Winter Morning

Nonno eases the door open to the soft anticipation of dawn. Snow dusts the entrance. He kneels to tighten the scarf about my chin, wafts of roasted chicory on his breath. He picks up the laden basket from the counter, and passes me the zappa from its mud-marked resting place. I cradle the tool’s long handle of yew in both hands, its broad head of beaten iron resting upon my shoulder. We trudge up the hill together.

At the top of the hill is a tunnel, narrow like the puckered mouth of a whistling ice giant. From its upper lip of arched stone, an unkempt moustache of thick icicles hangs down. Two tongues of steel stretch from its darkness, curving upon wooden sleepers through the ranges. Nonno takes his position, a foot on each track as I hand him the tool. He lines its blade with the edge of an icicle, pulling it back with a long intake of breath. He holds it. Then cracks the metal against the join of ice and stone. The track, affixed to its sleepers by little more than tradition, shudders as the spike falls to the ground. He lines up the next as I scramble by his feet, hefting the slippery mass against my chest as I crabwalk it down the hill. I leave it in the bucket by the door and run back up for the next. By the last few, the track of my footprints is wide enough that I can slide them from the top, and race them in a tumble to the bottom.

I return after the last one, dampened approaching sodden. Nonno stands in the morning light, plumes of vapour rising from him like his whole body is exhaling. From a small fire, crackles of dried wood punctuate the sizzle of a blackened pan. An egg loses translucence over a cut of polenta, and milk warms in a tin cup by the ashes. We eat as the sun rises proper, warmth drying us both.

Starting as a whisper, then climbing in pitch, a squeal of steel against steel emerges from the depths of the tunnel – the giant’s whistle. We stand back as the snouted smokebox of the engine car emerges, chimney passing within a handspan of the lip’s arch. Carriages follow. I see the first few faces; I meet the colourless eyes of a man. The rest blend into a tapestry of gauze-white and scab-red. I pull my eyes to the ground, and try to count springtails in the snow. Nonno still watches, unblinking, holding his blurred vision of each boy’s face against his murky memory of one smiling. The trundling begins to fade and I look up to him. He chews his lip between his teeth as he watches the shrinking form of the train. His hand hangs by his side. I hold it in both of mine.