The Taste of Sardines

By Jessie Morrison

In his seven years of life, Martin Moran’s world had never extended farther than the mossy borders of Buncrana, County Donegal.  And yet, as he stood now in the misty backsplash of waves gazing for the first time at the black and distant shores of America, he was filled with a petulant and boyish disappointment.

His mother stood beside him, gripping his hand tightly in her own.  Her skirts brushed against his bare legs.

“Well, Marty?”  she said, her voice hopeful and young, “What do you think?”

Martin shook his hand loose from his hers and placed his feet between the metal bars of the ship’s stern.  He shrugged his little shoulders.

“I thought it’d be bigger,” he said, jutting his chin in the direction of the green marble arm jabbing with her eternally flickering light at the clouds scudding by.
 
During their long, winding train ride east, Martin stared out the window agape at the variegated pastures of America.  They weren’t entirely different than the valleys back home, though there was something more arid about them, an expansiveness that was distinctly foreign.  For days, the train shot through the never-ending land, and each time they chugged their way to the top of a hill, the rise would give way to yet another endless horizon.  Even the cows seemed bigger. 

When they finally arrived at Union Station, Ma’s sister, Auntie Kat, was waiting for them on the platform.  She was a coarse woman with rough hands, and a gray, lightless quality had seeped into her skin from years working cramped away from sun in the garment factories on Milwaukee Avenue. Her eyes were gentle, though, the same color as his mother’s, but where Ma’s eyes seemed to refract light, the darker blue rim expanding and contracting with her emotions, Auntie Kat’s remained the same placid blue, like the water in a bathtub made with robin’s egg tile. 

Martin felt as mistrustful of those innocuous eyes as he did of the Statue of Liberty and the overfed cows that grazed on vertiginous American hillsides, and when Auntie Kat stretched her woolen arms to hug him, he shrank back behind his mother. 

“He’s a shy one, Anna, is he?” Kat said, dropping her arms and laughing.

With a short tug, Ma pulled her skirt out of Martin’s grasp and nudged him forward.

“Don’t be rude, Martin,” she said sharply. “Give a hug to your auntie.”

So Martin did.  In response, his aunt wrapped him up in an itchy embrace that smelled of woodsmoke, chamomile, and something oily and feral that he couldn’t quite place.  He would soon come to find that this was the smell of the stockyards, and no matter how much they washed, most everyone in Chicago emanated it.  
 

Auntie Kat lived in a third floor apartment on the corner of Madison and Sacramento with her husband, George, whom everyone called Uncle Jolly because he was fat and red-faced and had a high-pitched, womanly giggle—a titter, more like—that would burst forth whenever he repeated some bawdy joke he’d heard when out drinking with the men.  The apartment itself was cozy and worn.  Arranged in the living room were two velveteen loveseats, a low wooden table, and a rough hewn oak rocking chair that Uncle Jolly had built.  There was a large front window, flanked by yellowing lace curtains, which looked out onto Madison Avenue.  Mother and Martin slept in cots in the corner of the living room, so that often he was kept awake at night listening to the sounds of the city below—the faint lilt of a woman singing at the tavern over on Washington, or the hoarse crescendo of men in argument, punctuated by the bursting noises of broken glass. It was in these moments that Martin would curl up tightly next to his mother, like a little folded sock, and almost remember the silence of Donegal at night—nothing but singing wind and the lap of waves.  Sometimes he’d hear a curious noise coming from the other side of the wall where Auntie Kat and Uncle Jolly slept; a rhythmic pounding followed by high wild cries and strange grunts, like a pig makes when it roots for food.  When this happened, Ma would cover his ears with the flats of her palms and lay very still against him until the sounds stopped. 
 
Auntie Kat got Ma her job at the garment factory. Kat had worked there for several years, and said that the conditions were some of the best in the city.  Ma was grateful; she had come from a simple and hardscrabble background, and if she disliked the work she would not have expressed it.  But sometimes when she came home she looked distant and aged.  Distractedly, she’d pull Martin onto her lap. “It’s hard out there,” she’d say wistfully, rubbing her watery blue eyes and looking past his dark head out the window and into the glow of her past.  “Sure if it isn’t hard.”
 
Ma said they would move into a place of their own when Da came for them.  Da was in London—another strange, unknown city, the name which sounded to Martin like a high and low gonging of some great bell—LON-don.  But as the years ticked on, he, too, became nothing more than a mythic and faded image of Martin’s past, as ambiguous a memory as Ireland itself—more a feeling, an idea, than anything real.  By the time he was ten, Martin realized his father was never coming. It didn’t make him angry.  He really couldn’t blame the man—who’d want to trade a city that sounds like bells for a city that sounds like a sneeze?  Who’d want to come to this place, where the men all worked elbow deep in pig’s blood which mucked up the air and left a greasy film of rendered bone and fat on surfaces of buildings and streets?  Where this is no open spaces and certainly no sea; just the press of buildings and the clanging of streetcars and horses’ hooves and unwashed people shouting?  Whatever London was, its name alone, the clear syllables of bells in a church tower ringing, indicated to him that it must be a place that held a greater promise at happiness than this teeming slaughterhouse, this string of factories, this place of inhospitable climates and shady strange faces, this Chicago.
 
Often on Saturday nights, Jolly and Kat would join the other Irish to jam-pack the union hall for the neighborhood Ceili.  Sometimes they’d invite Ma, but she always declined, feeling that it would be inappropriate for a married woman to go out dancing.  It seemed that of all the inhabitants of the flat, she alone had  persisted in the dream that he would one day come for them.  

On one such night in the fall of 1928, Mrs. Tagletti knocked on the apartment door. She and her husband  had four sons, one of whom was Martin’s age.  They all lived upstairs, along with a squat grandmother, and few of them spoke much English, far as Martin could tell, or if they did, they spoke it in a funny way that made it sound like singing.  The Taglettis always had a big pot of something bubbling in the house, and the apartment always had a pungent, foreign smell to it.  Once, Martin had borrowed Frank’s pencil during arithmetic class and his fingers had smelled like garlic for the rest of the day.

Mrs. Tagletti often felt sorry for the young Irish woman upstairs who had no husband, and that night, when Ma opened the door, Mrs. Tagletti pointed at her.

“You doing nothing tonight?” she asked.

“Me?” asked Ma, flustered, “Well, I was going to fix some dinner and—“

“We having party, downstairs,” she said.  “Birthday.  You come?”
 

The Italian woman smiled encouragingly at her in the dimness of the hallway.

“Oh, thank you for the offer,” she began, “But I have my son—“

“Bring him,” Mrs. Tagletti cut her off with an impatient wave.  “We don’t speak English good, but we cook better than you.”
 
The party was a loud, boisterous affair, and while Martin ran off to play with the Tagletti children, Ma was left to fend for herself.  Someone handed her a glass of wine, which she had never drank before, and she savored the warm wash of it over her tongue, the sweetness of grapes and the dryness of apples in the back of her throat.  It made her feel tingly and sensual.  It made her forget her sorrow, her husband, even her loneliness.  She watched the quick, expressive movement of hands as the Italians spoke to one another, and listened to their singing language.  She knew that some of the men were looking at her, and she felt awakened by their dark velvet eyes and their long, deft fingers.  She tasted strange food and spices, and felt, for the first time since she’d come to America, the swirl of cultures, the cosmopolitan explosion of people, that she had heard tell of back in Donegal.

There was a young man there, one of Mrs. Tagletti’s brothers.  He was younger than Ma—maybe just 19 or 20.  He spoke a little English, and the color of his hair reminded her of the rocks at the bottom of the Atlantic.  He sat down next to her, closer than was appropriate, and he did not seem to care about, or even notice, that she wore a wedding ring.  He had a plate of food with him that he held out to her, smiling roguishly, his teeth clean and strong and white.

“I catch these myself,” he said.  She looked at the tiny silvery fish on the plate, drizzled in olive oil and Mediterranean spices. Her fingers hovered over the dish.  She looked at the indifferent globular eyes of the fish staring up at her and hesitated.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Sardina, what we eat at home,” he explained.  “Me and my father, we caught these ones ourselves.”

Fishing in Chicago!  She couldn’t believe it.  She suddenly remembered her father’s sturdy little fishing boat back home, how good and crisp and tender the taste of a fish fresh from the ocean could be, picking out the little bones from between her teeth and sucking the sweet brininess.  Her father.  His face, and the smell of him, like furze, and fresh fish, dirt and tobacco and rough soap—he’d never seen a tall building, or wanted to.  He’d died suddenly, collapsed in the doorway of their cottage, when she was eighteen.  She wanted to see his face now, more than anything in the world.  But when she looked up she saw the young and earnest face of the Italian boy instead.  So she pinched a sardine between her fingers and swallowed it whole. It slid down her throat coldly, briny, and underneath the exotic spices she could taste that familiar iron saltiness that reminded her of home.  The Italian watched her as she hid another behind her tongue and closed her eyes, feeling it slide down.  She took another.  And another.  And another.

Later that night, he walked her downstairs to her apartment.  In his arms, he held a sleeping Marty. And over her son’s bowed, shining head, the Italian boy kissed her on the mouth.  But then Martin stirred, muttering something in his sleep, and she remembered herself.  With shaking hands she fumbled with her keys, took Marty from his outstretched arms, and shut the door in his face.

A few days later, Anna and Kat stood in line, sewing buttons onto rows of cotton dresses.  Anna had become accustomed to being on her feet for hours, the monotony of the factory, and the slim shaft of light that slanted in around late afternoon.  And yet today she felt impatient, and her head was swimming with fog like she’d just woken from a nap.  Sweat stood out on her forehead, and she longed for a drink of water, or simply just to lean her head against something cool.

“Kat,” she whispered over the whir of the machines.  Her sister glanced up from her work.

“I don’t feel well.”
 

“Just another hour or so,” Kat whispered, returning to her buttons. 

“I don’t know if I can last it,” she said, wiping her forehead.

“Well, you’ll have to,” Kat hissed. “You won’t believe how easy they can replace you.” 
 
The next morning, when Kat got up for work, she came over to the cot where Anna slept and found her sister with her eyes half-closed, a fevered redness in her cheeks.

“I can’t go today,” she whispered through cracked lips.

Frightened, Kat stooped down to her younger sister.

“Anna?  Have you a fever?”  She placed a hand on Anna’s forehead.  The skin was slick and hot.

She pulled her hand away, wiping the sweat on her apron.  “I’ll tell Mr. Murphy.” She hesitated, saying words they both knew not to be true.  “I’m sure he won’t mind a bit.”
 
All that morning, Martin clucked around her, covering her with piles of blankets, tucking and retucking her and touching her forehead to pretend he knew where her fever stood.  But by mid-afternoon, a sticky, foul smell began to fill the room.  He lifted up his mother’s blankets as she moaned, silent tears escaping and sliding into the whorls of her ears.  Seeping through the white fabric of her nightgown between her legs was a runny, green liquid that made him gag, though he tried not to.

“Marty, go down to the factory and get your auntie,” whispered his mother, turning her head to the wall to save him his embarrassment. All across her chest were red splotches, like falling rose petals.

By the time he had arrived back with Auntie Kat and a doctor, she’d wet the sheets again, and her cot dripped with the abhorrent green matter. The red spots had crept up to her neck and she swayed her head from side to side, her feet pushing at the sides of the cot, as if she was trying to break free from the thing that tore at her insides.

The doctor shooed Martin out of the apartment, and he wandered about the hallway like a lost urchin, bumping into walls.  An hour later or so, Auntie Kat came out, closing the door behind her.

“Marty,” she said, her voice like the high key on a piano, “you did very well helping your mother today.”

“Is she going to die?” Martin asked bravely. 

Kat looked at her nephew, his bold eyes with the hooded lids that had always made him look like a little bit lost.  Her throat tightened.

“She is very sick,” she said.  “She’d like you to go inside and see her.  Now don’t cry; it will only make her upset.”

She put her hands on the small of his back and herded him back into the apartment.  The air was permeated with the evil smell of turned-out insides. It ignited a long-ago memory inside of him.  A pony, belonging to John Dowling, was in labor, and he’d gone over with Da to help birth the foal.  The mother, shabby and gray, with a wet, pink nose, was standing in the tiny stable, stomping its hooves and grunting softly. Inside the stable was warm and dim, thick with the earthy, mushroom smell of blood and life.  Outside, rain drummed. The pony stomped again, hard, its hooves scraping across the stable floor, and suddenly, two matchstick legs, slick with red and white fluid, dropped from behind its tail.  Martin’s father and John, wearing long, stiff gloves, moved toward the pony, who whinnied softly.  Each took hold of one of the protruding legs and pulled gently.  There was a tremendous sucking sound and a thump.  The tiny stillborn foal lay in a bloody pile on the floor, its legs folded beneath it, its head bowed at its chest as if in prayer.  The mother pony looked at it for a moment with mournful saucer eyes, cleaned its slick brown face with a tentative lick, then turned away and stared at the stable wall.  The grief on its face, Martin remembered thinking, was eerily human. 

“Ponies love their young,” Martin’s father told him that night, as they walked home together in the rain, his Da’s arm circling his shoulder.  “All warm-blooded creatures do.”
 
Ma’s mouth twisted, strained, as another cramp wrung out her stomach like a torn sponge.  Then, her body shuddered and relaxed, her mouth turning up into an almost-smile. She closed her eyes and let go of Marty’s hand.  Her own arm dropped limply down by her side, the knuckles grazing the floor and the fingers open and splayed, as if they were cupping something very delicate.  The doctor put an instrument to her chest, but Martin knew by the way he shook his head that his mother was dead.
 
Although at this time typhoid fever was all but cured in the United Sates, a strange and small outbreak occurred in the Italian community of Chicago in 1928.  While the stockyards were on the decline by this period, thousands of tons of unusable animal blood, bone, and fat were still dumped in the Chicago River each year.  Some Italian immigrants, unaware of the extent of the pollution, had taken to scooping out minnows from the river’s blood-swirling waters and serving them raw with oil and spices, as a way to alleviate their homesick craving for sardines.  A handful of immigrants died of it that year.  In places like the Empire Room and other bastions of wealth around Chicago, they were laughed at, between bites of caviar, for their foolish backward ways.

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Jessie Morrison is a high school teacher and candidate in the MFA program, Fiction Writing, at Columbia College.  Her work has appeared in Word Riot, McSweeney's, Ghostfactory Magazine, The Parlor, Flash Me Magazine, and the Columbia Storyweek Reader 2009 and 2010. She lives in Chicago.