Yet she did not have to see him to know that he, too, existed and had to be fed. He had men who came and gathered taxes in his name while the price of food got higher. “Ladro governo,” her father muttered about everything, even about the weather or crop failures in his fields. The thieving government that took everything and gave back nothing—not a road or a school or a sewer—was to blame for their misfortunes. It was the ladro governo that took bread from the mouths of the poor instead of giving out the lands Garibaldi promised when he told the peasants their day had finally come. The ladro governo taxed the poor man’s working mule but not the rich man’s carriage horse. The ladro governo had sent Garibaldi into exile and made land distribution available only to those rich enough to buy great quantities.

“It was better when it was worse,” the people of Castagna and the other villages said.

And they suffered as well from nature’s heavy hand: from earthquakes, landslides, floods, and droughts against which their prayers and processions rarely prevailed. Umbertina remembered in her tenth year when the earth shook and the tremor had ruined crops and widened the cracks of the poor hovels in the village, knocking the worst into rubble and loosening more stones in the old abbey. Don Antonio called it God’s retribution for the sacrilege done against His Church by those who in thought or deed had helped Rome be taken from the pope. Whatever it was, it worked a sense of helplessness in the people: It would always be thus—their land worn out, rent with shocks and tremors; a faraway government in Rome celebrating a victory that was meaningless for Calabria; and with it all, a priest, like all priests, who preached God’s wrath and never His mercy. Were they never to have hope? The only “Italy” that would mean anything to them would be not this old land with a new king, but whatever place would give a man bread for his family. They would leave.

Already the shepherds of the Sila, who in winter took their flocks to the coast, had come back and told of what they had heard and seen. The men from the north who were putting down rail for the train line said that many were leaving; the fishermen told of taking people up to Naples in their fishing boats so they could sail from there to America.

It was then that Serafino the shepherd left for America. He was the first from Castagna, and he was bound to go, Umbertina’s father said. He had no family. He would be taken in the conscription. And for what? To defend a country that had taken away his pastures and given him taxes instead? Besides, his life had always been difficult up in the mountains with his sheep. He lived alone, nourishing himself from the cheese he made by boiling the sheeps’ milk in a great iron kettle and fermenting it with the wild herbs he found. He carved wooden spoons and pipes and made reed flutes to pass the time, but it was a lonely life for a man; if he were to marry, his family would remain below in the village and he would see them only at the change of seasons when he brought his flock down.