Moscardino (7 page)

My granddad began to mutter through his teeth, then roared at me: Take down that dog! Put down that dog!

I set the dog on the wooden floor. My granddad got up suddenly, opened the door and drove out the dog. That is the way to bring up cowards, instead of men. If I don't die too soon I'll learn ye!

Shut up the stable! Go feed the sheep! He opened the door. The water groaning in the gutters splashed on my bare head.

 

Foscolo was a small-sized black dog with rather long thin legs, pointed ears and a tail sticking up.

Our next-door neighbor who was older than granddad and as crotchety had taught Foscolo to walk on his hind feet, to bring back stones, to hunt for a hidden handkerchief, to eat raw onions, to drink wine and hold a lighted pipe in his teeth.

Our next and wrathy neighbor came in the evenings to sit at our fire, with a gun slung over his shoulder, with Foscolo as lictor.

The old men got het up and talked of happenings, and I rolled about with the two dogs scraping round on the floor in the dark in the next room.

That sole distraction, I waited for with infantile joy.

Those two dogs were my world.

I was convinced that they knew me by name, I noticed that certain yaps were my name, namely BUCK.

They called me “Buck” by those yelps as I called them by their names.

When Foscolo was tied up by the neighbor's threshing floor, I called him: “Foscolo.” He replied with a long howl always the same, so that I knew he was tied. If on the other hand he was loose, he barked pleasantly, jumping around his old master as if asking permissions. Then I knew he was loose and continued to call him. Sometimes he did not ask permission. He came quickly through the vines, made four capers and rushed away.

Even my granddad was fond of Foscolo, because he said our Pomeranian bitch had lost her virtue and was no longer any good as a watch dog, since the time she had been carried off with the carts that carry the wine down to the plain of Lucca.

If you give me Foscolo, I'll give you the bitch. Pomeranians are scarce in these parts, and I'll give you a rooster that's a phenomenon, they've promised to bring me from Apulia. It's a cock without claws.

It don't scratch. You can leave it loose during seeding time. Eggs that cock makes will be wanted, you can sell 'em high everywhere.

The old neighbor laughed in his face, with his pipe wobbling in his mouth, betting that that clawless rooster was a hoax which my educated granddad wanted to put over him a poor old contadino.

One evening my grandfather said to our neighbor: It won't be more than a month before Foscolo's stopping here and I bet you won't be able to drag him away even if you chain him and try to.

“Baa' guum, I wanna see thaat.” And he kept Foscolo on leash from thence forward.

My yellow bitch began to dance and prance about Foscolo who also got playful. But the blondine raced off, into the shrubs, and came back sidling up and sniffing and moving off with odd movements such as I had observed in unbroken colts.

Catch me if you can, she seemed to say to her fiancé, who looked at her with infantile patience as engaged lovers who play at having secrets and excuse the capriciousness and coaxings as if happy to be more childish than they actually are,

to reduce themselves to greater weakness despite their having double the strength of the weak female,

they come to playing blind man's buff

in the hedge like butterflies, like the blondine Pomeranian and Foscolo.

My grandfather sent me to call our neighbor and when we got back the fiancés were already married, behind a rosebush.

There you are, old cock, right there in the bed where the violets bloom in April.

But now it is winter and the hummock is green and the rosebush is a bundle of thorns.

But do you think those dry twigs haven't love sap under the ground? Do you think they haven't subterranean witnesses to their amours, like us watching Foscolo and his blondine?

And do you think this grass — fur hasn't an amorous hook — up under the ground?

You will see, after their pregnancy, their sons will be born, thick on the hills as sand in a riverbed. Believe me, old sock, we are the ugliest of the lot. We are all dogs of one breed or another.

Foscolo was now standing quiet, almost asleep with his black muzzle on the yellow Pom's neck.

That's it, Buck, that's how your father begot you. And that's how you'll beget yours when you're married.

We are all dogs of one sort or another. It's a shame to talk like that to a kid nine years old, said the peasant.

Tell him with cleaner words, you old bugger, if you can find 'em. How did you come into this world?

And now take away Foscolo and keep him on chain.

Foscolo is no more use now.

Nothing is holy save the field where he has planted his seed, for continuity, or if you like, for immortality.

If we were talking of Buck's seed I would say immortality. Man is made in God's image; and one should burn incense to him.

The old neighbor looked bewildered and scandalized. He looked at me, and moved his shut fist over his mouth, lifted his elbow to ask if granddad was drunk.

I shook my head.

He shut his mouth. Opened his eyes extra wide. Shrugged his shoulders and went off full of suspicion taking Foscolo with him, tied with his leather belt.

Grandpop picked up the bitch and said: Now we must treat her respectfully.

 

The Apuleian cock was a common and very scrawny rooster with bare scaly legs of egg yellow.

He hadn't even the strut of a cock that serves many hens. He was a bastard little cock who would have become a deballed and crestless capon if my grandfather hadn't bought him from his original peasant owner.

Nothing good about him except his white feathers.

There was a sudden shower the day granddad bought him. The rooster with his legs tied had been chucked on the ground in the shed where we took shelter and had got his wings and belly covered with mud.

When we got home we washed him with water and soap, and so that he shouldn't get dirty again, we put him in a barrel to dry, and in the dark to keep him from crowing.

The downpour had made wash-outs along the banks of the boundary lane and my grandfather noticed that the break was all stones badly piled up, round stones, chunks with no corners such as you find in furrows of fields not before plowed, and that the peasants call field bones.

Grandpop had been going up that border drive for a long time looking at one thing and another, remembering what had been when he was a boy and went to the vineyard to get in the grapes. He got into a row with the old neighbor about a big fig tree which he had seen when new planted and which seemed to him to be too far on the other side of the boundary line.

Now the wash-out showed how the boundary line had been shifted. Granddad began to hum, stroking his beard, when he saw the neighbor coming along a bit thoughtful, saying that the bank was of no importance and that he would see to mending it himself.

Grandpop pretended not to understand and said: Tomorrow that Apuleian rooster will be here.

The neighbor grinned: Hey! by gob, I'll bet you three flasks of old wine . . .

 

Late that evening when we were sure the neighbor wouldn't come over that night, grandpop went down to the cellar, took the rooster out of the barrel, put it in a bag and brought it to the house.

He took a pair of pinchers, lit the lamp and said: You remember, Buck, when you were at Querceta, one of the farmer's hens always came into the house? Yes. And when I grabbed it, I said to you: If you speak I'll do you in as I do this hen? Yes. And I cut its head off, and we ate it that night. We put the feathers in a sack and the bones and went and buried 'em a long way from the house? Yes.

All right, Buck, now I tell you: If you speak, I'll pull out your nails, as I propose to pull 'em out of this Apuleian rooster.

I held the cock in the bag, with its feet sticking out; I felt it shake and shudder; and my heart beat and trembled as if I were committing a crime. The cock inside the bag was braced against the table, and the pinchers gripped its claws and used the edge of the table as fulcrum, and you could see the claws come out from the pulp like little teeth from a kid's jaws; and a spurt of black blood came out from he flesh.

Granddad had put on his glasses.

Every now and again he would look into my pallid face. He seemed to enjoy the operation.

When the eight claws were lined up on the table like eight bits of confetti, he heaved a sigh of satisfaction. He put down the tweezers and heated some oil. He anointed the feet of the Apuleian rooster, bound 'em up with bits of rag and took the bird back to the barrel.

The neighbor hadn't been easy and trusting for quite a while and no longer came in of an evening.

He had to be asked several times to come look at the rooster.

He brought Foscolo on lead, and I greeted my friend Foscolo and ran to get the Pom for a frolic as usual.

But the dogs seemed almost unacquainted; they hardly said a word to each other, a few mere civilities. I attributed this coldness to Foscolo's iron chain and the neighbor's having tied him to the leg of the table. Foscolo tied up like an assassin felt the humiliation.

The neighbor felt the rooster to see if it was made of real meat, pulled its anemic wattles, touched its crest with curiosity. There was reddish skin in place of claws which made him think it would grow its claws late.

The rooster walked on the table, slowly, very slowly, gingerly, as if its toes hurt.

Sure! It's a friek!

It's not a friek, it's a BREED! thundered my granddad, and the argument started.

When the old bloke was at the end of his arguments he decided sadly to go get the wine.

It started off as a joke.

Even Foscolo drank a glass of wine. I drank one. Foscolo danced on his hind legs, had a pull at the old man's pipe; then went to sleep under the table because the show was getting dramatic.

The old bloke got drunker, then he was afraid of my granddad, thought the scrawny Apuleian cock was a devil. He found the devil's claws in the last glass of wine and was terrified.

He wouldn't believe they were the claws of a mere cock born of a hen.

And my grandfather grinned at him: Look how that rooster is laughin', he's laughin' at you. He's got an eye on you. He's lookin' at you with only one eye.

The cock was hunched up behind the lamp by the wall.

Every now and again he opened an eye at the sound of grandpop's voice.

Look how he's lookin' at you!

See how red his eye is.

There'll be claws to wake you in hell, you damn thief!

Perhaps you'll turn into a crazy rooster, and the devil will send you to play jokes on old thieves, as this cock's played one on you.

See how red his eye is, going round and round, his eyes are still burnin' with hell fire.

The poor old buffer began to weep.

He made the sign of the cross, then got furious. He reached for his gun and it wasn't there. My granddfather had hidden it first. Then he began to shake, and his teeth rattled as if he had caught a chill.

Then gran'pop started a devilish conversation with the rooster. He asked questions in a foreign language, and answered in a different voice.

He paid no attention to the old peasant who begged for mercy, trembling before him and the rooster.

I'm goin' to die. I wanna confess. I don't wanna be damned. Intercede for me Mr. Rooster.

And he clasped his hands before the cock, and finally got down on his knees on the floor.

Then gran'pop put a chair near him and put the rooster on it and then said: I am the Holy Ghost. Confess! Confess!

My granddad was right. The fig tree was too far from the boundary.

For fifty years our neighbor had taken the stones which came up
with digging and plowing, and carried them to the boundary, and thus his land had spread over a yard and a half all along the edge. His property had been cleared, fondled from one end to the other.

In his vineyard the wine was now better because the old buzzard has shaken up the earth, taken out stones, taken out the bad vines, rooted up strawberry grapes and planted columbine and aleatico grapes.

Now the Christian labourer was old and about to die. He was leaving a perfect vineyard to his family and was receiving from God the reward of his labours, the sight of the Apuleian holy ghost to whom he could confess his sins before getting ready to pass on . . . a divine favor.

That's what my grandpop told him, and took him home late when the jag began to wear off.

On the way back we stopped near the fig tree. Grandpop paced off the distance to the boundary. I looked at the moon low over the sea. I saw the Ligurian hills and the roofs of the towns in the plain.

Two gun shots, one right after the other.

And the rattle of shot in the frosty grass between my bare feet, like the points of poison thorn, made me jump gasping: The old boy has shot himself!

No! he wanted to shoot us.

And granddad started down the boundary lane, talking of the frost that was bad for the vine shoots.