She had taken the children to the lavatory on the train and it was clean and unsmelling. Everything is better, she thought. It is true that you can start fresh.

And her optimism was confirmed by what she saw from the window; this was truly a new, fresh world. Ci siamo! she thought. We’re here.

Surely now they would not be preyed upon. She had seen good country all around her and people who lived in little towns. Surely now there would be an end to the interpreters who had been needed at every step of the way and who had preyed on their ignorance and trust—from Ranucci their paesano, who had warned them against putting their savings in an American bank, to the Italian priest who had threatened them if they let their children go to the Evangelists in the summer school mission tent where they would be taught to read and write English, and the brewery agents who sold them beer by telling them that the air in America was so strong that they all had to drink beer—children, too—to survive the hard winters.

They crossed the river at a large and imposing town, Albany. And then the country, as they proceeded westward along the Mohawk River and Erie Canal, became even greener and wider. She had the sense of vastness of continent, of lands stretching for immense distances and forests not yet felled. There was a still-uncultivated look to the land and the great luxury of many fields given over entirely to pasturing cows, not made to produce beyond their fertility. Finally she got her first glimpse of corn. “Grano turco,” Serafino said as he pointed to the tall stalks of ripened corn at its prime, and she thought it was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. The richness! Fields could be left with patches of trees between them or whole strands of woods, blocking out her view of the river. Here the fields weren’t rocky, walled, dusty patches with thin rivulets of irrigation as they were in Calabria, where nothing could be allowed to lie fallow and recover its strength. There farming had been plundering, sacking the dry earth beyond its endurance; here she saw such abundance of wild green that it put her soul at ease—it would never dry out and force them to be uprooted again.

“The first thing we will do is get a piece of land to grow our food,” Umbertina said.

Serafino nodded, satisfied to see her serene at last. He patted her hand, tough and hardened now like his. And she smiled fondly at the man she had made her destiny.