She opened her eyes at once. ‘Of course I’m awake,’ she said. She turned toward him and reached out to stroke his neck. ‘I never go to sleep before you, Johnny. I can’t somehow.’

They stayed on in Eliza’s tiny upstairs room. There wasn’t enough money to build a house, and anyway Jonathan was afraid for Sarah to be alone while she was pregnant. Eliza, somewhat to her own annoyance, didn’t worsen and die as she had so often predicted. In fact, with Carma’s future settled, she began to gain a little weight and something of the energy Jonathan remembered from years before.

‘Call me “mother”,’ she said to him one day.

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t know a good idea if it stood up and slapped your face, Preacher. You do as I say.’

‘Whatever happened to your baby? The little boy – what was his name? Netty? What happened to him?’

‘Went west.’

‘You can’t go west from here,’ he said irritably. ‘This is west.’

‘That’s what I told him. “I’m going west,” he said. Ain’t seen him since. You call me “mother”.’

Jonathan planned to be in Hannaville for the birth itself; he’d arranged for Dr Mundt, who lived in Walla Walla and charged five dollars a visit, to attend. Eliza disapproved. ‘Birthing ain’t got nothing to do with men,’ she said. But Jonathan’s word was law. Besides, he liked Burgess Mundt, a thin, stooped young man, and the only educated company for miles around. Burgess had taken a degree in philosophy before going into medical school, and he’d taken it at a time when philosophy departments still concerned themselves with the big questions, with God, free will, the meanings of things.

‘What we need is a science of truth,’ Burgess said one afternoon over a Sunday dinner that Eliza had prepared. Eliza added strange things to her roasts – herbs and preserves that she’d potted herself. ‘We need some way of dividing things up so we can make sense of them – cast off some of the veils that cloud the issue – analyze them somehow. Everybody disagrees with everybody else. Why isn’t there some sort of consensus? There is in medicine. Why not philosophy?’ Burgess had a long upper lip and a small round nose; he’d come west for the sea air, but he coughed even so and there were days when he confined himself to bed with poultices on his chest.

‘You agree with all other doctors, do you?’ Jonathan said, his sarcasm as thick as Eliza’s plum jam.

‘Of course I don’t. Some of them are nuts. Vaccination, for example: what an absurd idea!’

‘You can’t analyze God, can you? Or truth?’

‘Well, I don’t—’

‘Then all you’ve got left is words,’ Jonathan said.

Burgess sat quiet for awhile. ‘Just because I don’t know how, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. It just doesn’t add up, Johnny.’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘Life.’

‘Why should it?’

Burgess would have been fascinated with the pickings through higher grammar that Columbia forced down my throat in the name of philosophy; he was plainly ahead of his time. So was Jonathan, who got to the essence of Columbia’s agenda without even trying. Certainly from what he reports of this conversation, I think he would have reacted to linguistic philosophy much as I did. I was stunningly bad at it. I don’t mean that I got bad grades. I didn’t. I made the dean’s list every term. ‘I see your name on the dean’s list,’ said one of my professors, a young one, one interested in the philosophy of science, where there are real excitements, rather than in the science of philosophy, which strangles all questions it can’t answer as ruthlessly as farmwives strangle stray kittens. He was a very funny man, this young professor, much loved by his students for his parodies of what Columbia’s philosophers spent their time on; in the end, the department fired him. ‘No,’ he said, correcting himself, ‘I can’t quite say that. I didn’t actually see your name on the list: I saw the letters that make up your name . . .’