But Jonathan still had that grace, like Alvah’s. This shared grace must have troubled George; he loved his father more than ever with that blood-sucking, jealous love he practiced on his intimates. In his autobiography he refers to Alvah as most public people might refer to the spirit of the country they serve. Perhaps he was right. There was much in Alvah of the basic American soul – the independence, the drive, the ruthlessness – but there was still something in the way Jonathan held his head that disturbed George’s sleep. George worked harder at his lessons and his essay. When he caught sight of Jonathan, he was careful to let his eyes register no more interest than they did when he caught sight of the mare.

As for Jonathan, he kept his mind to the cubic shape of the tobacco cubes that the Stokes produced, the landscape inside his head as baked and barren as the landscape the locusts had left behind them. Before the snow had melted Alvah was entrusting him with the weekly trips to Sweetbrier to bargain for staples in exchange for Wikin’s Chewing Tobacco. Without teeth my grandfather couldn’t speak properly, so he didn’t speak at all. He pointed and shook his head if the price was too high. To deal with the sometimes complicated haggling, he developed those extraordinary gestures that remained with him for the rest of his life. Usually little kids are merciless to people like this (I have personal experience of such matters), but they didn’t harass Jonathan. Perhaps they were afraid. I don’t know what he looked like at the time – there are no photographs – but probably his face showed something of the fury that his mind denied. Whatever the reason, local children followed him down the street and into Benbow Wikin’s, where most of the haggling went on, as though he were the Pied Piper; they laughed delightedly when he got across some unexpected thought, and after he’d left, they squatted outside and tried to talk to each other with their own hands.

Jonathan paid no attention to them – which may have been part of his secret – nor did he pay attention to the gang of railway workers that appeared at the eastern horizon to bed the ground and lay the track that was to skirt the Stoke homestead on its way west through Sweetbrier. He hardly noticed them working throughout the bitter winter weather. He hardly noticed them disappear over the western horizon in May at just about the time George received a letter from the University of Kansas at Lawrence telling him he’d won the scholarship for 1876.

The week after George left for the University in September, the first train was scheduled to pass through Sweetbrier. Everybody from miles around came to look. It was night-time – one of those dark, moonless nights when the stars look garish. Beside the track, Jonathan stood a little back from the Stokes, waiting like the rest of them. Twenty years ago – or was it thirty? – I watched the first moon landing and was bored to death. We have a glut of wonders. But those people in Sweetbrier lived much as their fathers had lived and their fathers before them. No industry. No electricity. No running water. Trains didn’t yet play the liquid melodies of Casey-blow-your-horn; they had a high-pitched, single-note whistle, and here out of nowhere comes this disembodied sound, like no sound these people had ever heard. You have to envy them: what joy to be struck dumb by something altogether new. First the sound, then the headlight; this, too, was altogether new, a never-before-seen break in the darkness. Then the chuff-chuff-a-chuff of steam and heavy metal wheels; then the rumble. And at last a sight of the engine itself. A steam engine is a magnificent thing even to modern eyes, but for these dirt-poor farmers it’s the first man-made miracle they’ve ever seen. Here is a huge, clanking, shaking, hissing monstrosity out of the Apocalypse: and this time the miracle is ours – theirs – human, not divine.