Besides, the old fool Grayberg had said it himself: the role of preacher is at best the role of entertainer, actor, barker: a shadowland even when practiced by a believer. For a non-believer like Jonathan it was a shadow of a shadowland. There wasn’t any money in it, either. As for farms, whatever else can be said of them, they’re real. All a farmer needs to set up, as my grandfather said to Helen and Sebastian (while the light of the fire weakened and the room grew chilly), is money, strength and experience. They had the money. He had the strength and the experience. The solution seemed so simple as he talked about it that he found himself dwelling on the beauty of the northwest and the opportunities out there with an enthusiasm he hadn’t felt for anything in years. ‘We can try for some new crop: soft fruit maybe. Why not? Nobody grows soft fruit out there. There’s no fixed market, and a lot of the land is pure peatbog.’
He slept that night in a tiny attic room. He hadn’t been able to get a clear understanding of the arrangement between the Malloys and Josh, though by the end of the evening Sebastian was as open in his resentment as Helen; they were anxious to break away, go west with Jonathan, see the Pacific, buy a farm, live with him and Sarah, do something new – something never done before. Jonathan had seen enough of illness and death to know the Malloys were both seriously sick, that they wouldn’t live long – couldn’t live long – but he saw no reason why their last months should be eked out so sadly and so hopelessly. They gave him the name of the lawyer in Ellsworth who had drawn up the contract with Josh. Jonathan was sure he could find some common ground, some way to make his plan workable; they were sure of it, too.
He got up early the next morning to go into town and see what he could do. The barns stretched beyond the farmhouse as before but there were no beds in any of the bedrooms, no desks, no polished candlesticks, no pans in the kitchen, no books on the library shelves. Mold lined the throat of the rose-patterned water closet and one of the paws of the bathtub had broken loose. The walls were damp; the upstairs ceilings showed that the roofs had not been looked after.
Out in the animal barn, keeping a wary eye on Jenny’s bared teeth, he hung a bag of oats over her face and found Josh standing beside him.
‘You’re poaching on my ground, white man,’ Josh said.
‘You don’t know how to take care of your ground,’ Jonathan said, instantly furious. ‘When you don’t take care of things, you don’t deserve to keep them.’ He took a brush out of the saddle-bag and began to groom Jenny’s flank with angry strokes. She eyed him suspiciously over her oat-bag.