The Immigrant's Apprentice

By Jim Hunter

From Prison Guard to School teacher, Psych Tech to Pilot to Mexican orphanage volunteer, and many more in between these fourteen short stories are a kaleidoscope view into Mid-Century American and Mexican views, ideals and ways of survival, of both men and women; of what they had to do and how they did it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781698712420

Jim Hunter

Jim Hunter arrived in Alaska in 1955 as a seventeenyear-old Air Force private watching Russian jets on radar screens taunt the United States. He met and dealt with most of the characters in this book, which is the sequel to Mike, Charley & Wolf. Following discharge he earned a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State College. In 1976 Chronicle Books published his widely acclaimed guide to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula: OFFBEAT BAJA. Jim and his wife, Marilyn Mount of New Jersey, a retired School Counselor, divide their year between homes in Tucson, AZ and Fairbanks, AK.

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Copyright 2022 Jim Hunter.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1241-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1243-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1242-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022914032

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Trafford rev. 07/29/2022

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Contents

Preface

A Separate Cathedral

Girl in Pink Going Somewhere

The Prettiest Girl in The Class

The Trial

A Death in The Family

The Night The Giants Came

T-2 Women’s Receiving

Cottage 8 Violent

Cell Block D

Nectar 4570 Charlie

PART TWO

Of Pearls

Bronislaw & Maria

In Las Aguas Women Scream All The Time

Hogar de Los Ninos

Epilogue

Dedicated to

Pete Conrado of Angel’s Camp, CA who saved my life.

No more need be said.

Preface

These are stories of 20th Century America; a time when most Americans believed each generation would do better than the last, and actually felt an obligation to do it. We not only had hope and discipline, but faith in the system and ourselves.

I believe the people of Mexico and Canada may have felt the same about their countries from the 1950s on. And we all seem to have done so, right? Improved all three of our North American homes—and maybe the world too—since these stories happened?

We have the internet, cell phones, computers, North American military dominance, relative political stability, economic growth and so on.

But a compelling question remains. Is North America continuing to improve or not? Did we North Americans reach our highpoint seventy years ago, somewhere in the fifties, or sixties, or not?

I wonder, as I watch this year not just those three nations, but all nations on our planet, a quarter of the way now into our new century, if we human beings are going up any Planetary graph or down them all?

Jim Hunter

August 2022

Fairbanks, Alaska

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A Separate Cathedral

In 1906, when he was thirteen years old, Pete Conrado was sent with his aunt Tessina Teselli from northern Italy to the United States. In light rain in Genoa, after all the tears and hard hugging the two climbed a wet gangplank onto an odd vessel powered by wind and steam, steel and canvas, as relatives, at once thankful and fearful, waved them off.

During storms Tessina would plead from below decks for her short nephew to come back down below where it was safer. His face soaked, his cap blown away; hair wind blown, Pete would not obey her. He was daring the sea, as it rocked the whole ship back and forth, to tear him from the bronze railings, should it wish.

Priests and Nuns near the Alps had worked hard to make of Pietro Conrado a behaved boy, if one who seemed built for a different future—a fox crouched, they’d said to each other as they spoke of him. Always ending their prayers for him with: Cosi sia padre, knowing no matter what else the squirming bakery student might become or do, he would never be a priest.

Not in their church. His eyes were polite, but his teeth were not, indicating endurance, not acceptance. Priests knew. And the rebellious boy knew. It was a standoff.

As the hybrid sailing ship crossed the Atlantic Pete explored every inch he could access; weaving through the old and the new of it, the steam and the sails, the canvas and the steel, while going to a new country itself changing and expanding westward.

America! aunt Tessina shouted in his ear, during a set of final waves, finding him on deck and trying to drag him off it, both their faces wet with salt spray and wind-shot rain, shaking her fist at the black sky then at the roaming child their final day at sea. She held Pete with one hand and pointed west, over the leaping bow.

America! Tessina lectured her short nephew, herself still taller, as if the name alone were a long speech; an explanation in itself.

She made Pete look west over the bow, through their final storm, as if to see the place; the dream it was. Where life would be better, she lectured in Italian, pushing him back below decks, shouting America Pietro! America!

Before forcing the boy downward out of the final storm she glanced up at the great sails, high up, working hard and she felt like them. She wanted to put her hand to the ropes wider than her arm, and thank those ropes for carrying her and this wild child away from where they’d been.

Tessina sensed in some deep way, that what they were both escaping, man and woman alike, was not just the lock-step of the old ways in Italy and Europe itself (She had briefly in secondary school in Italy been urged by one instructor to pursue her education further) but other invisible barriers only a frontier could erase. Tessina knew, though she could not express it, and the brat had no need to know, they were going to the moon. They had won the lottery.

Released from Ellis Island, Pete followed his aunt in dry clothing, head down, during a rare period of absolute obedience—like a wheel on a covered wagon—across America to the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tessina had her special letter, and her new American identity. Her sponsors were waiting across an ocean of land and mountains, as she brought with her the wild pup of Italy’s Alps—the one she had to slap and kiss; love and worry about, be a female on a male planet.

Leaving Italy had cost both of the young Italians valuable employments. Pete had lost not just his apprenticeship in the small bakery near their ancestral home, but also his solo explorations into Italy’s northern mountains, where his country ended and Switzerland began, where boulders in rushing streams were the gray pews of his private church; she her maid’s work in The Mayor’s large estate, promotions ahead and a romance about to bud.

The women in Pete’s family had lectured him to be thankful for females on the planet who’d shoved milk-filled breasts into his crying mouth to shut him up; to allow him another day of life while theirs were compromised. In their Italian village Pete would nod and agree, not wishing to be swatted or taunted by his older sisters and aunts.

His Italian family had teased the cliff-seeking youth, asking him whether he’d been stream-fed, or breast fed; whether his mother, who had died not long after he was born, had given him her own milk or mountain snow, laughing as they said it. Or maybe, like Romulus and Remus of Rome, wolves had raised him?

At eleven years old Pete had quit praying for a brother and found in the mountains peace. While in the female dominated home enjoying the forehead kisses, if not the snapped towels.

Then in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains thousands of miles from all he had known—good fortune—for which he’d been afraid to pray—had placed him with Aunt Tessina in the small, California village of Altaville, just outside Angel’s Camp, where he was hired at fourteen to labor in that larger town’s bakery.

Pete was up early, obedient and already knew the trade well. The old Italian owner taught the immigrant boy not only how to bake for Yankees, but to speak their odd language, which sounded to Pete like German.

Tessina would marry a Norwegian immigrant miner. The two would strike gold, not as a mineral, but in their marriage. Well after Pete and Tessina were no longer in their first town, Tessina and her impossibly tall, taciturn husband Hiram, who never struck her physically or verbally for fear of Italian lightening striking him, saved together enough to make a down payment on ten acres just north of Angel’s Camp. Then with a crosscut saw, their own sweat and their own muscles, their own axes, with men and women from other nations and nearby villages, they began the making not just of themselves, but too of America, by cutting tall pines to build first their homes, then their lives, then the nation.

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Pete Conrado of Angel’s Camp and its jumping frogs never escaped a height of five feet three inches, an inch taller, finally, than his aunt Tessina. But being short was helpful near the low, wide baking ovens of Angel’s Camp, California. And for dancing forty years later with Jack McGregor’s five foot tall, Portuguese grandmother in The San Joaquin Valley town of Stockton—where Pete by then had discovered better paying work than baking—with the Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

It was in the late thirties; on a floor-pounding Saturday night, in a Stockton dance hall that Pete Conrado met the widow Betty Bettencourt, so far out East Main Street the moans of cattle mixed with the sounds of the Dance Hall Band.

Pete Conrado became Jack McGregor’s Grandfather not by blood, but fate. The American boy became the immigrant’s apprentice. Not to the old man’s day job, but to the patient waving of another wand. Jack was shown places of tall trees, steep slopes, free running water and hidden valleys. All appearing as if by magic. Things of which flat-landers like Jack knew almost nothing, but lay waiting.

From his red haired grandmother came Jack’s green eyes and red whiskers which allowed him to pass as a Scot; a civilized person—a reluctant one for whom American priests prayed— knowing somehow he would never embrace their world—always ending their prayers for him with the words: So be it father.

Both of Jack’s blood grandfathers died before he was born. The Bettencourt, of The Azores Islands was bucked off his horse in 1920 and killed during Watsonville’s Fourth of July Parade. Walt McGregor of Texas died in Stockton two years before Jack was born.

Pietro took the odd pup—dropped unceremoniously at eleven into his lap—into the Sierra Nevada’s. Where in six years he turned the four-eyed city boy into a quietly moving, confident creature of the great peaks, secret streams and gentle valleys.

In those mountains east of Stockton—with Jack hanging on tightly beside him—Pete forced his WW II jeep in four-wheel-drive up California’s most remote logging roads, long since abandoned, over which frightened deer jumped, to places beyond which the battle worn vehicle could not go; and from those halting points would lead Jack further upward on foot to cliffs and wind-bent pines into the gray granite of the ridge tops.

They would see far below the headwaters of streams so small no one would believe they could later be rivers. They would rest, then drop downward together to rarely fished pools, Pete showing Jack how to negotiate boulder-filled slopes without falling.

How many cats you ever see climb a tree? Pete asked Jack their first time into a deep canyon.

Confused, as he followed Pete, slipping on loose gravel, and trying to find better boot holds, Jack answered One or two.

How many cats you ever see climb down a tree?

None.

Pete stopped and looked back uphill at the boy coming down, Look back up behind you.

Jack did.

What do you see?

Steep.

Way easier to climb up outta these creeks than get down to them Jackie. I want to bring you home in one piece, so watch what I do going down and then do it yourself. Slow. You get it Jackie?

I do.

Going back out you can be the cat going up the tree, ’cause up there on top’s the jeep. I’ll follow you when we go back. You got to learn how to find your own way out here. I want you to own these mountains. If you come out on top where we came down, and show me my boot print, I will give you a quarter.

Pete turned without comment and continued to pick his way carefully down, rock-to-rock, calloused hands limb to limb, Jack just tall enough by twelve to place his hands and boots in almost the same places as his teacher.

They found no rattlers, and had no falls and reached the narrow, noisy creek with its grass and spring flowers judiciously few at ten thousand feet, splashing from snow melt, to stand on a rare flat boulder, believing no one else ever had.

Pete directed Jack to sit, as if at church. Below them was a big hole where fish swam, just downstream from where they’d reached bottom. Pete made them sit to calm themselves, to have lunch and be thankful before fishing.

Pete insisted always on the hardest to reach places, which was unlike Jack’s conservative nature in the city. Where the boy saw a sense of civic order and predictability that was reassuring. He liked sleeping in town, in a house without fear. He liked to enter each new day the same way.

Yet Pete’s pathways over boulders as big as houses, and on above them to rarely seen waterfalls, often hand over hand through ferns and mist, then up more, then down where no track could be seen, where even in June in certain shadows their boots made prints in snow, where the lion stalked the deer, called to him too; in a steady rhythm.

Twelve months later—after Pete ordered him to lead them up out of a different valley absent any trail, Jack topped out and found boot prints pointed downward, which matched the pattern of Pete’s Red Wing boots perfectly. He was handed his first quarter.

He still has it.

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Two rivers can be joined by earthquakes, time or falling trees. The events, which joined the Italian immigrant to the poorly sighted eleven year old, were invisible and completely unpredictable.

To Jack all of it was new; even strange: He came close to rejecting it: The wind which mussed his hair, the glaciers, the constellations, the cold hands, the hard hills and solid green slopes of fiddle-head ferns, the lost valleys, the heat, the busy, the standing still, the lightening strikes and the listening, the streams and lakes, the finding of wood for the night’s essential camp fire. The light the fires would give; the warmth and sense of security their gathering of wood as a team created; the smoldering all night of its coals, which kept away bears, cougars and smaller destroyers.

He became finally his grandfather’s willing dog. For even with its order and predictability, and essential life-giving parts, the city seemed to the boy in too many ways—having touched the Sierra Nevada—a kind of physical graveyard, and electricity a drug?

One time Pete walked Jack slowly, without telling him where they were going, below ancient redwoods seeming to look down at the two of them as if the trees had eyes, as if the two of them were intruders.

Standing below the giants the old man and the boy crossed themselves, and moved on, honoring something beneath the redwoods something neither could describe, but knew was there; feeling below them like grains of sand.

Lessons from Pete from Italy in survival were constant, along with footnotes on social behavior. When they slept in the wilds in the night’s noisy silence the day’s lessons—like a cowboy’s branding iron—left permanent marks during the night’s sleep on the boy’s brain.

Jack placed each boot ahead of the other, as he was taught, careful to honor not just the log that could trip him, or the bud come from no good place in the game trail’s center, but too the beetle and the bee, as if in their thrifty ways they too were a part of him. That all was connected; that what he did, or they did, or the wind or rain did; the storm’s lightening, and even moon light were part of some simmering recipe.

At night Pete would poke the dying coals and ask Jack if he knew why the Earth spun, and if that caused gravity? Then explain with slow precision why he’d led them that day up certain barren rocks and down game trails rarely seen by others, making Jack’s mind spin as one door after another in the fire light sermons opened and closed offering glimpses beyond Pete’s words of what they might really mean?

Pete showed Jack with bent binoculars Jupiter’s moons; and back on Earth how well wool’s natural warmth worked as opposed to cotton, the waking in the morning to the sun’s first heat, the absolute appreciation of it.

On his Stockton acre the shrinking Italian man showed the boy how to plant and harvest certain vegetables; then made him plant and grow his own herbs and tomatoes, how to cook, bake, boil, stir and fry. How to cleanup, be thankful, and be polite.

In the mountains, his face lit by the flames, Pete told Jack about growing up in Italy with sisters and aunts; being trained to bake and dreaming himself of leaping deer and waterfalls never climbed. Wondering always what pools, or more falls might be above them.

Firelight would come and go. Sometimes he was there to be seen; and at others just a voice as he spoke of la Montagne, his fingers gnarled with arthritis, one hand almost permanently closed with it—two working fingers surviving—still dexterous.

If Jack asked Pete around their fires at night why and when he’d first gone into the Swiss Alps it seemed to irritate the old man, as if he’d been asked why he breathed. He would smile, not answer, and poke the campfire into better flame.

If Jack asked if Tessina still lived in Angel’s Camp, Pete would poke the coals and say Who? without looking up.

Before Pete led Jack into the mountains in 1948 there was an accident. The three of them—Pete, Betty and Jack—were riding one night in a snow storm in Pete’s 1934 black, two door Plymouth coupe with the Mayflower ship as a hood ornament struggling east up the mountain roads from Stockton toward Angel’s Camp. Jack at three years old was seated on his grandmother Betty’s lap in the little coupe’s single front seat. It was 1940.

The road’s centerline was invisible.

Snow on the windshield lay thick, like white mud. The wipers failed to move. The small, black Plymouth ran head-on into another auto coming too fast down the mountain, each vehicle sustaining severe damage. Jack saw the windshield breaking, felt wet snow hit his face, the gear shift handle his forehead, glass in his eyes, heard his grandmother screaming because of her broken arm, Pete, his front teeth knocked out, his ribs broken, both autos in the winter night steaming, other autos crashing into the original two, then the sirens and red lights, the ambulance, the phone calls, and the doctor in Angel’s Camp stitching Jack’s forehead, his grandmother cursing the doctor—after her arm had been casted—for being drunk, Jack swallowing one of his own teeth, Pete in the hospital for a week.

That was Jack McGregor’s first snowstorm, drunken doctor, and head-on collision. Which was kindergarten compared to the future.

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On his Stockton acre, Pete created a miniature Italy, grew his own vegetables, kept chickens for eggs and a calf for slaughter. He made Jack ride the calf when young, and get bucked off, and months later help with the butchering of it; the hanging of the meat, watching Jack for any hesitation.

With other old men, all Italians from Italy, Pete built for Jack’s grandmother and himself a neither small nor large two-bed room, two-bath house, during which time the boy on weekends and often after school, would hold ladders, run for tools, and enjoy breaks with the old men. It was clear to Jack half the world had to be Italian. Maybe even two thirds?

The head patting could be irritating, but as the boy concentrated on making old nails useful, he grew. The old men taught him, more with their silence than not, that neither time nor materials; nothing iron or human should be easily discarded, thus wasted. They taught the boy, by waving their whittling knives, gathering the chips, and addressing his errors, that everything should get its chance to fit in: bent people and bent nails, to find their places and functions on the planet.

They didn’t say it that way, nor did the priests at his church in downtown Stockton, but into the boy’s brain, as if there were scales inside it, the strangely accented words would be placed on one side, and the men’s actions on the other.

He began to feel that life’s most important arithmetic might never be seen, but maybe always felt? That the old men’s words and expressions had more feeling than meaning. That old men and women could translate the universe with raised or lowered eyebrows, smiles or frowns, tones of voice and facial expressions.

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Inside the kitchen, in the home Pete built, opposite the wood stove which served both as stove and heater, Pete made raviolis from scratch on a black and white, tile counter by rolling the dough, then gently pounding and grinding the basil he called basilico with his own pestle. Using his own grinding bowl, and other utensils carried by his aunt across the ocean.

The two would rise in Stockton before the sun. They would climb slowly into Pete’s roofless jeep, like morning Calvary, with jackets, wool caps and scarves, and begin the grinding drive behind the straight-up wind shield, out of the San Joaquin Valley into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, crossing themselves and saying our fathers as if they were at Mass, which the two-night fishing trips were: a different kind of Mass.

Pete refused all streams, which might attract other fishermen. If another fisherman were there, Pete would not be. He had his private way of fishing, brought with him intact from Italy.

Quartets might be okay in town, but in the mountains, it was solo or not at all. And never where anyone else might be fishing. If Pete did not have the river to himself, it was not a river worth fishing.

They would inch into the foothills as starlight gave way to a rising sun; drive slowly through Linden, then through Ione and slowly on a curve on the foothills two lane pavement, the Reform School at Ione, a prison for young adults, depending on who was describing it, which looked to Jack exactly like a medieval castle, with its red towers, prison bars, seeming to lack only a moat, helmeted knights on horseback with lances ready. Bad Boys he was informed by Pete, Were sent to Ione.

Beyond Ione they would halt at two different grape orchards, miles apart, one larger than the other, always Pumbo’s first. Out from behind the driver’s seat, as if a magician on a stage, would come Pete’s gallon jug of homemade red wine, and up he and Jack would go onto Pumbo’s big, warm front porch.

The jug between them, as if below marble columns in Greece, the two would discuss grapes, clouds, spouses and atom bombs. Fishing could wait, or perhaps they were already at it, Jack often wondered, watching the two old men discuss the day’s news, their crops, their wives, their children, and Russia before the old man and the boy would depart, and wind their way again on gently curving foothills pavement toward steeper mountains capped in white.

After Pumbo’s Ranch—by the time the Jack was thirteen—Pete would have him drive. Next stop would be in the higher foothills, at Severini’s orchard, where Severini would be invited, as had Pumbo, to go with Pete and Jack to Grizzly Flats to camp two nights—and fish half a day on Saturday and all-day Sunday, on the Steeley Fork of the Consumnes River for brown trout, not for the detested rainbows, for which Pete had no respect.

Brown trout, Pete taught Jack, and Pumbo and Severini echoed, were survivors, grew larger, dodged humans and other predators far more successfully than hatchery raised rainbows, and eventually ate rainbows for dinner.

Rainbows were too easy to catch, while Brown Trout were impossibly cautious and the greater challenge. The two orchard owners rarely joined, having large ranches to operate, but would cry when speaking with Pete of The Po River Valley all three missed. And call Pete Pietro. Grown men in the morning crying. It was unseemly.

When Jack was fourteen, all four did go. It would be a memorable fishing trip. Returning from two nights at Grizzly Flats the four fishermen halted at a Valley Springs, California café for dinner. The café had a central opening of twin glass doors, and once inside four booths on each side, with a kitchen in the rear and cash register by it. It was small and homey, reassuring in sounds and set-up.

All four pushed in hungry, chatting loudly. Since three were born and raised in Italy, they were speaking loudly in Italian. They may have smelled of smoke, frying pans and happiness because of their mountain time; their three jeeps full with trout packed in snow.

A middle booth on the right side was set-up with silver ware and napkins. As a junior member Jack took the seat next to the wall, and Pete was on his left. Severini and Pumbo slid in across from them.

The daily limit in California in the fifties in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was fifty fish per person per day. Once in Stockton Pete and Jack would distribute more than one hundred fish; cleaned, prepared, cold and fresh.

After five minutes of sit-down talk, and leaning back in booth seats, all three men began to look up and down the restaurant for someone with menus.

Pumbo and Severini had their necks bent to see what the two waitresses were doing. For their part they were going by as if the booth were empty. Jack was reading a Ketchup bottle label, wishing he understood Italian better.

For the rest of his life Jack would say there are some things one never forgets; what happened next might always be a blur, except for the ending; sharp picture that would never change.

Severini stood and went to the cash register to catch one of the waitresses and ask when their booth would get menus?

The waitress by the cash register pointed to a large sign, which read: We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone.

Severini slid back into the booth and related what happened. The three men rose like some Yellowstone geyser, all at once, as if something coming from inside the Earth. Following suit, Jack rose too. Maybe the place was on fire? Is that why they were running?

Standing and realizing that wasn’t true, Jack wondered if they smelled too much of camp smoke and fish?

Conrado, Pumbo and Severini reached the exit doors, and then turned together in military fashion, which surprised Jack. But he turned with them, as they shouted in loud Italian back toward the cash register, and the sullen waitresses. To Jack the three men seemed like ancient cannons shooting at castle walls.

Fists waving, they opened the café doors, as if to exit, but didn’t. They turned around, Jack with them. And shouted back into the café.

Jack saw a brawl coming. He knew the cowboys back inside watching them exit would never put up with A bunch of disrespectful Stockton Dagos.

But there was something about the men’s fists Jack could see that was not correct. The fists were oddly shaped; the Italian knuckles a hair off. They were not clinched to fight, so what for then?

All four were halted halfway in, and halfway out facing the inside. Everyone inside was facing outside, some half raised from their booths. Time stopped. It was cultural ballet on a tiny stage; all but the music. Jack’s ears roared with the confusion—and the silence.

Then there were more shouts and waving, confusing Jack. Were the three Italians about to throw a harpoon? Were they whalers? Were they going to lasso California Cowboys?

Nope.

All three were hurling—while shouting Italian curses about Cowboy genitalia—handfuls of silver dollars and fifty-cent pieces into The Valley Springs Café, which were clattering like social grapeshot onto the tile flooring.

Jack had been looking forward to eating but knew what was happening was better than the world’s best hamburger, as the waitresses and some of the patrons scrambled on all fours, down on their hands and knees to pick up the silver money. Not to throw back.

Whatever it was that day, which Jack was both a part of and witness to, was half hidden, and dense, but Jack felt proud of the three men he was with; to be accepted by them as their three jeep convoy backed up almost like pilots in the air, executed circus turns, throwing dirt and gravel and left Valley Springs, CA physically unfed.

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For the next three years it was into the mountains to learn what a hellgrammite was, whether some trout were male or female, what the wind meant, when a rattler would rattle and why. What a birdcall meant, where trout in a ripple swam, and why? Jack cared little for town or high school, but a great deal for the mountain college into which he’d been enrolled.

How to kill a fish fast, so it did not suffer, how to know what clouds meant, what their shapes wrote in the sky, how to set a fire with a spark, gather wood, which burned clean, faster or slower and why, how a fire had to breathe, lay out a camp, prepare for rain or heat or both, climb a stream with no trail, negotiate steep slopes up or down, know what habitat rattlers used, their preferred meals and why; not to kill them in their house, but in his own quickly.

When fishing season was over, Jack learned