One morning in August, Sarah collapsed in the fields. ‘Will Gwendolyn come and stay?’ Burgess Mundt said. ‘She’s going to need a nurse, you know.’

Gwendolyn had grown into a fierce-faced young woman in strong shoes and a starched uniform. She drove into Seattle and bought wallpaper, carpet and curtain materials. ‘Let Rayner pay all his tuition next year,’ she said. She hired a man to put up the wallpaper; she made and hung the curtains, spread the carpet on the floor and bought a special bed that cranked up and down. Jonathan carried Sarah downstairs and laid her on the new bed. She looked around at the room, eyes alight. ‘Am I dying, Johnny?’ There was excitement in her voice, a delighted anticipation as though she’d been invited to a party. ‘Is that what it is? Is it over? Really? Oh, what a relief! What a – But there’s no pelmet. I want a pelmet, Johnny—’ She looked up at him, and a shadow of the old concern crossed her face. ‘Oh, don’t take it like that,’ she went on. ‘I’m so tired—’ She broke off, shut her eyes and lay back against the pillows.

During the fall she lost the weight she’d put on; in spring she shrank and grew yellow. The following June, tiny, wizened and brown, she died.

‘What was his reaction?’ I asked Atlas. ‘Did he show any?’

‘I found him out in the barn,’ Atlas said. ‘He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before, so I put my arm around him, and—’ Tears came to Atlas’s eyes. He looked down into his drink. The tears flowed faster. He was very, very drunk.

‘And what?’

‘He beat the shit out of me,’ Atlas said.

FIVE

Thursday

WAR

1

Judging by Atlas’s condition after the French dinner party, I wasn’t at all sure he could manage the trip we’d planned for the following day all the way to Hannaville and Jonathan’s grave. It was Claire who had to help me to bed – and him, too. In the morning, it was she who helped me up, she who maneuvered him out of bed at about ten, she who organized the trip, and she who sat at the wheel to begin with, while he snored, open-mouthed, drooling a little, looking not just old but ancient: eyelids papery behind slope-sided trifocals askew, body splayed out at the mercy of us all as vulnerably as it was splayed out across the back seat of the car. He must have taken valium or barbiturates to make him so calmly groggy – no sign of jitters at all. He’d said at the end of the evening that he didn’t really know what his father had done after his mother’s death: ‘Something happened,’ he said. ‘Not for a year or so, but then – I don’t know: something.’ Most of my details come from Jonathan’s diaries; a few come from newspapers; the rest is guesswork. But then what’s truth without a bit of guesswork thrown in?