My aunt Claire’s dinner party didn’t end in disaster for the simple reason that the Murphys and the Youngbloods left as early as they dared. Claire retired under the table with carpet cleaner and scrub brush.

‘Could you talk a little more? Or are you too tired?’ I asked Atlas.

‘Never tired. Let’s talk.’

‘Here?’ I said, trying to be diplomatic. I didn’t see how he could get himself anywhere else.

‘Nope. Office.’ He held onto my wheelchair for balance and together we staggered away from Claire’s scrubbing and toward my tape recorder, a shut door and yet another secret drink, poured out into a dosage glass from the remainder of the whiskey he’d bought that afternoon. ‘God knows what dad had in mind,’ Atlas was saying. ‘He got his shotgun from the parlor: 110-gauge single-shot: carries small pellets – you use it for short range – a good little gun. He sat out there near the barn. I just kept out of range: I knew how far the thing would shoot: I was ten years old. It went on for about three hours; he just lay there up against the rail fence. Cleanest farm in the community, dad’s farm was, straightest fences – made of cedar rails. He told us to get the hell out, leave him alone, he had something to do. Jesus, we were scared. In the end it was Rayner – You know, your dad, Rayner, he had a real warmth and gentleness to him that my dad never saw. Anyhow, Rayner went out to him and about five minutes later they came back together. Don’t know what happened. Nobody ever said another word about it. Lay you a bet that if you ever figure out how to read those diaries, you won’t find any mention of it in them, neither.’

Atlas was wrong. It’s there. Jonathan had his own fierce standards. Rayner walked up to him, right through the full range of that shotgun, not flinching at all (the auto-destruct bravado that is our family legacy), and he said, ‘You selfish bastard. What’s going to happen to mama? What’s going to happen to Hope?’ And so Jonathan gave him the gun. This isn’t the way Rayner told the story to me when I was little. He told only of the siege itself; and hearing it, I felt myself at the edge of whole landscapes of nightmare that lived in Jonathan and that threatened me through him. But I’ve never quite made out, not even now, grown up, with his diaries in front of me, precisely what it is that frightens me so much – and yet I know that somewhere here lies the secret bond between him and me.

13

For the next six years (owing more to the boom time wars bring with them than to any increase in my grandfather’s Herculean efforts), strawberries moved out of the Carrick farm over the Northern Pacific railroad eastward to elegant restaurants in Chicago where such luminaries as George Stoke ate and entertained. Strawberries paid part of Rayner’s tuition at Reed College and most of Gwendolyn’s nursing school in Seattle; in three years’ time strawberries were going to pay some of Atlas’s pre-med at the University of Washington. But there was little left over – and neither the will nor the energy to spend that little on pleasantries. The occasional stories about George that appeared in the paper – his power, his family, his good works and, in one story, his ‘fabled love of strawberries’ – penetrated my grandfather’s head like whisperings from hell.