He stopped, ashamed to speak further.

He thought of the filthy boxcar without windows where he and the other men had slept on straw bags placed on boards across boxes; the first time he had entered the car the stench had choked him; heaps of rubbish covered the ground around the cars and among those heaps were rusty tin boxes propped up with stones where the men cooked. When it rained the men’s clothes were drenched and they had to sleep like that. . . doors closed at night, no windows, no air, the coverings live with vermin. That’s how his lungs had gone. From five in the morning to noon with nothing in their stomachs but coffee to start them, they labored like beasts until they were given a sausage and bread and then went back to work. In such an existence there was no religion, no God. Serafino from time to time in Chicago and other towns had had the cheap and ugly women who were as hard as the money they traded in and as bitter as the despair they caused him. But none of this would he tell his listeners.

Serafino looked up at his friends. They were solemn and grave, as befit people who hear such a story and see a man who has sickened and come back to them. Yet what had they to offer that was any better than the misery of the American railroad gangs? They recognized their common fate as the poor of the earth and were silent for a time as they contemplated it.

“How is America to look at?” asked Carlo after a few minutes.

“Ah, my friend,” said Serafino, his mouth finally breaking into a smile. “It is immense—there is land there for everyone, and pastures and forests. The rivers are like the sea between here and Sicily. You cannot imagine how far the land goes, and it is green, not yellow and dried as in our plains. And I have seen heaps of fruit under the apple trees—so much fruit that people don’t bother gathering it all—it just lies there. And here, as a boy, I was whipped for taking an apple from the pharmacist’s tree. Yes, for some people it will be a promised land. . . . It is a place where, if you speak the language, you call everyone ‘you’; there is no special way of addressing the priest or the boss. And they say that this land was named for an Italian. That is what I learned there.”

The next day, when Umbertina had gone off with the goats, Serafino came by and spoke for her. It seemed to Carlo Nenci that Providence had sent Serafino back just for this purpose. But it was unseemly to be too quick to agree, and he offered instead a courteous objection.

“She is young, Serafì, like your daughter,” he said.

“She is a good and strong girl and she can come to me as she is, without dowry. I will purchase the linen that is brought to the marriage.”