‘What kind?’

‘Colory – the best.’

‘Two pouches,’ said Alvah.

The marriage took place a week later. Alvah and Wife – or Wify as Dotter became known on her wedding day – worked their way across the country, hiring out to farmers while the warm weather lasted and to railroad builders through the winter. When they reached Sweetbrier the next summer, Benbow Wikin’s General Store & Post Office already carried most anything people wanted. Not that anybody wanted much – salt, honey, cream of tartar, molasses, vinegar and the occasional whole codfish, salted and dried, over which flies swarmed as thick and hungry as any newcomer’s passion for land. Benbow was the local land agent for the government; he helped Alvah find ground to squat on. Alvah, true to his chosen kind, was no man of vision. He dreamed of one day growing tobacco worth nine cents a pound down at New Orleans; he dreamed of one day living in a house made of wood – no more. Wify dreamed of nothing. She was too tired to dream. She swept, cooked, spun, wove, washed, kept chickens, grew vegetables, had babies – and pulled the plow.

Alyoshus came first, then Cathern less than a year later; then several stillbirths. The third child who lived was George, the future Senator Stoke himself. After he was born, Wify’s great hips ceased to deliver. But she would not give up. Nor would Alvah: he serviced her from the rear because it was faster and because the genes that made her youngest son hideous in old age showed themselves early in her. No more babies came of it. Wify wept. Alvah showed no reaction. Was he a he-man of his time or was he not? But it rankled. It was breach of contract, this unexpected barrenness, and a breach of contract has to be punished.

So it was as much revenge as the need for extra labor that led him to advertise in the Overland Sentinel, for a boy that wanted buying.

3

Two children waited at Benbow Wikin’s that Saturday afternoon in September of 1865 after the ad appeared. As soon as Alvah arrived, Benbow drew him aside.

‘You don’t want that one, Alvah.’ Benbow gestured toward a scrawny child with fever spots on his cheeks. Alvah nodded agreement.

The second child had black hair that curled over his collar and blue eyes that looked out eagerly at everything around him. This is conjecture: this is what I was like as a child – or so I’ve been told anyway. The child chattered to himself, swinging back and forth at the end of a bearded man’s arm.

‘That’s your boy,’ Benbow said.

‘Wikin Store. Wikins Tor,’ the child chattered. ‘Rudabega and Potata—’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Alvah asked Benbow.

‘Don’t know – always going on like that. Don’t mean anything.’

The child skipped in a small circle around the bearded man, who turned in a circle himself to keep hold of the child’s hand. ‘No, no. No tomato. Bega, tata, no tomata—’