All this went through Serafino’s mind as he walked with Umbertina to the village. His heart had been touched when he had left the main road from Soveria Mannelli and turned into the valley where the Corace flowed past the Norman ruins. Inside, barely visible, was the dim souvenir of some past civilization that long ago had frescoed the walls with the life of Our Lord. Serafino’s eye recognized and took in gratefully the pilasters and arches of the transept, the vaulted apse, the fading fresco, the ogival windows and portals—none of which he could name or identify, but which spoke to his heart as nothing in the New World had.

From the valley distance had softened the contours of Castagna, giving it a serene and nestled look among the trees on its height above—so unlike the hard, raw sight of the ugly wooden towns thrown up across those vast lands in the middle of America where he had lived and worked building railroads for six years. Even New York and Chicago gave a feeling of makeshift, of being temporarily put together quickly, rather than being chosen sites where men set out gardens and sanctuaries for their saints. The homes were flimsy, of wood, not thick-walled stone.

Now Serafino’s tubercular lungs breathed the mountain air and he was cheered by the sight of the enduring mountains, rivers, and forests, and by the hand of man in the grace of the abbey.

But the reality of Castagna was another vision: What he saw as he walked again in the dirt streets among the stone hovels was not the picturesque and distant view of centuries, but the ugly countenance of miseria close up.

What was he to believe? His heart had felt the beauty of Italy the moment he had touched her shore. He could not put words to what he felt: that no matter in what forsaken village there was the feel of a long bond with nature that gave meaning to the endurance of poor men and women. In America, the land was vast, and it was unknown and unshaped except for the frenzied hurtling across it of buildings and tracks such as Serafino laid. Unlike the solitude of the mountains where he had tended sheep, the solitude of America’s wide expanses was broken by the furor of men pushing the railroad through, putting up towns, looking for fortunes.

But he had forgotten what la miseria was until he saw it again.

Back in Calabria he saw again the burnt-out fields in the plains, the thin and bent contadini, the ports filled with people fleeing the misery. If America was consumed by an almost brutalizing energy, a drive to change the wilderness and tame it, here instead, his eyes told him, there was no change. Even though his own lungs harbored the disease of hardship, he was still shocked at the evidence of malaria, trachoma, and rickets among the people he passed on his way inland. He had forgotten.

And what was he to believe of himself? He brought two things to his village that they had never had there: the money in his pockets and the tuberculosis in his lungs. America had given him hard work and money until the depression came, when the Italian laborers were the first to be laid off. In exchange, he had given the new country the health of a once-strong man and his very soul in sadness.