‘Mister Finster made them,’ she said.

‘Then I’ll make mine. Who made the stairs?’

‘Mister Finster.’ Alvah nodded. ‘So you’re going to make your house like this one, are you?’ Alvah nodded again. ‘Well then, you start with the foundation.’ She told them how much cement Mr Finster had used, how much gravel, how many buckets per cubic foot.

Jonathan paced off the walls. ‘You got it?’ Alvah asked.

‘Enough for now,’ Jonathan said.

Alvah turned to leave. There was tisk-tisking in Sweetbrier about the Stokes and their boughten boy: ‘suffer the little children,’ they said and shook their heads; ‘poor little mite,’ they said. Bessie put her hands on her hips. ‘You let this Jonathan of yours have a biscuit or you can’t look at my house anymore.’

In the kitchen sat a man with muttonchops. ‘Mister Conductor Finster of the Pennsylvania Railroad,’ she said, ‘this here’s Alvah Stoke.’

‘Good morning, Alvah Stoke,’ said Mr Finster, rising from his chair. ‘It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’

‘How’d you make them shingles?’ Alvah said.

That night, while George, Cathern and Alyoshus studied, Alvah cleared a space on the dirt floor and Jonathan began to draw lines with a stick.

‘What’s that?’ George said.

‘House,’ Alvah said. ‘Foundation.’

‘Our house?’ George said. Alvah nodded. ‘You letting that boy design—’

‘Shut up.’

‘Ain’t you got no shame, pa? You can’t let no boughten boy—’

Alvah raised his hand in threat.

By this time George knew that school provided the wherewithal of something important; he didn’t know just what, but he knew – he knew – that there was real power there. He says so in his autobiography; everybody remembers the endearing modesty of his sentence, ‘One dirt-poor, barefoot kid felt the future stirring in him.’ He’s understandably vague about Jonathan, ‘an orphan’, as he says, ‘whom my parents were kind enough to take in’; most people don’t remember even this mention. Why should they? He gives it no importance. ‘Hey, boughten boy,’ George said.

‘I told you—’ Alvah began, swinging around.

‘I just want to read him a story. Ain’t nothing wrong in that, is there? “Once upon a time there was a boy named Johnny, and when he was ten he went to work for a merchant.”’ There was no such story in the Third Reader, or in any of the other readers. Jonathan knew that. He could read as well as George. Alyoshus began to giggle. ‘“This boy worked very hard, and by the time he was grown up he wore a frock coat and—”’

Alyoshus hooted and doubled up laughing. So did George. Alvah glowered. Jonathan trembled with the indignation that was always so near the surface of him; but no word, no sign, not even the flicker of an eye escaped his iron control. He rubbed out a line with his foot and redrew it.

The next afternoon George cornered Jonathan in the curing shed. ‘There warn’t no story about Johnny in my book,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no Johnnys in any books. Not a single, solitary one. You just got to make up Johnnys.’