Stoke is not all that uncommon a name. That was a dead man – boy – that he’d left by the side of the railroad tracks. He’d certainly looked dead. He didn’t seem – Why weaken at that critical moment? Why fail to establish for certain that he was dead? Could he have been alive after all? Was it just carelessness? Is that why there had never been a Wanted poster? A clump of twigs swept past, this time going bow to stern; the boat had swung back to front since the log had gone by a few minutes before. Heaven is a conception for people who die young: if you live long enough you want no part of it. I need to be dead, Jonathan said. He tried to pray. He kneeled down, the boat swaying and rocking, and tried. But he could not. ‘Oh, You Bastard,’ he whispered urgently to the figure who had refused to answer Pilate about truth. He squinted into the gray that surrounded him, face tingling.

‘Okay, goddamn you,’ he shouted then. ‘You win this one! Hands down! Do you hear me? George?’

‘Hallo! Hallo!’ came the answering call from the shore beyond.

It’s always the absurdity of things that gets you. Marching to your own execution, you slip on a banana peel and break your neck. Laughter surged through Jonathan, the man who never laughed.

‘Hello! Hello! Call again! Hello!’

What difference does it make? he thought, pulling on the oars. You hear a cry and you row toward it, isn’t that enough? Who are you to demand answers anyway? Of God or George—

But that night for the first time in thirteen years, for the first time since his conversion had supplied him with the clean borders of an orderly universe with orderly beginnings and endings, where a thing and its opposite stayed properly separated: for the first time he woke to find his hands plucking imaginary tobacco worms from the covers of the bed he lay in. He knew what the dream meant: he knew his God was dead and buried – the idyll over – and he was again as forsaken as he’d been that night so long ago when he’d tried to shoot himself outside Bowie Jack’s in Cheyenne, as forsaken as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

FOUR

Wednesday afternoon and evening

REARMAMENT

1

Undertakers make regular calls on geriatricians like Atlas. I don’t really know why; I wasn’t allowed to accompany him into the living room for his talk with them. Morticians: what an inane word. I did meet them, though; Claire brought them to Atlas’s office when they first arrived: two plump young men, very young men – painfully young – aglow with health and money.

‘Hi,’ they said.

‘Are they old enough to be doing that sort of thing?’ I asked Atlas after the secret talk was over. It was mid-afternoon. Claire brought us tea, convinced that because I lived in England I couldn’t get through the afternoon without a tea bag. She did not set the tray down graciously; I feared I was in for a rough French dinner party to come. She made a second reference to seven being a difficult number around a table.