A Voyage to Italy

By James Henry Taylor

(Short story.) A small boy's favorite toy is a little wooden hammer; as he grows up, his childish infatuation turns into an obsession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300179290

Book preview

A Voyage to Italy

A Voyage to Italy

James Henry Taylor

A Voyage to Italy

by James Henry Taylor

ISBN 978-1-300-17929-0

© 2012 by James Henry Taylor

A Voyage to Italy

Carlo drove another nail into a slender piece of pine. He liked driving nails: even though he’d failed to make more than a brief living at it, there was something about the bang-bang-bang-bang-thunk of a job well-completed that he’d always—discounting the last few months, of course—found thoroughly satisfying. No matter what type of hammer he wielded or how tight the space, whether it was a twentypenny bruiser he was battering home or something delicate as a sewing needle, he never put one in at the wrong angle, never bent one with a careless blow, and never, never, never had to pull one out and start over.

The little crate was coming along nicely. Carlo paused and set down the hammer; he used his right hand to pry back the fingers of his left, to probe the bandaged hole at the center of the palm, then to bend the fingers back into their proper grip around the black-taped wooden handle. He drove another nail into the box’s frame.

* * *

His parents, born-and-bred Irish, had named him during an extended fit of Latinophile romanticism shortly before emigrating to America—there being no jobs in Italy in 1958. Throughout most of that year and the following one, Carlo’s father, Alexander, had even introduced himself to