“Those bastards don’t know what they’re doing,” Da says.

“You can’t cut off the work gangs before the harvest comes in,” a man behind me says. “People’ve still got to eat.”

I grunt in agreement.

“That’s the English for you,” Paddy Murphy says, from beside Da. “They’re sending us home to watch plants grow.”

The grumbles turn into shouts as the landlord’s bailiff comes riding up.

He trots his horse right into the middle of the group and the men quiet down. “I need five men for a job.”

He’s barely got the words out before I say, “I’ll do it.”

It takes less than five seconds for him to get workers together. From the fifty men clamoring to do whatever it is he needs done, he picks Paddy, Killian, Liam, Seamus and me.

Da tugs at my arm. “Let me go for you, Henry. You don’t know what he wants you to do.” A heavy tiredness pulls at him, bending his back and pitching his body to the right where he struggles to hold his shovel. Five years ago, when he broke his arm, I watched him split kindling one-handed with a single swing.

“No, Da,” I tell him. “You go on home.”

“Aye,” says Paddy beside us. “You’ll want to make a start with your waiting for the harvest.”

The five of us follow the bailiff to the Doyles’ place, and I get a prickling in my gut. John Doyle died in the spring leaving Mary to struggle alone with her four little ones.

From a burlap sack tied to the back of his saddle, the bailiff takes out poles and clubs and hands them to us.

“You can’t mean for us to be tumbling Mary’s home,” I say.

“She’s not paid her rent,” he says. “She’s been warned.”

“Don’t the landlords have enough?” Paddy says. “They have to go after widows and orphans now too?” He throws his club in the dirt, his flaming red hair matching his fiery temperament.

“They’re not orphans, they have their mother,” the bailiff says. “Now, either you tumble it, or I’ll get five others.”

Tumbling is what the landlords do to us when we can’t pay the rent. Our houses are knocked together into a tumbled heap, stone on stone, so that the tenants can’t sneak back in again once they’re out. It’s happening more and more, so that now there’re hundreds of tumbled homes sprinkled around the countryside.

All five of us are shuffling our feet and feeling wrong about it. But if we don’t do it, it won’t save her. He’ll have another eviction gang here in the time it takes to ride out and come back again. This hut is coming down today, no mistake. We might as well get the money for it.

“Are they still in there?” I ask.

“Of course they’re in there, Henry. Where else are they going to be?” says Paddy. He turns to the bailiff. “The Devil take you,” he says, but he picks up his club. “We’ll not knock it down on their heads.”