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and stern winter faces to see. He taking his sweet time. He punishing you. That’s what he was doing—but it’s only now I know he knew that what I wanted was to get on the train and put him and home and all of them behind me for good.
    The cousin next drove me to that flat on Botanic Avenue. He had secured it for me. The landlord was a close friend. A tiny second-floor flat that I immediately liked, a twenty-five-minute walk to my job. That tiny flat with the tiny fridge, a hot plate with two rings, the table and two chairs facing the only window. The shared shower and toilet on my floor. The black coin-box phone at the bottom of the stairs. Large water stains on two walls and the smell of mold. That windowlooked out onto a slate roof that was covered with fat green moss. Pressed against the edge of the roof were the tops of evergreens.
    My father’s cousin and I sat on the edge of the single bed and smoked his cigarettes. He stared at the floor between his opened legs, fidgeted with his thinning brown fringe, and warned me to be fair and honest in my dealings with others, and to not ever be late for work, because if I was, or if I misbehaved in any way, it was a mark against him, and a mark against him was a mark against the union, and it nearly killed him and a few others to get the union going. I told him I’d be good, and I reached into my pocket and handed him the money for the flat—I’d counted the notes on the train, counted them about twenty times—and without looking up, he shoved the notes into the sports coat pocket then said my father was a great man, his most favorite cousin, who stood with him at Limerick Junction when he took the train to Dublin all those years ago. The two of them piked hay in the meadows, the women crossed the meadows and the ditches with bottles of tea, ham and tomato sandwiches, tin-can gallons of well water, the best water he ever tasted, no water anyplace in the world like it, not like the filthy city water, you’ve no idea whatsoever, young fellow, what might be floating in that, and my father and he cycled together to dances and hurling matches, they acted in plays in the school hall, when it came to acting my father was hard to beat. And no one could read the horses like my father. Not one.
    He looked up. He offered me another cigarette, held the match out, told me I looked clever enough, I was a fairly all-right-looking young fellow, but I wasn’t handsome the way my father was, I must look like the other side, who he didn’t know anything about, but I needed to look out for myself, because no one else would, and he reached into the coat pocket where he’d put the money and handed me twenty pounds—I don’t know if it was one of the notes I’d given him—and he leaned back and reached into his left pants pocket and handed me ten cigarettes and a box of matches. I took them and thanked him, and he was fidgeting again with his fringe when he said, —Don’t forget to tell yourfather the next time you see him how well we got along, and don’t forget to tell him I was mad asking for him, and don’t forget to tell him that I was good to his young fellow.
    We stood up from the bed and walked down the narrow stairs. We shook hands on the front steps. I can’t remember what else we said. The exhaust of his small car made loud farting noises when it took off. And I felt great wonder sitting there by myself on the top step. Men walked past in overcoats, and workmen in anoraks and women hurried past with their plastic shopping bags. A group of teenagers shuffled past. They were laughing and smoking and they had cool haircuts and wore cool city clothes. A barking dog ran down the middle of the street. Someone far up the street shouted the dog’s name and cursed. And smoke from the chimneys was mixed in with the fog and was the color of mud in the beams of the streetlamps.
    I got up from the step and went upstairs and took the food out of the bag and put it in the fridge. I