After Garibaldi’s troops disbanded, Serafino returned to Castagna, and since he no longer had a flock became a day laborer by putting himself out for hire each day in the market square at Soveria Mannelli. It was the lowest of all the castes of misery, lower than the herders and sharecroppers; it was the lot of those who owned nothing.

Often as he waited in the square he would see Domenico Saccà, who was always agitating and talking about injustice.

“Garibaldi was betrayed,” said the fiery shoemaker. “He will not be sent here to govern and oversee the partition of lands, as he thought. He has been sent into exile by the man he made king. The troops who are coming here now are not the old ones, of Garibaldi’s Thousand. They are the king’s troops being sent to stop the protests and help with the conscription. As for me, I will leave now—for America.”

“America,” Serafino had repeated, his voice full of wonder.

“You can go too, Serafi,” Domenico had exclaimed, his voice sharp with urgency. “What keeps you here? You are not senza sale—witless—like the ones who stick here.”

“What good could it do me to leave?” asked the shepherd.

“Listen! There has to be one place in all the world where a good man, a strong man like you, can start fresh and be better than he was.”

Serafino was a mild man, a man of sentiment attached to the place where he had been born and to what was familiar to him. He lived in a poor shack on the edge of the village and his day work kept him alive, although there was never enough extra to think of buying sheep or even taking a wife. But as the years passed and nothing changed, he slowly came to accept the idea that he would leave. Along the coasts were agents who told of work for immigrants to America the minute they got off the boat in Brazil or Argentina or New York, for railroads were being built in all those countries. The agents would even advance the cost of passage, to be paid back from salaries.

Serafino chose New York because Domenico Saccà had gone there, and because in his time with the Redshirts he had heard the story of how the general, before his triumph, had gone in exile near Nuova Yorka, where he made candles until he could get back to Italy.

Now, many years later, walking with Umbertina, Serafino thought of the night he had told Carlo Nenci that he would go to America for work. The little girl Umbertina and her mother had been baking loaves of chestnut bread on the hearth, and Umbertina’s father had said sourly, “Tutto il mondo è paese—it will be the same everywhere, even America is hard for such as we. The poor have no place to rest except the grave.”

“But if a man wants work he should have it. If a man can earn, he can change,” Serafino said slowly, trying to repeat in his own words what he had heard so many times from the shoemaker.