Josh shrugged. ‘Me? The tame Injun? What good am I? Where the hell were you, white man?’

My grandfather mounted and rode off without another word, forcing Jenny into a gallop in the direction of Hannaville. But after he’d gone no more than a quarter of a mile he turned back. Josh was still standing at the door of the barn. ‘They think you stole the money from them,’ Jonathan said to him.

‘They don’t know what they think,’ Josh said. ‘Never needed to figure it out. They dream a little, trim a bit here, add a bit there until what they see is what they want to see – like good people everywhere.’

‘While living off your pay from Pinnock?’

‘Why not?’

‘Sure,’ Jonathan said. ‘Why not?’ He took twenty dollars – all he had – from his wallet and handed it to Josh, who received it without comment. ‘What else can I do while I’m here?’

‘Mend the roof,’ Josh said. Then he turned and walked away.

8

Jonathan spent a month repairing the roofs in Malloy’s Landing and watching the fearful spectacle of the Malloys’ disintegration. Sebastian died the week he planned to leave. Jonathan stayed on, organized the funeral and preached the oration, which was to be – he swore it – his final sermon; when Helen died a week later, the Reverend Grayberg buried her. But why didn’t Sarah write to him? This he could not understand. He spent two months in Malloy’s Landing. He wrote her almost every day, but no letters came back – not one.

‘I’m not a very good letter-writer’ was all she said, playing with little Rayner, who was by now eighteen months old and babbling happily on her lap, ‘letter-writer, writer-lighter,’ and such like, very much as Jonathan himself had babbled when he was a little boy, before Alvah Stoke bought him. It was the first evening of Jonathan’s return. ‘I told you that before you left, didn’t I? Now what’s this decision you’ve come to?’

‘I’m going to buy a farm,’ my grandfather said to her.

‘What?’ she said laughing. ‘You? Don’t make such jokes.’

The baby laughed with her. ‘Joke smoke,’ he cried.

‘It’s no joke.’

‘Oh, come on, Johnny—’ She broke off when he said nothing. ‘This is ridiculous. You can’t mean it. Don’t say—’

‘Mother hated farming as much as dad did,’ Atlas shouted at me from the bathroom. The Youngbloods and the Murphys were due for Claire’s French dinner party at six; it was five already and I was beginning to feel pressed for time. I figured there was more than an hour of the story left to go, and I wasn’t sure Atlas would be in any condition to tell the rest of it when the party was over. He had wheeled me into the bedroom so he could talk on while he bathed and dressed. ‘Hating farms was kind of a bond between them in the early days – the Stokes, George, all that unadulterated misery. Why the hell he was throwing away something he believed in for a way of life he hated, I have no idea. Never could figure it out. Money probably.’