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changes sweeping the land.
    This evening, two days before Christmas, Bullock would attend the annual holiday ball, or levee, for his people at the grange. It was not so different from the Saturday night dances held throughout the year, except that the outside public of Union Grove was not invited. This traditional Christmas levee—in its seventh season—would be limited strictly to the greater Bullock farm family, his people. As usual, he intended to supply plenty of the farm’s own champagne-style “bright” cider, hams, fowls, and roasts with all the trimmings, a very large, grand cake constructed to resemble a Yule log, made by Union Grove’s master baker Danny Russo, with ice cream churned on the premises, cookies, puddings, and other sweets for the twenty-two children of his people, and the distribution of gifts from the goods acquired over the preceding year in trade for the prodigious outputs of his farm, which derived, of course, from his people’s labor.
    But first there was a disagreeable matter to dispose of: the possible expulsion of one of his people, a very rare occurrence. He had asked Travis Berkey to report to the library in his house, the old manse, as they called it, at six o’clock in the evening. Bullock was already dressed for the levee in his customary riding trousers, shiny high black leather riding boots, a long green velvet frock coat, and a holly berry red satin vest within. He wore his long white hair in a tidy queue this evening. The large bookshelf-lined library contained an eight-foot-long map table covered with charts and drawings of Bullock’s ongoing projects—the sorghum mill, an expansion of the cement works, a contraption for sifting large batches of compost—as well as Bullock’s regular desk. A forty-watt bulb burned in the banker’s lamp there leaving the rest of the room shrouded in dimness.
    Two of Bullock’s most trusted lieutenants, Dick Lee and Michael Delson, occupied comfortable leather club chairs in far corners of the room. Both wore their best clothing for this special evening and both were armed but did not display their weapons. An old mantel clock chimed six times above the blazing fireplace between where the two men sat. Bullock poured whiskey made on the property into three pony glasses and brought the drinks to his two men. He put a disc of carols by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, on the CD player. The first carol, “In Dulci Jubilo,” struck just the right tone of gravity for the occasion, he thought. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” would have been all wrong, smacking of everything that had ruined the country in the way of late-twentieth-century complacency, narcissism, and hubris . . . yuletide in Las Vegas, chorus girls in Santa Claus getups, and cash registers ringing everywhere . . . It made him shudder.
    A knock on the door brought Bullock out of his reverie. The clock said 6:10. He put down his whiskey glass. Sophie Bullock, resplendent in a close-bodied silver satin gown that made her look like a Christmas tree ornament come to life, and which contrasted radiantly with the dim ambience of the library, showed Travis Berkey into the room, then withdrew into the hallway and closed the door, leaving all concerned in a resonant silence.
    “You’re a little late,” Bullock said eventually.
    “I had my duties,” Berkey said. He was sinewy and curved like a human scythe blade, as if well worn by physical labor, though he was not out of his thirties. He wore a greasy leather wool shearling-lined vest and wool trousers with holes in the knees. “Had to rebuild a singletree.”
    “How’d it break?”
    “Things get used hard around here.”
    “Yes, well, I’ll just come to the point then,” Bullock said. “You have to leave.”
    “Leave?” Berkey said. “I just got here.”
    “I mean the farm.”
    Berkey recoiled as from a blow and then visibly shrank within himself.
    “What for?” he said.
    “You beat poor Perses nearly