That night Jonathan made his third attempt to run away to the town that lay below the evening star.

None of the old inhabitants remained. Not one. Even the dance hall he’d remembered had disappeared. The new people had no idea what had happened to it or its owner or the girls who had danced there. ‘Probably gone west,’ they said. The one thing they did know was that there was a reward for the return of a boughten boy; as before, a bartender waylaid him and returned him to the homestead where Alvah beat him. Alvah’s patience was wearing thin; this time the beating was no ordinary beating. This time Alvah used the horsewhip. Then he chained my grandfather and set him a diet of bread and water for two weeks.

During the days of punishment, Jonathan was almost less aware of his pain and hunger than he was of the shift in battle-lines. George brought him food. George! Beans and bacon plainly stolen from the cold store. Jonathan was profoundly disconcerted. George won him release a day before the two weeks were up. The swagger was gone from George’s voice; he addressed Jonathan by name. My grandfather waited tensely. A month went by. Nothing happened. There was going to be hell to pay.

In April the snows melted and the prairies began to bloom. On the first hot morning in May, the locusts hatched. They’re always green at first, wingless and sexless; they move like the surface of a pond, sudden ripples in sudden gusts of wind. They grow, shed a carapace, grow again, shed again, five times in all; with the fifth come wings and sex. Then one day, in as abrupt a change as came over their parents the year before, there’s a hush, a wait, a changing of the tide: an army forms – no shoddy human imitation of an army, either – and begins to move, its lock-step so absolute that it marches up over anything that stands in its way, houses, fences, animals; it marches into creeks, where millions drown, and more and more march in and drown until there are so many dead ones that they make up a bridge for live ones to cross on.

West was the way everything went. Jonathan’s father went west; ‘probably gone to California,’ Benbow had said. Where else would he go? Where else would anybody go? The hurdy girls and the dance hall owner: ‘probably gone west.’ Where else? The locusts were no different. When the swarm took to flight, even the wingless, the sexless, the legless – the dregs that could not fly – straggled westward on the ground until they died in their tracks. And while the devastated ground around Sweetbrier caked and cracked once more, the Overland Sentinel ran a special edition:

BEHOLD! WE, TOO, ARE GOING WEST!

The Future Arrives in Sweetbrier This Winter! Work on the Railroad to Begin!

An advance workforce of the St. Jo, Hannibal & Denver starts work in November on the west-bound line that will go straight through town and link us with California.