‘I can’t figure the anatomy of that,’ I say to him after he hangs up.

‘That woman was quite a lady once,’ he says, ‘owned her own string of stables, had a couple of winners in the Kentucky Derby.’ There’s a queer iciness to doctors dealing with medicine just as there’s a queer iciness to philosophers with propositions; it’s just professionalism, but it sure as hell grates on the non-professional ear, especially when the owner of the ear – us – is the subject in question. ‘I remember when she first came to me,’ Atlas went on, ‘this was, oh, four, five years ago – and I said in the course of the examination, “When was the last time you had sexual intercourse?” And she said, “Young man” – I was well over seventy at the time – “young man, I can answer that precisely: October the fifth, nineteen hundred and thirty-two.”’

But Jonathan prayed for his own special plague, and years later it amused him to think that just like Moses he had called down the plague that devastated the Stokes. Moses said to the pharaoh, ‘If thou refuse to let my people go, behold, tomorrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast.’ In September of the year after the wooden house was built, just as the harvest began, the daylight dimmed one sunny afternoon. The tobacco plants stopped blowing. The Stokes and Jonathan dropped their tools and stared. At first sight a swarm of locusts is a glittering cloud. Locusts aren’t tiny things as I’d always thought; they’re sometimes as big as humming-birds. When they’re near, their wings rustle, which is queer because it’s a loud sound and a rustle shouldn’t be loud. The largest count of anything in the Old Testament is thirty thousand, but there can be as many as eighty billion locusts in a swarm; Moses had no way of describing what he’d brought down on Egypt. Nor did Jonathan. Locusts dropped out of the sky like giant hailstones.

They fell into the necks of shirts and pinafores, crawled up the legs of pants and skirts, clung to faces, hair, fingers, ears. Everybody – all six of them at once – broke into a run. Inside the wooden house, they listened to locusts thudding down on the roof. But they couldn’t stay there. They went back out. They had to. They hitched the insect-covered mare to an insect-covered wagon and loaded insect-covered hay into it. Between the tobacco hills they set hay piles afire. By late afternoon, locusts were four inches deep on the ground from horizon to horizon. In a swarm there are so many locusts that if they’re pink, the entire landscape is pink; if they’re gray, the landscape is gray. There’s a sort of palsy everywhere. Everything jiggles with bugs. They writhe in clumps from trees. Potatoes, carrots, beets, beans, whole fields of sorghum and timothy sink to the ground under their weight. When you walk through them, they organize themselves in waves and take off in succession – wave after wave roaring as it breaks into flight like a squadron of bombers setting out on a mission.