Before

These were the people she came from, and she kept them the only way there was left to keep anyone, which was to go over them in her mind until the edges wore smooth.

Papa Joe was born in the coal country, in one of the small hard towns that Wyoming used up and left along the rail line. He grew up the way he was always telling them a person ought to grow up, outside, in the cold, hungry enough to know what food was worth. His father worked the mines and drank and was gentle only when he hunted, and so Joe learned to hunt to be near the gentle part of him. Poverty was just the weather where he came from. It taught him to live without, which was probably why, in the end, he outlasted them all.