Traitors in Hell

By Weehar Molaesee

This is an intriguing story of a boy who grew up in riding gigantic waves of the seven seas, and as he gets older, he comes to know betrayals. He defies death at home and in the Mafia world, but now he has reached the threshold of his ninth life. And like a thunderbolt, he strikes back with vengeance before his last life ends.

In the meantime, the little girl he thought he had lost forever finds him twenty years later. Once a little baby whose selfish grandmother, with the complicity of her mother, conspired to deprive her of her father’s love—she comes at last, face-to-face with the man who procreated her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543443103

Weehar Molaesee

My name is Weehar Molaesee, I'm from Mola di Bari, a small town on the Adriatic coast of Italy.I am a self-taught person therefore my writing will neither be that of a sophisticated man nor of the kind that can be misconstrued by some. In order to convey my message to all of you I will try to apply a language, the one which is used daily at a kitchen table, so that even a quasi illiterate will be able to read and understand it. And I`ll try to be as brief as I possibly can in order for you to enjoy what you are about to read. As for my mother tongue I had forgotten some of the Italian grammar “usage” as well as many of the Italian words for having lived over 50 years abroad till, one day, I became friend with two young ladies; I nicknamed one of them“WINGS” and the other one “MARGARITA”. Both of them have been gracious enough to have offered their help to me, with refreshing my memory, and with some suggestions how to polish my Italian which was crushed and scattered all over the seven seas I had sailed on, and over the soil of the five continents on which I walked throughout my entire life. I needed to have a better knowledge of the Italian language in order to have the correct translation in English. Hadn't I sought their help I would've never been able to write the book which you're about to read. So, Margarita and Wings, thank you very very much, I owe you one!

Book preview

1st Chapter

Chaos, confusion, a large crowd started gathering around an old woman who was screaming loud: My grandson…Please help me, my grandson fell down into the well… (same well in which the car, in the worst dream I’ve ever had in my entire life, crashed)… Please somebody get some help, shouted the grandmother, who until just a few seconds earlier was walking mano a mano with her grandson!

A man nicknamed Ciccill (pronounce Chee cheell, whose proper name was Francesco Brunetti, printer by profession) who was on his way to a wedding reception, and appearing from nowhere, managed instantly to get hold of a tall ladder and not concerned about his attire, lowered the ladder down the well, descended to the bottom of the well, found the 18 months old little boy, looking lifeless, brought him up as fast as he could and took him inside the hospital which was right next to the well. A good part of the concrete top of the well, for lack of maintenance and repairs was shattered and as the little boy stepped on it fell down into the well’s rushing water and thanks to a fairly large rock which he got stuck to the little boy didn’t get washed away to the sea.

It was almost the end of world war 2, most hospitals were ready for all emergencies and the little boy who had almost drowned and about to be declared dead, his skin turning purple, and with the help of mouth to mouth resuscitation and a few careful lashes of olive branches onto his back, to incite pain, began to show signs of life, people around him held their breath for a few seconds and then a relief, their joy was overwhelming, they all cheered…the little boy was alive. It was definitely a miracle!

The child`s 31-year-old mother came rushing to the hospital when she found out about the accident; screaming her lungs out of control, and losing her shoes on the way, stepping barefoot over the rocks which were scattered on the floor of the street. Because of lack of finances the Town hall hadn’t paved them yet with asphalt causing her feet to bleed and not worrying about the pain. She couldn’t` believe another tragedy had happened; she had lost a two year old boy to diphtheria four years earlier and now wondering how she`d cope with this one, not knowing that her little boy was going to be okay, she ran upstairs to the room where her child was kept and given care, climbing two steps at a time, her heart pounding tremendously, but when she saw her little son she ran right on top of him, brought him so close to her chest that she almost suffocated him as she was saying: ‘Weehar figlio mio… povero figlio mio!’ Weehar, my son… poor little child) The doctor once more had been constrained to administer the necessary medication to bring him back to life for the second time.

The doctor made a remark: ‘This boy has 8 more lives left to live,’ and he picked up the little creature and handed him to his mother who, at last and with tears of joy she rushed him home.

The tragedy put a tremendous thorn into the grandmother’s heart which gradually, but slowly, made her health deteriorate for thinking every day that it had been her fault that her grandchild fell into the well, that she hadn’t been careful enough with him and whether there had been something she could’ve done to prevent the accident that almost killed the little boy. The little boy’s house was crowded with people every single day to go see how he was doing, his eyes wide open and his ears dedicated continuously to the conversation that the visitors were having, trying to understand what they were talking about and often looking at both his mother and his grandmother to get a hint from the expression of their faces.

2nd Chapter

The little boy was growing up, playing every day with other children, kicking a ball made out of rags, barefoot on a play ground with lots of rocks sticking out the surface which several times kids ended up hitting them, instead of the ball, hard enough that made their toes bleed, and when they got home they got beaten up by their mothers for having injured themselves; what a stupid culture, they were not allowed to get hurt, like as if though children enjoyed wounding themselves!

Most mothers used to dress up their children for Sunday’s mass…. oh man…if, God forbid, they had accident they tripped and fell, well…guess what? They got spanked for having gotten their clothes dirty, but mothers never bothered asking their child if he/she was okay… It was a very strange mentality! I`m not sure whether they were concerned more about saving soap or it was too much work for them doing the washing by hand on a corrugated wooden washing board. Several mothers were like that because their husbands worked abroad, on ships, on fishing boats and on farms out of town, therefore women managed the family’s discipline and the family’s economy…I suppose they were all stressed out.

One morning, I must have been 5 years old; I found out for the first time that the little boy who fell into the well was me. Now I was more aware of the danger which every day I was in. Most of the year the climate was warm those days and so many times I used to get together with my peers to go for a swim, and being that we lived right on the coast line we didn`t have to go too far, which was easier for someone to come looking for us.

I loved to swim, everybody knew how to swim by the age of four-five, and we were all having a ball, no supervision and without asking mother’s permission. Sometimes, diving into the shallow water of our modest bay, we didn’t even wear bathing trunks, we couldn’t afford one, we wore just our birthday suit. We were so excited and every one tried to show off their diving capabilities. There had been times when some of us hit a rock on the seabed of our bay and got a cut on our head, our face or to some other parts of our body, sometimes even more serious injuries, and we were reluctant to leave the beach for two reasons: one was that if mother found out that we were out swimming we`d get beaten up, and the second one was if we hurt ourselves, for which we were never asked if we were ok, we just got more hurt!

When we got hungry we decided to go home to get some bread to eat, scared and wondering about what our punishment would be; food was scarce.

I was the eldest of 3 brothers, and one more on its way, my sister was two years older than me, and at dinner time we ate altogether out of a large terracotta platter, like kittens around a bowl of milk, but I was always punished because I ate more bread than food. Sometimes my mother used to bring me a sandwich to school, in the middle of a lesson, more to embarrass me rather than to feed me, because no one else brought food to school; it wasn’t customary to bring food to school those days, that was my punishment for having given priority to bread rather than to her cooking.

One day I didn’t tell my mother that my friend and I went out in the fields to steal and eat cherries, many times we did that when we were hungry, eating anything we thought was edible and one day we heard a voice and then we saw someone getting shot while my friend and I hurried to hide behind a wall, built out of rocks, during the altercation which was taking place between the owner of the land and a thief who was steeling his artichokes. We didn’t want to be seen, because we’d gotten the ultimate punishment, especially that I saw my father and his colleagues (both field cops) arriving at the scene, soon after the shooting. We were scared and as soon as we made sure that it was safe my friend and I ran for our life. We got home just in time for dinner, and an hour later my father came home too.

We started eating, but I wasn’t hungry anymore so I ate just a spoon full of minestrone soup and without wasting anytime my mother reprimanded me in front of my father telling me either you eat the food or there will be no more bread from now on. So I asked her: ‘Mom why don’t you make roasted stuffed artichokes with potatoes and peas? If you cook those I’ll eat them.’ My father was listening and then he spoke: ‘We made an arrest today,’ and my mother asked: ‘Who got arrested?’ And so my father started telling her what had happened: ‘One guy went into the artichoke field and cut enough artichokes off the plants to fill two large sacks, and as the thief was doing his thing the owner of the field caught him while he was about to load them on his old three wheel motorcycle and ordered him to bring the artichokes back or he`d shoot. The thief sarcastically replied: ‘Eh c’ t’ la mange’ tu sc’kett, U’ s’ jie ka teng I feil pur jiegghjie?’(meaning: what…you wanna be the only one eating the artichokes…don’t you know that I got children too?) and laughed while continuing doing what he was doing. The owner of the artichoke field didn’t like neither what he heard nor the thief’s attitude, and so he loaded his gun and said to the perpetrator: ‘Ue’, pizz d’ merd, fegghjie d’ Putt’n ka’ P "maiusch’l… Anneusc i scarciof’l dojie s’ no t’ acceich (you piece of shit, son of a bitch, bring back my artichokes…or I’ll kill you)and without a second warning he shot the thief in cold blood. So my father and his colleague said that they happened to be in the vicinity, they heard the shots and ran to where the murder took place and arrested the killer. A couple of days later we heard that maybe a close member of his own family had blown the whistle on the thief. The killer went to a correction facility for only ten years, because he was an American citizen who paid his way out of jail to go back to the US.

My friend and I had witnessed the heinous crime but until this day we’d never told anyone.

As time went by I was growing a little taller for my age: eight maybe. One day my childhood friend, Pete, we used to call him Pieri’n u’ asked me to go fishing in a rowing boat. I said yes. We must have gone maybe a couple of miles out to sea from the little bay. We started fishing and all of a sudden the sky got cloudy, the waves slowly began to grow, the owner of the boat who my friend Pete was working for, seeing that a storm was organizing itself got into another boat and rowed his way to where my friend and I were fishing. As he was getting closer he shouted: ‘Hey, hey, Pieri’, Pieri’, stop fishing, start rowing back to Portecchia (little bay).’ Nothing, we heard nothing, the sea and the dark grey clouds became one, you couldn’t tell the difference which was which. From above a giant conic drill (tornado funnel, unusual phenomena in our part of the world) sank its bid into the sea triggering bigger waves of what appeared to be melted lead! And the boat owner, with all his strength, kept raising his boat, rowing hard till he got close enough for us to be able to see him and hear his plea. And when we saw him, his name was Mest Vincinz Uasta m’ r’ (Master Vincent, Sea fuckupper), we began to row toward him and him still rowing toward us, and when we reached each other he threw us a rope and told us to tie it to our boat so he could help us get to the bay by towing, and us rowing as well.

It took us half an hour to get to the shore…shit, just in time, the sea waves got so high it looked like a tsunami. Wind and rain which I had never seen raging the way they did before, maybe the storm was trying to tell us not to go too far from the shore from then on, unless we got information from a weather report. Both boats were thrown on to the land and got damaged, deafening thunder rolled as we were trying to get off the boat, and lightning that made it look like it was the end of the world. I knew I wasn’t gonna die then either because my mother used to tell me that the doctor who saved my life when I was 18 months old, when I fell into the well, said that I had 8 more lives to live. My fears ended when that thought crossed my mind. The storm ended an hour later after causing extensive damage to the little bay.

3rd Chapter

The elementary school teacher was a crook. He would embarrass many of us, telling us that we were stupid and not capable of learning quick, and that we were filthy and had lice in our hair and he didn`t want us to infest the rest of the class, so one day he told us that he wanted to talk to our mother. When my mother came to school the teacher told her that I wasn`t learning anything and that I needed to get rid of the lice too.

My mother was surprised because I was every day in salt water, swimming, from April to September, and I couldn’t possibly have bugs, salt water kills bugs. So, that was not the reason he wanted to talk to my mother. The real reason was that he wanted me to go to the afternoon school, to his private house, and pay for the lessons otherwise he would see to it that I’d fail and fall back.

My father`s monthly salary wasn`t much, but my mother agreed to pay for the private teaching even though she knew she had to make a big sacrifice. So, it wasn`t because of lice or me being capable of learning, my mother didn`t make me change habits as far as hygiene was concerned, and if the teacher wanted me to go to his house that confirmed that we were right, that the problem had a lot to do with money and neither being stupid nor having lice were the reason.

The teacher was making double the salary, now, with most of the boys going to his house for private lessons, and for the first time I found out about corruption!

Almost at the end of the fifth grade, I was a very slim boy, weak looking as if I was malnourished and being bullied by a guy who thought he was a wise guy, everyday insulting me, spitting at me and pushing me around sending me, one day, facedown to the ground, I got up hitting him in the groin and left him there but the next day he waited for me and punched me in the face hard enough to make my nose my bleed. Again, I kicked him in the same spot of his body; he stopped bullying me from that day on.

Evenings in my hometown were just boring, nothing much to do, only going to church because I was an altar boy, serving mass, and there I came up with the idea, with the approval of my co-altar boy, (who a few months later migrated to the US with his entire family), of substituting the wine which the priests drank during the services with vinegar, and as the priest began to drink it he had the most awful surprise of his life right on the altar.

When my friend left for America I wasn’t having much fun at the church any longer; no one else was like him, no one dared to pull a fast one on priests nor on nuns; they were all afraid of priests.

Time went by very slowly, nothing much to do in our small town, until one evening an 8/9 year old girl who I knew very well and who lived across the street from me took me by my hand to a dark street and she told me to do what she had seen her parents doing; she wanted to have something I’d never imagined I’d have been asked for. I was almost 9, she showed me how to do it, I had no idea what would be like. Without going into details, although I was very nervous at that moment, having a mother so strict, and being an altar boy who was about to commit a very deadly sin, I agreed, but more out of curiosity than anything. I didn’t enjoy it like we adults do, though.

There were a lot of dark places in my home town and we did it a couple more times after that evening. After a while I found out that other boys, my age, were doing the same thing with other young girls…there was nothing else to do! No play grounds, no TV, we couldn`t afford to go to a movie theatre.

I was a little angel at times and a little devil other times. Sometime in November I was asked by the bishop to give a sermon. in Piazza XX Settembre, (the town square) on the steps outside the Church of La Maddalena, on Christmas Eve in 1951, but I had to memorize 12 written pages. I began the sermon at 12 am on Holy night, never missed a word for the entire sermon. More than two thousand people