The Soddy       At the United Irish Cultural Center, San Francisco   My father rose and raised his glass, and everyone froze — oh, here it comes, here it comes. He smiled and waited, gathered himself. “Heaven,”   he said. “When they left Cork, they all thought they were going to heaven. Well, they never got there.” He paused, scanned our eyes. “They got   Nebraska.” Beyond this hand-me-down line the same old story — the little they’d brought in battered trunks, the troubles they’d found, nine   months of winter and three months of hell, pitiless banshee winds and barely a sign of life. Never give in, never admit   defeat — never. Not when the locusts come, nor the bankers . . .                                   When he got to the bit about the soddy, he stopped — and for some   time he stared back at it: the soddy, dug into a low hillside, no trees no lumber, just the soil and the sod and the bugs   and the bones, no rain till nothing but rain and what’ll we do for supper, just a jug of sour milk and cornbread gone green,   a woman weeping, Henry, I’ll not live in a goddamned hole, so how do you mean to prove up?                         She walked thirteen miles to give   her confession — a Wexford priest whose mumbles breathed incense and whiskey . . .                                                       Six kids. Five lived. Moved on. Proved up. Made a home of from.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont June 2014