JOE ANGELO RAN ACROSS THE slag fields wondering if those grumpy riveters down at the rail yards were serious about cleaning their greasy knuckles on his scalp if he didn’t stop telling tall stories about the Lattimer Massacre. But he swore to the Madonna of the Mountain that every time he passed the Pardee crossroads up ahead, he saw the ghosts of those unarmed Slovak miners who had been gunned down there fourteen years ago.
And there they were again.
He stopped and blinked hard, trying to chase the spirits off, but they wouldn’t move. He’d been just a bambino when the Hazleton sheriff and his posse of Irish thugs had opened up with their Winchesters, killing nineteen strikers and wounding nearly fifty. Yet he could still hear the laughter of those lawmen on their trolley car as they shot those running Slavs as if hunting buffalo from an observation train. One of the murdered miners, a squabish Serb, had worn a bowler hat and black suit that day, as if knowing he was on his way to his own funeral. While leading four hundred marchers toward the anthracite breaker to demand better living conditions, the poor fellow had been carrying a large American flag when the mine’s militia put the slugs into his chest.
Anthony Angelo, born in Naples and brought over to America by a padroia recruiter, had always dismissed his son’s claims of seeing the Lattimer ghosts as just the fruits of a wild imagination. Il bugiardo vuole buona memoria, Joe’s father used to say. The liar needs a good memory.
But his father changed his mind about the matter when, a year ago during the festival of the Cinti, an old maga just off the boat from Sicily read the cards for their family. The witch had warned the elder Angelo that she saw his son surrounded by the blood of others spilled from bullets. Asked if anyone in the family had witnessed a horror, Joe’s mother, Emma, confessed that she’d been terrified while cradling him as a babe while her husband marched off that day to join the Lattimer strikers.
Il bambino succhia i ricordi della madre, the maga had insisted, pronouncing her verdict. The child suckled the memories of the mother.
Joe still shuddered at how the maga hag had sized him up with her Evil Eye. Shorter than a grapevine stake and just as slender, he had to admit he wasn’t much to gaze upon. The other boys in town laughed at his mangled curls of black hair cut with sheep shears, and called him “Cavo” because his raisin-like eyes sank so deep into their sockets and his thin lips were so fleshless that his head resembled a skull. Apparently the maga had not been much impressed with him either, because she just shook her head and sent him away with a warning that he should say twenty Hail Marys each morning to ward off the approaching waves of misfortune.
The prayers had worked like magic.
A few weeks later, the tipple foreman at Mine Number Nine, hearing him singing, had pulled him from the hundreds of other whelps cracking anthracite in the breaker pits to ask him a few questions that sounded like a school examination. When he answered in passable English, the foreman had demanded to know how he’d come to learn the American tongue, suspecting him to be a spy for the union. He’d had to explain that his mama was from a place called Liverpool. Those words rose like holy smoke to God’s ear, because the next day, the foreman assigned him the job of translator for the thousands of Italians who were arriving in Philadelphia and tromping their way out here into the coal fields.
The extra dollar a week was a gift from the saints, to be sure. But he hadn’t yet told his papa of the promotion. All of Luzerne County seemed on the verge of exploding again. There was even talk in the union of another strike. Many of the miners feared that the hundreds of new immigrants being hauled in were for scabbing, and now he, poco Joey Angelo, was caught in the middle of the old Italians and the newcomers. He was thankful to be out of the pits—he crossed his breast and whispered Grazie, Gesù Maria e Giuseppe—but his loyalties were being pulled between these poor miserabli and the Pardee Company bosses who were paying him to tell their lies.
As he climbed to the next hill, leaving the Lattimer ghosts behind, he heard three sharp shrieks of the banshee from beyond the stripped valley, followed by the familiar chuffing of steam. That was the sound that every miner in Luzerne County waited each month to hear.
The paymaster’s car was coming through the patches to hand out wages.
He broke into a run for the railroad spur to avoid being late for his new job of identifying the miners and confirming their names on the rolls.
Drawn by the signal, the miners rushed from their shacks and ran breathless for the tracks. Some stumbled and fainted from weakness, while others pushed desperately to the fore, all driven by the fear that the legal tender in the casement car would run out. If that happened, the miners in the rear of the lines would have to accept credit vouchers redeemable at the local stores, or wait for next month’s car. Payday was held on Sundays to avoid loss of valuable work time, and the situation was always so tense that some of the men would inevitably panic and forget their own names. Most would not even understand when their names, mangled by the paymaster, were called. Two years ago, a riot had nearly broken out, so the Pardee bosses now employed hired gunmen to walk atop the cars and threaten to take down anyone who began politicking or fighting.
The locomotive pulled the armored car to a steaming halt.
The paymaster, a grizzled Ulsterman with a red cauliflower nose, stood atop the pay car. He caught sight of his reedy translator amid the scrum of miners hugging the tracks. “Hey, you sawed-off Wop! Get up here!”
The miners, eager to speed the transactions, hoisted Joe onto the roof of the pay car. After looking out over the sea of desperate faces, he took a deep breath and nodded his readiness for the onslaught.
“Giuseppe Russo!” the paymaster shouted. “Twenty days! Fifteen dollars! Sign the roll!”
Unable to understand the order, some of the miners began pushing and arguing about whose pay was being dispensed.
The paymaster elbowed Angelo to end the confusion.
Joe shouted the man’s name again and translated his pay for that week, “Venti giorni! Quindici dollari! Firma il rotolo!”
One of the miners, ballooning red with anger, fought toward the car and shouted, “No! Ho lavorato venticinque giorni!
Joe couldn’t remember ever having translated for that particular fellow. Was he one of the new arrivals from the ships? There was something disturbingly familiar about his dark, round face and otherworldly eyes. Shaken for a reason he could not comprehend, Joe turned to the paymaster and translated the miner’s protest, “He says he worked twenty-five days, not twenty.”
The paymaster waved fifteen dollars in front of the irate miner. “Tell him he can take the money, or file a claim at the office and wait for the next car.”
Joe couldn’t bear to look at the miner as he translated the demand.
The miner fixed his deadened eyes on Joe as he scribbled his name in exchange for the fifteen dollars. Walking off with his paltry pay, he muttered, “Chi parla in faccia non è traditore.”
The paymaster turned to Joe. “What’d he say?”
Joe’s face shaded lurid with dread. “A proverb from my country.”
“Spit it out.”
“He who speaks to your face is not a traitor.”
The paymaster laughed and called the next name on the roll. As the other miners stepped forward to sign to take their paltry tender, Joe kept watching the stranger who had cursed the disturbing indictment at him. The little man was wearing a black suit and a bolo hat from the old country. Suddenly, Joe gasped in recognition—that ghoulish face belonged to the murdered Slav who was always carrying the American flag in his visions.
Had the Lattimer ghost followed him down here from the grave?
Joe dropped to his knees and began babbling Hail Marys.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” the paymaster growled.
Joe jumped off the car and ran for the hills.
“You woolly-headed runt!” the paymaster shouted. “That extra dollar is goner than Caesar’s shriveled dick!”
“Scorrere il dollaro in un flauto!” Joe shouted over his shoulder. “Bastone su per il culo Mick, Danny Boy e giocare finchè le palle cadono!”
Left without a translator, the paymaster searched the scrum of miners below him. “Any of you shit-for-brains speak English? There’s two dollars a week more in it for you.”
One of the miners raised his hand to offer his services.
The paymaster tested the volunteer’s language skills. “What’d that two-bit Eyetie just say to me?”
The translator grinned as he translated Joe’s curse. “He say that you can roll the dollar into a flauto, stick it up your Mick asino, and play Danny Boy fino your testicoli fall off.”