Issue 9 - Spring 2020

Nonfiction

A Spontaneous Day in Rome

Dan Morey

I was walking around Rome with my mother. We stopped at the Piazza Navona to listen to a gypsy string band and view a truly striking scaffold. It was a tall, wobbly-looking exoskeleton, composed primarily of steel piping and wooden planks. Loose canvas hung about it, flapping in the breeze and blocking any view of the monument beneath.

“What’s that?” said Mother.

“This is the Scaffolding of the Fountain of the Four Rivers,” I said. “It’s a modern structure, with wood dating to the first term of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The canvas, while appearing quite ancient, is in fact less than a decade old, having been replaced after the great windstorm of 2007. Most of the piping is original, though certain substitutions have been made due to rust.”

“The fountain must be huge,” said Mother.

“It contains an obelisk, which would account for the extreme height of the scaffolding.”

Mother expressed some frustration at finding so much of the beauty of Rome in dispose.

“Not to worry,” I said. “There are two more fountains in the Piazza Navona.”

We walked to both ends of the square and admired the Fountain of Moro and the Fountain of Neptune. Mother said they were nice, but wanted the Baedeker guide’s opinion. I read: “‘Neither the Fountain of Moro nor the Fountain of Neptune can compare to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in terms of beauty and artistic quality.’”

“Figures,” said Mother.

“Yes. Well, let’s go find some more scaffolding, shall we?”

I had decided to make this a spontaneous day, with no specific destinations and no map. As we meandered the muddle of confusing streets that surround the Piazza Navona, I began to second-guess my plan.

“I love all the little workshops and things. It’s like stepping back in time,” said Mother.

I took her deeper into the maze of cobbled streets. The further we went, the more residential they became. Soon all evidence of commercial activity had vanished.

“Where are we going?” said Mother.

“Nowhere in particular. We’re having a spontaneous day. Rick Steves said we should be sure to schedule at least one spontaneous day in Rome.”

“If you schedule it, how is it spontaneous?” She leaned against a stucco wall, under a wrought-iron balcony dripping with bougainvillea. “I’m tired. Let’s go back to the piazza.”

Though I had no idea where we were, I led on, exuding what I hoped to be a comforting degree of mock confidence. One road twisted into another, and we dead-ended at a deserted church.

“Baroque,” I said, examining the façade. “Possibly by Boromini.”

Mother sat on the steps, visibly wilted. “I don’t want to see any more churches. I thought we were going back to the piazza. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I think if we bear left that alley will funnel us down to the Corso—”

“Get the map out.”

I informed her as delicately as I could that we had no map.

“What do you mean we have no map?”

“It’s a spontaneous day. Rick Steves would never bring a map on a spontaneous day.”

“Of course he would. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because Rick Steves isn’t an idiot.”

Mother harped, rather sarcastically, on this topic for an extended period. Her unpoetic argument was based primarily on the practical, though quite boring, assumption that finding your way around a strange city with a medieval street plan requires some sort of directional aid.

“But just look at the wonderful things you can stumble on when you don’t know where you’re going,” I said.

Mother glanced at the church. “It ain’t that wonderful. Let’s go.”

We walked a few blocks, made a turn, and miraculously popped out on the Corso Vittorio.

“Ha!” I said. “And you doubted me.”

Mother bowed to the superiority of my internal compass and requested that we take a rest at a sidewalk café. After a coffee for her and a bracing Campari for me, we recommenced our ramble.

“There’s the Piazza Navona,” she said.

“We’re not going back there. I’ve seen enough of the Scaffolding of the Fountain of the Four Rivers.”

She agreed to follow me if I promised to stick to the main arteries and not get us lost again. Within five minutes I got us lost again.

“Daniel—”

“One more block,” I said. “I know there’s something good around here—look at all the people.”

Two kilometres and a substantial amount of cursing later, we entered a small square and gasped in unison. Before us stood the peerless Pantheon, the best-preserved piece of ancient Roman architecture in the world.

I began to clap. People stared. They probably thought Mother had checked her special son out of the sanatorium for a day of sightseeing.

“Clap, damn you,” I said.

“Why?” said Mother.

“Great architecture deserves to be applauded.”

This was a reference to the Peter Greenaway film Belly of an Architect. In it, Brian Dennehy applauds the Pantheon. Mother should’ve known this since we’d recently watched the movie together. I ceased clapping.

“It’s a line from Belly of an Architect,” I said. “‘Great architecture deserves to be applauded.’ Remember?”

“No. What’s Belly of an Architect?”

“Let’s go inside.”

We passed between the grand Corinthian columns and through the bronze doors. The interior was dim, with a single beam of sunlight descending from the open oculus of the dome to the center of the floor. Looking up at the coffered ceiling and its illuminating eye was like gazing on architectural heaven.

“It’s beautiful,” said Mother.

There were pews and crosses and various other Christian bric-a-brac present, but I preferred to picture the Pantheon in its original pagan glory, when Marcus Agrippa had dedicated it to the most holy planetary gods. I asked Mother if she had anything to leave as an offering.

“I have half a candy bar,” she said.

“It isn’t a Mars bar, is it?”

“Snickers.”

She set the chocolate on the floor, in the middle of the oculus’ ray, where a pigeon promptly devoured it.

From the Pantheon, we took the Via Seminario to the Via del Corso. A quartet of snazzily clad Roman businessmen stood at the intersection, waiting to cross. One of them dropped a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, snuffing it with a twist of his loafer.

“Should we go for it?” said Mother, after the light had changed.

“Let’s see if these guys make it first,” I said.

The men slipped into the crosswalk en masse. They hadn’t taken five steps when a gang of lawless scooter girls came screaming through the red light. They bore down on the businessmen like leather-clad archangels, out to avenge some corporate misdeed. The man in the shiniest suit jumped out of the way, spun around, and let loose a roundhouse kick that grazed a scooter girl’s bum.

“Puttana!” he yelled. “Porca!”

She paused to flip him the bird before racing off to join her crew.

“That was awesome,” I said. “I should be hanging out with those chicks.”

We jogged across the street behind the ruffled businessmen, barely beating the light.

“Okay,” said Mother. “Now where are we?”

It was a fair question, but without the benefit of a map I had no way of answering it with any accuracy.

“We are moving east,” I said. “Or possibly west or north, from the Via del Corso toward some very famous stuff.”

“What famous stuff?”

“Famous Roman stuff. Known to centuries of travelers.”

We walked for a considerable distance without seeing anything remotely famous. I started making things up to entertain Mother.

“This building,” I said, “was once home to Mussolini’s favorite prostitute, Tosca Traviatta. Tosca weighed over three hundred pounds and was completely bald. She used to strap Benito to the bed and beat his buttocks with a bicycle pump.”

We turned onto a pedestrian street covered with a red carpet. I would’ve felt quite regal had it not been for the abundance of tacky tourist stands and souvenir peddlers. Though they made me cringe, their presence was not unwelcome, for I knew them to be harbingers of the beauty of Rome.

“What’s that?” said Mother.

“What’s what?”

“Don’t you hear it? Listen.”

I detected a faint rumbling; the further we progressed, the louder it grew.

“Water,” I said.

By the time we reached the end of the street and rounded the corner the rumble had intensified to a roar. Then, all of a sudden, we were face to face with the Trevi Fountain. At least I was face to face with the Trevi Fountain. Mother was staring at the backside of a large German tourist. I pulled her around him and up to the thundering waters.

“It’s the Trevi!” she said. “And there’s no scaffolding!”

Mother first saw Three Coins in the Fountain at the Dipson Plaza Theatre in Erie, PA in 1954, which meant she’d been longing to see the Trevi for over half a century. She gazed raptly at the nude statue of Oceanus, and I asked her if she was fantasizing about Louis Jourdan.

“Of course!”

People sat along the rim of the basin, tossing coins over their shoulders and posing for pictures.

“There’s a space,” I said. “Squeeze in.”

Mother got into position and dug a two-euro piece out of her purse. I snatched it away and handed her a dime.

“Cheapskate,” she said.

She let fly, and the coin plunked into the limpid water. Oceanus looked down with approval. Gods, despite their reputation for extravagance, are not incapable of appreciating thrift.

“Aren’t you going to throw one in?” said Mother.

I told her that I intended to abide by the original tradition. “In the days of Henry James, travelers used to drink from the fountain to ensure their return to the Eternal City.”

“Drink? Out of that?”

“Of course. These waters are pure. They originate at a virgin spring and flow through an ancient aqueduct.”

“But it’s filled with coins. Nothing’s filthier than money.”

Mother always knows how to appeal to the germaphobe in me. I took out a nickel and flipped it in.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back to the apartment. I’m hungry.”

“Right. I think there’s a Metro station just around this corner…”

Mother had begun to walk in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Back to the souvenir stands. I saw a guy selling maps.”

Dan Morey is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. He’s worked as a book critic, nightlife columnist, travel correspondent and outdoor journalist. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Harpur Palate, McSweeney's Quarterly, decomP and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find him at danmorey.weebly.com

Belle’s Lost Boys

Jenna B. Morgan

A century ago, a woman gave birth to a baby boy who could have been my great uncle.
Eighteen months later, when she was three months pregnant, he died.

Charles Glennister Crigger
b. April 3, 1919
d. September 4, 1920

Six months after she buried her baby, that woman gave birth to a second son. 
And eighteen months later, when she was pregnant yet again, he died too.

Iven Dean Crigger
b. March 6, 1921
d. August 26, 1922

There is not a person left in the world who knew them.

This ghost of their too-brief legacies remains: I wasn’t allowed so much as a butter knife until I was nine. But nobody can quite recall which almost-uncle was lost to illness and which bled out after a carving knife was left within his curious reach.

On November 26, 1922 a woman swamped by grief welcomed a third son into the world. When William Delbert Crigger was eighteen months old, she was four months pregnant again and unmoored by fear. The family still whispers: she was never quite right again.

But that third boy survived. He lived to see the births of his sister and four more siblings after her, the births of his own five children and twelve grandchildren.

***

A decade ago, I drove his pickup and Granddaddy rode shotgun. We followed Route 119 to Logan, Route 44 past Mountain View, Route 52 through Iaeger and Beartown.

At first, the roads wound wide and lazy. There were long hauls up steep grades and sloping downhill stretches punctuated by runaway truck ramps. As we got closer, the roads switchbacked tightly uphill and down, rarely a guardrail in sight.

Though I was born in the West Virginia hills, and visited family there every year of my life, I’d learned to drive in far-off, pancake-flat South Jersey. I kept my eyes on the next curve and my hands locked at ten and two.

Granddaddy was taking me to the old family graveyard down in McDowell County, West Virginia, a place I hadn’t even known existed. When I asked why, he said, “This is the thing that happens in this society. We’re going so fast, that people are buried, dead and buried, and nobody ever knows about it. I think it’s wrong but I don’t know what to do about it. Society’s moving too fast to try to remember, to go back.”

The final leg of our journey took us up an unthinkably narrow, deeply rutted, nearly vertical gravel road. I white-knuckled the steering wheel; Granddaddy laughed.

All the week before they buried his mother, he told me, it had been pouring like piss out of a bucket. The dirt tracks were washed out, and they didn’t think the hearse could make it up, so they loaded the coffin into the back of a pickup. The truck shimmied on the slick mud and damn near slid off the mountain more than once. What they wouldn’t have given back then for some gravel.

We stopped at each fork in the road, and Granddaddy stretched in his seat, looked one way and then the other, and gave half-certain directions. After a while he started to cuss the electric company, the gas company; they’d been up there cutting new roads damn it all. Trees that all looked the same crowded in. We dead ended at a gas well or two, passed the same tumbledown hunting shack, the same tattered No Trespassing sign three or four times. It took over an hour of backtracking to find our way to the top of Atwell Mountain.

For a few minutes we rode the ridge, the precariously narrow path barely wider than the truck, the hill sheering away just inches past the edges of the tires. I started to cuss myself, and if the vocabulary of a New Jersey teenager shocked my grandfather, he didn’t let on.

After a quarter mile or so, the road canted slightly downhill and widened. We pulled to a stop next to a rusted chain link fence and I peeled my hands from the steering wheel.

The only cemeteries I had known up to that point were manicured memorial parks: wide swaths of golf-course green, nice neat rows of identical polished headstones laid flush in the ground.

This place was not like that.

Where the grass grew at all, it was tall, weedy, and wild. The graves were humps of bare dirt. Some of the headstones stood plumb, some were prostrate, overcome by time and gravity.

Instead of neat rows, the only organizing logic was: where does the ground lie flat enough to take a body?

There were silk flowers everywhere. Not arrangements, just tiny individual bunches like you get at the dollar store. They were on every single grave, their plastic stems stuck straight down into the hard, dry dirt: garishly bright daisies, carnations, lilies, irises, daffodils.

Right alongside the bright blooms were bare spidery plastic stems bleached of color. The old petals had blown up toward the fence, and hundreds of pieces of grayed-out silk were caught in the rusted chain link, fluttering furiously in the wind.

The place felt more abandoned and untended than if it had been completely bare.

Granddaddy pointed out repeating surnames — Addair, Short, Mullins, Crigger, Muncy, Jones — and tried to explain the branches of the family. My great-great-great grandfather William Addair had owned all this land, he told me, the mountain sticking up in the middle of his acreage like a thumb. Eventually, the Shorts intermarried with the Addairs, and the Criggers with the Shorts. A handful of generations later, he was born on that mountain, lived in his grandparents’ house until he was six years old.

I asked if he’d been to many funerals there when he was a kid. He only remembered one, an aunt with typhoid who’d stayed quarantined in a separate house while the rest of the family crowded into another.

What he did remember was playing there, walking half a mile straight up from his grandparents’ front door into the green open space, into the sun.

I took pictures with a tiny digital camera, of the worn gravestones and faded, fluttering flowers.

I made my way to the back, where the graves stopped and the trees started and the hill fell away. The view was all horizon, the ridges receding endlessly.

When I went to look for him, I found Granddaddy pacing back and forth toward the front of the graveyard, walking slowly on the uneven ground and leaning heavily on his cane.

“I can’t find them,” he told me. “They were right here.”

What did he mean he couldn’t find them? He couldn’t find his own parents’ graves?

He moved away from me, bending and standing at each plot, cussing under his breath.

“They were right here! They moved the damn fence!”

Nobody moved the damn fence. It was older than I was with the rust to prove it. But how mad would he get if I said so? I ventured: “I’m sure they’re here somewhere…”

“They moved it! They moved the goddamned thing!” He leaned hard on his cane and gripped a fence post with his other hand; he yanked it toward him and pushed it away, loosening it in the rocky ground. Granddaddy had always been a big man; you could pass a quarter through his wedding ring. And even in his eighties, if he got good and mad enough, that fence didn’t stand a chance. He grunted with each pull and push. His face was turning red.

And I was flooded with panic. What if he had a heart attack up here? A stroke? Would my cell phone even work? How would I get him into the car? How would I find my way down the mountain? To the nearest hospital? I could not for the life of me remember any goddamn thing I learned in the fucking lifeguard CPR class I had just taken.

And then we found them.

The dormant viburnum bush had been a bundle of sticks barely the size of a basketball when my Uncle CD planted it, last time they’d been up he told me. Now it towered ten feet high in full bloom, exploding with fluffy snowballs as big around as cantaloupes.

It wasn’t planted on his parents’ graves, but adjacent to them, right between Glennister and Iven’s headstones. Their modest limestone rectangles were covered in lichen. The letters of their names were so smoothed by time that had we not already known them, we would hardly have been able to guess.

But the indelibly carved names of my great-grandparents were clearly visible on the granite headstones Granddaddy had paid for.

Mary Belle Short Crigger                Charles Grant Crigger                      
b. November 1, 1898                         b. March 16, 1892    
d. January 20, 1989                           d. July 19, 1992         

In 1989, I was three and my mom was pregnant with my brother Grant. The roads were so bad that only the preacher and men enough to lower the casket went up. No sisters or daughters or granddaughters were there to watch Belle go into the ground.

In 1992, I was seven and Grant was nearly three and Mom was pregnant with my brother Jared. Gramps was buried next to his wife just three years after he lost her.

But Belle, she had waited a whole lifetime to be laid to rest next to her lost boys.

***

Just a year after he took me up there, we buried Granddaddy next to my Nannie in a neat and tidy memorial park near Charleston, West Virginia.

He was gone and I was left with the same inscrutable advice he’d given me my whole life: “remember who you are and where you come from.”

I was born in West Virginia, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Virginia. I live in Tennessee now, and even though I’ve set down some roots, I’m more certain than ever that I’m not from anywhere.

So who am I?

I am a woman who probably couldn’t even find the old family cemetery on a map.

A woman who is the eldest of three siblings who all survived.

A woman with two children of her own, both so young they only understand dead as it applies to the batteries in their favorite toys.

I imagine the short lives of those two other children and wonder if their names have faded completely from their headstones. I wonder if I am the last person who will ever imagine their mother’s pain.

I come from a faded-but-not-gone legacy: when she helps me cook, I make my daughter put her hands on top of her head as I chop vegetables. When I lay down any kitchen knife, I put it right up against the backsplash, as far from the counter-edge as it will go.

And I come from some indelible truths: I am the cherished granddaughter of the third-born son who survived. Who was also a brother and a husband and a father, a World War II medic, a family doctor decades in practice who sometimes took payment in chickens. Who had an antique cane with a saber inside he snuck through an airport just to see if he could, a snaggle-toothed dog whose farts could clear a room, a penchant for phrases like hotter than the gates of Hades and faster than Snyder’s hound. 

When I asked him that day why he wanted to go up to the graveyard, he said: “I go up there once in a while... I don’t know why. You just need to go.”

I might not go, Granddaddy, but I promise I’ll remember.

Jenna B. Morgan’s nonfiction has recently appeared as part of Akashic Books’s Terrible Twosdays web series and her fiction has previously appeared in Wild Violet, Kestrel, Floodwall, and Soundings East. She has an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University and currently teaches at a community college outside Nashville, Tennessee. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @byjennabmorgan.

I Will Put My House in Order

M. Christine Benner Dixon

The prettiest of Grammy’s dishes broke in the move back to Pittsburgh. It was bundled in brown paper, but paper could not absorb the kinetic jolts of the road. I heard the loss before I saw it--the green shards of glass ringing like tiny bells in the box. It was not expensive--none of her things were expensive--but I had used it in her memory; every time I filled the bowl or washed it, it was always her bowl. And when it broke, it was hers.

I am the keeper of mundane heirlooms. My house is a cornucopia of unimportant family memories: open any cupboard door, and some pebble of nostalgia will roll off the shelf at you. Even as a child, I would protest if my mother tried to get rid of anything that carried the slightest whiff of someone I loved. The rattan peacock chair, which had served as a throne for every family birthday celebration for as long as I could remember, was falling to pieces by the time she decided to burn it. I wept over the ashes like Lorca wept for his friend Ignacio, gored by a bull. I pulled charred sticks from the fire and kept them. I still have them somewhere. As a result, I have acquired not the glittering spoils of inheritance--monument to some accomplished progenitor--but the scene dressing of the past, the minor trappings of my grandmothers' daily lives: bowls, pins, books, and the like.

It is right to have the possessions of my grandmothers about me. I am an osmotic vessel. If I keep the concentration of their memory high enough outside of my body, then it will not dissipate from within me into the air. I mix cookie dough in a yellow Pyrex bowl that my father gave me years after his mother died. It is not as lovely as the green glass bowl that broke in the move, but it is more invested with her touch. Her Mennonite faith taught her simplicity and frugality--her pretty things were generally kept modestly away, saved. The dough is rolled out, and I lean the heels of my hands on the cookie cutters from my mother's mother, my Grandma. She rummaged through them every Saturday, pulling out a sailboat, an angelfish, a seashell to make cookies for the Sunday School classes at Seymour United Methodist church. I feel the precise crunch of the tin's cutting edge against the sugar in the dough. I wiggle the shape on the floured counter, just enough to be sure it is cut through. I am shadowing Grandma’s movements years after she last made them, aware that I am not the first in this line of grandmothers, though I am the last. I am not a grandmother. I never will be.

My sister and I visited Värmland, Sweden, several years ago to walk in the places our grandmother's mother and her mothers and grandmothers walked. We spent a beautiful afternoon at the house where our great-grandmother lived before her father sent for her from America. Watching my sister run through the descendants of flowers that bent under our great-grandmother's feet, I was overcome with the strange fantasy of wanting to be buried there. I am sure the kind-eyed Swedish farmer whose land this now is would hardly welcome my American corpse as a natural part of his planting, but I longed for it. I wonder, though, if it was just memory pointed in the wrong direction, if this was my past remembering me. My body did lie there, in that land; it lies there still in quiet repose. The bees gather pollen from the bellflowers and the lupines above.

Parents talk reverentially of their children's lives. In the same breath as their complaints over fickle toddler appetites and teenaged morosity, they swear that they can't imagine life without them, how they would die or kill or cheat or any wild thing to mitigate a threat to the life of their child. I do not doubt the sincerity of this elemental and violent love, but statements like these create a comic theater of parental protectiveness in my imagination. The parent, seeing their child in the path of an oncoming bus, rushes to sacrifice themselves in place of the child, only to be caught up short by their own mother, wholly and blindly devoted to her child's survival. The grandmother, of course, has a father, and now a tottering old coot elbows his way in and faces down the roaring bus. But his life is deemed precious by his parents, and they crawl from their graves to intervene. And so on. A line of devoted parents count themselves as adjunct to their children's lives, conduits for the furtherance of the family line.

And this makes me wonder about myself, who has no wide-eyed child to defend against the proverbial (and curiously reckless) bus. Is it for me that the parade of self-sacrificing ancestors shoved their way in front of danger? I guess it must be, but I am no more the epitome of my line, the fulfillment of the promise of a thousand lives, than anyone is. My life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose because I do not have a child. Your life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose if you do have one. My grandmothers designed houses and cleaned churches and wrote poetry and made cookies not to summon me but because Grandma’s hands had structures in them and Grammy’s heart housed an earnest, practical, lyrical piety, and they loved the warm breath from the oven on their faces when they turned the trays.

I will not have a child and no grandchild; no one will ever say these things of me. So I turn the anticipation of my line backward. Because the ovum that would become the embryo that would become me was nested in my mother's and grandmother's bodies, I turn back to contain them both. I wait expectantly to age into their bodies' prophecies.

Grandma kept a resolution magneted to her refrigerator: I will put my house in order in 1998. This date is crossed out: 1999. This, too, crossed out: 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. She could never seem to order her house. I can. Because mine has an end. From there, I work backwards. I write the family figures on the page and add and subtract, working out the long division in its beautiful trailing lines.

My grandmother drew the plans for my mother’s house, and I redraw that house in a poem and put my mother in it. She will inhabit the house my grandmother and I built together forever. When I make the Thanksgiving finger rolls in the kitchen that my mother inhabits and my grandmother designed, I use the recipe of my Grandma's mother who came from Sweden, which was given to her by her mother. I feed their memories to my family in sweet, twisted rounds of bread and poetry. All I have to give is that which was given to me. When the other children complained that she never had to speak in class, the teacher said of the girl who was not yet my grandmother, "Mary speaks with her pen." I use her pen now to outline speeches which I will deliver in lieu of children. My mouth, my hands, and reams of paper are filling with them. They overflow the bowl.

But paper cannot absorb the kinetic jolts of the road, and neither can my words, though I pack them densely in. The dish will shatter into golden bells. I will be carefully transferred to the earth, far from the lupines. This will be the end. My grandmother’s house will be in order. We are not lost, having been broken. We are what we have always been: our grandmothers' granddaughters, long buried and newly hoped for. We are cut glass handed down. We are memories turned backward.

M. Christine Benner Dixon is a scholar, writer, and communication consultant living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her writing has appeared in Paperbark Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, American Literary Realism, DreamSeeker Magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.