Dogtown Papouli

Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts
Sometime around 1938

For Greeks, the ocean was a boundary. It was a line in the sand, drawn between shores. On either side of that line there was before and after, then and now. Immigration was both a division and a rebirth. Some gained new names and new families, most arrived with two feet firmly on the sand. But not Nick Xenakis. Nick had a rough passage, and he stumbled.

Ask any Greek: a person without family was like meat without salt, or salad without oil. Nick was an orphan, and his grandmother, an aging fortune-teller in the port of Piraeus, paid for his trip to America. She wasn’t a great fortune-teller, but Nick wondered later if she’d foreseen her death, and knew Nick would be better off, no matter how unhappy, in America. He came alone to work in a granite quarry in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Language is another kind of border, and Nick Xenakis was as lonely as a young Greek boy could be. But forty years later, when he sat with his granddaughter Isabelle by a wooded stream in Dogtown, he spoke English, Italian, and a smattering of Mi’kmaq, along with his now-rusty Greek. And today they were studying the language of water.

Isabelle had two wooden cups, and filled each with water from the clear stream.

“Here, Papouli,” she said. “You go first.” Isabelle was eight years old, and sometimes bossy, which Nick was guilty of encouraging.

Nick sipped. His grandmother taught him that water could tell the past, and in rare cases the future. She read coffee grounds in kafenions in Piraeus, flipping the small porcelain cups over to see the patterns in the muddy grounds.

“My grandmother said that coffee doesn’t gossip. It’s water that spills the beans.”

Isabelle rolled her eyes. “Take another sip, Papouli, and focus.”

“Water will tell you its history, and if you are patient, it will tell you about a person’s secrets.”

Isabelle sighed. She loved her Papouli, but sometimes he talked too much.

Nick sipped again and tasted the mineral tang of the stream, the gray stone under the mud. And underneath that…the Atlantic, the oil-treated hull of the freighter that brought him, the char of street food at the port in Piraeus. Maybe it was the stream, or maybe he was just remembering his own story.

Isabelle, he knew, was a more skillful reader. As humans left Dogtown, the spirits reclaimed the forest, and the little stream was like a message board that Isabelle could read.

She sipped the water and first tasted her family: the bite of Nanna’s whiskey, salt of her mother’s grief, Papouli’s bitter coffee, and iron tang of her father’s absence. Greece seemed a long way away, and she’d only seen the ocean from one side, but the nearby spirits chattered. She was their grandchild as much as Papouli’s.

“Once upon a time,” she began, “A handsome young stranger fell in love with the town witch, and he built her an invisible cabin in a haunted wood.”