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move to Loughrea when the Land Reform laws came. We went tobetter farmland, but I believe he never got over the sting of leaving those fields and that house he’d helped to build as a lad.”
    The apartment and neighbors and outside noises seemed to succumb to Desi’s charms. All went hush as he rubbed his bristled chin.
    “I was much younger than him, seven or so when we moved, so I had a grand time building the new house. We pulled it up out of the land. We boys and our father dug clay, dragged timbers from the bog, and harvested the thatch for the roof. I tell you, it was plumb and solid, still is. Everyone was satisfied but your father. He said that if they could take one house from you against your will, they could take another. He never settled into it. The sky was his ceiling, I suppose. One thing: he never had to be asked twice to work. Jesus, he never had to be asked once. He was always working. The stone walls he built—you would have thought they were a mile around.
    “All he ever wanted was a little money to play cards. There’d be poker games that would last five days. That, and a chance to work in the fields. When I tell you he had strength enough to bend a hammer, I don’t know if you’ll believe me. The only thing he wanted it for was to pull up stubborn vegetables. Then, in 1931—your father must have been twenty-four—my eldest brother Willie, he was a beat cop in Dublin, well, he developed a cataract. He went blind in that eye and had to come back to the farm. The plot wasn’t big enough to support two men and my father, and there wasn’t a job to be found on the entire godforsaken island, not even for a man like your father.”
    He raised one brow and clicked his tongue dramatically, as if to suggest that the failure to find room for his older brother spelled doom for the country he had left behind.
    “The best our father could do for him was buy him a ticket over. It was Willie who’d wanted to emigrate, not your father, but that was out of the question. This country didn’t admit the infirm.
    “Our father gave him three months. Your father spent the time plowing, harrowing, and sowing, barely stopping to eat or sleep. A man could be forgiven for wondering if he were trying to die in the fields. His friends threw the biggest good-bye party in memory; it lasted three days and nights. What a time! At the end, your father went directly from the revelryto the crops. People tried to get him to go in and sleep, but he wouldn’t listen. He worked through the night. Our father went out in the morning, the ticket in his hand; I followed behind. He found him ripping out weeds. I’ll never forget what he said.”
    Desi paused. He stood up to act out the scene.
    “ ‘Michael John,’ he said, handing it over.” He stretched an imaginary ticket toward her. “ ‘You have to go. And that’s that.’ Then he turned back to the house.” Desi faced away, took a couple of steps and looped back. “I stood there for a while with your father in perfect silence. Our mother took him to the boat.”
    He sat back down and eyed his empty teacup. She got up to refill it for him.
    “I remember the first letter from your father,” Desi said as he chewed some shortbread. “He said the hardest part about leaving was knowing that Willie had no idea what to do with the crops he’d planted, that he’d let them linger in the earth too long. And that’s exactly what happened. He wrote that the whole way over, he saw, in his mind, the crops moldering there, sugaring over, their rich nutrition going to waste. He said he was never planting another seed. My brother Paddy—your cousin Pat’s father, God rest his soul—was here already a couple of years. Paddy referred your father to Schaefer Beer. As soon as they got one look at him, they put him to work hauling barrels.”
    She knew how much pride her father took in being able to write, since not everyone he grew up with could, and she watched with interest