on the cross so that ye can go around on yeer First Communion day with the paws clutching for The Collection. Our Lord died so that ye might be redeemed. It is enough to receive the gift of Faith.Are ye lis- tening to me? We are, sir. And what’s enough? The gift of Faith, sir. Good. Go home. At night three of us sit under the light pole at the top of the lane read- ing, Mikey, Malachy and I. The Molloys are like us with their father drinking the dole money or the wages and leaving no money for can- dles or paraffin oil for the lamp. Mikey reads books and the rest of us read comic books. His father, Peter, brings books from the Carnegie Library so that he’ll have something to do when he’s not drinking pints or when he’s looking after the family anytime Mrs. Molloy is in the lunatic asylum. He lets Mikey read any book he likes and now Mikey is reading this book about Cuchulain and talking as if he knows every- thing about him. I want to tell him I knew all about Cuchulain when I was three going on four, that I saw Cuchulain in Dublin, that Cuchu- lain thinks nothing of dropping into my dreams. I want to tell him stop talking about Cuchulain, he’s mine, he was mine years ago when I was young, but  I  can’t  because  Mikey  reads  us  a  story  I  never  heard  of before, a dirty story about Cuchulain which I can never tell my father or mother, the story of how Emer became Cuchulain’s wife. Cuchulain was getting to be an old man of twenty-one. He was lonely and wanted to get married, which made him weak, says Mikey, and got him killed in the end.All the women in Ireland were mad about Cuchulain and they wanted to marry him.He said that would be grand, he wouldn’t mind marrying all the women of Ireland. If he could fight all the men of Ireland why couldn’t he marry all the women? But the King, Conor MacNessa, said,That’s all very well for you, Cu, but the men of Ireland don’t want to be lonely in the far reaches of the night. The King decided there would have to be a contest to see who would marry Cuchulain and it would be a pissing contest. All the women of Ireland assembled on the plains of Muirthemne to see who could piss the longest and it was Emer. She was the champion woman pisser of 123