says this war is none of our business because the English are up to their tricks again. He tells me about the great Roosevelt in Washington and the great De Valera in Dublin. In the morning we have the world to ourselves and he never tells me I should die for Ireland. He tells me about  the  old  days  in  Ireland  when  the  English  wouldn’t  let  the Catholics have schools because they wanted to keep the people igno- rant, that the Catholic children met in hedge schools in the depths of the country and learned English, Irish, Latin and Greek. The people loved learning.They loved stories and poetry even if none of this was any good for getting a job. Men, women and children would gather in ditches  to  hear  those  great  masters  and  everyone  wondered  at  how much a man could carry in his head.The masters risked their lives going from ditch to ditch and hedge to hedge because if the English caught them teaching they might be transported to foreign parts or worse. He tells me school is easy now, you don’t have to sit in a ditch learning your sums or the glorious history of Ireland. I should be good in school and some day I’ll go back to America and get an inside job where I’ll be sit- ting at a desk with two fountain pens in my pocket, one red and one blue, making decisions. I’ll be in out of the rain and I’ll have a suit and shoes and a warm place to live and what more could a man want? He says you can do anything in America, it’s the land of opportunity.You can be a fisherman in Maine or a farmer in California.America is not like Limerick, a gray place with a river that kills. When you have your father to yourself by the fire in the morning you don’t need Cuchulain or the Angel on the Seventh Step or anything. At night he helps us with our exercises. Mam says they call it home- work in America but here it’s exercises, the sums, the English, the Irish, the history. He can’t help us with Irish because he’s from the North and lacking in the native tongue. Malachy offers to teach him all the Irish words he knows but Dad says it’s too late, you can’t teach an old dog a new bark. Before bed we sit around the fire and if we say, Dad, tell us a story, he makes up one about someone in the lane and the story will take us all over the world, up in the air, under the sea and back to the lane. Everyone in the story is a different color and everything is upside down and backward. Motor cars and planes go under water and sub- marines fly through the air. Sharks sit in trees and giant salmon sport with kangaroos on the moon.Polar bears wrestle with elephants in Aus- tralia and penguins teach Zulus how to play bagpipes.After the story he 209