When the snows melted in April, Alvah sowed seed and George threw himself exultantly into a war of attrition against this boughten boy. He leapt from behind bushes. He laid tripwires across paths. He teased, tweaked, scoffed, poked, giggled, punched, slandered. Jonathan marshaled what forces he had, a pitiful supply, no allies, no weapons but his wits; tiny as he was, he came quickly to the conclusion that in battle a loser must be seen to lose if a victor is to be seen as victorious. So began the first, tentative probings into what was to become his life’s strategy: absolute control over himself. He set out to stifle the chattering child he had been – to stifle any show of soft underbelly: that quick anger of his as well as his ingenuousness, his humor, his gaiety. Nothing was to go free, not the slightest errant thought, not the faintest twitch of an eye.

In May Alvah pricked out. George intensified his campaign; Jonathan hardened his resolve. In June Alvah constructed hills for the young tobacco. The children weeded the ground by hand, and at night their knees were so raw they couldn’t touch them with their fingers. In July the worms came – and with them Jonathan’s first dark hint that there were massed legions behind the spearhead of the Stokes.

In the evening the tobacco field was calm, silent, harmonious, blowing in the wind, profoundly vegetable: just as a field should be. The next day, without any warning whatsoever, the boundary between vegetable and animal was gone. Everything looked the same, and yet there was a grinding, discordant, intensely animal sound of chewing, as though the plants had sprouted jaws and were frantically eating away at their own insides. When a snake swallows its own tail, what happens in the end? When the eating’s over, who’s won? The paradox is old. How can the jaws eat the jaws? how can the stomach digest itself? But what was a tiny child to make of it except unadulterated terror?

Alvah knelt, opened the leaves of a tobacco plant, and beckoned to the children.

‘Tobacco worms are bigger than other worms,’ Atlas said into my tape recorder. ‘About like this’ – he held up his index finger. ‘Jesus, they’re ugly bastards, green, no real shape, no head, no eyes, insentient and insatiable. They’re digesting machines, efficient as hell: jaws at the near end, stomach in the middle, waste disposal unit at the far end.’ He curled and uncurled his finger, still holding it up to the light. ‘Kind of like my patients – you know, the ones in the Medicare rooms – Ever seen one of those places? no? They got four rooms set apart in the nursing home here, three beds each, awful smell, you can’t even tell the sex of the poor bastards: foetal positions, heads back, mouths open, faces gray, tubes in, tubes out, no brain: life reduced to its essentials. Makes a lot of rich guys an awful lot of money. Anyhow, tobacco worms curl up in the axils of the leaves and eat and crap, and that’s all they do.’