Free Crazy in the Kitchen by Louise DeSalvo Page B

neighbors keep pigeons
     in pigeon coops. My mother thinks they're a nuisance and disease-ridden— flying rats, she calls them— and can't understand
     this old-world practice.
    My grandfather pulls back the elastic on the slingshot. Takes aim. Lets go.
    The pigeon drops to the ground. In my alcohol-induced haze, this happens in slow motion.
    My grandfather tells me to stay where I am. He runs downstairs, out the back door, into the courtyard. And though I know I'm
     not supposed to, because it's dangerous, I lean way out the window to see what happens next.
    My grandfather picks up the pigeon, inspects it. The bird doesn't look dead. It looks startled. I think I see it move its
     wings.
    Satisfied, my grandfather tucks the pigeon under his shirt. Back in the kitchen, he wrings its neck. The pigeon's head dangles,
     like the head of my abused and broken doll.
    I have, in my young life, seen many animals brought home live from the market and slaughtered in my grandparents' kitchen.
     Also, on my grandmother's relatives' farm when we visit. My grandparents won't eat anything that doesn't come into their home
     alive.
    I am curious about, horrified by, how my grandparents wring birds' necks, pluck their feathers, kill eels with sharp blows
     to the head, kill fish by plunging a knife between their eyes. I watch them strip the skin off animals with pliers, remove
     entrails, drain animals' blood. I am beginning to wonder when life becomes nonlife; beginning to think about death, beginning
     to have nightmares in which I, too, am dressed for cooking.
    I watch my grandfather's work with the pigeon. He dangles the head before me, teasing me. This, he won't discard, for in this
     household nothing is wasted. Later, he'll dress it, impale it on a metal skewer, thrust it into the coals of the stove to
     roast, share it with my grandmother.
    The entrails, though, are his alone. These, he chops and fries, dousing them with wine. He toasts a piece of my grandmother's
     bread, smears it with pigeon guts, pours the juices over, serves himself a little more wine. He is, at this moment, a very
     happy man.
    After my grandfather eats the entrails, he puts the pigeon in a pot and stews it with a few tomatoes, garlic, parsley, and
     wine. Though it smells delicious, when mealtime comes I won't eat it. Won't say where it comes from when my mother pressures
     me to tell her where my grandfather got the pigeon.
    Because it's wartime, there is much talk of death in our household. My mother and grandparents discuss the carnage of the
     war at the supper table and I have heard it. I have seen the pages of newspapers filled with pictures of GIs victorious, of
     GIs slain, though my mother tries to hide them from me. Images of the war, though, are everywhere and can't be hidden— on
     the newsprint the vegetable man uses to wrap my mother's purchases; on the front pages of the newspapers for sale at Albini's,
     our corner drugstore.
    Italy is at war against the United States, and my grandparents wonder how their relatives in Italy are faring. Throughout
     the war, they send them packages of clothing, of dried beans, dry biscuits. My grandparents want the Allies to win. Still,
     they don't want anyone from their villages to die.
    And whether my father will come back from the war alive, we don't know. My mother knows he's in the Pacific, near some heavy
     fighting. She knows this because of coded messages in my father's letters.
    During the war, my mother eats whatever is put in front of her (and it is almost always cooked by my grandfather). She is
     happy to have someone else attending to the business of food, happy to be with her father, happy to have help managing me.
     She enjoys what he cooks. She has not yet developed her revulsion for the peasant fare he and my grandmother eat. This comes
     later, when she moves to the suburbs and tries to put her Italian past behind her.
    My grandfather was a farm boy, born into a family of farm laborers. As a