," the recent convert to the American game declared. "My hero is Ty Cobb. The Georgia Peach."
Dolly did not know what a Georgia peach was. "My hero," he replied, "is Mr. Vanzetti."
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