Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Pete started tinkering with his old Ford tractor. The only modification on it for him was a hand clutch.

  “You got to get up pretty early in the morning to keep up with those winery boys,” he said. “During Prohibition, Widmer’s sold grape juice to stay in business. But who wanted grape juice? So they put a label on the bottle that said the juice might ferment if it didn’t get kept cold. That’s upholding the law.”

  As Pauline came out to the workshop, she talked softly in Italian to the swallows. She wanted to show me the garden orchard they had just planted. The trees—cherry, plum, apple, pear—were nothing but fishing poles. “I look out kitchen window when I cook and see leafs,” she said. “Someday, God letting me, I see apples and plums.” We walked around to the well, and she pumped up a sample. “Taste this water sweet like candy and tell if this is a good place.”

  Pete said, “We play with farming now. I rent the fields to a young guy. Nice Italian boy. He’s put in kidney beans this year. I wouldn’t sell the farm. I wouldn’t as long as nobody waves big money in my face.” He pointed toward the lake. “Good vineyard country. The hills let cold air slide down to the water, and we don’t get so many late spring freezes.”

  “We used to make our wine,” Pauline said. “Pete, his father teached him.”

  “Now, Pa was a champeen winemaker. He learned in Naples, Italy, the old-country way. Back in Rochester he made wine in the basement out of Little Black Joes. We call them Zinfandels now. Always kept the winecellar locked and the key around his neck. He’d come upstairs and say, ‘Il vino fa’l sangue sano!’ Wine makes good blood! The old man’s breakfast was a big glass of red with two raw eggs in it.”

  Pete had a long smile, and he smiled often, and always he smiled when he spoke of his father.

  “You know how we knew when to bung up the bottles? The way we knew the fermenting was finished?”

  “I couldn’t guess.”

  “Then you’re learning, my friend. This is the old Italiano way: we pulled a penny balloon over the neck of the bottle to keep air and dirt out and let gas escape into the balloon. When the balloon didn’t get bigger, we’d start bunging up.”

  “Those darned old days,” Pauline said, and she smiled at them.

  “They’re gone, honey.” Pete waved a crutch skyward. “My grandfather planted his grapes according to the stars and moon. Now the boys out here plant according to Cornell University.”

  We went in for lunch. Pete poured out two jiggers of Seagram’s Seven Crown and passed me one. “No good blood in it; only just some heat.”

  Filomena joined us. The conversation covered many things: crops, carpentry, machines, Italy, food. At times the talk was about someone who had failed a promise or pulled a shenanigan—they condemned the man then.

  Pauline made the lunch from what she had taken from her garden and the edges of the field: a salad of dandelion and wild mustard greens served with olive oil and vinegar, boiled cardoon deep-fried in a garlic egg batter, boiled and sugared rhubarb, and a small piece of fried venison from a quart jar.

  “Never eaten canned deer,” I said.

  “Does it taste like more?”

  “That’s the cardoon.”

  “And you have some more rhubarbs too,” Pauline said. “You know, we hear about this place called McDonald’s. Two weeks ago we drive there for a hamburg sangwich.” Her face pinched up. “Meat was thin like cheesecloth. ‘This is no hamburg sangwich,’ I say. ‘This is joke.’”

  Filomena couldn’t have the dinner. She took boiled spinach and bread, dipping the bread into the spinach and eating all of it. She had her health, but the hearing wasn’t so good now. “She’s ninety-four,” Pete said.

  “I’m ninety-four.”

  “I just told him you’re ninety-four, Ma.”

  “I was lucky all my life,” she said.

  “She came to America when she was eighteen.”

  Pete spoke in a kind of Bronx accent, his wife and mother with deep Italian accents. Sometimes I asked questions just to hear their words.

  “When we talk about American things, we speak American. When it’s Italian things, we talk Italiano,” Pete said. “I don’t speak it so good, but Pauline, jeez, she really talks the old language. They out-talk me in Italiano, but I take care of them in American.”

  Filomena, whose common name was Fanny, finished her meal and sat back listening as best she could, looking at nothing in particular. Her hands, spotted and veined like moth wings, fluttered up and down from time to time and landed softly on the table, in her lap.

  I asked her, “Did you like the old days?”

  “Ha!” she said. “They think more of horse or jackass than human person. They never teach me to read!”

  “We womens was brought up to be just like mouse,” Pauline whispered. “We was so quiet.”

  “Work all time because we got to make everything,” Filomena said. “Couldn’t buy no cookies, no cakes. Got to make it all. Couldn’t buy nothing.”

  “You had two choices for dinner and supper,” Pete said. “Pasta fasol or nothing. Every day we ate pasta fasol. Always on the stove pasta fasol, pasta fasol. Macaroni and beans. Shit on it.”

  “You got tired of it?”

  “What can you do, my friend? We ate poor, lived poor, slept poor.”

  “How do you sleep poor?”

  “Five to a room.”

  “My mother she had eight childrens,” Pauline said. “They was all delivered by midwife. She go to doctor for first time in her life when she is sixty-five. Poor was not all things bad.”

  Pauline cleared the table and got the risen dough ready for the oven. Just before she pushed the pan in, she made the sign of the cross and kissed her first two fingers and touched them to the dough. I asked her what it meant.

  “I don’t know, but my mother used to bless the breads. If she throwed bread away, she kissed it. It was sin to waste.”

  “Rough living,” Pete said.

  Pauline smiled. “But life was good. You had your band.”

  “My band? Hell! The only good thing was eating on Sunday.”

  “We call Sunday a little special,” Pauline said.

  “Sunday was spaghetti day. But there were other hard things in Rochester, even if you were born in America like us. If your name ended in a vowel, you didn’t go to college.”

  “What’s a vowel got to do with it?”

  “Masucci, Zambito, Gambrini, Barsetta. You were Italian, my friend. All they would say to you was ‘Shut up’ or ‘Go to hell.’”

  “Polish peoples come in our garden and steal our garlics,” Pauline said. “We have nothing extra.”

  “Rochester was tough. If you were a German off the boat, you got a good job. Kodak or Bausch and Lomb wanted Germans. They thought just being Kraut made a good worker in lenses and film. But if you were Italian, you got the shovel and pick. No questions asked, no answers given. My brother finally got a job with a master carpenter, but the old man hid the skills from him—afraid the kid would take his trade away.”

  “Work all the time,” Filomena said. “Work, work.”

  “Work was their god. Pa was a machinist for the Rochester streetcar company. The whole family worked. I drove a dump truck to help out.”

  “You was driving the truck when you first find me,” Pauline said.

  “I saw her washing clothes in a tub under a tree. I was hauling dirt in a hundred-twenty-five-dollar truck. I had a truck, a straw hat, and a cigar. Big man, you see. I honked and she smiled and that was it.”

  “Pete and me we go to the park. My brother and sister go with us always.”

  “It was courting then,” Pete said. “Her father, Sam Zambito, he watched and approved everything. No messing around. The old Sicilian he knows when the pear’s ripe it falls to the ground by itself.” Pauline grinned at that. “But after I married her, Sam encouraged me. Without him, I wouldn’t ever got this place. See, he came out here first. He lived up the road, up at the dead end
where the undertaker lives now.”

  “The undertaker lives at the dead end?”

  “Hey,” Pete said. “Leave the jokes to me. I’m the fifty-third card.” He passed a whiskey. I asked, “Were you ever bitter about the crutches?”

  “Bitter? Where was time to be bitter?”

  “I prayed for him,” Filomena said.

  “It didn’t help, Ma.”

  “Could a doctor have helped?”

  “Who knows? My parents had no money, no education. They believed anything.”

  “I prayed for him. I prayed, yes.”

  “Okay, Ma.” Pete poured himself another. “They wheeled me two miles in a kid’s wagon one time to see Aimée Semple McPherson, the faith healer. I was seven or eight. We were up on a stage. She made a cross on my forehead in oil, and she looked at me and said, ‘Throw away those crutches! Throw them down!’ I knew I couldn’t do it. You think I hadn’t tried a thousand times? ‘Throw away those sticks, boy!’ She yelled at me. I didn’t, though. The audience called out. Jeez, they were crazy for a miracle.”

  18. Pete, Pauline, and Filomena Masucci near Cheshire, New York

  Pete’s mother looked distressed as he told the story. “I prayed for him,” she said quietly.

  “And they took me to another healer. An Indian he claimed to be. The seventh son of the seventh son. They got him for fraud too. Now the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the door and want to heal me. I tell them, ‘Shit on this healing!’”

  We went outside to the edge of the fields. Pete said, “With the garden and wild food and the orchard, we got our retirement. There’s a grocery in the cellar with what Pauline’s put up. We always had our own meat, but we butchered the last steer a year ago and the last hog three years ago. Now that’s finished for us too.”

  Pauline pointed to the cardoon growing along the fence, and said, “God’s green earth.”

  Pete shook his head. “There was a time when we made our own cheese and sold it door to door and grew our own wheat and had it milled over in Pittsford. We took apples down to Canandaigua to get made into cider. We raised ducks and turkeys. Tried them all. Old MacDonald had a farm.”

  “E-I-E-I-O,” Pauline sang. “We never have sheeps though. When we have dairy cows, I wash the barn insides every day. You could eat in there, it was so clean. And when Pete drived the tractor, I ride on back behind him so I can be out of the wind. Where he go and work, I go.”

  “All that stuff is gone, honey.”

  “Now we don’t move so good, and I got the sugar.”

  “She means sugar diabetes.”

  “The best was the childrens. We have twenty-four foster childrens come live with us since we move here in nineteen forty-five, but we never have childrens out of us.”

  “Cheaper by the dozen,” Pete said. “One time we had seven all at once. Some had problems, but they were good pups when they got out here. We have a Puerto Rican boy coming back to see us Memorial Day.”

  Pauline looked at her watch and hurried into the house.

  “Soap opera,” Pete said. “I don’t care for any of that. I work. What else can you do? I was born all over again when we came out. I’d be dead now if we didn’t move to this place.” He stopped and poked a crutch at some cardoon. “There’s one thing though I’ve looked for here. I thought I’d find it.”

  “What’s the thing?”

  “I been put on this land for something, but I don’t know what the hell for.”

  “You just told me.”

  4

  I STAYED in the old vineyard country three days. Chisholm and I talked and worked, I wrote a few letters, cleaned cameras, we ate, we drank some Genesee. We disagreed, agreed, and said where we might be in a year or ten years and where we wouldn’t be if we could help it.

  My last evening with him, we walked down the road and he pointed out a spring in the hill high above the lake, where Indians had camped for many years. Under the grass, big dark rings, the marks of Seneca huts, still remained. “It seems they left nothing behind,” he said, “as if they never were, but their signature is still here when you know where to look.”

  He talked angrily about the Sullivan-Clinton campaign George Washington sent through New York in 1779 to punish local Indians for siding with the British and also to clear the region for white settlers. The Iroquois tribes, led by the Onondaga Hiawatha, lived in houses, farmed the land, and, by most definitions, were civilized. Yet some settlers found that idea intolerable and saw to the destruction of the Iroquois. To encourage new settlement, the government even gave veterans of the Revolutionary War tracts of Indian land, but most of the soldiers sold it to speculators for a few cents an acre.

  We turned to head home. “This has been a strange part of the country,” Chisholm said. “Something around the lakes brings out the mystical in a person. These counties have been full of prophets, religious zealots, and spiritualists who had hot-lines to God. Or the dead. Joseph Smith, Jemina Wilkinson, the Fox sisters. There was a pair. They rapped to spirits in seances and got them to tap back. Under investigation later, they admitted making the noises from the other world by cracking their toe joints.”

  In the moonlight, we walked over an abandoned vineyard. The posts had fallen down, and vines inched about for something to crawl up on; one had twisted around a rusting baler and another climbed a broken plow. We passed a foundation of a barn that had collapsed, a toppled chimney, and a weedy depression where an icehouse had stood. “These are all dreams we’re walking over,” I said.

  Chisholm looked at me strangely and went quiet for some time. When he spoke again it was about the dogs. Afterward, I thought I understood his silence: I had undercut the stone wall we had built, our accomplishment. The wall looked enduring, and it would serve for a while, but there would come a time when it would be a pile of rock to no end. I had undercut the biggest dream of all—the one for permanence. Maybe that’s what we really felt in the stones: how man is the tool of his dreams, dreams that rise only to fall back to earth.

  Wednesday afternoon I left. “Going?” Chisholm said. “You’ve got wings on your feet.” I drove up along Canandaigua Lake, past the summer houses of the company men from Kodak and Bausch & Lomb and Xerox, past houses with names like Bide-a-Wee and Summer Daze, past the Roseland amusement park of sno-cones and fudge ripple, past pink and aquamarine motels, through Canandaigua with its wide main street of brick buildings from another century.

  At the top of the street, among the Greek Revival houses, stood the old Ontario County Courthouse—nearly as big as a state capitol—where Susan B. Anthony was found guilty of voting; to one side, in the same architectural style, the Masonic Lodge. Chisholm had said the similarity and proximity of the two buildings indicated something about the administration of justice here in the nineteenth century. It was western New York where, in the 1820s, a Masonic Lodge in Batavia turned down William Morgan for membership even though he claimed membership in Rochester. He threatened to reveal the highest secrets of the order. The last time a non-Mason saw him alive was in Lewiston; a few days later, Lake Ontario washed up a body that may have been Morgan’s. The issue mobilized a group into a political party called the Anti-Masons. “That,” Chisholm had said, “was the power Masons used to have here.”

  5

  JOSEPH Smith, an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and “unlaughing” boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra in 1827. The road is now New York 21 and the drumlin, a streamlined hump of glacially drifted soil, they call Hill Cumorah. It is not a Mount Sinai or an Ararat, but rather a much humbler thing, yet apparently of sufficient majesty for angels and God to have chosen it as the place to speak to Smith. There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the “revised” Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he i
nsisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain.

  I looked at Hill Cumorah and tried to envision it as it was in Smith’s day. The Mormons have built a shaft depicting witnesses who attested to the reality of the plates and the heavenly pronouncements, but, to my mind, the tower protested too much. Somehow monuments more entomb history than mark it. To see Bunker Hill (in fact Breed’s Hill) today rising unimposingly from the workers’ houses is to put historical imagination to the test, because Bunker Hill now belongs more to a notion of the past than to actuality.

  Palmyra was a clean town of three-story brick buildings where I turned east on New York 31 and went down along the route of the Erie Canal, through villages, over fields of deep green, under blooming locust trees, and past barns collapsing next to mobile homes that looked depressingly immobile yet also impermanent. At Savannah, I found the unmarked road to Conquest (down the highway from Victory) easily enough, but staying on it was another matter. Trying to distinguish the main line from the tributaries by playing compass against the worn, yellow stripes was blue roading at its perplexing best. After some miles, I had no idea where I was. I called out to five fellows pouring something into the crankcase of a Trans-Am. These were the men who believe in the restorative power of STP as the Chinese believe in rhinoceros horn. “Is this the road to Conquest?”

  They answered almost together: “Yes! Where? No! Conquest?” Then, pleased to be considered authorities on the country, they all came to my window. Each answered the question at length, and sometimes at the same moment as another. They corrected, modified, amplified, clarified, and repeated each other’s directions. At last I came to understand nothing. “All right,” one said, “here it is: run this road straight through, and you can’t help but miss it.”

  Off I went, hoping Conquest would find me. In the dairy country, chewing Holsteins and Guernseys switched their tails and flicked their skins. On the other side of Johnny Cake Road lay Conquest. Then I began the game again, looking for Cato. Along the roads were cottage industries selling clothesline poles, purple martin houses, potted plants, AKC pups.