When Henry’s on The Pride of Bethlehem all them long weeks he reads the Buffalo Bill chapbooks what are padding out its hold as ballast, but that’s just because it’s sometimes all there is to do and not because of any admiration he might have for Colonel Cody. Still, he understands the need that people have for such nonsensical adventures, and he don’t begrudge them that. What Henry reckons is that in amidst the shove and effort and small comfort of this world when we’re down here enmired in it like what we are, a man has got to have a star up there above him so as he can navigate, and what that star is, it’s some manner of ideal what you can’t reach but what shows you the way. Back there in Tennessee on the plantation you get the old stories come from Africa about the fearless warriors and all the clever spirit-animals what teach about how it’s good to be kind to people and the benefits of being cunning and the like. At the same time you got the songs and the religion, Pastor Newton’s hymn included, which Henry supposes is another breed of the same thing, some better way of living or some better place what we might never get to but where the idea of it can keep us going all the same. Where it don’t matter if you find out that the man what writes the hymn has got his shameful side and doesn’t necessarily live up to what he writes about, because it’s the ideal what’s the important thing. On the same track you have your mythological inventions like, say, Hercules and made-up characters from out the chapbooks like that Sherlock Holmes they got here or, for that matter, like Buffalo Bill, a made-up character if ever Henry met one. Just the thought there’s somebody that clever or ingenious or brave, even if they don’t properly exist except when you’re all caught up in the story, it gives you something to reach for and to head the wagon of your life towards. And then there’s the real men and women what in Henry’s estimation make the brightest beacons and most glorious good examples you could follow, seeing as they’re flesh and blood and not some ancient god or hero from a chapbook, which means maybe if you try as hard as them then wondrous things might truly come of it. Sometimes when he’s asleep he calls up Britton Johnson, like a stepping beauty on the boardwalks of some giant place what’s always there in Henry’s dreams, twirling his six-guns like a cowboy in a moving picture or else dressing up like a Red Indian to get his wife and children back from the Comanche. What it must be like to be a man like that, and Henry hopes that if Selina or his little ones are ever in harm’s way he’ll have the courage to do just what Britton Johnson does, or at least something what’s as brave. Black Charley gets enough attention in the ordinary run of things and don’t know about dressing up like no Red Indian. He’ll do it if he’s got to but there’s no great likelihood of that here in the Boroughs. Henry dreams of Mother Seacole livening up the wounded soldiers with some herbs, some rum and maybe a quick dance round the field hospital and general provisions store she’s got on the front line of the Crimean War, who in most people’s eyes is never going to measure up to Mrs. Nightingale no more than Britton Johnson’s ever going to have a silly chapbook in his honour like Bill Cody. Henry dreams of Walter Tull, out there in no-man’s-land between the trenches like in all those stories what come back of how the Germans and the English play a football game on Christmas day before they all get back to blowing out each other’s vitals the next morning. Henry dreams of Walter Tull in his white baggy shorts and claret shirt, dribbling the ball between the tank traps and dead horses, darting this way and then that invulnerable through mustard gas, and booting it high above all the duckboards and the bodies and barbed wire into the black skies over Passchendaele like a bursting signal-flare. He never dreams about John Newton, never dreams of Jesus, and now that he’s getting on in years Henry prefers his saints to be just ordinary men and women who make no great claim to saintliness. He’s not in any way an atheist, it’s more like these days he’s not specially inclined to put religious faith in people what might let him down, or in some institution other than his own self who he’s sure of. Henry raises up a rough church in his heart what he can carry with him where he goes, poking around in the old barns and that, with humming to himself instead of organ music and the stained-glass light spilled out of his imagination on the floor in all the straw and horse muck. Henry thinks about all what he’s done, taking care of his mom and pop like they took care of him, crossing the great wide sea and sliding down upon Northampton in a snowy woollen avalanche, him and Selina raising up their children without losing any of them, and he feels contented with himself and with his life. It’s best, Henry believes, a man should be his own ideal and champion, however long it takes him to arrive there.