On another occasion I found a ball, one that had never been lost. A boy, hoping to get me in front of my father, claimed the ball. My mother on this occasion sat in judgment.
"Where did you get the ball?" she asked the boy. He couldn't remember. She probed for the truth, but neither of us would give in. When all efforts failed she cut the ball in half and gave each a piece!
"Nixt time I'll tell yer Dah," the boy said when he got outside, "he makes you squeal like a pig."
When times were good—when work and wages got a little ahead of hunger, which was seldom, Anna baked her own bread. Three kinds of bread she baked. "Soda,"—common flour bread, never in the shape of a loaf, but bread that lay flat on the griddle; "pirta oaten"—made of flour and oatmeal; and "fadge"—potato bread. She always sung while baking and she sang the most melancholy and plaintive airs. As she baked and sang I stood beside her on a creepie watching the process and awaiting the end, for at the close of each batch of bread I always had my "duragh"—an extra piece.
When hunger got ahead of wages the family bread was bought at Sam Johnson's bakery. The journey to Sam's was full of temptation to me. Hungry and with a vested interest in the loaf on my arm, I was not over punctilious in details of the moral law. Anna pointed out the opportunities of such a journey. It was a chance to try my mettle with the arch tempter. It was a mental gymnasium in which moral muscle got strength. There wasn't in all Ireland a mile of highway so well paved with good intentions. I used to start out, well keyed up morally and humming over and over the order of the day. When, on the home stretch, I had made a dent in Sam's architecture, I would lay the loaf down on the table, good side toward my mother. While I was doing that she had read the story of the fall on my face. I could feel her penetrating gaze.
"So he got ye, did he?"
"Aye," I would say in a voice too low to be heard by my father.
The order at Sam's was usually a sixpenny loaf, three ha'pence worth of tea and sugar and half an ounce of tobacco.
There were times when Barney had no work for my father, and on such occasions I came home empty-handed. Then Jamie would go out to find work as a day laborer. Periods like these were glossed over by Anna's humor and wit. As they sat around the table, eating "stir-about" without milk, or bread without tea, Jamie would grunt and complain.
"Aye, faith," Anna would say, "it's purty bad, but it's worse where there's none at all!"