His name was Seamus Kerr, and when they took him from the village, he was thirty-one, with hands hardened by peat and stone, a body already worn down by hunger, and eyes that had never learned to look too far ahead because the poor, when they grow up in a place that tightens around their throat, get used to measuring life in days, not years. Their village lay out west, low, near bogs and small fields that had once produced potatoes and now produced only coughs, mud, and death. The land had stopped smelling like harvest. It smelled of illness. It smelled of rotting plants, wet soil, empty pots, and people who went to bed early not from tiredness but to deceive their hunger until sleep took them.