‘Just grow up as fast as you can,’ Benbow had said to him. ‘Shut your eyes and grow.’

When Cathern’s turn came, Jonathan craned his neck to see over her shoulder.

‘Get that boy out of there,’ George cried.

She started to pull the book away, but George had not yet learned (as my father, who became a professor of economics, used to say in the stuffy, professorial way he sometimes played with) how ‘to affirm that the rewards of an endeavor are commensurate with the risk entailed’. George teased Cathern at school; he pulled her red pigtails; when she peed behind the fence, he poked at her from the other side with a twig. She scanned him, cocked her head, ruffled her shoulders and held the book so Jonathan could see. In the evenings after that, Jonathan followed her finger along the words. Working on tobacco plugs with Alvah and Wify, he reconstructed whole pages in his mind. Before the year was out, he was whispering answers in Cathern’s ear. School finished for the summer. The McGuffey reader – its purpose served – was thrown away, and so became Jonathan’s.

‘You don’t understand,’ my uncle Atlas said, eyes dry but red-rimmed, coffee cup of whiskey already empty. ‘This was the very first thing he ever owned.’ It is true. I don’t understand. I’m a child of the intellectual middle classes, who whimpered when my heap of presents under the Christmas tree looked smaller than the heaps coveted by either of my sisters. ‘He didn’t have his own bed,’ Atlas said. ‘He slept on the dirt floor like the pig. He didn’t have his own clothes. No mother. No father. No brothers and sisters. Nobody that was his. He had open sores on his legs. He didn’t have any shoes. He wasn’t even sure he had his own name. Then all of a sudden he’s the owner of McGuffey’s Eclectic First Reader, Progressive Lessons in Reading and Spelling Mostly in Easy Words of One and Two Syllables. Can you blame the poor bastard for what he became?’

7

As I say, the young are stupid. They think they can escape. Worse, they know it. They are immortal and in their essence, invulnerable: it’s enough to make you weep. One evening in the following year Alvah came back from Sweetbrier and jerked his head toward the west. ‘New town out there.’ As soon as it was dark everybody climbed up to the roof of the soddy. A faint line of light flickered below the evening star.

‘How far away is it?’ George said.

‘Mebbe fifteen miles.’

That very night my grandfather crept away. He’d grown big enough to see over the grass; it tickled his nose as he forced his way through it. But he couldn’t see the town from the ground, so – like some lone bearer of frankincense to the Christ child – he scrambled toward the evening star until it set. He slept the rest of the night by a stream. In the morning, the horizon showed nothing but grass, no town at all. He played all day in the water, a magical day for a child never allowed to play. That night again he followed the star. He spent another day playing. On the third night he heard the tinkle of pianos, followed his ears, found a dozen dance halls and dashed through the swinging door of the nearest one. There were kerosene lamps and a haze of smoke. Hurdy girls danced with men in hats. A man pumped a player piano. People at the bar laughed. Dogs barked. Gamblers gambled. Jonathan burst into tears, and the love of whores he found that evening stayed with him all his life.