The place stank of rubber from which the rubber overshoes were made. Sylvia's post came just after the galoshes emerged from the mold. She painted a red ring around the top of each one. Had the firm been able to train a dog to do the job, it would have. That failing, it grudgingly paid her.

When she'd worked in a mackerel-canning plant, she'd been able to operate the machine that glued gaudy labels to cans almost without thinking about it; sometimes, when she was lucky, she would hardly notice the time going by between getting to the factory and dinner or between dinner and going home. She hadn't had that luxury at the shoe factory where she'd been working when George was killed. If she didn't pay attention to what she was doing there, the powerful needle on the electric sewing machine would tear up her hand. She'd seen it happen to operators who'd been at the place longer than she'd been alive. A moment's lapse was all it took.

All that could happen with a moment's lapse here was her ending up with red paint on her hand, not red blood. Still, she couldn't let her mind wander, as she'd been able to do in the canning plant. What she did here wasn't simple repetitive motion, the way that had been. She had to pay attention to painting the rings precisely. If she didn't, the foreman started barking at her.

Frank Best wasn't a hardened old Tartar like Gustav Krafft, the foreman at the shoe factory where she'd worked, who gave a walking demonstration of why the limeys and frogs thought of Germans as Huns. Best's style was more the sly dig: "Thought you were going to slip that one by me, did you?" was a favorite remark.

The other difference between the two men was that Krafft had been too old to serve in the Army. Frank Best wore a Soldiers' Circle pin with the year 1904 on it. That being his conscription class, he was only a handful of years older than Sylvia. He was also single, and convinced he was the greatest gift to women God had ever set on the planet.

A lot of women who worked in the galoshes factory were widows, some still wearing mourning, others not. Most of them, like Sylvia, heartily despised the foreman. "Like to put a certain part of him in the mold-the size-two mold," Sarah Wyckoff, one of those widows, said at dinner on a day when Best was being particularly obnoxious. "Wouldn't need nothin' bigger."

That produced a good set of giggles. Sylvia said, "No, for goodness' sake, you don't want him vulcanized there. He'd never keep quiet about it then." More giggles rose.

"If so many of us hate him," said May Cavendish, another widow, "why does he think he's so bully?"

"He's a man," Sarah Wyckoff said, as if she expected that to cover everything. By the way the other women nodded, it probably did.

May Cavendish tossed her head; her blond curls bounced on her shoulders. "What frosts me is that some of the girls do like him."

"I can't imagine that anybody would really like him," Sylvia said with a shudder. Her companions nodded. She went on, "But if he says, 'Be nice to me or go look for another job,' some of the girls are going to be nice to him. Times are hard. Believe me, I know."

"We all know, sweetheart," Sarah said. "If he said anything like that to me, though, I'd break him in half." She was built like a longshoreman; Sylvia didn't think she meant it any way but literally.

"There ought to be a law," Sylvia said. She'd had that thought before, when she lost her job at the canning plant because she'd had to stay home and tend to her children after they came down with the chicken pox.

"There ought to be a lot of things that there ain't," Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. "If I was Teddy Roosevelt-"

"You'd look silly with a mustache, Sarah, and you haven't got enough teeth to be TR," May Cavendish said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, scraped a match on the sole of her shoe, got the cigarette lighted, and blew out a creditable smoke ring. Then she coughed. "Sorry. I'm still getting the hang of this."

"Doesn't it make people think you're fast?" Sylvia asked.

May shook her head. "Not the way it would have before the war," she said, and drew on the cigarette again. The coal glowed red. She let the smoke go without showing off this time. "It's not like it's a big, smelly cigar or anything. It's not like it was hooch, either. You don't get drunk or anything-you feel better about things for a little while, that's all." She extended the pack toward Sylvia. "Want to try one?"

"Sure. Why not?" Sylvia said. "It's not like they can hurt you or anything." She took a cigarette. May Cavendish struck another match. Sylvia didn't drag deeply on the cigarette, the way May had done. She drew in a cautious mouthful of smoke-or so she thought. When she tried to suck it down into her lungs, she hacked and wheezed and started to choke.

"Very same thing happened to me the first time I tried," May assured her. "It gets easier, believe me it does. You get used to it."

Sylvia's mouth tasted as if someone had just doused a camp-fire in there. She stared at the cigarette in dismay. "Why would you want to get used to it?" she asked, and coughed again. But she felt tingly all the way out to her fingers and toes, tingly and light-headed in a strange and pleasant sort of way. Ever so cautiously, she took another puff.

It still tasted bad. It made her chest burn. But the tingles and that good feeling in the middle of her brain got stronger.

"Don't do too much the first time," May Cavendish advised her. "You can get sick if you do. Think about whether you like it or not. It's not like cigarettes are expensive, or anything like that."

"That's true," Sylvia said. "They've come down since the war ended, too. I've noticed that, even if I don't usually buy them."

May nodded. "And the tobacco's better now. It's the one good thing you can say about the Rebs-they grow better tobacco than we do. Some of the stuff they were selling while the war was still on… Honey, I swear to Jesus they were sweeping the horseballs off the street and wrapping paper around 'em."

"People kept smoking, though," Sarah Wyckoff said.

"Why not?" Sylvia said. "It's not a bad thing, and May's right-it does make you feel nice for a little bit." Despite saying that, she had no great urge to smoke the rest of the cigarette May Cavendish had given her. She let it fall to the ground and crushed it with her foot. Maybe she'd acquire the habit and maybe she wouldn't. If she did, she'd do it slowly. If she tried to do it in a hurry, she had the feeling she would get sick instead.

"Time to get back to work," Sarah said, "or Frank'll start sweet-talking us again." She rolled her eyes to show how much she looked forward to that.

When Sylvia went back into the plant, it didn't stink so badly of rubber, or so it seemed. After a while, she realized the cigarette had numbed her sense of smell. That seemed a good reason to start smoking all by itself.

The line began to move. Sylvia painted red rings on a pair of galoshes. The machinery sent them down the line to the next worker, who would trim off extra rubber. Sylvia dipped her brush in the paint can and painted more rings.

Lucien Galtier was the sort to enjoy summer while it lasted. Up here, close to the St. Lawrence, a few miles outside the town of Riviere-du-Loup, it did not last long. The farmer did not hold that against summer. It was what it was. He accepted along with enjoying.

He accepted weeds, too, but he did not enjoy them. At the moment, he was hoeing the potato patch. When he saw a bit of green of the wrong shade and in the wrong place, the hoe lashed out without his conscious direction. The decapitated weed toppled.

"Strike them all dead, cherpapa," Lucien's son, Georges, said from a couple of rows over, seeing the hoe come down. At eighteen, Georges overtopped his father by several inches, and was wider through the shoulders, too-Lucien's strength was of the wiry, enduring sort. Georges' humor was also wider than his father's; he enjoyed playing the buffoon, while Lucien met the world with irony.