The Lasting Bond with Joey

This flow follows Isherwood Williams’s devotion to Joey, from the recognition of unusual promise to grief and a more modest understanding of the future.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

A Shared Glance

A Shared Glance A father recognizes a difference Isherwood Williams notices Joey following the adults’ discussion closely. When father and son exchange a glance, he feels that Joey understands him in a way the others do not. Hope turns personal The boy’s intelligence becomes bound up with his father’s hopes for The Tribe. Isherwood Williams begins to see Joey not only as a son but as a possible bearer of civilization’s future.

The Young Reader

The Young Reader Learning eagerly Joey reads beyond the level of the other children and responds to mathematical and verbal puzzles. Isherwood Williams encourages his curiosity while worrying that intellectual growth is outrunning his physical strength. A complicated affection The father recognizes Joey’s insecurity beneath his competitiveness. His teaching is also an attempt to give the boy the understanding and companionship he himself lacked.

The Library Visit

The Library Visit An inheritance of books Isherwood Williams takes Joey into the city library, showing him a storehouse of knowledge from the Old Times. Joey asks whether he can read all the books. A dangerous hope Joey imagines that reading might let him make the dead electric lights work again. His father feels pride and fear, sensing the distance between an inspiring ambition and what one child can accomplish.

The Child of the Blessing

The Child of the Blessing A mind beyond routine Joey devises new ways to solve puzzles, notices patterns, and invents riddles. Isherwood Williams sees the imaginative capacity to perceive what is absent as the basis of discovery. A fragile exceptionalism The father’s admiration grows into a private belief that Joey is specially destined. That belief may sustain hope, but it also risks turning a child into the answer to adult fears.

Grief Without a Successor

Grief Without a Successor A child lost Joey dies in the epidemic along with other children. Isherwood Williams cannot immediately bear the reality and wonders whether his deepest hope has disappeared with him. Hope revisited In later reflection, he accepts that Joey might not have overcome the forces shaping The Tribe. The love remains, but the imagined guarantee of a restored civilization falls away.

At the New Year gathering in Year 21

During the school years after Year 21

During the water crisis in Year 22

After Joey’s tenth birthday

During the Year 22 typhoid epidemic