The bread box was empty, except for a few stale loaf heels.  That was a bad sign.  My mother dropped the hard bread chunks into a brown paper bag.  They were so dried out they could have been used to hammer nails.  No one in the house wanted to eat them, but my mother knew who would.

“Why don’t you two take this bread next door for Mr. Moretti’s chickens?” she said to me and my sister, handing me the bag.  Lucia and I nodded nervously and exchanged a look.  You didn’t just walk onto the Moretti farm.  Going anywhere near it was a serious business requiring careful surveillance of the area and knowledge of several well-planned escape routes.  There was always the chance of running into one of the Morettis on the Moretti farm.  Most people in town thought the Morettis were a little strange.  They had odd habits, and they seemed to refuse to learn English.  The rest of the immigrant families had adjusted years ago.  My generation barely even spoke Italian anymore.  But the Moretti family was a different case.  Something just wasn’t right about them.

Lucia and I slipped out the kitchen door and walked around the back of our house.  Lucia gripped Anna, her favorite doll, for protection as we made our way down the back path towards the Moretti farm.  In those days, going next door was more of a journey than it is today.  This was before most of the farmland was divided up and used to build more houses for the coal miners.  Today, there are three houses separating our old house and the Moretti place, but back then, you could see the Moretti barn and garage from our living room window.  I used to look out at that barn through the holes of our lace curtains.  I’d watch Old Man Moretti milking his cows or baling hay.  Moretti was barely five feet tall and probably in his sixties, but he was the strongest man I’d ever seen.  Sinew and muscle, that’s all there was to him.  He could lift an entire haystack on his pitchfork and carry it from the field to the barn without dropping a straw.  But Old Man Moretti wasn’t so bad.  He looked mean and he didn’t talk much, probably because he didn’t know much English, but he was always polite and seemed reasonably good-natured.  It was his son that really scared me.  Everyone said he was stupid, or crazy, or both.  If I ever saw Lou Moretti, even through the lace curtains, I’d get away as fast as I could.

“Teresa?” my sister murmured.  “Do you think he’ll be there?”  By “he,” I knew she meant Lou.

“If we’re lucky, he’ll be up at the junkyard.”  I tried to sound comforting, but I could barely keep the uncertain tremble out of my voice.  I looked down the path that led to the Moretti barn.  The path was little more than a ditch between the Moretti garage and a steep bank behind it.  I called it Chicken Scalder Road.  It was where the Morettis would pluck and scald their chickens.  If you’ve never smelled a scalded chicken, then let me assure you, you’re lucky.  Before plucking, chickens have to be scalded in boiling water to soften the feathers.  Chickens smell bad enough.  Dead chickens smell even worse.  Dead chickens that have just been immersed in steaming hot water are enough to turn even the strongest stomach.  And it was a smell that lingered.  Chicken Scalder Road was not the route my nose would have chosen, but it was the best way to approach the farm without being spotted by anyone.

No one was around as Lucia and I edged our way to the chicken coop, sticking close to the shadows behind the garage for cover.  When we reached the corner of the garage, we hung back for a few minutes, looking around at the barn and the chicken coop a few yards in front of us.  No one was there.  I nodded to Lucia, and together, we crept across the winding dirt driveway to the coop.  I eased the door open, mindful of the rusty hinges, and lobbed the bread scraps into the middle of the coop.  Just as quietly, I closed the door and turned to go back home as fast as possible.  That was when I saw that the garage door was open.

The garage was so full of junk that I almost didn’t see him.  Old engine parts, broken crates, rusty barrels, torn and stained clothing, a cracked bathtub, and countless other items were stacked up on the floor and on shelves clear to the roof.  There was barely room for the car, which was so rusty it was barely distinguishable from the junk around it.  That was what Lou Moretti did.  He salvaged trash from the junkyard and sold it.  And as my eyes finally picked out the man himself standing in the doorway of his worthless treasury, I felt my entire body freeze in terror.

He was huge.  I’d never really been close enough to him to see just how big he was, but Lou Moretti was as big as his father was small.  And he was filthy.  His hair, his face, his hands, his clothes, every part of him was smudged with grease and dirt.  His eyes were small and watery and his face was stupid.  He looked up.

My breath caught in my throat, and I felt Lucia suddenly grip my hand.  Lou had spotted us.

“Hey!” he called.  “Ragazze!  Yous girls!” 

But before he could say anything else, Lucia and I had started to run across the field where several horses were grazing, heading for the woods on the other side of the road.  Lucia was holding her doll by one arm, letting it dangle as she ran.  Lou was still shouting behind us, half in Italian and half in English.  I only caught a handful of the words.  “No you!” I thought I heard, and, “Bad!  Cavallo…pericoloso!”

Lucia and I ignored him, our minds set firmly on reaching the shelter of the woods.  We were nearly across the field and about to hop the fence and cross the road when Lucia chanced a glance back at Lou.  No longer looking where she was going, she nearly collided with a large, chestnut stallion grazing near the fence.  Spooked, the horse almost kicked her.  As she jumped back in fright, Anna, her cherished doll, slipped from her fingers.  Lucia reached out to grab Anna, and I grabbed Lucia, yanking her back from the horse.  The stallion bolted, trampling Anna as he went.  Lucia paused only to grab her battered doll before she and I swung ourselves over the fence and disappeared into the safety of the woods, still pursued by Lou’s mad yells of Italian words we didn’t understand and broken English.

It was only after creeping through the woods back to our own front porch that Lucia stopped to look at Anna.  The doll’s head was crushed, the painted features gruesomely distorted.  It no longer fit properly into the plastic neck.  The hollow head fell off completely when Lucia tried to pop it back into its proper shape.  But it was damaged beyond repair.  The rest of the doll looked all right, just dusty, but what good was a headless doll?

That was what my mother asked over and over, but Lucia, still crying two hours later, absolutely refused to let her throw out Anna’s body.  The head, she had to admit, looked so unlike a head now that there really was little point in keeping it, but the body she continued to squeeze to her chest, crying for her Anna.  My mother tossed the head into the trash can out front, but gave up trying to throw out the body.  It was just too important to Lucia.

For days I watched my sister carry that decapitated doll around the house.  It made me feel slightly sick to see it.  It wasn’t its headlessness that bothered me, it was the memory of how it got that way.  When I saw that doll, I saw Lou Moretti’s twisted face, shouting a crazy man’s words at us as we ran across his field.  I saw the dirt caked in his hair and grease on his hands and clothes.  And I could hear the sharp screech of his voice, yelling broken words, making no sense in two languages.

“Put it away!” I finally shouted at Lucia when she came out onto the porch, still dragging the headless Anna.  It had been four days since our run-in with Lou, and I still couldn’t get the memory out of my head.  “It’s worthless anyway.”

“But she’s mine,” Lucia said quietly, sitting down on the porch steps next to me.  “And I want her.”

We sat in silence for some time, staring at nothing in particular.  Then the sound of footsteps cut through the silence.  I looked down the side driveway to see Lou Moretti coming for us, a dusty burlap sack dangling from his hand.  I stood to run back into the house, but he held up his other hand.  “No go, ragazza, please.  Me got thing.  Me got idea.”  He said it like “eye-day-uh.”

Every instinct told me to run, but curiosity told me to stay.  I agreed to give my curiosity thirty seconds to satisfy itself before I allowed instinct to take me back inside.  I turned and stood on the porch facing Lou.  Lucia hadn’t even moved.  She remained seated on the steps, playing with a loose thread on the lace trim of Anna’s dress.  She had barely even looked up when Lou spoke.

Lou approached us slowly.  He set the burlap sack down on the sidewalk about five feet in front of us, then knelt beside it.  He rummaged around and finally withdrew something small and yellow.  He held it out to Lucia.  She looked at it, disinterestedly at first, and then seemed to realize what it was.  It was a doll’s head.  Not Anna’s crushed head, but another head, apparently taken from a different doll.  Lucia reached out a tentative hand and Lou placed the little blonde head in it.  She tried to pop the knob at the base of the head into the empty neck of Anna, but it didn’t fit.

“It’s too big,” she whispered.

Lou reached into the sack again and pulled out another head, this one dark-haired.  Lucia took it from him and tried to fit it into Anna’s neck.  It was too loose.

“Too small,” she said, her voice slightly louder.

Lou upended the sack on the sidewalk, and what looked like about twenty doll heads spilled out onto the pavement.  They were all different sizes, some blonde, some brunette, even a few red-headed, all taken from unwanted dolls.  Lucia left the steps and knelt down on the sidewalk among the doll heads.  She began trying one head after another, twisting them into Anna’s neck almost frantically until, finally, she found a head, a blue-eyed blonde head, that fit.  She held up Anna, admiring the new head, and then her eyes met Lou’s.  She smiled and said one of the few words of Italian she’d picked up from our grandmother.  “Grazie.”

Lou returned the smile.  “Prego,” he said.  “You welcome.”