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 wouldnt 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 dont have to sit in a ditch learning your
sums or the glorious history of Ireland. I should be good in school and
some day Ill go back to America and get an inside job where Ill be sit-
ting at a desk with two fountain pens in my pocket, one red and one
blue, making decisions. Ill be in out of the rain and Ill 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, its 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 dont 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 its exercises, the sums, the English, the Irish,
the history. He cant help us with Irish because hes from the North and
lacking in the native tongue. Malachy offers to teach him all the Irish
words he knows but Dad says its too late, you cant 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
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