By bedtime, underneath the shroud of smoke not a single tobacco plant stood – nor did any other green thing.

All night the writhing went on, the rustle of carapace and wings, the milling, meaningless activity. The next morning – as abrupt as a slap in the face – it stopped. The bugs sat upright, all of them at once. This is the genetic clock at work, a unity of timing we humans can only dream of: this is how locusts lay their eggs. Then they die. Hatching doesn’t come until spring, which is to say that next year’s crop was destroyed as surely as this year’s, and even before the seed was sown. Alvah went out in the wagon. When he got back he tossed a piece of paper on the table.

‘What’s that?’ Wify said. Alvah shook his head. ‘What’s it say, George?’

‘“This document says”,’ George read, ‘“that Alvah Stoke and Benbow Wikin are partners in Wikin’s Sweetbrier: A Good Chew. Benbow Wikin to supply three hogsheads of Ohio White Burley, Alvah Stoke to manufacture. George Stoke to sell around. Signed Alvah Stoke and Benbow Wikin.”’

George looked up. ‘What’s that mean – “George Stoke to sell around”?’

‘Wify’ll teach you,’ Alvah said.

The Bible doesn’t say what effect Moses’ plague of locusts had on Moses himself and on the Jews, who had to suffer it just as Pharaoh and the Egyptians did, but Jonathan’s agonies were far greater than anyone else’s. His plague brought about a critical phase in the formal education of the future Senator Stoke. Every evening after supper, Wify taught George the techniques that had earned her father the title of ‘Best Salesman in New Hampshire’ from the Barghest Traveling Medicine Show.

‘Heels first when you walk, George,’ she’d say. ‘Clomp. Clomp. Right up to the sucker. Look him in the eye and don’t let him go.’ She taught him to smile with his eyebrows raised, lean his elbow against a storekeeper’s counter and open with ‘Howya keeping?’ She chose clothes for him from the Sears Roebuck catalogue; he was going to ride the mare and sell Wikin’s Sweetbrier in towns up to fifty miles away. A drummer needs spats and a bowler hat.

A drummer needs a frock coat.

‘You got to think what a frock coat meant to people like that,’ Atlas said to me. We got to this part of the story in mid-morning. There was a brackish mixture in his coffee cup by this time, half gin and half brandy. ‘Looks kinda like whiskey, wouldn’t you say?’ he said to me. The whiskey was gone. Claire didn’t nag at him, so he said, if he drank only whiskey. ‘She thinks she can – what’s the word she uses? – “monitor” my intake that way.’ Atlas’s fourth wife – Claire’s immediate predecessor (I’d liked number four) – had thought she could ‘monitor’ his intake, too. Such self-deception is standard, I’m told. Number three drank with him. I was too little for number one, and all I remember about number two was that I didn’t like her; her name was Matilda and when I was only six she laughed at my jokes, the silly cow. Even at the time – especially then – I could see what a fool she was.