Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

Author:Frank McCourt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780684845241
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1999-10-15T10:00:00+00:00

THE PLOT

When the war started and food was rationed in Ireland the government offered poor families plots of land in fields outside Limerick. Each family could have a sixteenth of an acre, clear it and grow whatever vegetables they liked.

My father applied for a plot out the road in Rosbrien and the government lent him a spade and a fork for the work. He took my brother Malachy and me to help him. When my brother Michael saw the spade he cried and wanted to go too but he was only four and he would have been in the way. My father told him, Whisht, that when we came back from Rosbrien we’d bring him berries.

I asked my father if I could carry the spade and I was soon sorry because Rosbrien was miles outside Limerick. Malachy had started out carrying the fork but my father took it away from him because of the way he was swinging it and nearly knocking people’s eyes out. Malachy cried till my father said he’d let him carry the spade all the way home. My brother soon forgot the fork when he saw a dog who was willing to chase a stick for miles till he frothed white stuff with the weariness and lay down on the road looking up with the stick between his paws and we had to leave him.

When my father saw the plot he shook his head. Rocks, he said, rocks and stones. And all we did that day was to make a pile by the low wall along the road. My father used the spade to keep digging up rocks and even though I was only nine I noticed two men in the next plots talking and looking at him and laughing in a quiet way. I asked my father why and he gave a small laugh himself and said, The Limerickman gets the dark earth and the man from the North gets the rocky plot.

We worked till the darkness came and we were so weak with hunger we couldn’t pick up another rock. We didn’t mind one bit if he carried the fork and spade and wished he could carry us, too. He said we were big boys, good workers, our mother would be proud of us, there would be tea and fried bread, and he marched ahead with his long strides till halfway home he stopped suddenly. Your brother Michael, he said. We promised him berries. We’ll have to go back out the road to the bushes.

Malachy and I complained so much that we were tired and could hardly walk another step that my father told us go home, he’d get the berries himself. I asked why couldn’t he get the berries tomorrow and he said he had promised Michael berries for tonight, not tomorrow, and away he went with the spade and fork on his shoulder.

When Michael saw us he started to cry, Berries, berries. He stopped when we told him, Dad is out the

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