XI Mam warns us,Ye are to keep yeer paws out of that trunk for there’s nothing in there that’s of the slightest interest or any of yeer business. All she has in that trunk is a lot of papers, certificates of birth and baptism, her  Irish  passport, Dad’s  English  passport  from  Belfast, our American passports and her bright red flapper dress with spangles and black frills she brought all the way from America. She wants to keep that dress forever to remind herself she was young and dancing. I don’t care what she has in the trunk till I start a football team with Billy Campbell and Malachy. We can’t afford uniforms or boots and Billy says, How will the world know who we are? We don’t even have a name. I remember the red dress and a name comes to me,The Red Hearts of Limerick. Mam never opens the trunk so what does it matter if I cut off a piece of the dress to make seven red hearts we can stick on our chests? What you don’t know won’t bother you, she always says herself. The dress is buried under the papers. I look at my passport picture when I was small and I can see why they call me Jap.There’s a paper that  says  Marriage  Certificate,  that  Malachy  McCourt  and  Angela Sheehan  were  joined  in  Holy  Matrimony  on  the  twenty-eighth  of March, 1930. How could that be? I was born on the nineteenth of August and Billy Campbell told me the father and mother have to be 252