He slept badly in his bed with sheets. It was a rare night that went by without a nightmare; one in particular frightened him more than all the rest. The first night he had it, he’d gone to sleep with his mind on a number 104 Consolidation, a thirty-eight-ton behemoth of an engine with four pairs of driver wheels. He’d watched it ease its great mass into the yard, pause, and then reverse, steam rising, back onto a siding. All that power so delicately moved left him with an oppressive calm that hung on into the night. This comes from his coded diaries. Nobody knows about it but Jonathan and me.

He saw Cathern come to milk the cow again, just as she used to. He collected the little death machine he’d made out of wood and leather, just as he used to and – just as he used to – he went out to the tobacco fields. I’ve always been fascinated by borderlands. Just when does one thing become another? At just precisely what point in my life did I become a cripple? When the tumor began to grow? When I first sat in this chair? When does a freeman become a slave? When the money changes hands? When the spirit breaks? When does truth become falsehood? The precise moment goes by so fast we can’t catch it; it’s always blurred, always subject to lies, ritual, elaborate evasion. For Jonathan, that most vegetable of things, a tobacco field, becomes suddenly, unaccountably an animal being with mouths that eat away at its own innards: there is the world of pure terror, and then the desperate fight of the little death machine to restore integrity. At just what point is a battle irrevocably lost? or won?

Coming awake with a start Jonathan found his hands moving methodically on the sheets and over the blankets, plucking at worms, picking, squashing, doing what he’d done for all the summer Wednesdays of his childhood.

‘I signed on for brakeman,’ he shouted at College the next evening over the din in the Home Rule in the half-shout, half-speak that he’d mastered along with link-and-pin couplings and such rare delicacies as how to purchase socks and a shoe-shine.

‘You what?’ There were no jobs on the rolling stock of the Hannibal & St Joe.

‘Can’t stick around any longer.’

‘Did you talk to Frank?’

Jonathan nodded. He’d been to the Home Rule Bar more times than he could remember now. After a few months of tense watching and waiting, even the Wanted posters had come to seem friendly to him, and there had been a glowing period not long after his arrival when it had seemed that life just might make sense to him, when he thought he’d like to spend the rest of it in this noisy, smelly room. No longer. After two years, the Home Rule epitomized the sham of Denver; he wanted to run from it, run now, run fast, run so hard that nothing could ever catch him. At least running was real.