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Toronto, Chicago, and California.
    Before Joe and Tom boarded, Grattan presented them each with a twenty-five-cent cigar. “There you are, boys. Smoke the best!”
    Joe felt his throat narrow once more with that metallic feeling as he shook hands with Sojer Boy. But he knew he had done his best for them. They were safe, and leaving behind the thin, acidic soil of the clearings. They were all on their way to richer ground. Hope and Kate were waving and laughing merrily as the locomotive chuffed steam and sucked air into its brakes and Negro porters hurried the last passengers aboard. The whistle howled, the engine gave a tug, steel couplings clanked up and down the length of the train, and the cars began rolling. Grattan and the girls ran alongside for a while, and Tom and Joe hung out the window and waved for as long as they could see them before falling into their seats.
    At Montreal they boarded a Delaware and Hudson train. Later that night along the shore of Lake Champlain, while the Little Priest slept, Joe sat in the smoking car puffing his twenty-five-cent cigar, savouring a sense of majestic loneliness and freedom as the train raced south to New York City. He had done all he could to ensure that his brothers and sisters were safe and settled, but for himself he needed more than safety. He needed risks and danger and lots of room to grow, and that was why he would go out west.
    ~
    Stepping onto the platform at Grand Central Depot at seven o’clock in the morning, Joe and the Little Priest were swept along in a herd of businessmen and handsome, well-dressed girls hurrying through the tunnels, riding up the electric stairs, and pouring out into a street howling with motor cabs and buses. Joe sensed energy and wanton danger. Eager for a glimpse of the ocean, he thought he smelled the tang of salt water on a bright breeze smacking up Lexington Avenue.
    They both wanted breakfast. At a diner on Third Avenue they sat guarding their baggage at their feet while a Negro rattled handfuls of silverware on the counter and a waiter sloshed coffee into two mugs.
    â€œGosh, Joe, it all sure moves fast.” The Little Priest spoke so softly Joe could barely hear him over the clatter. They had fed at cookhouses packed elbow to elbow with Frenchmen, but never in such a hectic, steamy place as this. Joe ordered ham and eggs for them both from a greasy menu card. Dozens of strangers were gulping coffee, cramming doughnuts into their mouths, and leaving nickel tips.
    â€œDo you suppose it’s like this in the Bronx, Joe?”
    Looking at Tom, he noticed for the first time his resemblance to their mother. The Little Priest had always been an anxious child, shy of strangers and especially terrified of the bunkhouse men and hoboes who roamed the Pontiac in logging season. When he admitted he was afraid of being “stolen,” Joe had reassured him that boys were never stolen except in the old stories of witches, Whiteboys, and roving spirits, but there was nothing much he could say to adjust the flame of such caustic anxiety. Nonetheless, the Little Priest had slept soundly aboard the train while Joe sat up the whole night, watching the dark country flash by, and the quick, yellow-lit platforms of upstate towns. And the Little Priest was now eating ham and eggs with gusto — Joe had observed that his brother’s anxieties rarely interfered with his appetite.
    â€œI guess you’ll get used to it,” Joe said.
    New Yorkers swam in the noise and rush of the diner as naturally as trout in a swift stream. The brazen babble of voices, the clatter of dishes, the florid steam of a dozen steel coffee urns — it was all ordinary and entirely normal as far as these people were concerned, a complex of violent sensualities so commonplace that their faces looked, if anything, bored.
    Unfolding a sheet of gilt-edged cream notepaper, Joe checked Father Lillis’s instructions, which were written in thick black