want your kind in this post office, people that can’t keep their hands off the ham and sherry, so hand in your telegram pouch and bicycle for your days are done in this post office. But I need the job. I have to save and go to America. America. Sad day when America lets in the likes of you. I hobble through the streets of Limerick. I’d like to go back and throw a brick through Mr. Harrington’s window. No. Respect for the dead. I’ll go across the Sarsfield Bridge and out the riverbank where I can lie down somewhere in the bushes. I don’t know how I can go home and tell my mother I lost my job. Have to go home. Have to tell her. Can’t stay out the riverbank all night. She’d be frantic. Mam begs the post office to take me back.They say no.They never heard  the  likes. Telegram  boy  mauling  corpse. Telegram  boy  fleeing scene with ham and sherry. He will never set foot in the post office again. No. She gets a letter from the parish priest.Take the boy back, says the parish priest. Oh, yes, Father, indeed, says the post office. They’ll let me stay till my sixteenth birthday, not a minute longer. Besides, says Mrs. O’Connell, when  you  think  of  what  the  English  did  to  us  for eight hundred years that man had no right to complain over a little ham and sherry. Compare a little ham and sherry to the Great Famine and where are you? If my poor husband was alive and I told him what you did he’d say you struck a blow, Frank McCourt, struck a blow. Every Saturday morning I swear I’ll go to confession and tell the priest of my impure acts at home, on lonely boreens around Limerick with cows and sheep gawking, on the heights of Carrigogunnell with the world looking up. I’ll tell him about Theresa Carmody and how I sent her to hell, and that will be the end of me, driven from the Church. Theresa is a torment to me. Every time I deliver a telegram to her street, every time I pass the graveyard I feel the sin growing in me like an abscess and if I don’t go to confession soon I’ll be nothing but an abscess riding around on a bicycle with people pointing and telling each other, There he is, there’s Frankie McCourt, the dirty thing that sent Theresa Carmody to hell. I look at people going to Communion on Sundays, everyone in a 329