Alvah reached out and swung him back.

‘This is our house,’ George crowed. ‘Never yours! Ours!’

‘Food’s on,’ Wify said.

George climbed onto one of the crates that served as benches for the box table. Alyoshus and Cathern appeared from behind a bed. Cathern had red pigtails; Alyoshus was round all over. Wify doled out stew onto tin plates, and the family shoveled it down as fast as they could. Jonathan stood silent and watched.

‘What’s the matter?’ Wify demanded. A gobbet of stew flew out of her mouth and arced across the room in Jonathan’s direction. ‘Food not good enough for him?’

‘Eat, boy,’ Alvah said.

Almost before he knew what was happening, Jonathan was at the door again. This time he kicked and scratched when they tried to stop him. Wify caught both his wrists in one of her great hands and both his ankles in the other. She trussed him with a rope; when she let go, his thrashings were so violent that they bounced him across the tiny room.

‘Switch, George,’ Alvah said.

At the first blow Jonathan stopped his struggles to stare at Alvah. Even as he watched Alvah’s arm lift into the air for a second blow, he couldn’t believe it. When the switch hit the third time, he cried out.

Alvah nodded and put the switch away.

The next day, after Alvah and the Stoke children went out to the fields, Jonathan lunged for the door whenever Wify took her eyes off him. He beat at the dirt walls with his fists. Before she went out into the fields herself, she drove a stake into the floor of the soddy and tied him to that with the halter she’d hoped she might be using to tether a calf instead. He remained tied up for the rest of the week. He drank because he did not know how to resist the liquids they poured down his throat, but he would not eat. Every day he fought the halter. Every day Alvah beat him.

At the end of the week, on a blustery afternoon when the Stokes were out in the fields, he managed to jiggle the stake out of the ground. Outside the door, a track disappeared into the grass. He dashed along it, trailing stake and halter behind him. The grass was higher than his head on both sides; it swung back and forth in great billows, and he lost the track. When he found it again, he ran down it – only to find himself back at the door of the sod hut where Alvah stood, switch in hand.

The following day Alvah took him to Sweetbrier and Benbow Wikin’s store.

‘Tell him about his ma,’ Alvah said, depositing Jonathan (who was still trussed up in the halter) on the counter.

‘You don’t got to tie him up, Alvah,’ Benbow said. He was a small man with a pouter pigeon chest. ‘It ain’t official, tying boys up.’

‘He’s mine, ain’t he?’

‘Well, yes, ’course he is, but—’