Atlas began my introduction to my grandfather’s fire by telling me what he knew about Alvah Stoke.

Alvah was weeding full-time on a tobacco farm in New Hampshire when he was only eight years old. At twenty-six he was pulling in two dollars a day for dawn-to-dusk hard labor on the same farm. He’d have tried practically anything, and he listened carefully to Jason Yoxall, a traveling medicine man with a large daughter: Jason was newly married to a rich widow who wanted no part of her husband’s offspring.

‘You ever think about going west?’ Jason said.

‘Why should I?’ Alvah said.

‘You know, Alvah, my Dotter cooks and spins and keeps chickens – a fine woman, Alvah. What a wife she’d make. Eh?’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Name’s Dotter. Like I said.’

‘That ain’t a name,’ Alvah said in disgust.

‘Well, what else am I going to call her? When she gets married, she gets called Wife. Ain’t that enough?’

‘She can’t read,’ Alvah said. Alvah had no education to speak of, but even he could read a little.

‘What does a woman want with reading, you ass? Her mother left her three hundred dollars. You marry her, it’s yours.’

Alvah and Jason fashioned themselves on the he-man of the 1850s. Take away Hollywood’s sanitized version and this much-loved hero was as brutish a creature as the pit of hell ever spewed forth: a humorless, ruthless, benumbed halfwit, at home with dogs, cows, horses, rifles and rotgut liquor: proud of feeding habits that belonged in a zoo, of a face as expressionless as his backside, of an unrivalled imbecility at conversation, friendship, love, courtship, copulation, family life, all art, all music, all learning, all words. Reading was for women: you despised the accomplishment in yourself, but you wanted it for your wife. Besides, Dotter’s lumpen inertia oppressed Alvah. Her face was glutinous, like uncooked rolls on a baking tin; she smoked a clay pipe. The money was real enough, but a man needed something like $500 to set up in the west: plows, tools, animals, that kind of thing. Where was a man like Alvah to get the $200 extra?

‘Dotter, come here,’ Jason said. Dotter lifted her apron and hid her face in it. ‘Look at that back, Alvah. With a back like that a man don’t need a horse. Just take a look at those hips – the hips of mother earth. Think of the children to come from hips like those.’

Women often pulled plows. It was customary. Kids were for hoeing the rows; if they were lazy you beat the shit out of them. Dotter smiled: she was of her time, too – and at that, only a woman who couldn’t read. Her mouth curled into a Cupid’s bow, and the pipe rolled across her teeth, scattering sparks and ashes. It was a strong back, no doubt about it. Alvah’s heart beat a little faster, but he said nothing.

‘Tell you what,’ Jason said. ‘I’ll toss in a pouch of tobacco seed.’