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“And you’re not really my uncle, I suppose?” Dominic inquired of Umberto.
“Ask your mama,” Umberto said. “If she wanted to keep you siciliano, she shoulda given you her name.”
His mother’s maiden name was Saetta-she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.
A
All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant A
As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle-and definitely a “legendary asshole,” as Ketchum would have said.
“What kind of name is Umberto?” Dominic had asked the foreman.
“From da king!” Umberto had answered indignantly.
“I mean it’s a Neapolitan name, right?” the boy had asked.
“What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!” Umberto cried.
“You told me to say I was sixteen,” Dominic reminded the foreman.
“Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo,” Umberto had said.
Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston’s North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She’d left the city and had moved to the north country when Ge
Asshole (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic’s dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo-cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as A
In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of) the wolf; for A
Had they expected she would put her child up for adoption, and come back to the North End? Nunzi knew that this was done, but she wouldn’t consider giving up her baby, and-notwithstanding the sizable nostalgia she expressed for the Italian North End-she was never tempted to go back to Boston, either. In her unpla
While A
She wouldn’t teach the boy Italian, either-some essential cooking lingo excepted-nor was Dominic inclined to learn the language of “the old country,” which to the boy meant the North End of Boston, not Italy. It was both a language and a place that had rejected his mother. Italian would never be Dominic Baciagalupo’s language; he said, adamantly, that Boston was nowhere he ever wanted to go.
Everything in A
Neither area of education was available to Ketchum, who had left school when he was younger than twelve. At nineteen, in 1936, Ketchum could neither read nor write, but when he wasn’t working as a logger, he was loading lumber onto the railroad flatcars from the open platforms at the end of the biggest Berlin mill. The deck crew tapered the load at the top, so that the flatcars could safely pass through the tu
At least the saga of Ketchum belatedly learning to read seemed not in the tall-tale category of Ketchum’s other stories-the one about the low-roofed bunkhouse at Camp One, for example. According to Ketchum, “some Injun” had been assigned the task of shoveling snow off the roof, but the Indian had neglected the job. When the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow, all but one logger escaped the bunkhouse alive-not the Indian, who was suffocated by what Ketchum called “the concentrated odor of wet socks.” (Of course the cook and his son were well aware of Ketchum’s nearly constant complaint-namely, that the stink of wet socks was the bane of bunkhouse life.)
“I don’t remember an Indian at Camp One,” was all Dominic had said to his old friend.
“You’re too young to remember Camp One, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.
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