Alvah picked the worm off the plant and spurted it open between his fingers. Jonathan bolted.

‘They had no chemical insecticides, see?’ Atlas went on. ‘So what could you do? You had to pick them off by hand.’

‘How often?’ I asked.

‘Once a week. Wednesdays. Dad was always at his touchiest on Wednesdays – all his life – it never left him. The second time Alvah had to beat him to get him into the field.’

But later on that day, in the sod hut after supper, Jonathan proved what a valuable chattel he was. He hinged together two blocks of wood with a leather thong to be hooked over the thumb like a castanet. Alvah watched and did not interfere. He was no fool; he knew a good thing when he saw it. The Wednesday after that, Jonathan picked and squashed faster than any of the others.

‘Make one apiece of them,’ Alvah said that night.

‘What for?’ George said, glaring at Jonathan.

‘Works, don’t it?’ Alvah said, and he gave Jonathan the materials he needed.

George turned his shiny eyes on his father, only half taking in the meaning of this. ‘Ain’t no boughten boy gonna make me a squasher,’ he said. ‘I’ll make my own.’

‘Nope,’ said Alvah, the man who was no fool. ‘You ain’t no good at that.’

George kept vampires deep down in his soul; when they weren’t out seeking blood on the front lines, they ravened and drooled; so he set them to suck dry the people he loved with as much ferocity as they sucked dry his enemies. And George loved his father. Jonathan understood this – which is why, years later, sitting in the opulence of the senator’s living room, he knew that the silver-framed daguerreotype had to be Alvah: the bald head, the fringe of hair, red in life, black in the picture, the deeply lined face that despite its lines was as pure an American face as my aunt Claire’s: a face that expressed nothing, not age, not pain, not evil, not good, nothing at all. In the sod hut, the child George gawped at Alvah, his beloved father; the vampires clanked in their chains, stunned, hungering, adrift. How could this beloved father – how could the object of such unrestrained devotion tell him he wasn’t good at what a boughten boy was good at? He? George? Not as good—? He grabbed the pieces of board and leather out of Jonathan’s hands and hurled them at Alvah, then threw himself after them. Alvah fended him off. George fell to the ground in a faint.

He lay sick in bed for several days. Even when he was well enough to go back out to work he could not shake off his father’s betrayal. Alvah was quick and sure in everything he did, economical, and economy made him graceful. George was animated. He had shiny, black eyes. But he was clumsy like his mother. He was fat like her. Before his illness, he hadn’t noticed these things. Where did they leave him? He couldn’t figure it out. Who was he to be? From time to time he stopped in the middle of his weeding, sat back to study his father’s grace, far off in the field. Then slowly, deliberately, brow furrowed with puzzlement, he turned his gaze on Jonathan, already a slender, economical figure himself, even more graceful in his small size.