After Sarah’s death, the only thing my grandfather did with passion is wait. At night he waited for morning to come. In the morning, he waited for noon. In the evening he waited for eight o’clock, then for nine o’clock, then – Even lifting a spoonful of porridge came to seem an intrusion. This waiting went on, as Atlas said, for a year or so: seventeen months, to be exact. What point was there in it? What point was there in anything? Why not just sink into the grave? There must be answers to questions like these that buzzed across Jonathan’s mind like bluebottles in an outdoor crapper, and then buzzed back again, back and forth, back and forth, bodies thumping against the walls to mark the end of each passage: the Biblical questions, the fundamental ones, the ones rejected these days by philosophy departments. His old nightmare was constant; no night went by without it. Weeds encroached on his land. His once-pristine fences, made of cedar rails, once the straightest fences for miles around, bowed and sagged under the weight of snow.

Then came the story about the Methodist Conference – and at the same moment his decision to go to the source itself: to go to George, to settle the affair between them that had ruled his life and beggared his spirit. This decision changed everything: it led him beside the still waters; it restored his soul. It gave him aim, purpose, meaning. Most important, it stopped the questions and the nightmare, just as God had stopped them during the period of the idyll.

The principle that rules modern philosophy departments has always ruled in war: as Clausewitz says, war is easy. In war, if a question can’t be answered, it must be ignored: a question posed is a question with an answer – exactly what linguistic philosophy teaches. What a wonderful conjunction of purpose! The philosophic and the military wedded at last, united in this neatly closed interval of thought which is the metaphysic of battle. Jonathan was ready – had been ready for years – supplies depoted, troops on standby, strategy planned, tactics worked out. The trip to Sweetbrier pleased him as nothing had pleased him in years: over the mountains, across the deserts and plains he’d crossed and recrossed so many years ago on the railroad, and straight on to Sweetbrier itself. His glimpse of George from across the lawn left him exhilarated; his talk with George’s daughter brought him the kind of taut excitement known only to military professionals on the eve of action. Jonathan’s generals conferred in camera; his troops massed along the border. He kept these preparations secret by spending two weeks at the Methodist Conference in Topeka where he attended lectures and meetings and where, professional that he was, he even heard his own voice speaking from time to time.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘No, no. That would never do.’

‘You must forgive me. I really can’t venture an opinion.’

He strained against the days that stood between him and George, between him and the answer, between him and truth, precisely as all those years ago he had strained against the weeks that stood between him and the moment he’d left George for dead beside the railroad and run away to the west, to Denver and a peacetime circus of a life, where the air was clean and the mountains glistened. But when he slept now, even with the tension on him, he slept the sleep of angels, quiet, unperturbed, undreaming, his nightmare as far away from him as such things are from any of us who know the justice of what we’re doing, and feel easy with it.