And then Francesco understands. The man has carved a letter into the wood, the letter P, and after this he gouges out a small dot, a period, and then begins to carve the letter H, meticulously digging out each vertical bar, and then the crossbar, and then uses the point of the knife to gouge out another period. Rising, standing erect again, he closes the knife and puts it back into his pocket. Then he brings the pick close to his mouth and blows into the carved letters, sending fine minuscule splinters flying, and then passes his hand over the letters caressingly, and looks at Francesco, and grins.
“P.H. Patrick Halloran. My name, my initials, and my damn pick.”
The Irishman continues to grin. Is there some humor here that Francesco is missing because of his scant understanding of English? There are so many words in English which sound the same, but mean different things. Is “pick” one of those words, and has he missed the entire thrust of the conversation from the very beginning? But no. “Dago” he understands, and “fucking” he understands, and yet he has heard these men jokingly calling themselves big fucking micks, which he knows is derogatory, so perhaps fucking dago was meant in the same way, perhaps a joke was intended, after all; perhaps the man was only being friendly, is that a possibility? He misses so many nuances because he does not understand; the subtleties of this land are overwhelming. But if it was all a joke, if the man is smiling now because a joke was intended, then why did he put his mark on a pick belonging to the company? Francesco knows it is the man’s mark, he knows he is not mistaken about that because now that he has seen the letters gouged into the wood, the word “initials” makes sense to him, it is almost identical to the Italian word iniziali. Is it possible that the man was only trying to introduce himself? Trying to tell Francesco his name? Carving his initials into the wood handle to facilitate communication? This appears ridiculous to Francesco, but so many things in this new country seem foolish to him. Would the man have damaged a pick belonging to the company merely to have his name be known? Does he not know the company rules? Does he not realize... and here a new fear seizes Francesco. This is the pick that was assigned to him this morning. A workman was responsible for his own tools, and had to pay for any damage done to them through his own negligence. Would he now have to pay for the damage this man has done to the pick handle by carving his initials into it?
“You have damaged my pick,” he says. They are back again to the question of possession, though now Francesco is not so sure he wishes to claim this damaged pick.
“I shouldn’t worry about it,” the man says.
“It is the pick I used all morning. The company will...”
“No, my friend, you’re mistaken. I’ve been using this pick all morning. You were using the one over there.”
Francesco follows the man’s casual head gesture, squints into the gloom, and suddenly understands. A I pick with a broken handle is lying half-submerged in the mud. The man’s pick, broken in use. By claiming Francesco’s pick, he is simultaneously willing to him the pick with the broken handle, so that the cost of replacing it will come from Francesco’s pay and not his own.
“No,” Francesco says.
“No, is it? Ah, but yes. This one is mine, and that one is...”
He leaps upon the man before he realizes what he is doing. He has not been angry until this moment, but now a fury boils within him, and he gives no thought to the consequences of his sudden action. He knows only that the man is stealing from him, and by extension stealing from the family in Fiormonte. He seizes the handle of the pick, tries to wrest it away, but the man merely swings it around, with Francesco still clinging to it, pulling Francesco off his feet and dragging him sprawling into the mud, his eyeglasses falling from his face.
“Ladro!” Francesco screams in Italian. “Thief!” And gets blindly to his feet. And springs for the man’s throat. The first scream goes unnoticed in the general din, but he continues to shriek “Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!” as his mud-covered hands struggle for a grip around the other man’s throat. The man hits Francesco in the chest with the end of the pick handle, knocking him down again. The screams have finally attracted the other workers, most of them Italians who understand the meaning of the word that comes piercingly from Francesco’s mouth in strident repetition: “Ladro! Ladro! Ladro!” He gets to his feet again, and again charges the other man. The man throws the pick aside, I bunches his fists, and begins to beat Francesco senseless, methodically breaking first his nose and then his jaw, pounding at both eyes until the lids are swollen and bleeding, splitting his lips, knocking out four of his teeth, and then kicking him repeatedly in the chest after he has fallen unconscious into the mud. The other men do nothing. It is the foreman who at last comes over, and says, gently, “Come on, Pat, there’s no sense killing the little wop, now is there?”
My grandfather paid dearly for his encounter with Pat Halloran, and to his dying day he was to hate the Irish with undiminished passion. The broken pick handle cost him a dollar and a half, which was deducted from his weekly pay check. His hospital bill — they taped his broken ribs, applied poultices to his eyes, set and taped his broken nose, and took three stitches in his upper lip — came to twenty-four dollars and thirty-eight cents. The dentist who made his bridgework and supplied him with four false teeth charged him seventeen dollars. He lost two weeks’ work at fourteen dollars a week, and did not return to the tunnel until the beginning of May. To honor his debts, he was forced to borrow money from Bardoni (at interest, of course), and it was Bardoni who suggested that there were men in Harlem who would be happy to take care of Halloran for a slight fee. My grandfather said he wished to have nothing to do with such men; he would take care of Halloran himself, in his own good time.
He did, finally, in the month of June — in a way that was entirely satisfactory and supremely ironic.
But before that, Pino Battatore fell in love.
I don’t wish to create the impression that nothing else was happening in America during that May of 1901. But according to my grandfather, at least, Pino’s love affair with the neighborhood’s undisputed beauty was far more fascinating to that band of wops in Harlem’s side streets than were the politics, or economics, or quaint folkways and customs of a nation they did not consider their own. The Spanish-American War, for example, had not been their war, and the subsequent Filipino uprising against our military government, a struggle that had been raging for two years by the time my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, was of little if any interest to them. Their letters home concerned the basic necessities of life, and not the trappings of power. They were not impressed with America’s good and noble reason for declaring war against Spain (To Free Cuba from the Foreign Oppressor), nor did they understand the subsequent insurrection in the Philippines. (They did not even know where the Philippines were!)