As I play the scene for myself, Jonathan began to hear the words just as George was saying:

‘– and what are these fancy bosses in their button-up suits tellin’ us? Eh? “Sacrifice this little town of Sweetbrier for the greater good of the nation.” That it?’

When I was small, my two sisters and I spent a year at an elegant boarding school far away from home. My father and mother did a lot of wild quarreling; sometimes it was best to have us children out of the line of fire. Three little maids at school: there were banks of rhododendrons at the edge of the school’s lawn, and to this day the scent of rhododendrons brings back the peculiar unhappiness of that place and that time in my life with a force not even my most vivid memories can evoke. It was much like this for Jonathan, hearing George’s voice for the first time in more than forty years.

‘Got us licked? The Midwest Pacific? Us? Lemme hear what you say to that, friends.’

Jonathan took in his breath and began his report to the generals at base camp in Topeka, where the Methodist Congress was just getting under way. ‘The salesman’s smoothness: it rules everything – always did, of course, but there’s real power in it now. And money. Then what? There’s something – what is it? – something that’s askew. Why are the eyes dull? Is it greed? fear?’

George had become a traveling salesman at the age of fifteen when times were hard for his family. He was big for his age even then. They called them drummers in those days – some ten years after the Civil War was over – and George drummed up trade for Sweetbrier Chewing Tobacco in First Chance, Dixon, Nirvana and all the other little towns, dozens of them, that are still spotted here and there over the midwest like mold on damp linen. Jonathan hadn’t seen George in the flesh for nearly half a century, although he’d watched him grow older and fatter in newsprint: the papers carried many pictures of the great senator. It was such an illustrious career. Even so, when Jonathan thought of George, he thought of the boy who practiced his salesman’s spiel, elbow on makeshift table, black eyes shining: ‘Set ’em up, friend. Bourbon for me.’

Youth is merciless, feral, but age? There aren’t words terrible enough. Look at the fat old grotesque perched on that top step. Whatever happened to the shiny-eyed boy? Look at the mountainous thighs that touch even though the stance is splay-footed. When George got his first frock coat, frock coats were fashionable. He’d got it to sell in, because a drummer has to dress well or the suckers won’t buy. It had come from Sears Roebuck; it had a buckram lining and shell buttons. Thinking of these things, Jonathan swayed and caught himself, the look of anguish appearing on his face as it did in Hannaville when some weakness opened up in the war-torn principality of his mind.