Then, finally, out again. Christmas Eve day all bundled into the car for the trip through falling snow, fine blowing flakes dancing as if each pellet were unsprung upon its own single course of air. To Littleton where Joey shopped with the children and Jamie wrapped in a greatcoat and muffler, still coughing, his legs still spindly—a strawman— went to the Thayer Hotel and spoke with the desk clerk and made half a dozen calls from the public telephone and then down the street to the barbershop for a haircut and to collect some money held there for him, making arrangements as best he could. A month out of it and his trade was falling off by half. He made promises he wasn’t sure he could keep but had no choice but to make. Then small shopping of his own: matching mother-and-daughter lockets on fine gold chains and a twin-bladed pocketknife for the boy. Back to the car where he ran the engine for heat and sat sipping from the leather-covered flask out of the glove box. Watching the figures moving up and down the street in the dim gray of falling snow. Waiting for those three. Smoked a cigarette and killed his coughing with a taste from the flask. Saw them then, Joey carrying Claire against the piling snow, packages in her other arm. Foster beside his mother, both arms around wrapped boxes. The red paper and green ribbons framing the boy’s cold-red face. Then all of them in the car, Joey’s breath warm against him as she leaned to touch her cold lips to his face.

So they had Christmas. Snow kept falling. Late in the day he forced his way out to the barn. The horse stalls empty the three years he’d owned the Packard. He sat in the cold on an upturned crate and smoked, not even bothering to gaze at the moldering pile of old hay, not needing to envision the eight crates of bottled whiskey buried there. A fraction of what he needed. Which meant the long drive out to Binter’s farm and then to the rented basement in Bethlehem where he would bottle the whiskey. Then the deliveries—at night now, with the wartime prohibition still in effect until demobilization and the Anti-Saloon Leaguers boiling over the country like a hot tar. Volstead was inevitable. All which meant hustle. Hustle and duck and dodge. What had been more sport than effort now held a weight and he was tired when he could not be, weak where he could not afford weakness.