America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

Irish songs. Now and then of course we were shaken loose. Once Tetrazzini came to Del Monte, eighteen miles away. We in grammar school learned the Italian words to “Santa Lucia,” written phonetically on the blackboard, and we journeyed to Del Monte, each one of us clutching a wilted bouquet of violets. We sang for her and threw our violets at her and went sadly home. She was a corseted, fat woman and she cried. I don’t remember that she sang. Perhaps our singing threw her and maybe she was laughing, not crying.
    One section of Salinas was called Kidville—a district where the less prosperous lived and procreated violently. Kidville kids were kind of “across the tracks.”
    Andy was a Kidville kid, one of the nicest boys I ever knew. A quiet, lonely boy who went about by himself and yet loved to be with others. No matter how early you got to the West End School yard, Andy would be there, squatting against the wooden fence, waiting. Andy was a boy who walked about early in the morning. In any kind of excitement you would see Andy on the sidelines, silent but present. If men talking privately said, “Get that kid out of here,” that kid would be Andy. All of us were in love with the fourth-grade teacher, it turned out Andy most of all, but as usual Andy was quiet and inward.
    We had excitements in Salinas besides revivals and circuses, and now and then a murder. And we must have had despair, too, as when a lonely man who lived in a tiny house on Castroville Street put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the triggers with his toes. That morning Andy was not first in the schoolyard, but when he arrived he had the most exciting article any Salinas kid had ever possessed. He had it in one of those little striped bags candy came in. He put it on the teacher’s desk as a present. That’s how much he loved her.
    I remember how she opened the bag and shook out on her desk a human ear, but I don’t remember what happened thereafter. I have a memory block perhaps produced by a violence. The teacher seemed to have an aversion for Andy after that and it broke his heart. He had given her the only ear he or any other kid was ever likely to possess.
    We had many of what are now called characters in Salinas. Looking back it seems to me now it was solid characters, but at the time I thought everyone lived that way.
    There was Hungry Anderson, who was known to be a tight man with a dollar. He and his wife lived about a mile out of town. He got his name on an occasion when he had some carpenters working on the roof of his house. At noon it took them about six or seven minutes to get down off the roof, and by the time they did, Hungry had eaten their lunches. He explained that when they were late, he had thought they didn’t want to eat. He was called Hungry Anderson from that day on, and people began to say he was a miser. To prove that he wasn’t he bought a shiny Chalmers automobile, but his instincts were too strong for him. He kept the car in a shed in town and came in with his horse and buggy, motored about town, put up the car and trotted back to his farm.
    We had a man who wore long hair and looked very distinguished. We had heard that it was because the tips of his ears were clipped, a common punishment for stealing sheep.
    And we had misers, lots of misers. Heaven knows what they were, but we needed misers, perhaps with visions of counting gold pieces and hiding treasures. In those days many transactions were carried out in gold. Paper was highly suspected simply because it was unusual. One of our rich men used to sweat with nervousness when he had to pay a bill in gold. Paper saved him considerable painful emotion because it didn’t really seem like money to him.
    We had, however, one whooping dolager of a miser who gave us a great deal of pleasure. Of course now I know he was nuts, but then it was a different thing. He and his wife and his daughter lived in a dark