And so it was the teeth were pulled from the boy who was all teeth and claws like the uncrowned king of Arabia.

11

‘There’s just so much of this I can take,’ I said to Atlas, although at the time I didn’t have all the details I’ve put down here simply because Atlas didn’t know them all, not by any means. Jonathan’s coded diaries are my primary source. Back in England, when this day at Atlas’s old age ghetto in Washington state was well over, I typed hundreds of pages of the diaries into my computer, which ground out for me letter by letter (in electronic green, accompanied by electronic bleeps) a life of nightmare that makes me feel ill just to think about it: a life decoded onto fanfold listing paper with micro-perforations, printer chuffing through its paces as indifferently as though it were producing a tax assessment. But why were the diaries in code? What was the point of it? As a child I’d known the crude outlines – the bounding out, the tobacco farm – although in my family the hatred of Jonathan was so great that my father seemed to lay claim to these things for himself, as though they had been lived through for the sole purpose of terrorizing him. But Jonathan was efficient. He wouldn’t have wasted his energy on coding diaries just because the tale they told was ugly. It made no sense to me.

‘You got to keep in mind,’ Atlas said, ‘that Alvah Stoke had his virtues as a slavemaster.’

‘How can you say that, Atlas? This is the most terrible—’

‘It’s just old-fashioned slavery. Nothing special.’

‘—and as for George – How much more stuff like this is there?’

‘Not all that much. It gets better soon.’

‘Promise?’

He laughed. ‘See, this guy, Alvah, he wasn’t cruel for no reason at all; he took good care of his animals, and the way he saw it, dad wasn’t much different from the mare and the pigs. A hell of a lot more trouble, though; and he’d have killed any animal that hurt the others. Besides, the operation seemed to work – which would have justified it entirely in any slavemaster’s book.’

Jonathan was sick for weeks afterwards. They kept him in the wooden house and tended him just as Atlas said, like a feeble calf in winter. The pain he suffered must have been dreadful to watch, and he drank only water. But at least he drank. When he began to get better, Alvah knew there would be no more running away – not for a while, anyhow. ‘In a lost battle,’ says Clausewitz, ‘it is the moral power of an army that is broken to a greater degree than the physical.’ Alvah said to Benbow Wikin with some satisfaction, ‘You get you an animal, you got to break him.’ For just over a year, Alvah’s satisfaction remained intact.

In his autobiography, George says he went out selling tobacco during this winter of Jonathan’s defeat, in Sullen Springs and Frying Pan, in Whiskey, First Chance and Cow. Miss Emelina’s pressure on Alvah had got him back to school; she’d started him to work on an essay called ‘A Drummer Looks at Kansas’ which they both hoped would win him the Farm Boys’ scholarship, written up in the Overland Sentinel, alongside stories about the St Joe, Hannibal & Denver Railroad that was to run through Sweetbrier. But he says nothing about his state of mind, and what a state it must have been! How much he’d learned! Play by the rules: you lose. Hold back: you lose. Consider any consequence other than winning: you lose. But lie, scheme, cheat – break every rule you’ve ever been taught, cross every line that’s ever been drawn – and what happens? You win. This is the secret of war. This is the secret of life. What greater secret can anybody possess? The laughter in him must have threatened to boil up out of control.