I’ll start in Sweetbrier. I hate the midwest, and Sweetbrier never was up to much, anyway. Today it’s no more than a smattering of shacks tossed down along one of those roads that score the cornfields. Cars don’t stop here. Farmers go elsewhere to shop and socialize. You can still make out Benbow Wikin’s name over his grocery store if you really want to, but there’s hardly anything on the shelves inside. The few patrons that come and go are as creaky and barren as the aged toad of a man who sleeps behind the counter.

Here lie the beginnings of truth.

Sweetbrier started to fall apart in 1923. The Midwest Pacific decided to close the line through the town, which had become not much more than a water stop on the way from Topeka to Jefferson City. This wasn’t the way the townspeople looked at it, of course, but people do kid themselves so. The news first appeared in the Overland Sentinel. Most everybody refused to believe it until Senator George Stoke – the great windbag himself – told them it was true. History calls this windbag a ‘fearless liberal’. Encyclopedias talk about his reformation of the Senate rules, his campaign against the First World War, his denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, his federal power projects – one so famous I’m afraid to mention it – and all those farm relief measures. John F. Kennedy wrote him into Profiles in Courage. Even so I say he was a windbag. Worse than that, he was a first-class shit, and the end he came to was too good for him – way too good for him. I’ll get to it.

Anyhow, he’d formed anti-railroad committees before anybody else had even absorbed the news. The Overland Sentinel suggested a picnic lunch on the lawns of his mansion, where at this late date in his career, the senator was still growing power as his main crop, manuring it well with money and years of patronage, planting in spring, flourishing in summer, ready for harvest by November and election time, for the festivals, the cider, the corn dollies – the win, the kill – and then plowing under in preparation for years to come. The senator lived just out of town. ‘We’ll run a full-page ad, Senator, sir,’ the gangly young journalist said to him. ‘’Course we will.’ And the senator’s eyebrows slithered around on his face like live bait in a fishing bucket.

It would certainly help if I knew what truth is. At Columbia they said they taught a powerful technique for making successive approximations to it; the phrasing is theirs, not mine. Like calculus, they said. But calculus produces something solid, slope of a tangent, orbit of a planet. Ask the philosophers what they produce, and all you get is drivel about weather reports and rain today. Well, as I say, it isn’t good enough. Besides, I’ll bet truth (whatever it is) is sometimes truer when you make it up. Like that first Saturday in June of 1923, out on the senator’s lawn. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even born. But I can see the wives of local worthies setting up tables on the grass. I can see the senator’s Greek-columned portico, asquat above rolling lawns like a tourist caught out with diarrhea alongside a golf course. Tablecloths flap in the breeze. Wicker baskets disgorge hams, salads, pies, cakes, lemonade, ice cream. The women gossip while they work. Hats bob. Dresses billow. My uncle Atlas knew most of these women. He told me about them years ago, when I was young, before the tumor in my spine began to grow too big for its bony enclosure. They had names like Hattie and Maude, Gertrude, Carrie and Hope.