Every day his thundery expression became more thundery and his temperament more mercurial. The atheist preacher who lives in the town that pays his bills must make his children a party to his deception. No child can be relied on to pretend, so my grandfather made the pretending real. They said grace at meals, which they had done only erratically before, whenever Sarah thought to insist. Each child learned a verse of the Bible every day, went into papa’s study and said the verse – and got a whipping if the verse was not correct. Sundays were miserable: church, Sunday school, no play, only chores and God, and whoever dared otherwise got a whipping.

Atlas assumed his father’s faith was completely genuine. My father never doubted it, either; it never crossed his mind that the religion-bound household of his childhood was an exercise in playacting. He never even knew his father’s diaries existed. When he was fourteen he went out behind the barn to defy God and his old man, all in one stroke, and to pay for it with his life if that’s what it came to. He said, ‘God, I defy you,’ and waited for the thunderbolt. When none came, he figured God hadn’t heard and so defied Him again. Thereafter he, too, was an atheist. This rebellion pleased him immensely; it was a source of strength to him throughout his life. Yet the pity of it is that his watershed didn’t amount to rebellion at all; in the end, all he was doing was joining forces with his father in the very way that would have pleased his father most.

If Jonathan my grandfather was a harder man when Sarah returned from Sweetbrier, she had grown softer. There were three more babies in the next five years, all girls; Sarah named the youngest one Hope because by then she knew there was no hope left – not for her anyway. She was too tired to play the piano Jonathan went into debt to buy for her; she was too tired to make a pelmet or curtains for a pelmet to go over. When a twenty-six-acre piece of land abutting the farm came up for sale – this was in 1914, the year World War One broke out in Europe, the onset of a wonderfully profitable few years for American farmers – when this neighboring piece of land came up for sale, it was Sarah who proposed buying it. They mortgaged the land they had to get it.

Then the next year, 1915, came the bull.

Atlas told about it seated at the head of the table at Claire’s French dinner. The French dinner was in full swing, a pretty tense swing, too, with Claire’s own battle-line preparations all too reminiscent of my grandfather’s war on life: three wines and three courses down: the aioli on a platter with raw vegetables around it, the soup, the fish (filets de sole gratinés à la Parisienne): our party of seven (an awkward number) seated around Claire’s plate glass table with the iron filigree base, the Japanese arrangement of chrysanthemums in a wide, cut glass bowl in the center, the confusion of glasses: here we all sat when drunken Atlas (falling into one of those alcohol-induced holes in his head and so forgetting that our interview was suspended for the duration of the festivities) – here we sat when Atlas began the tale of the bull.