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give you money. I sat on a chair beside my aunt’s bed and happened to mention how sad it was I’d never get to know Aunt Tess inDublin. Aunt Hannah gripped my wrist. Her eyes rolled toward me. The eyes narrowed.
    —Jimmy, she said. —Didn’t your aunt Tess fling herself under one of them city buses across the street from the Garden of Remembrance, and that was that for her. I can tell you that now, Jimmy, she added. —You’ll never live here again, but my sister, God knows, she was haywire. None of us knew what was going on inside her head at all, she kept things to herself, and your father and myself were more than glad that she did, like you have to keep what I’m telling you to yourself, but my sister did that woeful thing to us, did that to her own family, your father and mother know every bit of it, they knew about it the time it happened, but your aunt Tess, Jimmy, was the odd one, but every family has the misfortune of having one of them, and only one if they’re lucky.
    Aunt Hannah let my wrist go. Her eyes were all tears. I looked from them to the low city buildings outside the window. I imagined myself sitting on a train to Dublin. All their tears and their farm jobs and their sordid secrets were falling behind me. Then Auntie Hannah shoved her hand under the blanket. I looked down. The hand scampered about like a rat. When it came out it pressed a fifty-quid note into my opened hand.
    The morning I left, my mother cried when she packed my bag. I put my arms around her and kissed her. I squeezed her hands and said I would write a letter home every week. Cross my heart and hope to die. The bag was brown, with a glossy finish. A woman’s bag, with long, cushioned handles. Aunt Tess’s, which arrived in our house by way of Aunt Hannah. Some of my dead aunt’s things were sent to her sister. My mother pinned a Sacred Heart medal on the inside of the bag. She said the medal would forever protect me. Someone I was friendly with for a short time when I first moved to Dublin stole the bag.
    My mother had washed two of my father’s blue Sunday shirts. They hung drying on the bar above the range that morning. Steam flowed around them, like steam on summer days rising from an American citygrate. My mother clutched the shirts. Not dry enough yet, Jimmy, but they’ll be fine and dry in time for the train, Jimmy. Then she spent a long time ironing them. She steered the hissing iron into every corner. Her teardrops fell onto the shirts and the iron went back and forth over each teardrop until they all vanished. And I never once wore those shirts. With my first paycheck, I bought my own. Nor did I see my mother neatly fold the shirts and place them in my dead aunt’s bag. I didn’t because I was saying good-bye to Stephen and Anthony. I don’t remember that at all, but I do remember standing with Tess at the side of the house. We stood where I chopped and cut the wood and stared at the mountains, whose peaks were capped in snow, and my shoes sank into the thick patch of snow-covered sawdust.
    —Stop crying, Tess, I pleaded. —Come to the train station with me. You promised last night you would. You gave your word, Tess—
    —I can’t go, Jimmy. Hannah is going. I can’t—
    —You promised me. Wipe your face, Tess. I want you to be the last person I see out the train window—
    —I can’t, Jimmy. I don’t want you to go at all, but I know you have to—
    —You’ll be gone soon, Tess, gone in a few months. But you promised!
    —I know I did, Jimmy, but I don’t want any of us to go. I never ever wanted this day to come, never, Jimmy—
    —But I’m so glad this day is here, Tess, I’m so glad—
    She then ran around the back of the house. I ran after her and stood and held the barbed wire that she had slipped under, and I called after her to come back, but Tess was running in the snowy field. She ran around the cows. Her red hair and purple coat were flying around her.
    My father’s cousin, Eddie, met