Jonathan had watched animals being born – many times. He and Alvah Stoke had both been up to their elbows in a cow, both of them covered in blood, each grappling a leg of a breech-presenting calf, and all the while the cow chewed her cud as though bored by the whole procedure – not like this. The screaming went on intermittently all afternoon and all night, punctuated by Burgess’s cough. Eliza fetched water from the pump and boiled it on the pot-bellied stove; she fetched towel after towel, running to borrow from one neighbor after another. Jonathan watched her carry these things up the stairs; he watched her bring bowls full of knotted linen down again, bright with blood. But she barred his way to the room. ‘I already got one man in that room mucking things up,’ she said. ‘I ain’t having another.’

And the truth of the matter was, he didn’t really want to see. Instead, he raged back and forth across the small downstairs room, hands slimy with sweat, mouth dry. He raged against the straightback chairs in his path, against the knick-knacks on the shelf above the stove, against the windows that rattled at his angry steps, against sex, against Sarah for putting him through this, against the God in Whom he no longer believed.

Before morning Burgess appeared. He eased himself into a chair opposite Jonathan. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ he said, ‘I’m really – I’ll try to save the baby’ – he shook his head – ‘but I don’t think—’

‘To hell with the baby,’ Jonathan said. ‘I want my wife.’

‘All we’ve got left is prayer.’

Jonathan turned away and stared out at the frozen landscape. ‘What kind of sanctimonious crap is that?’ he said. ‘Where’s the man of science you keep telling me about? You save my wife, damnit – What do you want, mother?’ He swung around to face Eliza as she came through the door. ‘Or have you just come to watch the effect of the news on the sorrowing husband?’

Eliza looked him up and down. ‘You’re a fool, boy,’ she said. ‘I told you before and I’m telling this here man doctor, too. You got to get Cheeba.’

Burgess shook his head. ‘Let her die in Christian hands, Missis Chawder. There’s nothing anybody can do.’

Eliza didn’t even look at him. ‘Take potatoes. She’ll follow you for potatoes. Go, Johnny. Now.’

Jonathan’s circuit took him to the Indian reservation five miles to the south. He’d preached in the potlatch house there only once. Almost as soon as he began the sermon he realized that his audience, hidden away on their platforms behind their family totems, watched him with sullen eyes and watched him only because he’d brought food. Thereafter, he visited as his circuit required, but he didn’t preach; he brought food, sharpened tools, helped mend anything that seemed to need mending. He was good with his hands. The Indians hadn’t grown friendly.

He grabbed a twenty-pound sack of potatoes from the kitchen store and went.