Lodgings had been found for the Longobardis in a three-story wooden structure which, they were amazed to learn, Annicharico the baker owned. It was like a palazzo—wood, yes, but still high as a palazzo.

On Labor Day, a few days after their arrival, a large festa was organized in Muskieville, just across the river from Cato, on the lands Giovanni Muzzi rented at the farm of James Brown. They pulled up to a field beyond Brown’s farmhouse and barn, and there were other wagons full of people to welcome them. The calabresi of Cato, both familiar and unfamiliar, expressed their feelings of satisfaction at the safe arrival of more of them in the exchange of sarcasms and twittings that buoyed up spirits, recharged confidence, and allayed the sense of lost birthplace that the sight of newcomers always brought to mind.

It was a beautiful day of late summer, one of those unique upstate days when skies are perfectly limpid and the horizon stretches far and nature is a marvel of beauty with just the hint of being at its peak and therefore fleeting. Umbertina gave thanks in her heart as she looked over the fields and saw what the earth produced here. Ci siamo!—we’ve made it—she thought over and over.

Gino Gualtiero had his accordion and was playing a lively tune, the women were putting out the coperte in the fields to spread the breads and cheese and salamis upon, and Domenico Saccà was making a fire to boil water in a cauldron for the heaps of still-unshucked corn next to him. The children ran about gathering field daisies. Umbertina reveled in the feel of sun and in the clean air. She looked with pleasure at Giovanni’s tilled rows of tomatoes, well staked and growing fuller and rounder than she had ever seen tomatoes before; beans climbing up poles, peppers, eggplants, even the feathery rows of finocchio and the dense clusters of rughetta, basil, and escarole; and he had tall stalks of broccoli and cabbage, and beyond these a small vine of grapes carefully trained along stakes.

There were no walls or gates around James Brown’s farmhouse, nor around the other farms they had passed on their way from the city. Everything was open and peaceful, and Umbertina compared it silently to the walls with jagged bits of glass embedded in the top that separated a landowner’s place in Calabria from the landless. “This is what we need,” Umbertina told Serafino. “A field to grow our food on.”

“And here when you hoe the ground you can truly say everything is a mouthful for me and mine and no one else,” said Giovanni Muzzi.

“And what about him?” asked Serafino, nodding toward Brown’s farmhouse.

“All I have to pay him is the rent—not half my crop like in the old country. And we swap, me and the American. He gives me eggs and milk for some of my vegetables.”

The others nodded, recognizing the good fortune of being in such a land.