A Lark

   

Willamenia  Samantha Lark, Willa Girl to most, was born on a dusty June morning in the same house, in the same bed as her father, almost seventeen years before.
Not much changes in Nickel, Oklahoma.  The Indians stay on the rez side of town, the isolated whites live around a small country club to the north and the rest, the people, as her Grandmama, would say, lived were folks should.  In town, that is, within walking distance of the First Antioch Baptist Church.
Willa knew her father through the house, his high school yearbooks remained neatly stacked on his dresser.  She felt his arms around her when she sank into the tree swing he had rigged for her mother before there ever was a Willa.
  Beneath the branches of the ancient pecan tree, bare toes dragging in the dirt, she’d talk to him, she called it whispering prayer. 
The pecan tree shaded the whole white frame house and as Grandmama said, thank the man that planted that tree Willa Girl, as I thank him every August morning.
Willa knew her father from the picture every poor draftee proudly sent home.  William Samuel Lark, Private First Class, U.S. Army.  His chin lifted, his mahogany complexion flawless, his hazel eyes fixed on the middle horizon.
He was killed on his second patrol. 
Her Grandmama and Auntie Ray ritually went over their men, their deaths.  Willa could read the signs of the talk that was coming by the time she was seven or eight.  She’d run out of the house to the swing, her sanctuary.
“Poor boys is always cannon fodder.  You know that.”  Auntie Ray would say.  Grandmama would close her eyes and say, “You’re thinking of our Granddad now.
I surely am.” Said Auntie Ray.  He could pass, that man was so light and in those Jim Crow times he should of.  But what did he do?  He joined the U.S. Army to go to France.
Just because he wanted to go to France.” Finished Grandmama.
“It seems as soon as a Lark shows some sense it flies away.”  That’s how Auntie Ray would conclude the ritual.  And if she were shelling peas or snipping pole beans her hands would move in cadence with her talk.
Willa was planning her moment.  She would stand in front of them in the kitchen take a deep breath and say, “Dear ladies, this Lark has got to fly.”
Grandmama and Auntie Ray had been too much for Willa’s little Mexican mama.  She had Willa, early, brought on be the telegram sent by the U.S. Army.  As quietly as she had arrived, she left.  She was all of seventeen.  The same age as Willa  come next June.

   "You are soaked," he said.  Touching ever so lightly my right knee.  We were sitting in seats facing one  another on the train to Avon.  I was looking at where we had come from; the disappearing past, he, facing forward, saw only the future.

     "What's going on?" I asked hearing the tension, the broad mid-western accent, ringing out, foreign, in the crowded car.

To be continued...

        She was born at the turn of the century in North Beach to another Italian Irish family who fished.  Her father went out every morning with a seining net, trawling out past the Marin headlands to the rich fishery.
He was dark-haired and dark-eyed and his name was Marco Torranetto.  He had a temper, needed little sleep but much drink and of his six children he truly loved only one, his last and only daughter, Katie Lynn.
    His Irish wife, Katherine Lyndon, wrapped her apron around her growing bulk and stood at the stove feeding kindling to the morning fire.
    Behind her the sky was growing pink and overhead in the narrow flat she heard her husband pull on his boots and then bang out the front door.  He’d breakfast at the Java Bar at the Fisherman’s Wharf and she knew that would be an espresso with grappa.  His eye opener her own father would of said.
    One by one her five sons trouped through the sooty kitchen grateful for the thick Italian coffee and cream with the ends of last nights bread to dip into it.  They spoke little for they had nothing they wanted to say.
    Another baby was on the way, that much they could see.  Even the 8-year old, Nicky, knew that.
    The only child without a clue was Katie Lynn, the wide-eyed 6-year old with the dark twisting hair.
    She stood on a stool in front of her mother to get her hair done up in dark green ribbon, a color that mirrored her eyes.  The size of it would be enough to set her a sail in a stiff breeze as she and Nicky made their way to the parochial school leaning in the shadow of Saint Peter and Paul Church.

    The Halycon rocks in her  berth between the Peter Pan and the Katie Lynn, all spotless
working Monterey crabbers, but of the three, the Katie Lynn sparkles like a bride.  Up the hill from the harbor, in a snug cabin built by a ship wright, the pre-dawn cold wakes the old fisherman. 
    He rolls to his feet and then turns to tuck the down comforter around her sleeping form.  She murmurs something from her dreams as his hands reach for the clean long johns and Dickey's laid out on the  faded chintz chair.  She does this small thing for him each night before they go to bed together, spooning in the center of the feather mattress. 
    Searching his pockets, he finds the note.  She has done this, too, almost every night for twenty-two years.  He reads it by the light of the stove as the kettle slowing roils to the boil.
    "Keep a weather eye, and berth with me tonight."
    He folds the note and pulls the  mason jar out from its hiding place behind the worn trestle table.  The old-fashioned jar is filled with yellowing slips of paper.  Hundreds of notes, one for every day that he put to sea over the past two decades.
    No one would suspect, but he doubts he'd set out on the sea if he failed to find a note; if she had not written; bidding him safely home.

    Her left hand was raised, shielding her eyes.  It was ringless he noted and felt his fists unclench some in the deep front pockets of his Dickey's.  Her auburn hair fell in curls around her shoulders.  Who was she?
    She wondered at the way the light changed on the wind.  Clouds part and the sun shines on the Half Moon Bay Harbor.  Wind over light, like wind over water, rippling light.  Her lips parted and she tried the phrase aloud, softly, rippling light, rippling light.
    The boats are only tethered, she thought, not anchored.  They are frail, shell-like toys.  And what colossus nerve must fisherman have possessed, to step aboard, start the engine and steer for open seas.
    The 1923 Monterey fishing boat was about to be dedicated to the memory of all those fishing men, husbands and sons, who pushed their bows to the horizon day after day and then one evening did not return to safe harbor. The harbor master was re-launching the lovely old boat, the newly renovated Irene.
     He was a fisherman.  The man in the oil-stained work pants.  John or Giovanni to his mother.  His father had been a fisherman, his grandfather, too,  and his great-grandfather had sailed from Italy to Monterey, following the anchovy.  He was right behind her now as the crowds surged forward to hear Father Russo's blessing for the fleet.

    Something, maybe the weight of his attention falling on her made her turn and look up at the dark eyed man.  "Well," she asked,  "what do you think of the Irene?"

            "It's everything I want for myself, one day, that is..."  And next he felt as if he were standing behind himself as he had never been a bold man.  It was as if he watched himself lift the woman's porcelain chin, gently cupped in his right hand.  Speaking to her in a low,husky voice he asked, "What would your name be?

    Katie, Katie-Lynn," she said. 

    "Then that's what I will christen my boat, when the day comes.

        Yes," she said lifting her chin free, "When the day comes."

To be continued....