He takes us to South’s pub, which is not supposed to be open, but he’s a regular customer and there’s a back door for men who want their pint to celebrate the birthday of the Baby Jesus above in the crib. He orders  his  pint  and  lemonade  for  us  and  asks  the  man  if  there’s  any chance of getting a few lumps of coal.The man says he’s been serving drink for twenty-seven years and nobody ever asked him for coal before. Pa says it would be a favor and the man says if Pa asked for the moon he’d fly up and bring it back.The man leads us to the coal hole under the stairs and tells us take what we can carry. It’s real coal and not bits from the Dock Road and if we can’t carry it we can drag it along the ground. It  takes  us  a  long  time  to  go  from  South’s  pub  to  Barrack  Hill because of a hole in the bag. I pull the bag and it’s Malachy’s job to pick up the lumps that fall through the hole and put them back again.Then it starts to rain and we can’t stand in a doorway till it passes because we have  that  coal  and  it’s  leaving  a  black  trail  along  the  pavement  and Malachy is turning black from picking up the lumps, pushing them into the bag and wiping the rain from his face with his wet black hands. I tell him he’s black, he tells me I’m black, and a woman in a shop tells us get away from that door, ’tis Christmas Day and she doesn’t want to be looking at Africa. We have to keep dragging the bag or we’ll never have our Christ- mas dinner. It will take ages to get a fire going and ages more to get our dinner because the water has to be boiling when Mam puts in the head of cabbage and the potatoes to keep the pig company in the pot.We drag the bag up O’Connell Avenue and we see people in their houses sitting around tables with all kinds of decorations and bright lights. At one house they push up the window and the children point and laugh and call to us, Look at the Zulus.Where are yeer spears? Malachy makes faces at them and wants to throw coal at them but I tell him if he throws coal there’s less for the pig and we’ll never get our dinner. The downstairs in our house is a lake again from the rain pouring under the door but it doesn’t matter because we’re drenched anyway and we can wade through the water. Dad comes down and drags the bag upstairs to Italy. He says we’re good boys for getting so much coal, that the Dock Road must have been covered with it.When Mam sees us  she  starts  to  laugh,  and  then  she  cries.  She’s  laughing  because 100