‘Pemberton,’ she said.

He didn’t spend long with her. ‘You ever get her name right?’ I asked him when he’d shown her out and taken me back into his office. He’d only spent a few minutes with her.

‘Happens all the time,’ he said. I said nothing, and he laughed. ‘Well, Christ, these guys are all so goddamned old they don’t rightly remember who I am, either. You could make out it’s a bond between us.’

But the fact is, it wasn’t age, or not just age: not in Atlas’s case, anyway. Even as a young man he drank too much; by the time I taped my day-long interview with him he’d been drinking for fifty years solid. He had holes in his head big enough to swallow up any misery he wanted to, any misery in his own life, that is. But he couldn’t seem to lose his father’s misery with such ease; talking about Miss Emelina hurt him. He went out to the living room, fetched an almost empty whiskey bottle and poured it out into the coffee left over from breakfast, now cold and forming a dark ring around the cup; but whiskey or no whiskey, his voice trembled. As for Jonathan, his version in the diaries is simple reportage. I came to see that when he was most upset, he was at his most straightforward, no adjectives, short sentences – the control pulled as tight (even though he was a grown man by the time he wrote this section) as Miss Emelina’s stays. He took the denial of school very hard.

After lessons started in November he spent the days in silence with Alvah and Wify and the drying tobacco leaves. In the evenings after dinner, while the others studied by candlelight, he wrapped tobacco plugs and watched the excitement of book-learning replace the sense of betrayal that had come to George with his illness.

‘“A is for ax.”’ George read out the line in early January and then handed the book to Cathern.

‘“B is”—’ Cathern began. She bent over the picture. Her red pigtails fell onto the page. ‘“B is for,” uh—’

‘“Box.” It’s “box”, you dummy,’ George said irritably.

Alyoshus took the book and squinted down at the page. ‘“C is for puss,”’ he announced.

George grabbed the book away. ‘“C is for cat. D is for dog. E is for—”’

By February he managed to read out a passage with all the words joined together. ‘“O Ned! Watch me toss my ball. See how high it goes! Do you not love to play a game of ball!”’

Jonathan felt a sudden chill. There is a moment when the tide stands still, just that one, and then reverses its direction. Stout Cortez stares out at the Pacific in wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Jonathan – strong-hearted, too – did not know what an ocean was but stared, too, in wild surmise, too, silent upon a dry goods box in Kansas. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chapman’s Homer or a McGuffey reader: it’s the clean cut of the salt air, that’s what counts.