And there were plenty of visitors. Before he passed his mantle to Calvin, Eden had been a powerful and respected medicine man. Sure it was changing in the seventies, with the young folk sneering at the old ways, but even they came to him occasionally when they couldn’t get a girl or were worried they had venereal disease. One guy had even come asking for cowboy boots; a young lanky kid, with big flared Levi’s and a denim vest over his T-shirt. Seemed he couldn’t afford the boots he’d seen in town and couldn’t figure out a way of stealing them, so he came to ask Eden how to get them. Calvin had thought he’d be shown the door, but the old man had leaned back in his chair and smiled.

‘You got to walk off the ones you got on, and give thanks.’

‘What you talkin’ about?’ the kid had asked.

‘What I say. Don’t eat nothin’ for four days, just water, then walk till your boots wear through, keep your heart pure and the spirits will give you the boots when you give them thanks.’

The boy had made a tutting sound and looked at him like he was crazy, but Calvin had caught a look in his eye that told him the boy believed Eden. A week later Calvin heard that the kid had won sixty dollars at bingo, and next time he saw him at the community centre pool hall, he was kicking the boards with a pair of silver-capped cowboy boots that would set your heart racing. Calvin had told Eden who just wheezed out a laugh.

‘All you got to do is say thanks the way they want. Boots be nothin’ to the spirits.’

The women were never out of there. His linoleum, with its patterns of fish and suns, was as shiny as linoleum could get without wearing through to the wood. They scrubbed anything that didn’t move and Eden watched them, smoking his pipe and nodding in his big plastic chair. And Calvin liked to cook for him.

It was one of the few times the two men were alone and that was important to Calvin. It was those times that Eden would tell him things, things that helped him understand why he’d chosen Calvin as his apprentice and not Moses. He struggled to piece it together from the old man’s memories, which became more disjointed and rambling as he got older.

‘You don’t be picked, Calvin. You be born a shaman. I be born Walks Alone, and I don’t have no choice in it. Change my name don’t change nothin’ about what I got to do. A man can change his name all he likes. Changes nothin’.’

Eden had made a noise in his throat then, sucking up snot from the back there and swallowing it.