That night, gazing at the fire of his friend’s hearth, Serafino sat with a Carlo who was the same as before, no richer and with no money in his pocket, but a Carlo who was the head of his home, the father of a family, and a man who still tilled the soil of his native land. He was, in the light of the village world they both knew, a man following his given destiny. He would live and die where he had been born, hearing only the tongue he knew and seeing only the faces that were familiar to him. Serafino, tasting the coarse dark bread of Castagna, the sharp goat cheese, and the strong sour red wine that was saved for such occasions, savored it all and thought of how no food of the New World had ever eased his hunger.

“Tell us, Serafì, how it was,” said Carlo.

After a long pause of looking into the fire and collecting his thoughts, Serafino spoke the idea that had accumulated in his years of exile. “It is a strange thing,” he said slowly, shaking his head; “here I was nothing, a poor devil with no flock, no land, no family . . . waiting in the marketplace each day to see if I would get work and would eat that night. But over there I was less than nothing. Here I had a name, and in the memory of people of this village I had been a shepherd and a follower of Garibaldi.

“There I wasn’t even a Christian with a name, but just a pair of arms for the bosses to trade off. I was already promised to the railroads to pay back my passage. I didn’t speak the language of America, it was the padrone who spoke for me. Every week we gave him the bossatura, the boss’s part of our pay, because we can’t speak to the Americans, we are dumb as animals and treated so. The Americans have nothing to do with us. And I have heard it said that America is named for one of us, an Italian! We paid the boss for the tools we worked with, the rotten food we ate, the stinking railroad cars we slept in, and even the train fare to where the railroad company wanted us to work. And still I saved money!” Here he stopped to cough into his handkerchief and to shake his head in disbelief. “That’s the difference, my friend—money. Here you have miseria all your life and with nothing saved at the end. There you have hell, but at the end you’re saved because you have money.”

Serafino rubbed his forehead as he gazed down in the fire and shook his head from side to side, as if to activate the memories he had put from him. Umbertina, all the while, stayed in the shadows and listened while she kneaded the loaves from the chestnut flour.

“Where did you live?” Carlo asked.

“In the middle of that enormous land. We slept in the railroad cars and worked, that was our life. To eat we were given company bread, so bad it would turn the stomach of the goats in your pen,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the grating. “Some nights the tears would roll down my face as I remembered the clean air of the mountains where I pastured the sheep. I thought of the good cheese I made, of our bread . . . of wine. I thought of what a bad life it is for a man in a strange land that despises him, in a place with no family to take care of him when he is sick or to remember him when he is gone. What good then is money?”