There was a woman some called a gypsy, others a witch, who came into the print shop where I worked, and maybe cast a spell on me. The year was 1951, a year I remember because Carl Feldman had a brother up by the reservoir whose letters talked about Chinese soldiers pounding drums, blowing bugles, and chanting, ‘GI die tonight!” Carl’s brother said it was forty-two below and this was the only way the Chinese with their cotton quilted jackets could keep warm. I should have signed up for that, but the more I heard about it, the more I thought I would just wait.
Witch or not, this woman and her husband, some said father, ran a butcher shop down on Market Street, and they would advertise in the Standard. From time to time, I would see her in the composition room pointing out something she wanted changed on that week’s copy, and I always thought the same thing; there she is, the witch.
I was seventeen and had already been working almost a year as a devil. I cleaned up the presses, swept out the shop, ran small jobs on the Gordon, and was supposed to be learning how to operate the larger presses from a guy named Jim Schimer, a veteran of the European fighting who was related in some way to the owners of the shop. So far, he had taught me exactly nothing, other than we had been on the wrong side in the war, and a lot of what Hitler said made perfect sense. Thankfully, I had recently been given a new task, casting stereotypes, which was a lot better than standing around listening to him.
In those days, The Park Island Standard was not actually printed in Park Island. Instead, we set up all the pages in metal type, locked them into steel frames, ran them through a machine called a mat roller, and sent the mats off to another, larger shop to be cast into plates and printed on a rotary press. When the used mats returned my job was to scissor out any images we might want to save, and later cast them into metal sheets that could be cut up and used again, a process more difficult to describe than actually learn. I had my own dim little cubicle where I worked alone, probably because no one else wanted to absorb the fumes of the molten lead.
One afternoon, I was working in my cubicle when I felt the presence of something significant just a step behind me. I turned my head, and this was my first really close look. Witch she may have been, but she could not have been older than thirty and she was beautiful, something I had not even imagined seeing her at a distance. She showed me a copy of last week’s ad, illustrated by a line drawing of some poor headless creature with all the choice cuts marked out. “They sent me to you,” she said. “Do you have anything better than this?”
This must have been the exact moment she cast the spell. She was standing very close, and I felt something within me change. “Yes, yes,” I said, and I fumbled in the drawers where I kept an assortment of used mats. At last, I found a lively looking piglet with a curly tail who looked as if he had never even heard of bacon. My heart was racing. “Oh, that would be beautiful,” she said, and when I addressed her as Miss, hoping to learn if she was indeed married to a butcher, she said “You may call me Lucia.” Her voice was low and pleasant, smoky, the writers of that era would have described it, but with an accent that set me to thinking of the peasants and villagers in those Hollywood movies where the full moon follows its victims into the shadows.
The piglet was a tiny thing, a papier-mache matrix not much larger than a postage stamp. I had to paste it together with other mats we were planning to use until I had a rectangle large enough to cast. Now, imagine a solid steel table, hip high, upon which I placed this rectangle and secured it with two steel bars before swinging the entire thing up and locking it against its vertical other, creating a chute into which the metal could be poured. Since this will come up later in my story, it is important to picture a rectangular pot we called a cauldron filled with molten lead, and a nozzle you opened and closed with a lever. If this sounds dangerous, it was, but only if you held the lever open too long. Fortunately, lead hardens almost immediately; I was constantly peeling it from my trousers. When I made the first cast, I could hear my visitor catch her breath as if she were seeing something quite wonderful, something manly, and this inspired me to make another, pretending the first was imperfect. Then, while she watched, I sawed out the second little piglet and handed it to her, still warm to the touch. “You can have this,” I said.
Then she was gone and I, not quite sure what had taken place but very much certain something had, was alone in my cubicle with a half day’s work to do and a deadline to match. I was part of the Park Island Standard. When people picked up their weekly newspaper and looked at the ads, they would be looking at work that I, Peter Day, had done. At the end of the shift, washing up at the long sink with the others, I was teased by the guys. What had I been up to with that gypsy? Had she told my fortune? But Joe Schimer, just as I knew he would, said, “Stay away from those DPs kid. They’re dirt, all of them.”
In less than a year, I had learned to dislike Joe Schimer as much as I ever disliked anyone before or since. My parents, I’m happy to say, may have had some faults, but they insisted we treat others with respect. Even Protestants, my father said, would probably get into heaven.
So that night, at the supper table, I felt comfortable telling them, and my sister, about that woman Lucia and the little lead piglet I had given her. I didn’t mention the spell I thought she had cast over me; that seemed a bit more than necessary.
“Oh, you mean the Braka’s,” my mother said. “They’re no gypsies.”
“They’re Russians,” my father said.
“No, no, no,” my mother said. “Mrs. Callaghan says they just came in from Balla Roose.”
“Well that’s Russia!”
“No, it’s not.”
My parents were good people, but not always useful. My sister, of course, caught on. “Ma,” she said. “He wants to know if that girl is married!”
“Oh, she’s much too old for him,” my mother said. And that was all the answer I did get.
My sister had more to say later. If this Lucia had been coming into the shop so regularly, why hadn’t I mentioned her before? I had no answer to that. One moment, she had just been a butcher’s wife who may have been a witch. But something had happened today, and I no longer recognized myself, or exactly remembered who I had been.
My sister reminded me. Peter, she said. I got you dates with three girls last year. They liked you! But you…
Yes, it was true. Those girls had made no impression at all on me. I took two of them to the movies, the other to a dance at Eagles Hall, even kissed one, and never felt a thing. It was as if I had no interest in girls, and my father worried about this although, at the time, I could not understand why.
Could you at least describe her, my sister asked. Even that I found difficult. A red scarf over dark hair, a broad face, heavy legs beneath heavy skirts. Old enough to be a wife, but I couldn’t even say she’d been wearing a ring.
She’s not for you, my sister said. She’s a grown woman and you are a boy, a boy! Just because you quit school doesn’t mean you are a man.
So I told her about those Chinamen with their bugles and their “GI die tonight.” I’d soon be man enough for that, wouldn’t I? And she said, don’t say Chinamen, it sounds coarse.
The following week, Lucia sought me out again. She had that lead piglet with her and wanted to know if I could saw it more closely to the line. What I had given her, understand, was a simple rectangle. What she wanted was the shape of the pig.
It wasn’t easy, but I did it. And this time I made sure there was no ring on her finger. She had rings. Plenty of rings. But not that telltale one on the third finger of the left hand. She touched me when I handed that pig to her. Just our fingertips, but the spell went through me again, exactly like fire, and I knew I had become an entirely different person, someone who could charge up a hill and send the enemy screaming in terror. I rubbed my chin and felt something like a beard about to sprout. Dare I embrace this woman? Who would stop me, we were alone in the cubicle with a cauldron of molten lead waiting to be poured.
I would like, she said, to wear this. As a pendant. Could you make a hole?
I certainly could and did.
* * *
When I was in parochial school, my parents had a dog my father named Ichabob, a tragic rescue from the alleys, abused and weakened and never quite right. In the apartment next-door, the neighbors had a spaniel they locked indoors whenever she came into heat. Poor Ichabob would lie belly-flat on the kitchen linoleum, as if to cool his testicles; I can still hear how he whimpered. Eventually he ran off, what else could he do, and was struck by a car, and that is all there is to that particular story except now, most emphatically, I found myself thinking about poor Ichabob, and understanding something I once thought a joke.
I burned, I tell you, and one night, she, Lucia, the witch, came to me in a dream with her thick hair falling loose to her shoulders, and her white arms outstretched. What made this dream so intense was that it took place in my room which was vividly lit and absolutely authentic from the flowered wallpaper that was slightly peeling above the closet door to the posters of White Sox players above my bed. The feeling was that the dream was actually happening and I had only to let it keep on happening to make it real. There was one problem. I could not control my body which is to say I could not hold back the orgasm that came surging up so suddenly it ended everything almost as soon as it began. Then I was actually awake and wet as I had been before, although, till now, there had never been any dream to go with it. My mother who, of course, laundered the sheets, had advised me not to be alarmed by these occurrences, and if I had any questions, I should ask my father. How he would have responded? I can only imagine and still do. Did this immense overwhelming flood satisfy me? Not one bit. I lay in my room more spellbound than before, and the next day, I decided I would have to walk down to Market Street and see Madam Lucia, as I was beginning to think of her, on her own terrain.
Every town seems to have its own wrong side of the tracks. If you were to look at Park Island on a topographical map, you would see that most of it is indeed an island, a ridge rising out of the surrounding prairie. The south side, cut off by a canal and a railroad line, is not part of this island. When I was in grade school, I sometimes visited friends who lived below the hill, although I always felt out of place. Everything was factories, railroad tracks, smokestacks, a creek as red as blood, and weedy side streets where people spoke languages you could not learn in school.
Why not walk down to that butcher shop after work someday and pick out a few rounds of sausage for the family table? No one would think it strange. Ever since I dropped out of school, I had been bringing my mother small offerings of groceries in lieu of actually paying room and board.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, maybe a year after the war in Europe ended, a couple of friends whose names no longer matter brought me down to Market Street, determined to show me something they had already seen. In an empty storefront, one of our returning GIs had set up a display of photographs taken on his Brownie in a newly liberated Nazi death camp. My parents talked of it; they had heard people say the photos were fake, and now I would see it for myself.
The dead were stacked one upon another, stripped of clothing, hair, even teeth, mouths wide open as if they would scream for all eternity. The living with their shaven skulls and skeletal ribs looked ready to join them. One man in a dark uniform, photographed several times, was hanging from a lightpole; perhaps he had been one of the guards. Now, I allowed myself to imagine my Lucia’s butcher shop in this same cursed storefront. That was fantasy, and I knew it. When I reached the location, the cobwebbed windows were dark as they must have been for years, and what lay behind was fit only for the existence of rats.
Branka’s butcher’s shop was where I knew it would be, on the corner of Market and Levitt, a surprisingly clean, well-scrubbed store with fragrant sausages hanging in the windows and customers waiting before a glass counter. The butcher was a large man who looked as old or even older than my grandfather but still strong after a lifetime of hard work. His hair was white, his apron too; he wore a white butcher’s cap and had a great white mustache that would have made any brigadier proud. He and a woman in a long dark coat were speaking in a language that was not English, and I could see this woman was a very particular shopper who knew what she wanted and would get it if it took the last breath of her miserable life. Such women were common in Park Island. The butcher saw me, I think, and may even have nodded, before he opened up the meat locker and stepped inside, releasing a cloud of ice cold air. Well, I thought, my Lucia could not be married to that man! A moment later he returned with an entire slab of fresh beef liver in his bare arms and dropped it on the table as if to say, this was alive only yesterday, and perhaps it had been. He picked up a long slender knife I am sure was already very sharp and proceeded to sharpen it again on a stone. His eye caught mine, and he winked, not maliciously, but in the way certain of these European men think funny. He carved off three slices, very much like the slices my mother fried every Thursday night, and held them up. His customer insisted he slice a fourth. Then she chose the two she liked best, just as I knew she would.
* * *
There was another person in that bright store, someone whose presence came upon me as if it had drifted through the walls. Out of nowhere, she was beside me, smiling as if we were old and intimate friends, a woman with a broad face, her dark hair all shot with silver, her fingers abundant with rings. Then I saw my little lead piglet on a chain worn round her neck, and thought, oh, the mother! It was for her mother!
I could not have been more wrong. “Ah!” she cried. “The boy who pours lead!” And the little piglet, all of its own, blushed and turned pink. “Look how shy he is,” she said to the butcher, before switching to another language. The two of them talked about me, laughing as only spouses will laugh with each other, and the butcher thrust his hand over the counter for me to shake. “I have heard about you,” he said. “Poof, poof, you go. With the lead!”
His customer cried out angrily, how dare he turn away when she was paying good American dollars? He sighed, I think, and set to wrapping her purchase in waxy brown paper that would not let blood soak through. His wife — surely she must have been his wife — now touched my little piglet with her index finger and coyly said:
“I put paint on him. You don’t mind, do you?’
“Madam Lucia?” I said, and that, I suppose, is how spells work: You can believe or not believe; it is entirely up to you.
I never saw her again. I very nearly never saw anything again. A few days later, I was getting my casting machine warmed up for an afternoon’s work, and I may have been a bit careless. There is one thing molten lead will not tolerate; a bit of moisture, to even spit at it, will cause an eruption you had better be ready to duck. Something much larger and wetter than a gob of spit must have been in the hellbox, how it got there I have my own ideas, but what use are they now? I shoveled the metal into that cauldron I told you about, and my face turned into fire. I must have screamed; instantly, someone was holding my arms, saying, don’t touch it, don’t touch it, and that made sense for I had no idea what would happen if I did. It would be much easier to write that I lost consciousness and came to days later but that was not the case. I stayed conscious all the way to the hospital, and I remember thinking this must be the hell the nuns had promised, unending pain for all dark eternity. There were nurses and doctors who were only voices to me. I was rushed here and there on a gurney, and finally someone must have injected me with a drug so powerful I did not come to for what really did feel like days.
My hands were fastened to my sides. I was sightless although there seemed to be some light playing on my left eye. “Is anybody there?” I said, and a woman’s voice answered. ”Peter,” it said. “Listen to me. You won’t be blind!”
My parents and my sister were there when the bandages were removed. Or maybe I saw this scene in a movie. My sister, I do remember, bent close, looked into my remaining eye and said, “We’ll help you, Peter.” She had already inquired at school and learned of a program that would get me my diploma and start me into college. Why would I want to do that? I asked her, but she just smiled and held my hand.
On my final day, I was alone. I say alone because my roommate was an elderly man who no longer seemed capable of speech. If we could have spoken, I would asked him what he had seen in his long, long life that made it worth living. Instead, I just lay there thinking.
“Visitor for you,” the nurse said. I looked up with my good eye and saw my mentor from work, Jim Schimer, and he was not carrying flowers. “Nice job you did on yourself,” he said. He had never liked me, and he had never hidden it. Today, he had a small brown envelope that he handed to me with visible pleasure. It was my check. The bosses had paid all the way up to the moment the lead exploded in my face.
“They’re not going to charge you for the damage,” Jim said. “Mr. Carmichael told me to wish you good luck on your next job.”
I was fired, fired for nearly killing myself. Then, without sitting down or removing his hat and coat, this hero of the great crusade in Europe told me a story I could not believe, but he told it with such glee I knew it had to be true.
“Your gypsy friends,” he said. “Those fucken DPs. You won’t be seeing them again.”
There had been a holdup, and he’d been down there to “cover the story,” which was bullshit coming from a man who never wrote anything in his life.
“A couple of ‘Negroes,’” he said. He never missed a chance to jeer at me for using that word instead of the one he preferred.
A “nickel-plated revolver,” he said, as if he had seen it himself.
That “jagoff gypsy,” he said. Went after them with a fucking cleaver and got it right through the eyes.
“He’s dead?”
“Maybe that witch will give you a tumble now. If anyone can find her. The place is all boarded up. Ain’t that a shame?”
It would have been nice to crawl out of bed and hit this man with something solid, but it would not have been wise. He had been to Europe, fought and killed, and I would never be his match. At that exact moment my sister entered the room, softly haloed by the painful light. He eyed her up, and he eyed her down, the way a man like him will look at something he believes he could have — if only he wanted it. Finally, he gave her that checked-you-out look, as if to say, “not bad.”
“So, what do you think, sister?” he said. “Your brother is pretty damn lucky, right? The army will never take him now.”
Bastard, I thought. Bastard. And then my mind went back, as it would for many years to come, to the witch, my beautiful bewitching witch.
