Peter Oresick

Look who’s whistling through bleached teeth now, one hand on svelte hip, one fist pumping the air– Pittsburgh–once that madcap & zany joke factory now chosen for her fetching comeback tale & her earth-sheltered welcome center & her Warhol & her Tropical Forest Conservatory & her Rosemont, working farm of the moguls of ketchup. Rarely since the global credit crisis do Pittsburghers cross bridges or rivers or the thresholds of stunningly profitable ventures. Yet tonight, as global output contracts at a pace not seen since the 1930s, as the French president proposes reform of the International Monetary Fund & the US president delights in the local crepes with crispy edges, & as Greenpeace commandos drape a WHAT THE FUCK? banner from the deck of the West End Bridge (above which Chinook & Black Hawk helicopter hover), & as police use the LRAD sound cannon on protesters for the first time in the United States or Canada– a Pittsburgh Pirate homers into the Allegheny River & sets the esplanade ablaze with the flash & fizzle of fireworks launched at the flat lozenge of the moon, a ghostly azure, suspended low above the sweep of the cantilevered roofs on the opposite shoreline–the poured concrete, the glass towers, the obelisks–a costly parody of bygone days when confidence in the future, evinced by our sixty miles of integrated mills, was illustrated by a time capsule, a chamber “hermetically” sealed in Steel City alloys, bicentennially filled with newsprint & artifacts of 1958 Pittsburgh to be cracked open & savored in some distant epoch, an idea first embraced by Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, Babylonia, & Egypt, & reenacted now in waves of sound & light–the roar of fireworks night for a losing franchise, the hoarse voices of Pittsburghers– wafting into the void, accelerated by Jupiter’s pull, & then hurled by Jupiter out of the solar system, yet another urban missive from a noisy planet, a comingling of mathematics and human music, charming & powerful, a murmur preserved of our city-state that once flourished–before its citizens dispersed to other lands, to greater deeds on the blue Earth.

My father was four years in the war, and afterward, according to my mother, had nothing to say. She says he trembled in his sleep the next four years. My father was twice the father of sons miscarried, and afterward said nothing. My mother keeps this silence also. Four times my father was on strike, and according to my mother; had nothing to say. She says the company didn’t understand, nor can her son, the meaning of an extra fifteen cents an hour in 1956 to a man tending a glass furnace in August. I have always remembered him a tired man. I have respected him like a guest and expected nothing. It is April now. My life lies before me, enticing as the woman at my side. Now, in April, I want him to speak. I want to stand against the worn body of his pain. I want to try it on like a coat that does not fit.

Someone is looking for us. I sensed it earlier at the creek while floating on my back, and again on Route 8 near Brookline. So we’ve detoured to this hillside eroding and crazy with markers. We’re looking for row mm or nn or something like that. I lug the baby; my wife runs ahead. This neighborhood knows her– she passes so easily between stones. She finds the grave, her father dead ten years now. In the time it takes to say kaddish the sun’s dropped. I set down my son and he crawls in the dimness, pulling himself up on the headstone. How delicately he fingers the marble. Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes. I’m thinking:grass, stone, quiet– then babbling from another world.

My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages. My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming. *    *   * Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants. Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties. No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter. *    *   * Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent. I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates. *    *   * During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars. Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows. *    *   * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security. I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair. “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.