‘Look,’ one of them shouted, discovering him, ‘we got us a wee John!’

You couldn’t really call them whores, though. Most of them were farm girls running from work that would reduce them to hags at forty and kill them at fifty – big girls in dirty calico skirts like Wify’s, with strong backs, great shoulders and powerful arms. What passed for dancing among them wasn’t much more than clumping around in heavy boots, but they were young – and all the young (while stupid) are beautiful. The hurdy girl who discovered Jonathan had tiny, sequin-eyes that peeped out from above mountainous flanks of cheek. ‘How’d you get here, little johnny?’ she demanded. ‘You gonna be my johnny, ain’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he cried.

She set him on her shoulders, hooked her skirt up under her belt, and galloped from one end of the room to the other. Jonathan bobbed up and down atop her in ecstasy. Toward morning everybody slept. Alvah found his boughten boy curled up in a chair like a house cat.

Until winter closed in that year, Jonathan’s hands stayed tied behind his back every night, an ankle tethered as before to the stake in the sod hut’s floor. As soon as spring came he ran away again. But Alvah had promised two dollars’ reward for the return of his boughten boy: Jonathan was bundled back to the homestead in handcuffs. The next year – the year of Alvah’s big crop – he stayed put. In October Alvah’s final shipment went overland to Kansas City, from there to St Louis and on down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where tobacco was selling at nine cents a pound. Nine cents a pound! the American dream come true! Alvah’s expressionless face showed the faintest hint, the most remote shadow of a smile. Wify’s vast hunch unhunched a quarter of an inch. Payment came back in the form of a wooden box with sixty gold pieces in it. Alvah bought a cow, two pigs and a piebald mare, and one April morning he and Jonathan hitched up the mare and drove into Sweetbrier. Time had come to build the wood house that was the capstone and the mighty fulfilment of the Stokes’ ambitions in life.

Jonathan was ten or eleven by this time, still small, fine-boned and narrow-faced; his hair was black and his eyes were blue. He’d designed the new barn and worked out a ventilating system that could be adjusted according to the weather: this is why Alvah took him along to town to look at houses even though the blue-eyed face, young as it was, already glowed with hate; and Alvah knew in his bones that the boy wasn’t to be trusted.

‘Which one?’ Jonathan asked.

Alvah pointed at a narrow, two-story structure with a porch out in front. A woman of about twenty-five in a crisp, clean apron answered Alvah’s knock. She wore a tea towel over her shoulder.

‘Who sold you them roof tiles, Bessie?’ Alvah said.