On a raw bright day the following spring with the ground thawed he was buried under high blown clouds down off the St. Lawrence, the shadows moving over the land like the hands of God, leaving her face intermittent with heat and chill as she stood beside her mother head to toe in black. Two days later they rode trains south from Sherbrooke, her mother following the trail in reverse of the letters that arrived over the winter from an attorney in Barre city offering attractive services in a suit against the quarry. Joey later came to understand her mother was traveling not only after the promise of money, some restitution for the life envisioned, but also fleeing from under the roof of her in-laws, the small village gossips and the glances of the single and married men of Saint-Camille.

For six months they lived in a modest hotel and ate cheese and day-old bread that Claire brought home from the bakery where she worked as a counter clerk. Leaving Joey then still Joy with a humpbacked woman with a small cottage set apart among the derelict rooming houses and failing shops along the riverfront, the woman who would slap Joey when she spoke French not English, cuffing her shoulder or the back of her head. There were a dozen other children kept thus and the older ones boys and girls both tortured the younger. It was there she learned that pain inflicted directly upon a penis immediately changed male behavior toward her. The girls were harder, more clever in cruelty. Joey watched them all, sure that watching would reveal how if not to please them at least to imitate.

Upon occasion known only to himself the attorney McCarson would arrive of an evening carrying a paper sack of licorice whips and hore-hound drops for Joey. He would consult quickly with her mother and then leave, to wait on the outer stairs while Claire quickly brushed out her hair and changed to her best dress and left Joey alone with the sack of candy. She would eat the licorice and feed the horehound one drop at a time out the small dormer window, watching the lozenge slide down the mossed shingles to lodge in the eavestrough or bounce clear into the street. For a couple of days after these nights out her mother would be pensive, her forehead working in quick bursts of thought, then after a little time would relax. And her chin would again tilt up and her eyes quicken leaving each day for work. As if, Joey told Jamie, she had again seized the future.

The suit failed. McCarson sent a clerk reading law in his office with this news. A week later himself arrived, a vast man of fine suits and a constant sheen to his face, florid, with a pouched neck. An eater of beef and pork and game. An appeal was proceeding. The key was not to despair. He knew these men. It was much like chess but Claire did not know chess. It was much like devising a new recipe, knowing the ingredients and knowing the end result aimed toward. You do not stop once you’ve begun. Where would any of us be if we did that? There was the question of his bill to date.