‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

Grayberg leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Life’s a bore,’ he said. ‘East, west, anywhere at all. People want to shiver a little, cry, tremble, feel their hearts thump. You and that Baptist out there are the only entertainment they got, and if your act don’t pick up you’re gonna lose that circuit of yours. Hear me?’

7

Before going to Grayberg’s, Jonathan had arranged to rent a horse from a stable in Ellsworth. When he arrived there the horse wasn’t ready, and he took out his rage at Grayberg on the stable, the horses and the stable owner, Lemon Pinnock, who scuttled around him, stuttering apologies. ‘I’m right s-sorry, Reverend. My help didn’t sh-show up this m-morning. Don’t carry on so, Reverend, you’ll do yourself an injury.’ When Lemon turned over to him a chestnut mare called Jenny, he said, ‘She’s a b-biter, Reverend. Don’t take it p-personal. She bites everybody except the Injun what does the mucking out. Keep your hands c-clear, Reverend.’

Snow covered the ground. Jenny clattered into streams and out of them, snorting and farting as horses do, hooves slipping on the stones of the banks, tail swishing. The air was cold and sea-scented. Jonathan pressed into a gallop, still railing at Grayberg and now also at the Indian who mucked out Lemon Pinnock’s stables – and at anything that came to mind. He hadn’t seen Helen and Sebastian since he’d left Maine for Chicago and the Moody Institute some twelve years before; he’d written regularly, though, and received regular letters in reply. By the time he arrived in Malloy’s Landing it was dark; not even an outline of the rambling structure he remembered was visible.

At his knock the door opened a crack, and an aged man poked his head out. ‘Who—?’ a voice began. Skin drooped down over the bones of the man’s face like sodden gauze. ‘Johnny? Is that really—? Helen! Helen! Johnny’s here.’ Sebastian pushed the door open and took hold of Jonathan’s arm. ‘Johnny, how wonderful to – Helen!’ There was nothing left of the Sebastian Jonathan had known. This new Sebastian was skeletal, bent, atremble – his sentences as fragmented as his wife’s had once been.

Inside, the only light came from a fire in the fireplace. Two people sat at a table, one of them in shadow, the other a hugely fat old woman who fought to pull herself out of her chair, just as Sebastian had fought to pull himself out of his chair when Jonathan first arrived in Malloy’s Landing all those years ago. When power shifts in a marriage – so my uncle Atlas says (and a man married as many times as be should know) – sometimes all the trappings of power, however queer, shift as well.

‘Welcome, Johnny. Welcome,’ Helen said, and her voice had all the volume and authority that Sebastian’s had once had. ‘Come in. Sit down.’ Her enormous belly slopped up over the edge of the table. Only her face and arms were still thin enough for him to recognize her. ‘Josh, find Johnny a chair.’