‘Yes. There’s more. There’s money.’

‘Money?’

He nodded.

‘How much?’

‘Six hundred dollars,’ he said.

She held her breath a moment. ‘Enough?’ she whispered then.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite enough.’

It was a judgment on them both. By the time Sarah arrived back from Sweetbrier with a strongbox containing thirty double eagles, he’d chosen twenty-two acres of sandy loam that ran right down to the railroad tracks, precisely as the Stoke homestead had, at precisely the same orientation to the sun, and for precisely double the price Alvah had paid. Jonathan took his wife – pretty, strawberry-blond Sarah – who even though she was pretty, could read no better than Alvah Stoke’s wife had been able to: Sarah who had paid for his land with her mother’s money just as Wify had paid for Alvah’s land with her mother’s: he took his Sarah to see his land just as Alvah Stoke had taken Wify to see his land precisely half a century before. Sarah carried Rayner, and they walked three miles through the cedar forests that still surrounded Hannaville.

But there is something primal about ownership of land; Jonathan had felt it first when he was talking to the Malloys. So despite these similarities with the Stokes, all of which he saw and recorded in his diaries, he was in high spirits: the occasionally glimpsed gaiety in him is in full flight in his entries for this period. He dashed ahead, jumping fallen logs as he went, just as years before he’d jumped the railway ties in the Denver yards on his first day in that land of miracles. He slapped a hand on a huge tree, fifteen feet in diameter, and yelled back to her that these were western red cedars, arbor-vitae.

‘The tree of life, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Look at the slope of that trunk’ – he drew a scoop-sided pyramid with his hands in imitation of it – ‘like a wineglass elm upside down. They’ve got wineglass elms in Ellsworth, did I tell you that?’ He broke off a frond of scaly leaves, put it to his nose and ran back to her. ‘Smell it, Sarah. Isn’t it wonderful? Smell, Rayner.’

The little boy stuck the frond in his mouth.

The land was not yet fully logged off. Lumberjacks in pairs balanced on narrow platforms twelve feet up in the trees, sawing and swinging axes: Swedes and Norwegians, mammoth men with mammoth shoulders and mammoth hips. The beasts that dragged the timber away over stripling slips were hogs – not oxen, not horses: hogs – huge, red hogs called Durocs, as mammoth when compared to ordinary hogs as the men were compared to ordinary men. To the east was forest. To the west the land was clear; tall stumps of thousand-year-old trees stood in ragged disarray.

‘The house goes there, Sarah,’ Jonathan said. The strawberries there – and there – Anjou pears, I think.’ Sarah laughed at his enthusiasm despite herself. ‘Nobody out here grows soft fruit yet. There’s no competition, do you see? It’s a completely new idea. We’ll corner the market. How can we miss? The black caps go there—’