Curious about my mother and her laughing sister, Roseanne, Armando travels from Lake Como, across an ocean and half a continent to revisit the World War II California P.O.W. camp where he was imprisoned.
On weekends, my widowed grandmother signed out young Italian prisoners, including him, to milk cows, prune fruit trees, work in her vineyard. Like her, they came from the northern Bormio region, and spoke her dialect. Fifty years later, Armando tells of our Uncle Jimmie slicing through the fence with wire cutters, late nights drinking wine, dancing with local Sicilian farmers’ hot daughters.
Today at the Catholic cemetery, he genuflects, says a prayer before my grandmother’s headstone, remembers her broken English, the woman who braved small town persecution to support prisoners of war who could have been brothers.
