To Ed, and to Ed’s mother, and to Ed’s older brother Michael, the old man had seemed to be immortal and indestructible and it was only when he had collapsed from a stroke in the middle of last year’s harvesting, felled in one of his own fields under a sky like boiling blue ink, that the family had come to understand at last that he wasn’t going to live for ever. Dan Hardesty, the creator of South Burlington Farm, the wealthiest, toughest man in Kingman County, Kansas, was only days away from death, and someone was going to have to take over.

Michael, as stubby and proud as his father, had been the legal and natural successor. During his teenage years, Michael had stayed on the farm, learning the modem and computerised business of growing wheat, while Ed, who was tall and wiry and thoughtful, like his maternal grandfather, gravitated away from the farm, and then the county, and eventually, the state. In the years of Kennedy and Johnson, flower-power and Vietnam, Ed had gone to Kansas University in Manhattan, Kansas, on a financial study course and then to Columbia Business College, and eventually made his way to New York, where he had been taken on by a smart new investment corporation called Blyth, Thalberg & Wong.

As a boy, Ed had always disliked the farm – maybe for no other reason than he knew it was never going to be his. The farm was all dust and heat and just like his father had been demanding of his mother, he had been equally demanding of Ed, as if he was trying to test him, and maybe break him. Whenever Ed had tried to slip out on a date with one of the girls from the neighbouring farms, or from town, his father had invariably caught him at the gate and given him some last-minute chore like folding sacks or sweeping up dust, so that if he ever made it to the girl’s house, he was always at least an hour late and perspiring, and prickly as a scarecrow with wheat chaff. One pretty and unkind young girl had nicknamed him Li’l Abner.

On the day before Dan Hardesty’s funeral, however, as the family were solemnly gathered on the farm to pay their last respects to the man who had built their lives for them, Ed’s whole existence had been turned upside down. Michael had been obliged to drive over to Wichita late in the afternoon for an urgent meeting with the bank. On the way back, just after midnight, he had tried to overtake a truck on route 54 where it crossed the South Ninnescah River, and he had failed to see another car coming towards him in the mist. The Kansas Highway Patrol had estimated the collision speed to be 125 mph, head-on.