‘A frock coat! Jesus, these were the kind of people who usually wore nothing but home-spun flax. You know what that is? Wify grew it. She reaped it, carded it, spun it, wove it, cut the cloth and sewed it. They were so fucking poor, they slept in those clothes. They wore them night and day until the goddamned things fell off their backs.’ Sometimes I used to catch glimpses of Clark Gable’s rubbery ogle on Atlas’s face and then, a moment later, a hint of my own father’s pewter-polished academic manner. But talking like this, Atlas’s face became his own; you could see the man he might have been. ‘A guy like Alvah never even dreamed of wearing a frock coat,’ he went on. ‘Preachers wore frock coats. Doctors wore them. You know, rich people – you, me – people who undressed for bed and had running water. The audacity of it. A frock coat! To hell with locusts. With a frock coat in the offing, anything can be borne.’

After the locusts laid their eggs and died, no green things grew again, not even a weed. The land was a desert of dirt that cracked and split. The well went dry; what water there was came from a night-drip in the stream. There was not enough food. The Stokes’ home-spun hung loose on them and Wify’s great bones stuck up through her flesh like the tent poles of a circus big top. All efforts went on Wikin’s Sweetbrier: A Good Chew. In late winter, by the time they’d manufactured several hundred pounds of it, George’s frock coat arrived.

‘It was serge, black, satin-lined,’ my uncle Atlas said, ‘double-breasted, two rows of mother-of-pearl buttons. Dad described it to me once, every detail, down to the price tag.’

George unfolded the coat, spread it out, surveyed it, held it up and put it on with a swing of its skirt just as Wify’s father, the great salesman, might have done. Jonathan’s hands went on kneading sticky tobacco into plugs, but he could not look away. George stepped over to the crate that still served the family as a dining-table; he bent from the waist and rested one elbow next to Jonathan’s pile of tobacco.

‘Howya keeping, boughten boy?’

Jonathan said nothing.

George straightened and, with his eyes on Jonathan, ran his hands down the front panels of the coat that was the promised land.

Then he winked.

9

‘An army with all its physical powers, inured to privations and fatigue by exercise, like the muscles of an athlete’ – these are the words of Karl von Clausewitz again, the great philosopher of war – an army like this is an army that can win battles even when the odds are very much against it.

For nearly ten years, ever since George had declared the war between them that first day in the sod hut, Jonathan’s hatred had held the balance. Hatred had exercised his physical powers, inured his mind to privations and fatigue, kept his spirit in fighting trim. But this wink – this was new, altogether new. He found himself off balance. Surprise allows the surpriser, says Clausewitz, ‘to gain a march upon the enemy, and thereby a position, a road, a point of country.’