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things for granted.

New York Central Train, 1929
    As the hours pass I get used to the motion of the train, the heavy wheels clacking in their grooves, the industrial hum under my seat. Dusk softens the sharp points of trees outside my window; the sky slowly darkens, then blackens around an orb of moon. Hours later, a faint blue tinge yields to the soft pastels of dawn, and soon enough sun is streaming in, the stop-start rhythm of the train making it all feel like still photography, thousands of images that taken together create a scene in motion.
    We pass the time looking out at the evolving landscape, talking, playing games. Mrs. Scatcherd has a checkers set and a bible, and I thumb through it, looking for Psalm 121, Mam’s favorite: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth . . .
    I’m one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she’d make me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.
    “Donner brand car-bonated bev—”
    “Beverage.”
    “Beverage. LemonKist soda. Artifickle—”
    “Artificial. The ‘c’ sounds like ‘s.’”
    “Artificial color. Kitric—citric acid added.”
    “Good.”
    When I became more proficient, Mam went into the shabby trunk beside her bed and brought out a hardback book of poems, blue with gold trim. Francis Fahy was a Kinvara poet born into a family of seventeen children. At fifteen he became an assistant teacher at the local boys’ school before heading off to England (like every other Irish poet, Mam said), where he mingled with the likes of Yeats and Shaw. She would turn the pages carefully, running her finger over the black lines on flimsy paper, mouthing the words to herself, until she found the one she wanted.
    “‘Galway Bay,’” she would say. “My favorite. Read it to me.”
    And so I did:
              Had I youth’s blood and hopeful mood and heart of fire once more,
              For all the gold the world might hold I’d never quit your shore,
              I’d live content whate’er God sent with neighbours old and gray,
              And lay my bones ’neath churchyard stones, beside you, Galway Bay.
    Once I looked up from a halting and botched rendition to see two lines of tears rivuleting Mam’s cheeks. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “We should never have left that place.”
    Sometimes, on the train, we sing. Mr. Curran taught us a song before we left that he stands to lead us in at least once a day:
    From the city’s gloom to the country’s bloom
    Where the fragrant breezes sigh
    From the city’s blight to the greenwood bright
    Like the birds of summer fly
    O Children, dear Children
    Young, happy, pure . . .
    We stop at a depot for sandwich fixings and fresh fruit and milk, but only Mr. Curran gets off. I can see him outside my window in his white wingtips, talking to farmers on the platform. One holds a basket of apples, one a sack full of bread. A man in a black apron reaches into a box and unwraps a package of brown paper to reveal a thick yellow slab of cheese, and my stomach rumbles. They haven’t fed us much, some crusts of bread and milk and an apple each in the past twenty-four hours, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re afraid of running out or if they think it’s for our moral good.
    Mrs. Scatcherd strides up and down the aisle, letting two groups of children at a time get up to stretch while the train is still. “Shake each leg,” she instructs. “Good for the circulation.” The younger children are restless, and the older boys stir up trouble in small ways, wherever they can find it. I want nothing to do with these boys, who seem as feral as a pack of dogs. Our landlord, Mr. Kaminski, called boys like these “street Arabs,” lawless vagrants who