When Serafino’s American savings were gone he found he needed loans for farm animals and seed. These were charged at high interest. Then there was a fall in the price of farm goods on the market, while the dread land tax, the catasto, stayed as high as ever. To that was added the tax on draft animals, and to these taxes that Rome took were added the supertaxes of the provinces and communes.

Serafino struggled to keep up the installments. Then, in desperation, he began to hire out as a day laborer, going each dawn to the marketplace in Soveria Mannelli to be bid for. And Umbertina, with Giacomo and Benedetto kept in sight at the field’s edge, took to working their land alone.

Two more pregnancies ended in miscarriages before the third son, Paolo, was born. Umbertina’s strength ebbed and Serafino’s confidence was gone.

“It is time to think of leaving,” she told him.

Serafino resisted. What would he have to leave his sons, he would ask in anguish of Umbertina, if they gave up their land and went to America?

“Don’t worry,” she reassured him. “You gave your sweat and muscle to that new country—now it can give something back to you for your sons.”

Slowly, he was persuaded. This was the bitter lesson of his life that he must swallow for the sake of the sons already here and for the children who would come after.

Reluctantly he agreed to leave: “Italy doesn’t want us—it makes us bandits or beggars in our own country. It pretends to give us land in exchange for our money and work, then takes it back with taxes and interest while the rich are exempt.”

“We cannot live here,” said Umbertina. No longer were there the old communal rights of gathering wood, food, or stone on feudal lands as she had done in her years as a goat herder.

And though Serafino marveled at her willingness to go, it had all been decided in her long before, at the time she agreed to be his wife. It was a hope she had always kept alive within her even during the years of trying to succeed on the land.

When the time came for departure from the little stone house where she had lived seven years with Serafino and where her sons had been born, the scent of rosemary filled the air from the bush which had grown from the shoot Nelda gave her. How do I know, she thought, if there will be rosemary where I am going? She dug a root and carefully wrapped it close to the dampness of Paolo’s swaddling clothes. Just to be sure, she would take her own with them. And she took the tin heart, which had always been at her side reminding her that she had made her choice. The marriage spread was packed with their few clothes, the whole covered by a sheet and looking like a bundle of laundry.

It was she who reassured Serafino about their leavetaking. He no longer wore American clothes, nor had American money in his pocket. He wore his country rig of years past—the high pants held up by a thick leather belt around his waist, and his shoulders covered by a mantle. And still he worried, remembering the crowded chaotic streets of New York when he landed there fifteen years earlier: the wagons, the throngs of hurrying people, the miles of buildings, and not a field in sight. How would Umbertina, who had lived all her life in the open, live in New York? But they had to go, and this time it was for good.