Conka

            by John Briscoe

 

 

When all the others were away at mass

it was like that with me too.

I stayed home with her and her floured hands

and floured hair and apron.  From the icebox

in the screened-in pantry she carried plates

of dough balls she had made the day before

of flour, manteca, water and salt,

each the size of my little fist.

Taking the top ball from the pyramid

she’d flatten it with the heels of her palms

then fingers working beneath the dough, thumbs

on top, begin to whirl a widening disc

much as I had seen the Italian cooks do

with two big hairy hands and much more dough

then would stop mid-spin and ask me in Spanish,

What is a mouse when it spins?, before

handing me a dough ball to try myself.

She would guide my little fingers but I,

I think now, could never get the hang of it.

Like a cook uncurdling a broken sauce

she’d repair my torn and tattered tortilla,

cook it on the griddle side of the stove,

a Wedgewood wood-burning stove and tell me I had made it.

She’d sizzle lard in a skillet to scramble eggs

with chopped calves’ brains and maybe

she’d make hot chocolate–

 

Come to think of it she never sat down

to eat with me, and rarely then with others.

She only served me, and cleaned after me

and told me stories during the while

of her husband, my grandfather murdered

by a stranger just for his police badge

when she was only twenty with four sons,

my father and his three younger brothers,

of her mother Trinidad, a singer

and bar dancer, and her father Fernando,

the woodcarver of Old St. Mary’s Church

in Phoenix, Arizona Territory,

who was also a saloon keeper

who could not enter the saloon he owned

because his kind was not allowed in a bar

anywhere in White Man Country

anywhere in the country.

 

That’s how I know

what little I know

of her.

That’s how I know

what little I know.