3

They went to the Hamilton ranch in Louis Lippo’s buckboard--Louis and Adam Trask. The iron straps rattled around in the box, and a leg of venison, wrapped in wet burlap to keep it cool, jumped around on top of the iron. It was customary in that day to take some substantial lump of food as a present when you went calling on a man, for you had to stay to dinner unless you wished to insult his house. But a few guests could set back the feeding plans for the week if you did not build up what you destroyed. A quarter of pork or a rump of beef would do. Louis had cut down the venison and Adam provided a bottle of whisky.
“Now I’ll have to tell you,” Louis said. “Mr. Hamilton will like that, but Mrs. Hamilton has got a skunner on it. If I was you I’d leave it under the seat, and when we drive around to the shop, why, then you can get it out. That’s what we always do.”
“Doesn’t she let her husband take a drink?”
“No bigger than a bird,” said Louis. “But she’s got brassbound opinions. Just you leave the bottle under the seat.”
They left the valley road and drove into the worn and rutted hills over a set of wheel tracks gulleyed by the winter rains. The horses strained into their collars and the buckboard rocked and swayed. The year had not been kind to the hills, and already in June they were dry and the stones showed through the short, burned feed. The wild oats had headed out barely six inches above the ground, as though with knowledge that if they didn’t make seed quickly they wouldn’t get to seed at all.
“It’s not likely looking country,” Adam said.
“Likely? Why, Mr. Trask, it’s country that will break a man’s heart and eat him up. Likely! Mr. Hamilton has a sizable piece and he’d of starved to death on it with all those children. The ranch don’t feed them. He does all kinds of jobs, and his boys are starting to bring in something now. It’s a fine family.”
Adam stared at a line of dark mesquite that peeked out of a draw. “Why in the world would he settle on a place like this?”
Louis Lippo, as does every man, loved to interpret, to a stranger particularly, if no native was present to put up an argument. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Take me--my father was Italian. Came here after the trouble but he brought a little money. My place isn’t very big but it’s nice. My father bought it. He picked it out. And take you--I don’t know how you’re fixed and wouldn’t ask, but they say you’re trying to buy the old Sanchez place and Bordoni never gave anything away. You’re pretty well fixed or you couldn’t even ask about it.”
“I’m comfortably off,” said Adam modestly.
“I’m talking the long way around,” said Louis. “When Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton came into the valley they didn’t have a pot to piss in. They had to take what was left--government land that nobody else wanted. Twenty-five acres of it won’t keep a cow alive even in good years, and they say the coyotes move away in bad years. There’s people say they don’t know how the Hamiltons lived. But of course Mr. Hamilton went right to work--that’s how they lived. Worked as a hired hand till he got his threshing machine built.”
“Must have made a go of it. I hear of him all over.”
“He made a go of it all right. Raised nine children. I’ll bet he hasn’t got four bits laid away. How could he?”
One side of the buckboard leaped up, rolled over a big round stone, and dropped down again. The horses were dark with sweat and lathered under the collar and britching.
“I’ll be glad to talk to him,” said Adam.
“Well, sir, he raised one fine crop--he had good children and he raised them fine. All doing well--maybe except Joe. Joe--he’s the youngest--they’re talking about sending him to college, but all the rest are doing fine. Mr. Hamilton can be proud. The house is just on the other side of the next rise. Don’t forget and bring out that whisky--she’ll freeze you to the ground.”
The dry earth was ticking under the sun and the crickets rasped. “It’s real godforsaken country,” said Louis.
“Makes me feel mean,” said Adam.
“How’s that?”
“Well, I’m fixed so I don’t have to live on a place like this.”
“Me too, and I don’t feel mean. I’m just goddam glad.”
When the buckboard topped the rise Adam could look down on the little cluster of buildings which composed the Hamilton seat--a house with many lean-tos, a cow shed, a shop, and a wagon shed. It was a dry and sun-eaten sight--no big trees and a small hand-watered garden.
Louis turned to Adam, and there was just a hint of hostility in his tone. “I want to put you straight on one or two things, Mr. Trask. There’s people that when they see Samuel Hamilton the first time might get the idea he’s full of bull. He don’t talk like other people. He’s an Irishman. And he’s all full of plans--a hundred plans a day. And he’s all full of hope. My Christ, he’d have to be to live on this land! But you remember this--he’s a fine worker, a good blacksmith, and some of his plans work out. And I’ve heard him talk about things that were going to happen and they did.”
Adam was alarmed at the hint of threat. “I’m not a man to run another man down,” he said, and he felt that suddenly Louis thought of him as a stranger and an enemy.
“I just wanted you to get it straight. There’s some people come in from the East and they think if a man hasn’t got a lot of money he’s no good.”
“I wouldn’t think of--”
“Mr. Hamilton maybe hasn’t got four bits put away, but he’s our people and he’s as good as we got. And he’s raised the nicest family you’re likely to see. I just want you to remember that.”
Adam was on the point of defending himself and then he said, “I’ll remember. Thanks for telling me.”
Louis faced around front again. “There he is--see, out by the shop? He must of heard us.”
“Has he got a beard?” Adam asked, peering.
“Yes, got a nice beard. It’s turning white fast, beginning to grizzle up.”
They drove past the frame house and saw Mrs. Hamilton looking out the window at them, and they drew up in front of the shop where Samuel stood waiting for them.
Adam saw a big man, bearded like a patriarch, his graying hair stirring in the air like thistledown. His cheeks above his beard were pink where the sun had burned his Irish skin. He wore a clean blue shirt, overalls, and a leather apron. His sleeves were rolled up, and his muscular arms were clean too. Only his hands were blackened from the forge. After a quick glance Adam came back to the eyes, light blue and filled with a young delight. The wrinkles around them were drawn in radial lines inward by laughter.
“Louis,” he said, “I’m glad to see you. Even in the sweetness of our little heaven here, we like to see our friends.” He smiled at Adam, and Louis said, “I brought Mr. Adam Trask to see you. He’s a stranger from down east, come to settle.”
“I’m glad,” said Samuel. “We’ll shake another time. I wouldn’t soil your hand with these forge hooks.”
“I brought some strap iron, Mr. Hamilton. Would you make some angles for me? The whole frame of my header bed is fallen to hell.”
“Sure I will, Louis. Get down, get down. We’ll put the horses to the shade.”
“There’s a piece of venison behind, and Mr. Trask brought a little something.”
Samuel glanced toward the house. “Maybe we’ll get out the ‘little something’ when we’ve got the rig behind the shed.”
Adam could hear the singing lilt of his speech and yet could detect no word pronounced in a strange manner except perhaps in sharpened i’s and l’s held high on the tongue.
“Louis, will you out-span your team? I’ll take the vension in. Liza will be glad. She likes a venison stew.”
“Any of the young ones home?”
“Well, no, they aren’t. George and Will came home for the week-end, and they all went last night to a dance up Wild Horse Canyon at the Peach Tree school-house. They’ll come trooping back by dusk. We lack a sofa because of that. I’ll tell you later--Liza will have a vengeance on them--it was Tom did it. I’ll tell you later.” He laughed and started toward the house, carrying the wrapped deer’s haunch. “If you want you can bring the ‘little something’ into the shop, so you don’t let the sun glint on it.”
They heard him calling as he came near the house. “Liza, you’ll never guess. Louis Lippo has brought a piece of venison bigger than you.”
Louis drove in back of the shed, and Adam helped him take the horses out, tie up the tugs, and halter them in the shade. “He meant that about the sun shining on the bottle,” said Louis.
“She must be a holy terror.”
“No bigger than a bird but she’s brassbound.”
“ ‘Out-span,’ ” Adam said. “I think I’ve heard it said that way, or read it.”
Samuel rejoined them in the shop. “Liza will be happy if you will stay to dinner,” he said.
“She didn’t expect us,” Adam protested.
“Hush, man. She’ll make some extra dumplings for the stew. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Give me your straps, Louis, and let’s see how you want them.”
He built a chip fire in the black square of the forge and pulled a bellows breeze on it and then fed wet coke over with his fingers until it glowed. “Here, Louis,” he said, “wave your wing on my fire. Slow, man, slow and even.” He laid the strips of iron on the glowing coke. “No, sir, Mr. Trask, Liza’s used to cooking for nine starving children. Nothing can startle her.” He tongued the iron to more advantageous heat, and he laughed. “I’ll take that last back as a holy lie,” he said. “My wife is rumbling like round stones in the surf. And I’ll caution the both of you not to mention the word ‘sofa.’ It’s a word of anger and sorrow to Liza.”
“You said something about it,” Adam said.
“If you knew my boy Tom, you’d understand it better, Mr. Trask. Louis knows him.”
“Sure I know him,” Louis said.
Samuel went on, “My Tom is a hell-bent boy. Always takes more on his plate than he can eat. Always plants more than he can harvest. Pleasures too much, sorrows too much. Some people are like that. Liza thinks I’m like that. I don’t know what will come to Tom. Maybe greatness, maybe the noose--well, Hamiltons have been hanged before. And I’ll tell you about that sometime.”
“The sofa,” Adam suggested politely.
“You’re right. I do, and Liza says I do, shepherd my words like rebellious sheep. Well, came the dance at the Peach Tree school and the boys, George, Tom, Will, and Joe, all decided to go. And of course the girls were asked. George and Will and Joe, poor simple boys, each asked one lady friend, but Tom--he took too big a helping as usual. He asked two Williams sisters, Jennie and Belle. How many screw holes do you want, Louis?”
“Five,” said Louis.
“All right. Now I must tell you, Mr. Trask, that my Tom has all the egotism and self-love of a boy who thinks he’s ugly. Mostly lets himself go fallow, but comes a celebration and he garlands himself like a maypole, and he glories like spring flowers. This takes him quite a piece of time. You notice the wagon house was empty? George and Will and Joe started early and not so beautiful as Tom. George took the rig, Will had the buggy, and Joe got the little two-wheeled cart.” Samuel’s blue eyes shone with pleasure. “Well then, Tom came out as shy and shining as a Roman emperor and the only thing left with wheels was a hay rake, and you can’t take even one Williams sister on that. For good or bad, Liza was taking her nap. Tom sat on the steps and thought it out. Then I saw him go to the shed and hitch up two horses and take the doubletree off the hay rake. He wrestled the sofa out of the house and ran a fifth-chain under the legs--the fine goose-neck horsehair sofa that Liza loves better than anything. I gave it to her to rest on before George was born. The last I saw, Tom went dragging up the hill, reclining at his ease on the sofa to get the Williams girls. And, oh, Lord, it’ll be worn thin as a wafer from scraping by the time he gets it back.” Samuel put down his tongs and placed his hands on his hips the better to laugh. “And Liza has the smoke of brimstone coming out her nostrils. Poor Tom.”
Adam said, smiling, “Would you like to take a little something?”
“That I would,” said Samuel. He accepted the bottle and took a quick swallow of whisky and passed it back.
“Uisquebaugh--it’s an Irish word--whisky, water of life--and so it is.”
He took the red straps to his anvil and punched screw holes in them and bent the angles with his hammer and the forked sparks leaped out. Then he dipped the iron hissing into his half-barrel of black water. “There you are,” he said and threw them on the ground.
“I thank you,” said Louis. “How much will that be?”
“The pleasure of your company.”
“It’s always like that,” Louis said helplessly.
“No, when I put your new well down you paid my price.”
“That reminds me--Mr. Trask here is thinking of buying the Bordoni place--the old Sanchez grant--you remember?”
“I know it well,” said Samuel. “It’s a fine piece.”
“He was asking about water, and I told him you knew more about that than anybody around here.”
Adam passed the bottle, and Samuel took a delicate sip and wiped his mouth on his forearm above the soot.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” said Adam. “I’m just asking some questions.”
“Oh, Lord, man, now you’ve put your foot in it. They say it’s a dangerous thing to question an Irishman because he’ll tell you. I hope you know what you’re doing when you issue me a license to talk. I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second--Liza says to a fault. What do you want to know?”
“Well, take the Bordoni place. How deep would you have to go to get water?”
“I’d have to see the spot--some places thirty feet, some places a hundred and fifty, and in some places clear to the center of the world.”
“But you could develop water?”
“Nearly every place except my own.”
“I’ve heard you have a lack here.”
“Heard? Why, God in heaven must have heard! I’ve screamed it loud enough.”
“There’s a four-hundred-acre piece beside the river. Would there be water under it?”
“I’d have to look. It seems to me it’s an odd valley. If you’ll hold your patience close, maybe I can tell you a little bit about it, for I’ve looked at it and poked my stinger down into it. A hungry man gorges with his mind--he does indeed.”
Louis Lippo said, “Mr. Trask is from New England. He plans to settle here. He’s been west before though--in the army, fighting Indians.”
“Were you now? Then it’s you should talk and let me learn.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not? God help my family and my neighbors if I had fought the Indians!”
“I didn’t want to fight them, sir.” The “sir” crept in without his knowing it.
“Yes, I can understand that. It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don’t know and don’t hate.”
“Maybe that makes it easier,” said Louis.
“You have a point, Louis. But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”
“I’d rather you told me about this land,” Adam said uneasily, for a sick picture of piled-up bodies came into his mind.
“What time is it?”
Louis stepped out and looked at the sun. “Not past ten o’clock.”
“If I get started I have no self-control. My son Will says I talk to trees when I can’t find a human vegetable.” He sighed and sat down on a nail keg. “I said it was a strange valley, but maybe that’s because I was born in a green place. Do you find it strange, Louis?”
“No, I never been out of it.”
“I’ve dug into it plenty,” Samuel said. “Something went on under it--maybe still is going on. There’s an ocean bed underneath, and below that another world. But that needn’t bother a farming man. Now, on top is good soil, particularly on the flats. In the upper valley it is light and sandy, but mixed in with that, the top sweetness of the hills that washed down on it in the winters. As you go north the valley widens out, and the soil gets blacker and heavier and perhaps richer. It’s my belief that marshes were there once, and the roots of centuries rotted into the soil and made it black and fertilized it. And when you turn it up, a little greasy clay mixes and holds it together. That’s from about Gonzales north to the river mouth. Off to the sides, around Salinas and Blanco and Castroville and Moss Landing, the marshes are still there. And when one day those marshes are drained off, that will be the richest of all land in this red world.”
“He always tells what it will be like someday,” Louis threw in.
“Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.”
“If I’m going to settle here I need to know about how and what will be,” said Adam. “My children, when I have them, will be on it.”
Samuel’s eyes looked over the heads of his friends, out of the dark forge to the yellow sunlight. “You’ll have to know that under a good part of the valley, some places deep and others pretty near the surface, there’s a layer called hard-pan. It’s a clay, hard-packed, and it feels greasy too. Some places it is only a foot thick, and more in others. And this hard-pan resists water. If it were not there the winter rains would go soaking down and dampen the earth, and in the summer it would rise up to the roots again. But when the earth above the hard-pan is soaked full, the rest runs fresheting off or stands rotting on top. And that’s one of the main curses of our valley.”
“Well, it’s a pretty good place to live, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, but a man can’t entirely rest when he knows it could be richer. I’ve thought that if you could drive thousands of holes through it to let the water in, it might solve it. And then I tried something with a few sticks of dynamite. I punched a hole through the hard-pan and blasted. That broke it up and the water could get down. But, God in heaven, think of the amount of dynamite! I’ve read that a Swede--the same man who invented dynamite--has got a new explosive stronger and safer Maybe that might be the answer.”
Louis said half derisively and half with admiration, “He’s always thinking about how to change things. He’s never satisfied with the way they are.”
Samuel smiled at him. “They say men lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.” And then he laughed again. “I can see myself sitting on my dust heap making a world in my mind as surely as God created this one. But God saw this world. I’ll never see mine except--this way. This will be a valley of great richness one day. It could feed the world, and maybe it will. And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands--” A cloud seemed to come over his eyes and his face set in sadness and he was silent.
“You make it sound like a good place to settle,” Adam said. “Where else could I raise my children with that coming?”
Samuel went on, “There’s one thing I don’t understand. There’s a blackness on this valley. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it. Sometimes on a white blinding day I can feel it cutting off the sun and squeezing the light out of it like a sponge.” His voice rose. “There’s a black violence on this valley. I don’t know--I don’t know. It’s as though some old ghost haunted it out of the dead ocean below and troubled the air with unhappiness. It’s as secret as hidden sorrow. I don’t know what it is, but I see it and feel it in the people here.”
Adam shivered. “I just remembered I promised to get back early. Cathy, my wife, is going to have a baby.”
“But Liza’s getting ready.”
“She’ll understand when you tell her about the baby. My wife is feeling poorly. And I thank you for telling me about the water.”
“Have I depressed you with my rambling?”
“No, not at all--not at all. It’s Cathy’s first baby and she’s miserable.”
Adam struggled all night with his thoughts and the next day he drove out and shook hands with Bordoni and the Sanchez place was his.

Chapter 14


1
There is so much to tell about the Western country in that day that it is hard to know where to start. One thing sets off a hundred others. The problem is to decide which one to tell first.
You remember that Samuel Hamilton said his children had gone to a dance at the Peach Tree School. The country schools were the centers of culture then. The Protestant churches in the towns were fighting for their existence in a country where they were newcomers. The Catholic church, first on the scene and deeply dug in, sat in comfortable tradition while the missions were gradually abandoned and their roofs fell in and pigeons roosted on the stripped altars. The library (in Latin and Spanish) of the San Antonio Mission was thrown into a granary, where the rats ate off the sheepskin bindings. In the country the repository of art and science was the school, and the schoolteacher shielded and carried the torch of learning and of beauty. The schoolhouse was the meeting place for music, for debate. The polls were set in the schoolhouse for elections. Social life, whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-night dance, could be held nowhere else. And the teacher was not only an intellectual paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher. Her children were presumed to have intellectual advantages both inherited and conditioned.
The daughters of Samuel Hamilton were not destined to become work-destroyed farm wives. They were handsome girls and they carried with them the glow of their descent from the kings of Ireland. They had a pride that transcended their poverty. No one ever thought of them as deserving pity. Samuel raised a distinctly superior breed. They were better read and better bred than most of their contemporaries. To all of them Samuel communicated his love of learning, and he set them apart from the prideful ignorance of their time. Olive Hamilton became a teacher. That meant that she left home at fifteen and went to live in Salinas, where she could go to secondary school. At seventeen she took county board examinations, which covered all the arts and sciences, and at eighteen she was teaching school at Peach Tree.
In her school there were pupils older and bigger than she was. It required great tact to be a schoolteacher. To keep order among the big undisciplined boys without pistol and bull whip was a difficult and dangerous business. In one school in the mountains a teacher was raped by her pupils.
Olive Hamilton had not only to teach everything, but to all ages. Very few youths went past the eighth grade in those days, and what with farm duties some of them took fourteen or fifteen years to do it. Olive also had to practice rudimentary medicine, for there were constant accidents. She sewed up knife cuts after a fight in the schoolyard. When a small barefooted boy was bitten by a rattlesnake, it was her duty to suck his toe to draw the poison out.
She taught reading to the first grade and algebra to the eighth. She led the singing, acted as a critic of literature, wrote the social notes that went weekly to the Salinas Journal. In addition, the whole social life of the area was in her hands, not only graduation exercises, but dances, meetings, debates, chorals, Christmas and May Day festivals, patriotic exudations on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. She was on the election board and headed and held together all charities. It was far from an easy job, and it had duties and obligations beyond belief. The teacher had no private life. She was watched jealously for any weakness of character. She could not board with one family for more than one term, for that would cause jealousy--a family gained social ascendancy by boarding the teacher. If a marriageable son belonged to the family where she boarded a proposal was automatic; if there was more than one claimant, vicious fights occurred over her hand. The Aguita boys, three of them, nearly clawed each other to death over Olive Hamilton. Teachers rarely lasted very long in the country schools. The work was so hard and the proposals so constant that they married within a very short time.
This was a course Olive Hamilton determined she would not take. She did not share the intellectual enthusiasms of her father, but the time she had spent in Salinas determined her not to be a ranch wife. She wanted to live in a town, perhaps not so big as Salinas but at least not a crossroads. In Salinas, Olive had experienced niceties of living, the choir and vestments, Altar Guild, and bean suppers of the Episcopal church. She had partaken of the arts--road companies of plays and even operas, with their magic and promise of an aromatic world outside. She had gone to parties, played charades, competed in poetry readings, joined a chorus and orchestra. Salinas had tempted her. There she could go to a party dressed for the party and come home in the same dress, instead of rolling her clothes in a saddlebag and riding ten miles, then unrolling and pressing them.
Busy though she was with her teaching, Olive longed for the metropolitan life, and when the young man who had built the flour mill in King City sued properly for her hand, she accepted him subject to a long and secret engagement. The secrecy was required because if it were known there would be trouble among the young men in the neighborhood.
Olive had not her father’s brilliance, but she did have a sense of fun, together with her mother’s strong and undeviating will. What light and beauty could be forced down the throats of her reluctant pupils, she forced.
There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city--to consider himself better than his father. Enough arithmetic to measure land and lumber and to keep accounts, enough writing to order goods and write to relatives, enough reading for newspapers, almanacs, and farm journals, enough music for religious and patriotic display--that was enough to help a boy and not to lead him astray. Learning was for doctors, lawyers, and teachers, a class set off and not considered related to other people. There were some sports, of course, like Samuel Hamilton, and he was tolerated and liked, but if he had not been able to dig a well, shoe a horse, or run a threshing machine, God knows what would have been thought of the family.
Olive did marry her young man and did move, first to Paso Robles, then to King City, and finally to Salinas. She was as intuitive as a cat. Her acts were based on feelings rather than thoughts. She had her mother’s firm chin and button nose and her father’s fine eyes. She was the most definite of any of the Hamiltons except her mother. Her theology was a curious mixture of Irish fairies and an Old Testament Jehovah whom in her later life she confused with her father. Heaven was to her a nice home ranch inhabited by her dead relatives. External realities of a frustrating nature she obliterated by refusing to-believe in them, and when one resisted her disbelief she raged at it. It was told of her that she cried bitterly because she could not go to two dances on one Saturday night. One was in Greenfield and the other in San Lucas--twenty miles apart. To have gone to both and then home would have entailed a sixty-mile horseback ride. This was a fact she could not blast with her disbelief, and so she cried with vexation and went to neither dance.
As she grew older she developed a scattergun method for dealing with unpleasant facts. When I, her only son, was sixteen I contracted pleural pneumonia, in that day a killing disease. I went down and down, until the wing tips of the angels brushed my eyes. Olive used her scattergun method of treating pleural pneumonia, and it worked. The Episcopalian minister prayed with and for me, the Mother Superior and nuns of the convent next to our house held me up to Heaven for relief twice a day, a distant relative who was a Christian Science reader held the thought for me. Every incantation, magic, and herbal formula known was brought out, and she got two good nurses and the town’s best doctors. Her method was practical. I got well. She was loving and firm with her family, three girls and me, trained us in housework, dish washing, clothes washing, and manners. When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.
When I recovered from my pneumonia it came time for me to learn to walk again. I had been nine weeks in bed, and the muscles had gone lax and the laziness of recovery had set in. When I was helped up, every nerve cried, and the wound in my side, which had been opened to drain the pus from the pleural cavity, pained horribly. I fell back in bed, crying, “I can’t do it! I can’t get up!”
Olive fixed me with her terrible eye. “Get up!” she said. “Your father has worked all day and sat up all night. He has gone into debt for you. Now get up!”
And I got up.
Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of the month was a debt. The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor. Olive, who truly believed that her family was the best in the world, quite snobbishly would not permit it to be touched by debt. She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbors had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.

2
Olive had great courage. Perhaps it takes courage to raise children. And I must tell you what she did about the First World War. Her thinking was not international. Her first boundary was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line. Thus she did not quite believe in the war, not even when Troop C, our militia cavalry, was called out, loaded its horses on a train, and set out for the open world.
Martin Hopps lived around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired. His mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say good morning to him was to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to Troop C because the armory had a basketball court.
If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.
She cast about for a weapon. Knitting helmets and socks was not deadly enough for her. For a time she put on a Red Cross uniform and met other ladies similarly dressed in the armory, where bandages were rolled and reputations unrolled. This was all right, but it was not driving at the heart of the Kaiser. Olive wanted blood for the life of Martin Hopps. She found her weapon in Liberty bonds. She had never sold anything in her life beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the basement of the Episcopal church, but she began to sell bonds by the bale. She brought ferocity to her work. I think she made people afraid not to buy them. And when they did buy from Olive she gave them a sense of actual combat, of putting a bayonet in the stomach of Germany.
As her sales skyrocketed and stayed up, the Treasury Department began to notice this new Amazon. First there came mimeographed letters of commendation, then real letters signed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and not with a rubber stamp either. We were proud but not so proud as when prizes began to arrive, a German helmet (too small for any of us to wear), a bayonet, a jagged piece of shrapnel set on an ebony base. Since we were not eligible for armed conflict beyond marching with wooden guns, our mother’s war seemed to justify us. And then she outdid herself, and outdid everyone in our part of the country. She quadrupled her already fabulous record and she was awarded the fairest prize of all--a ride in an army airplane.
Oh, we were proud kids! Even vicariously this was an eminence we could hardly stand. But my poor mother--I must tell you that there are certain things in the existence of which my mother did not believe, against any possible evidence to the contrary. One was a bad Hamilton and another was the airplane. The fact that she had seen them didn’t make her believe in them one bit more.
In the light of what she did I have tried to imagine how she felt. Her soul must have crawled with horror, for how can you fly in something that does not exist? As a punishment the ride would have been cruel and unusual, but it was a prize, a gift, an honor, and an eminence. She must have looked into our eyes and seen the shining idolatry there and understood that she was trapped. Not to have gone would have let her family down. She was surrounded, and there was no honorable way out save death. Once she had decided to go up in the nonexistent thing she seemed to have had no idea whatever that she would survive it.
Olive made her will--took lots of time with it and had it checked to be sure it was legal. Then she opened her rosewood box wherein were the letters her husband had written to her in courtship and since. We had not known he wrote poetry to her, but he had. She built a fire in the grate and burned every letter. They were hers, and she wanted no other human to see them. She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes. I think perhaps she saw the wide twisted mouth and embarrassed eyes of Martin Hopps on her and felt that in some way she was reimbursing him for his stolen life. She was very gentle with us and did not notice a badly washed dinner plate that left a greasy stain on the dish towel.
This glory was scheduled to take place at the Salinas Race Track and Rodeo Grounds. We were driven to the track in an army automobile, feeling more solemn and golden than at a good funeral. Our father was working at the Spreckles Sugar Factory, five miles from town and could not get off, or perhaps didn’t want to, for fear he could not stand the strain. But Olive had made arrangements, on pain of not going up, for the plane to try to fly as far as the sugar factory before it crashed.
I realize now that the several hundred people who had gathered simply came to see the airplane, but at that time we thought they were there to do my mother honor. Olive was not a tall woman and at that age she had begun to put on weight. We had to help her out of the car. She was probably stiff with fright but her little chin was set.
The plane stood in the field around which the race track was laid out. It was appallingly little and flimsy--an open cockpit biplane with wooden struts, tied with piano wire. The wings were covered with canvas. Olive was stunned. She went to the side as an ox to the knife. Over the clothes she was convinced were her burial clothes, two sergeants slipped on a coat, a padded coat, and a flight coat, and she grew rounder and rounder with each layer. Then a leather helmet and goggles, and with her little button of a nose and her pink cheeks you really had something. She looked like a goggled ball. The two sergeants hoisted her bodily into the cockpit and wedged her in. She filled the opening completely. As they strapped her in she suddenly came to life and began waving frantically for attention. One of the soldiers climbed up, listened to her, came over to my sister Mary, and led her to the side of the plane. Olive was tugging at the thick padded flight glove on her left hand. She got her hands free, took off her engagement ring with its tiny diamond, and handed it down to Mary. She set her gold wedding ring firmly, pulled the gloves back on, and faced the front. The pilot climbed into the front cockpit, and one of the sergeants threw his weight on the wooden propeller. The little ship taxied away and turned, and down the field it roared and staggered into the air, and Olive was looking straight ahead and probably her eyes were closed.
We followed it with our eyes as it swept up and away, leaving a lonesome silence behind it. The bond committee, the friends and relatives, the simple unhonored spectators didn’t think of leaving the field. The plane became a speck in the sky toward Spreckles and disappeared. It was fifteen minutes before we saw it again, flying serenely and very high. Then to our horror it seemed to stagger and fall. It fell endlessly, caught itself, climbed, and made a loop. One of the sergeants laughed. For a moment the plane steadied and then it seemed to go crazy. It barrel-rolled, made Immelmann turns, inside and outside loops, and turned over and flew over the field upside down. We could see the black bullet which was our mother’s helmet. One of the soldiers said quietly, “I think he’s gone nuts. She’s not a young woman.”
The airplane landed steadily enough and ran up to the group. The motor died. The pilot climbed out, shaking his head in perplexity. “Goddamest woman I ever saw,” he said. He reached up and shook Olive’s nerveless hand and walked hurriedly away.
It took four men and quite a long time to get Olive out of the cockpit. She was so rigid they could not bend her. We took her home and put her to bed, and she didn’t get up for two days.
What had happened came out slowly. The pilot talked some and Olive talked some, and both stories had to be put together before they made sense. They had flown out and circled the Spreckles Sugar Factory as ordered--circled it three times so that our father would be sure to see, and then the pilot thought of a joke. He meant no harm. He shouted something, and his face looked contorted. Olive could not hear over the noise of the engine. The pilot throttled down and shouted, “Stunt?” It was a kind of joke. Olive saw his goggled face and the slip stream caught his word and distorted it. What Olive heard was the word “stuck.”
Well, she thought, here it is just as I knew it would be. Here was her death. Her mind flashed to see if she had forgotten anything--will made, letters burned, new underwear, plenty of food in the house for dinner. She wondered whether she had turned out the light in the back room. It was all in a second. Then she thought there might be an outside chance of survival. The young soldier was obviously frightened and fear might be the worst thing that could happen to him in handling the situation. If she gave way to the panic that lay on her heart it might frighten him more. She decided to encourage him. She smiled brightly and nodded to give him courage, and then the bottom fell out of the world. When he leveled out of his loop the pilot looked back again and shouted, “More?”
Olive was way beyond hearing anything, but her chin was set and she was determined to help the pilot so that he would not be too afraid before they hit the earth. She smiled and nodded again. At the end of each stunt he looked back, and each time she encouraged him. Afterward he said over and over, “She’s the goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!”

Chapter 15


1
Adam sat like a contented cat on his land. From the entrance to the little draw under a giant oak, which dipped its roots into underground water, he could look out over the acres lying away to the river and across to an alluvial flat and then up the rounded foothills on the western side. It was a fair place even in the summer when the sun laced into it. A line of river willows and sycamores banded it in the middle, and the western hills were yellow-brown with feed. For some reason the mountains to the west of the Salinas Valley have a thicker skin of earth on them than have the eastern foothills, so that the grass is richer there. Perhaps the peaks store rain and distribute it more evenly, and perhaps, being more wooded, they draw more rainfall.
Very little of the Sanchez, now Trask, place was under cultivation, but Adam in his mind could see the wheat growing tall and squares of green alfalfa near the river. Behind him he could hear the rackety hammering of the carpenters brought all the way from Salinas to rebuild the old Sanchez house. Adams had decided to live in the old house. Here was a place in which to plant his dynasty. The manure was scraped out, the old floors torn up, neck-rubbed window casings ripped away. New sweet wood was going in, pine sharp with resin and velvety redwood and a new roof of long split shakes. The old thick walls sucked in coat after coat of white-wash made with lime and salt water, which, as it dried, seemed to have a luminosity of its own.
He planned a permanent seat. A gardener had trimmed the ancient roses, planted geraniums, laid out the vegetable flat, and brought the living spring in little channels to wander back and forth through the garden. Adam foretasted comfort for himself and his descendants. In a shed, covered with tarpaulins, lay the crated heavy furniture sent from San Francisco and carted out from King City.
He would have good living too. Lee, his pigtailed Chinese cook, had made a special trip to Pajaro to buy the pots and kettles and pans, kegs, jars, copper, and glass for his kitchen. A new pigsty was building far from the house and downwind, with chicken and duck runs near and a kennel for the dogs to keep the coyotes away. It was no quick thing Adam contemplated, to be finished and ready in a hurry. His men worked deliberately and slowly. It was a long job. Adam wanted it well done. He inspected every wooden joint, stood off to study paint samples on a shingle. In the corner of his room catalogues piled up--catalogues for machinery, furnishing, seeds, fruit trees. He was glad now that his father had left him a rich man. In his mind a darkness was settling over his memory of Connecticut. Perhaps the hard flat light of the West was blotting out his birthplace. When he thought back to his father’s house, to the farm, the town, to his brother’s face, there was a blackness over all of it. And he shook off the memories.
Temporarily he had moved Cathy into the white-painted, clean spare house of Bordoni, there to await the home and the child. There was no doubt whatever that the child would be finished well before the house was ready. But Adam was unhurried.
“I want it built strong,” he directed over and over. “I want it to last--copper nails and hard wood--nothing to rust and rot.”
He was not alone in his preoccupation with the future. The whole valley, the whole West was that way. It was a time when the past had lost its sweetness and its sap. You’d go a good long road before you’d find a man, and he very old, who wished to bring back a golden past. Men were notched and comfortable in the present, hard and unfruitful as it was, but only as a doorstep into a fantastic future. Rarely did two men meet, or three stand in a bar, or a dozen gnaw tough venison in camp, that the valley’s future, paralyzing in its grandeur, did not come up, not as conjecture but as a certainty.
“It’ll be--who knows? maybe in our lifetime,” they said.
And people found happiness in the future according to their present lack. Thus a man might bring his family down from a hill ranch in a drag--a big box nailed on oaken runners which pulled bumping down the broken hills. In the straw of the box, his wife would brace the children against the tooth-shattering, tongue-biting crash of the runners against stone and ground. And the father would set his heels and think, When the roads come in--then will be the time. Why, we’ll sit high and happy in a surrey and get clear into King City in three hours--and what more in the world could you want than that?
Or let a man survey his grove of live-oak trees, hard as coal and hotter, the best firewood in the world. In his pocket might be a newspaper with a squib: “Oak cord wood is bringing ten dollars a cord in Los Angeles.” Why, hell, when the railroad puts a branch out here, I could lay it down neat, broke up and seasoned, right beside the track, for a dollar and a half a cord. Let’s go whole hog and say the Southern Pacific will charge three-fifty to carry it. There’s still five dollars a cord, and there’s three thousand cords in that little grove alone. That’s fifteen thousand dollars right there.
There were others who prophesied, with rays shining on their foreheads, about the sometime ditches that would carry water all over the valley--who knows? maybe in our lifetime--or deep wells with steam engines to pump the water up out of the guts of the world. Can you imagine? Just think what this land would raise with plenty of water! Why, it will be a frigging garden!
Another man, but he was crazy, said that someday there’d be a way, maybe ice, maybe some other way, to get a peach like this here I got in my hand clear to Philadelphia.
In the towns they talked of sewers and inside toilets, and some already had them; and arc lights on the street corners--Salinas had those--and telephones. There wasn’t any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn’t have room to store his happiness. Contentment would flood raging down the valley like the Salinas River in March of a thirty-inch year.
They looked over the flat dry dusty valley and the ugly mushroom towns and they saw a loveliness--who knows? maybe in our lifetime. That’s one reason you couldn’t laugh too much at Samuel Hamilton. He let his mind range more deliciously than any other, and it didn’t sound so silly when you heard what they were doing in San Jose. Where Samuel went haywire was wondering whether people would be happy when all that came.
Happy? He’s haywire now. Just let us get it, and we’ll show you happiness.
And Samuel could remember hearing of a cousin of his mother’s in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the world who loved him.
“There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
Adam Trask nosed some of his happiness into futures but there was present contentment in him too. He felt his heart smack up against his throat when he saw Cathy sitting in the sun, quiet, her baby growing, and a transparency to her skin that made him think of the angels on Sunday School cards. Then a breeze would move her bright hair, or she would raise her eyes, and Adam would swell out in his stomach with a pressure of ecstasy that was close kin to grief.
If Adam rested like a sleek fed cat on his land, Cathy was catlike too. She had the inhuman attribute of abandoning what she could not get and of waiting for what she could get. These two gifts gave her great advantages. Her pregnancy had been an accident. When her attempt to abort herself failed and the doctor threatened her, she gave up that method. This does not mean that she reconciled herself to pregnancy. She sat it out as she would have weathered an illness. Her marriage to Adam had been the same. She was trapped and she took the best possible way out. She had not wanted to go to California either, but other plans were denied her for the time being. As a very young child she had learned to win by using the momentum of her opponent. It was easy to guide a man’s strength where it was impossible to resist him. Very few people in the world could have known that Cathy did not want to be where she was and in the condition she was. She relaxed and waited for the change she knew must come some time. Cathy had the one quality required of a great and successful criminal: she trusted no one, confided in no one. Her self was an island. It is probable that she did not even look at Adam’s new land or building house, or turn his towering plans to reality in her mind, because she did not intend to live here after her sickness was over, after her trap opened. But to his questions she gave proper answers; to do otherwise would be waste motion, and dissipated energy, and foreign to a good cat.
“See, my darling, how the house lies--windows looking down the valley?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“You know, it may sound foolish, but I find myself trying to think the way old Sanchez did a hundred years ago. How was the valley then? He must have planned so carefully. You know, he had pipes? He did--made out of redwood with a hole bored or burned through to carry the water down from the spring. We dug up some pieces of it.”
“That’s remarkable,” she said. “He must have been clever.”
“I’d like to know more about him. From the way the house sets, the trees he left, the shape and proportion of the house, he must have been a kind of an artist.”
“He was a Spaniard, wasn’t he? They’re artistic people, I’ve heard. I remember in school about a painter--no, he was a Greek.”
“I wonder where I could find out about old Sanchez.”
“Well, somebody must know.”
“All of his work and planning, and Bordoni kept cows in the house. You know what I wonder about most?”
“What, Adam?”
“I wonder if he had a Cathy and who she was.”
She smiled and looked down and away from him. “The things you say.”
“He must have had! He must have had. I never had energy or direction or--well, even a very great desire to live before I had you.”
“Adam, you embarrass me. Adam, be careful. Don’t joggle me, it hurts.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so clumsy.”
“No, you’re not. You just don’t think. Should I be knitting or sewing, do you suppose? I’m so comfortable just sitting.”
“We’ll buy everything we need. You just sit and be comfortable. I guess in a way you’re working harder than anyone here. But the pay--the pay is wonderful.”
“Adam, the scar on my forehead isn’t going to go away, I’m afraid.”
“The doctor said it would fade in time.”
“Well, sometimes it seems to be getting fainter, and then it comes back. Don’t you think it’s darker today?”
“No, I don’t.”
But it was. It looked like a huge thumbprint, even to whorls of wrinkled skin. He put his finger near, and she drew her head away.
“Don’t,” she said. “It’s tender to the touch. It turns red if you touch it.”
“It will go away. Just takes a little time, that’s all.”
She smiled as he turned, but when he walked away her eyes were flat and directionless. She shifted her body restlessly. The baby was kicking. She relaxed and all her muscles loosened. She waited.
Lee came near where her chair was set under the biggest oak tree. “Missy likee tea?”
“No--yes, I would too.”
Her eyes inspected him and her inspection could not penetrate the dark brown of his eyes. He made her uneasy. Cathy had always been able to shovel into the mind of any man and dig up his impulses and his desires. But Lee’s brain gave and repelled like rubber. His face was lean and pleasant, his forehead broad, firm, and sensitive, and his lips curled in a perpetual smile. His long black glossy braided queue, tied at the bottom with a narrow piece of black silk, hung over his shoulder and moved rhythmically against his chest. When he did violent work he curled his queue on top of his head. He wore narrow cotton trousers, black heelless slippers, and a frogged Chinese smock. Whenever he could he hid his hands in his sleeves as though he were afraid for them, as most Chinese did in that day.
“I bling litta table,” he said, bowed slightly, and shuffled away.
Cathy looked after him, and her eyebrows drew down in a scowl. She was not afraid of Lee, yet she was not comfortable with him either. But he was a good and respectful servant--the best. And what harm could he do her?

2

The summer progressed and the Salinas River retired underground or stood in green pools under high banks. The cattle lay drowsing all day long under the willows and only moved out at night to feed. An umber tone came to the grass. And the afternoon winds blowing inevitably down the valley started a dust that was like fog and raised it into the sky almost as high as the mountaintops. The wild oat roots stood up like nigger-heads where the winds blew the earth away. Along a polished earth, pieces of straw and twigs scampered until they were stopped by some rooted thing; and little stones rolled crookedly before the wind.
It became more apparent than ever why old Sanchez had built his house in the little draw, for the wind and the dust did not penetrate, and the spring, while it diminished, still gushed a head of cold clear water. But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the earth is sick in the rainless months.
Adam sent Lee with a note to the Hamilton place to ask Samuel to visit him and discuss the boring of some wells on his new place.
Samuel was sitting in the shade, watching his son Tom design and build a revolutionary coon trap, when Lee drove up in the Trask cart. Lee folded his hands in his sleeves and waited. Samuel read the note. “Tom,” he said, “do you think you could keep the estate going while I run down and talk water with a dry man?”
“Why don’t I go with you? You might need some help.”
“At talking?--that I don’t. It won’t come to digging for some time if I’m any judge. With wells there’s got to be a great deal of talk--five or six hundred words for every shovel of dirt.”
“I’d like to go--it’s Mr. Trask, isn’t it? I didn’t meet him when he came here.”
“You’ll do that when the digging starts. I’m older than you. I’ve got first claim on the talk. You know, Tom, a coon is going to reach his pretty little hand through here and let himself out. You know how clever they are.”
“See this piece here? It screws on and turns down here. You couldn’t get out of that yourself.”
“I’m not so clever as a coon. I think you’ve worked it out, though. Tom, boy, would you saddle Doxology while I go tell your mother where I’m going?”
“I bling lig,” said Lee.
“Well, I have to come home some time.”
“I bling back.”
“Nonsense,” said Samuel. “I’ll lead my horse in and ride back.”
Samuel sat in the buggy beside Lee, and his clobber-footed saddle horse shuffled clumsily behind.
“What’s your name?” Samuel asked pleasantly.
“Lee. Got more name. Lee papa family name. Call Lee.”
“I’ve read quite a lot about China. You born in China?”
“No. Born here.”
Samuel was silent for quite a long time while the buggy lurched down the wheel track toward the dusty valley. “Lee,” he said at last, “I mean no disrespect, but I’ve never been able to figure why you people still talk pidgin when an illiterate baboon from the black bogs of Ireland, with a head full of Gaelic and a tongue like a potato, learns to talk a poor grade of English in ten years.”
Lee grinned. “Me talkee Chinese talk,” he said.
“Well, I guess you have your reasons. And it’s not my affair. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe it, Lee.”
Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.”
Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me.”
Lee said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but it has happened so often to me and to my friends that we take if for granted. If I should go up to a lady or a gentleman, for instance, and speak as I am doing now, I wouldn’t be understood.”
“Why not?”
“Pidgin they expect, and pidgin they’ll listen to. But English from me they don’t listen to, and so they don’t understand it.”
“Can that be possible? How do I understand you?”
“That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”
“I hadn’t thought of it. And I’ve not been so tested as you, but what you say has a candle of truth. You know, I’m very glad to talk to you. I’ve wanted to ask so many questions.”
“Happy to oblige.”
“So many questions. For instance, you wear the queue. I’ve read that it is a badge of slavery imposed by conquest by the Manchus on the Southern Chinese.”
“That is true.”
“Then why in the name of God do you wear it here, where the Manchus can’t get at you?”
“Talkee Chinese talk. Queue Chinese fashion--you savvy?”
Samuel laughed loudly. “That does have the green touch of convenience,” he said. “I wish I had a hidey-hole like that.”
“I’m wondering whether I can explain,” said Lee. “Where there is no likeness of experience it’s very difficult. I understand you were not born in America.”
“No, in Ireland.”
“And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing.”
“If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?”
“No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an untrustworthy one; and at the same time my Chinese friends steered clear of me. I had to give it up.”
Lee pulled up under a tree, got out and unfastened the check rein. “Time for lunch,” he said. “I made a package. Would you like some?”
“Sure I would. Let me get down in the shade there. I forget to eat sometimes, and that’s strange because I’m always hungry. I’m interested in what you say. It has a sweet sound of authority. Now it peeks into my mind that you should go back to China.”
Lee smiled satirically at him. “In a few minutes I don’t think you’ll find a loose bar I’ve missed in a lifetime of search. I did go back to China. My father was a fairly successful man. It didn’t work. They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil. I made mistakes in manners, and I didn’t know delicacies that had grown up since my father left. They wouldn’t have me. You can believe it or not--I’m less foreign here than I was in China.”
“I’ll have to believe you because it’s reasonable. You’ve given me things to think about until at least February twenty-seventh. Do you mind my questions?”
“As a matter of fact, no. The trouble with pidgin is that you get to thinking in pidgin. I write a great deal to keep my English up. Hearing and reading aren’t the same as speaking and writing.”
“Don’t you ever make a mistake? I mean, break into English?”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s a matter of what is expected. You look at a man’s eyes, you see that he expects pidgin and a shuffle, so you speak pidgin and shuffle.”
“I guess that’s right,” said Samuel. “In my own way I tell jokes because people come all the way to my place to laugh. I try to be funny for them even when the sadness is on me.”
“But the Irish are said to be a happy people, full of jokes.”
“There’s your pidgin and your queue. They’re not. They’re a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It’s said that without whisky to soak and soften the world, they’d kill themselves. But they tell jokes because it’s expected of them.”
Lee unwrapped a little bottle. “Would you like some of this? Chinese drink ng-ka-py.”
“What is it?”
“Chinee blandy. Stlong dlink--as a matter of fact it’s a brandy with a dosage of wormwood. Very powerful. It softens the world.”
Samuel sipped from the bottle. “Tastes a little like rotten apples,” he said.
“Yes, but nice rotten apples. Taste it back along your tongue toward the roots.”
Samuel took a big swallow and tilted his head back. “I see what you mean. That is good.”
“Here are some sandwiches, pickles, cheese, a can of buttermilk.”
“You do well.”
“Yes, I see to it.”
Samuel bit into a sandwich. “I was shuffling over half a hundred questions. What you said brings the brightest one up. You don’t mind?”
“Not at all. The only thing I do want to ask of you is not to talk this way when other people are listening. It would only confuse them and they wouldn’t believe it anyway.”
“I’ll try,” said Samuel. “If I slip, just remember that I’m a comical genius. It’s hard to split a man down the middle and always to reach for the same half.”
“I think I can guess what your next question is.”
“What?”
“Why am I content to be a servant?”
“How in the world did you know?”
“It seemed to follow.”
“Do you resent the question?”
“Not from you. There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension. I don’t know where being a servant came into disrepute. It is the refuge of a philosopher, the food of the lazy, and, properly carried out, it is a position of power, even of love. I can’t understand why more intelligent people don’t take it as a career--learn to do it well and reap its benefits. A good servant has absolute security, not because of his master’s kindness, but because of habit and indolence. It’s a hard thing for a man to change spices or lay out his own socks. He’ll keep a bad servant rather than change. But a good servant, and I am an excellent one, can completely control his master, tell him what to think, how to act, whom to marry, when to divorce, reduce him to terror as a discipline, or distribute happiness to him, and finally be mentioned in his will. If I had wished I could have robbed, stripped, and beaten anyone I’ve worked for and come away with thanks. Finally, in my circumstances I am unprotected. My master will defend me, protect me. You have to work and worry. I work less and worry less. And I am a good servant. A bad one does no work and does no worrying, and he still is fed, clothed, and protected. I don’t know any profession where the field is so cluttered with incompetents and where excellence is so rare.”
Samuel leaned toward him, listening intently.
Lee went on, “It’s going to be a relief after that to go back to pidgin.”
“It’s a very short distance to the Sanchez place. Why did we stop so near?” Samuel asked.
“Allee time talkee. Me Chinee number one boy. You leddy go now?”
“What? Oh, sure. But it must be a lonely life.”
“That’s the only fault with it,” said Lee. “I’ve been thinking of going to San Francisco and starting a little business.”
“Like a laundry? Or a grocery store?”
“No. Too many Chinese laundries and restaurants. I thought perhaps a bookstore. I’d like that, and the competition wouldn’t be too great. I probably won’t do it though. A servant loses his initiative.”

3

In the afternoon Samuel and Adam rode over the land. The wind came up as it did every afternoon, and the yellow dust ran into the sky.
“Oh, it’s a good piece,” Samuel cried. “It’s a rare piece of land.”
“Seems to me it’s blowing away bit by bit,” Adam observed.
“No, it’s just moving over a little. You lose some to the James ranch but you get some from the Southeys.”
“Well, I don’t like the wind. Makes me nervous.”
“Nobody likes wind for very long. It makes animals nervous and restless too. I don’t know whether you noticed, but a little farther up the valley they’re planting windbreaks of gum trees. Eucalyptus--comes from Australia. They say the gums grow ten feet a year. Why don’t you try a few rows and see what happens? In time they should back up the wind a little, and they make grand firewood.”
“Good idea,” Adam said. “What I really want is water. This wind would pump all the water I could find. I thought if I could bring in a few wells and irrigate, the topsoil wouldn’t blow away. I might try some beans.”
Samuel squinted into the wind. “I’ll try to get you water if you want,” he said. “And I’ve got a little pump I made that will bring it up fast. It’s my own invention. A windmill is a pretty costly thing. Maybe I could build them for you and save you some money.”
“That’s good,” said Adam. “I wouldn’t mind the wind if it worked for me. And if I could get water I might plant alfalfa.”
“It’s never brought much of a price.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. Few weeks ago I took a drive up around Greenfield and Gonzales. Some Swiss have moved in there. They’ve got nice little dairy herds, and they get four crops of alfalfa a year.”
“I heard about them. They brought in Swiss cows.” Adam’s face was bright with plans. “That’s what I want to do. Sell butter and cheese and feed the milk to pigs.”
“You’re going to bring credit to the valley,” Samuels said. “You’re going to be a real joy to the future.”
“If I can get water.”
“I’ll get you water if there’s any to be got. I’ll find it. I brought my magic wand.” He patted a forked stick tied to his saddle.
Adam pointed to the left where a wide flat place was covered with a low growth of sagebrush. “Now then,” he said, “thirty-six acres and almost level as a floor. I put an auger down. Topsoil averages three and a half feet, sand on top and loam within plow reach. Think you could get water there?”
“I don’t know,” Samuel said. “I’ll see.” He dismounted, handed his reins to Adam, and untied his forked wand. He took the forks in his two hands and walked slowly, his arms out and stretched before him and the wand tip up. His steps took a zigzag course. Once he frowned and backed up a few steps, then shook his head and went on. Adam rode slowly behind, leading the other horse.
Adam kept his eyes on the stick. He saw it quiver and then jerk a little, as though an invisible fish were tugging at a line. Samuel’s face was taut with attention. He continued on until the point of the wand seemed to be pulled strongly downward against his straining arms. He made a slow circle, broke off a piece of sagebrush, and dropped it on the ground. He moved well outside his circle, held up his stick again, and moved inward toward his marker. As he came near it, the point of the stick was drawn down again. Samuel sighed and relaxed and dropped his wand on the ground. “I can get water here,” he said. “And not very deep. The pull was strong, plenty of water.”
“Good,” said Adam. “I want to show you a couple more places.”
Samuel whittled out a stout piece of sagewood and drove it into the soil. He made a split on the top and fitted a crosspiece on for a mark. Then he kicked the brittle brush down in the area so he could find his marker again.
On a second try three hundred yards away the wand seemed nearly torn downward out of his hands. “Now there’s a whole world of water here,” he said.
The third try was not so productive. After half an hour he had only the slightest sign.
The two men rode slowly back toward the Trask house. The afternoon was golden, for the yellow dust in the sky gilded the light. As always the wind began to drop as the day waned, but it sometimes took half the night for the dust to settle out of the air. “I knew it was a good place,” Samuel said. “Anyone can see that. But I didn’t know it was that good. You must have a great drain under your land from the mountains. You know how to pick land, Mr. Trask.”
Adam smiled. “We had a farm in Connecticut,” he said. “For six generations we dug stones out. One of the first things I remember is sledding stones over to the walls. I thought that was the way all farms were. It’s strange to me and almost sinful here. If you wanted a stone, you’d have to go a long way for it.”
“The ways of sin are curious,” Samuel observed. “I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he’d manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They’re the last things we’ll give up.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing to keep us humble. The fear of God in us.”
“I guess so,” said Samuel. “And I guess humility must be a good thing, since it’s a rare man who has not a piece of it, but when you look at humbleness it’s hard to see where its value rests unless you grant that it is a pleasurable pain and very precious. Suffering--I wonder has it been properly looked at.”
“Tell me about your stick,” Adam said. “How does it work?”
Samuel stroked the fork now tied to his saddle strings. “I don’t really believe in it save that it works.” He smiled at Adam. “Maybe it’s this way. Maybe I know where the water is, feel it in my skin. Some people have a gift in this direction or that. Suppose--well, call it humility, or a deep disbelief in myself, forced me to do a magic to bring up to the surface the thing I know anyway. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I’d have to think about it,” said Adam.
The horses picked their own way, heads hung low, reins loosened against the bits.
“Can you stay the night?” Adam asked.
“I can but better not. I didn’t tell Liza I’d be away the night. I’d not like to give her a worry.”
“But she knows where you are.”
“Sure she knows. But I’ll ride home tonight. It doesn’t matter the time. If you’d like to ask me to supper I’d be glad. And when do you want me to start on the wells?”
“Now--as soon as you can.”
“You know it’s no cheap thing, indulging yourself with water. I’d have to charge you fifty cents or more a foot, depending on what we find down there. It can run into money.”
“I have the money. I want the wells. Look, Mr. Hamilton--”
“ ‘Samuel’ would be easier.”
“Look, Samuel, I mean to make a garden of my land. Remember my name is Adam. So far I’ve had no Eden, let alone been driven out.”
“It’s the best reason I ever heard for making a garden,” Samuel exclaimed. He chuckled. “Where will the orchard be?”
Adam said, “I won’t plant apples. That would be looking for accidents.”
“What does Eve say to that? She has a say, you remember. And Eves delight in apples.”
“Not this one.” Adam’s eyes were shining. “You don’t know this Eve. She’ll celebrate my choice. I don’t think anyone can know her goodness.”
“You have a rarity. Right now I can’t recall any greater gift.”
They were coming near to the entrance to the little side valley in which was the Sanchez house. They could see the rounded green tops of the great live oaks.
“Gift,” Adam said softly. “You can’t know. No one can know. I had a gray life, Mr. Hamilton--Samuel. Not that it was bad compared to other lives, but it was nothing. I don’t know why I tell you this.”
“Maybe because I like to hear.”
“My mother--died--before my memory. My stepmother was a good woman but troubled and ill. My father was a stern, fine man--maybe a great man.”
“You couldn’t love him?”
“I had the kind of feeling you have in church, and not a little fear in it.”
Samuel nodded. “I know--and some men want that.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve always wanted the other. Liza says it’s the weak thing in me.”
“My father put me in the army, in the West, against the Indians.”
“You told me. But you don’t think like a military man.”
“I wasn’t a good one. I seem to be telling you everything.”
“You must want to. There’s always a reason.”
“A soldier must want to do the things we had to do--or at least be satisfied with them. I couldn’t find good enough reasons for killing men and women, nor understand the reasons when they were explained.”
They rode on in silence for a time. Adam went on, “I came out of the army like dragging myself muddy out of a swamp. I wandered for a long time before going home to a remembered place I did not love.”
“Your father?”
“He died, and home was a place to sit around or work around, waiting for death the way you might wait for a dreadful picnic.”
“Alone?”
“No, I have a brother.”
“Where is he--waiting for the picnic?”
“Yes--yes, that’s exactly what. Then Cathy came. Maybe I will tell you some time when I can tell and you want to hear.”
“I’ll want to hear,” Samuel said. “I eat stories like grapes.”
“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”
“I recognize it,” Samuel said. “That’s an old friend of mine. It never dies but sometimes it moves away, or you do. Yes, that’s my acquaintance--eyes, nose, mouth, and hair.”
“All this coming out of a little hurt girl.”
“And not out of you?”
“Oh, no, or it would have come before. No, Cathy brought it, and it lives around her. And now I’ve told you why I want the wells. I have to repay somehow for value received. I’m going to make a garden so good, so beautiful, that it will be a proper place for her to live and a fitting place for her light to shine on.”
Samuel swallowed several times, and he spoke with a dry voice out of a pinched-up throat. “I can see my duty,” he said. “I can see it plainly before me if I am any kind of man, any kind of friend to you.”
“What do you mean?”
Samuel said satirically, “It’s my duty to take this thing of yours and kick it in the face, then raise it up and spread slime on it thick enough to blot out its dangerous light.” His voice grew strong with vehemence. “I should hold it up to you muck-covered and show you its dirt and danger. I should warn you to look closer until you can see how ugly it really is. I should ask you to think of inconstancy and give you examples. I should give you Othello’s handkerchief. Oh, I know I should. And I should straighten out your tangled thoughts, show you that the impulse is gray as lead and rotten as a dead cow in wet weather. If I did my duty well, I could give you back your bad old life and feel good about it, and welcome you back to the musty membership in the lodge.”
“Are you joking? Maybe I shouldn’t have told--”
“It is the duty of a friend. I had a friend who did the duty once for me. But I’m a false friend. I’ll get no credit for it among my peers. It’s a lovely thing, preserve it, and glory in it. And I’ll dig your wells if I have to drive my rig to the black center of the earth. I’ll squeeze water out like juice from an orange.”
They rode under the great oaks and toward the house. Adam said, “There she is, sitting outside.” He shouted, “Cathy, he says there’s water--lots of it.” Aside he said excitedly, “Did you know she’s going to have a baby?”
“Even at this distance she looks beautiful,” Samuel said.

4

Because the day had been hot, Lee set a table outside under an oak tree, and as the sun neared the western mountains he padded back and forth from the kitchen, carrying the cold meats, pickles, potato salad, coconut cake, and peach pie which were supper. In the center of the table he placed a gigantic stoneware pitcher full of milk.
Adam and Samuel came from the wash house, their hair and faces shining with water, and Samuel’s beard was fluffy after its soaping. They stood at the trestle table and waited until Cathy came out.
She walked slowly, picking her way as though she were afraid she would fall. Her full skirt and apron concealed to a certain extent her swelling abdomen. Her face was untroubled and childlike, and she clasped her hands in front of her. She had reached the table before she looked up and glanced from Samuel to Adam.
Adam held her chair for her. “You haven’t met Mr. Hamilton, dear,” he said.
She held out her hand. “How do you do,” she said.
Samuel had been inspecting her. “It’s a beautiful face,” he said, “I’m glad to meet you. You are well, I hope?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I’m well.”
The men sat down. “She makes it formal whether she wants to or not. Every meal is a kind of occasion,” Adam said.
“Don’t talk like that,” she said. “It isn’t true.”
“Doesn’t it feel like a party to you, Samuel?” he asked.
“It does so, and I can tell you there’s never been such a candidate for a party as I am. And my children--they’re worse. My boy Tom wanted to come today. He’s spoiling to get off the ranch.”
Samuel suddenly realized that he was making his speech last to prevent silence from falling on the table. He paused, and the silence dropped. Cathy looked down at her plate while she ate a sliver of roast lamb. She looked up as she put it between her small sharp teeth. Her wide-set eyes communicated nothing. Samuel shivered.
“It isn’t cold, is it?” Adam asked.
“Cold? No. A goose walked over my grave, I guess.”
“Oh, yes, I know that feeling.”
The silence fell again. Samuel waited for some speech to start up, knowing in advance that it would not.
“Do you like our valley, Mrs. Trask?”
“What? Oh, yes.”
“If it isn’t impertinent to ask, when is your baby due?”
“In about six weeks,” Adam said. “My wife is one of those paragons--a woman who does not talk very much.”
“Sometimes a silence tells the most,” said Samuel, and he saw Cathy’s eyes leap up and down again, and it seemed to him that the scar on her forehead grew darker. Something had flicked her the way you’d flick a horse with the braided string popper on a buggy whip. Samuel couldn’t recall what he had said that had made her give a small inward start. He felt a tenseness coming over him that was somewhat like the feeling he had just before the water wand pulled down, an awareness of something strange and strained. He glanced at Adam and saw that he was looking raptly at his wife. Whatever was strange was not strange to Adam. His face had happiness on it.
Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she had swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel’s mind repeated, “Something--something--can’t find what it is. Something wrong,” and the silence hung on the table.
There was a shuffle behind him. He turned. Lee set a teapot on the table and shuffled away.
Samuel began to talk to push the silence away. He told how he had first come to the valley fresh from Ireland, but within a few words neither Cathy nor Adam was listening to him. To prove it, he used a trick he had devised to discover whether his children were listening when they begged him to read to them and would not let him stop. He threw in two sentences of nonsense. There was no response from either Adam or Cathy. He gave up.
He bolted his supper, drank his tea scalding hot, and folded his napkin. “Ma’am, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll ride off home. And I thank you for your hospitality.”
“Good night,” she said.
Adam jumped to his feet, He seemed torn out of a reverie. “Don’t go now. I hoped to persuade you to stay the night.”
“No, thank you, but that I can’t. And it’s not a long ride. I think--of course, I know--there’ll be a moon.”
“When will you start the wells?”
“I’ll have to get my rig together, do a piece of sharpening, and put my house in order. In a few days I’ll send the equipment with Tom.”
The life was flowing back into Adam. “Make it soon,” he said. “I want it soon. Cathy, we’re going to make the most beautiful place in the world. There’ll be nothing like it anywhere.”
Samuel switched his gaze to Cathy’s face. It did not change. The eyes were flat and the mouth with its small up-curve at the corners was carven.
“That will be nice,” she said.
For just a moment Samuel had an impulse to do or say something to shock her out of her distance. He shivered again.
“Another goose?” Adam asked.
“Another goose.” The dusk was falling and already the tree forms were dark against the sky. “Good night, then.”
“I’ll walk down with you.”
“No, stay with your wife. You haven’t finished your supper.”
“But I--”
“Sit down, man. I can find my own horse, and if I can’t I’ll steal one of yours.” Samuel pushed Adam gently down in his chair. “Good night. Good night. Good night, ma’am.” He walked quickly toward the shed.
Old platter-foot Doxology was daintily nibbling hay from the manger with lips like two flounders. The halter chain clinked against wood. Samuel lifted down his saddle from the big nail where it hung by one wooden stirrup and swung it over the broad back. He was lacing the látigo through the cinch rings when there was a small stir behind him. He turned and saw the silhouette of Lee against the last light from the open shadows.
“When you come back?” the Chinese asked softly.
“I don’t know. In a few days or a week. Lee, what is it?”
“What is what?”
“By God, I got creepy! Is there something wrong here?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean.”
“Chinee boy jus’ workee--not hear, not talkee.”
‘‘Yes. I guess you’re right. Sure, you’re right. Sorry I asked you. It wasn’t very good manners.” He turned back, slipped the bit in Dox’s mouth, and laced the big flop ears into the headstall. He slipped the halter and dropped it in the manger. “Good night, Lee,” he said.
“Mr. Hamilton--”
“Yes?”
“Do you need a cook?”
“On my place I can’t afford a cook?”
“I’d work cheap.”
“Liza would kill you. Why--you want to quit?”
“Just thought I’d ask,” said Lee. “Good night.”

5

Adam and Cathy sat in the gathering dark under the tree.
“He’s a good man,” Adam said. “I like him. I wish I could persuade him to take over here and run this place--kind of superintendent.”
Cathy said, “He’s got his own place and his own family.”
“Yes, I know. And it’s the poorest land you ever saw. He could make more at wages from me. I’ll ask him. It does take a time to get used to a new country. It’s like being born again and having to learn all over. I used to know from what quarter the rains came. It’s different here. And once I knew in my skin whether wind would blow, when it would be cold. But I’ll learn. It just takes a little time. Are you comfortable, Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“One day, and not too far away, you’ll see the whole valley green with alfalfa--see it from the fine big windows of the finished house. I’ll plant rows of gum trees, and I’m going to send away for seeds and plants--put in a kind of experimental farm. I might try lichee nuts from China. I wonder if they would grow here. Well, I can try. Maybe Lee could tell me. And once the baby’s born you can ride over the whole place with me. You haven’t really seen it. Did I tell you? Mr. Hamilton is going to put up windmills, and we’ll be able to see them turning from here.” He stretched his legs out comfortably under the table. “Lee should bring candles,” he said. “I wonder what’s keeping him.”
Cathy spoke very quietly. “Adam, I didn’t want to come here. I am not going to stay here. As soon as I can I will go away.”
“Oh, nonsense.” He laughed. “You’re like a child away from home for the first time. You’ll love it once you get used to it and the baby is born. You know, when I first went away to the army I thought I was going to die of homesickness. But I got over it. We all get over it. So don’t say silly things like that.”
“It’s not a silly thing.”
“Don’t talk about it, dear. Everything will change after the baby is born. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
He clasped his hands behind his head and looked up at the faint stars through the tree branches.

Chapter 16


1
Samuel Hamilton rode back home in a night so flooded with moonlight that the hills took on the quality of the white and dusty moon. The trees and earth were moon-dry, silent and airless and dead. The shadows were black without shading and the open places white without color. Here and there Samuel could see secret movement, for the moon-feeders were at work--the deer which browse all night when the moon is clear and sleep under thickets in the day. Rabbits and field mice and all other small hunted that feel safer in the concealing light crept and hopped and crawled and froze to resemble stones or small bushes when ear or nose suspected danger. The predators were working too--the long weasels like waves of brown light; the cobby wildcats crouching near to the ground, almost invisible except when their yellow eyes caught light and flashed for a second; the foxes, sniffling with pointed up-raised noses for a warm-blooded supper; the raccoons padding near still water, talking frogs. The coyotes nuzzled along the slopes and, torn with sorrow-joy, raised their heads and shouted their feeling, half keen, half laughter, at their goddess moon. And over all the shadowy screech owls sailed, drawing a smudge of shadowy fear below them on the ground. The wind of the afternoon was gone and only a little breeze like a sigh was stirred by the restless thermals of the warm, dry hills.
Doxology’s loud off-beat hoofsteps silenced the night people until after he had passed. Samuel’s beard glinted white, and his graying hair stood up high on his head. He had hung his black hat on his saddle horn. An ache was on the top of his stomach, an apprehension that was like a sick thought. It was a Weltschmerz--which we used to call “Welshrats”--the world sadness that rises into the soul like a gas and spreads despair so that you probe for the offending event and can find none.
Samuel went back in his mind over the fine ranch and the indications of water--no Welshrats could come out of that unless he sheltered a submerged envy. He looked in himself for envy and could find none. He went on to Adam’s dream of a garden like Eden and to Adam’s adoration of Cathy. Nothing there unless--unless his secret mind brooded over his own healed loss. But that was so long ago he had forgotten the pain. The memory was mellow and warm and comfortable, now that it was all over. His loins and his thighs had forgotten hunger.
As he rode through the light and dark of tree-shade and open his mind moved on. When had the Welshrats started crawling in his chest? He found it then--and it was Cathy, pretty, tiny, delicate Cathy. But what about her? She was silent, but many women were silent. What was it? Where had it come from? He remembered that he had felt an imminence akin to the one that came to him when he held the water wand. And he remembered the shivers when the goose walked over his grave. Now he had pinned it down in time and place and person. It had come at dinner and it had come from Cathy.
He built her face in front of him and studied her wide-set eyes, delicate nostrils, mouth smaller than he liked but sweet, small firm chin, and back to her eyes. Were they cold? Was it her eyes? He was circling to the point. The eyes of Cathy had no message, no communication of any kind. There was nothing recognizable behind them. They were not human eyes. They reminded him of something--what was it?--some memory, some picture. He strove to find it and then it came of itself.
It rose out of the years complete with all its colors and its cries, its crowded feelings. He saw himself, a very little boy, so small that he had to reach high for his father’s hand. He felt the cobbles of Londonderry under his feet and the crush and gaiety of the one big city he had seen. A fair, it was, with puppet shows and stalls of produce and horses and sheep penned right in the street for sale or trade or auction, and other stalls of bright-colored knickknackery, desirable, and because his father was gay, almost possessable.
And then the people turned like a strong river, and they were carried along a narrow street as though they were chips on a flood tide, pressure at chest and back and the feet keeping up. The narrow street opened out to a square, and against the gray wall of a building there was a high structure of timbers and a noosed rope hanging down.
Samuel and his father were pushed and bunted by the water of people, pushed closer and closer. He could hear in his memory ear his father saying, “It’s no thing for a child. It’s no thing for anybody, but less for a child.” His father struggled to turn, to force his way back against the flood wave of people. “Let us out. Please let us out. I’ve a child here.”
The wave was faceless and it pushed without passion. Samuel raised his head to look at the structure. A group of dark-clothed, dark-hatted men had climbed up on the high platform. And in their midst was a man with golden hair, dressed in dark trousers and a light blue shirt open at the throat. Samuel and his father were so close that the boy had to raise his head high to see.
The golden man seemed to have no arms. He looked out over the crowd and then looked down, looked right at Samuel. The picture was clear, lighted and perfect. The man’s eyes had no depth--they were not like other eyes, not like the eyes of a man.
Suddenly there was quick movement on the platform, and Samuel’s father put both his hands on the boy’s head so that his palms cupped over the ears and his fingers met behind. The hands forced Samuel’s head down and forced his face tight in against his father’s black best coat. Struggle as he would, he could not move his head. He could see only a band of light around the edges of his eyes and only a muffled roar of sound came to his ears through his father’s hands. He heard heartbeats in his hears. Then he felt his father’s hands and arms grow rigid with set muscles, and against his face he could feel his father’s deep-caught breathing and then deep intake and held breath, and his father’s hands, trembling.
A little more there was to it, and he dug it up and set it before his eyes in the air ahead of the horse’s head--a worn and battered table at a pub, loud talk and laughter. A pewter mug was in front of his father, and a cup of hot milk, sweet and aromatic with sugar and cinnamon, before himself. His father’s lips were curiously blue and there were tears in his father’s eyes.
“I’d never have brought you if I’d known. It’s not fit for any man to see, and sure not for a small boy.”
“I didn’t see any,” Samuel piped. “You held my head down.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“What was it?”
“I’ll have to tell you. They were killing a bad man.”
“Was it the golden man?”
“Yes, it was. And you must put no sorrow on him. He had to be killed. Not once but many times he did dreadful things--things only a fiend could think of. It’s not his hanging sorrows me but that they make a holiday of it that should be done secretly, in the dark.”
“I saw the golden man. He looked right down at me.”
“For that even more I thank God he’s gone.”
“What did he do?”
“I’ll never tell you nightmare things.”
“He had the strangest eyes, the golden man. They put me in mind of a goat’s eyes.”
“Drink your sweety-milk and you shall have a stick with ribbons and a long whistle like silver.”
“And the shiny box with a picture into it?”
“That also, so you drink up your sweety-milk and beg no more.”
There it was, mined out of the dusty past.
Doxology was climbing the last rise before the hollow of the home ranch and the big feet stumbled over stones in the roadway.
It was the eyes, of course, Samuel thought. Only twice in my life have I seen eyes like that--not like human eyes. And he thought, It’s the night and the moon. Now what connection under heaven can there be between the golden man hanged so long ago and the sweet little bearing mother? Liza’s right. My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day. Let me dig this nonsense out, else I’ll be searching that poor child for evil. This is how we can get trapped. Now think hard and then lose it. Some accident of eye shape and eye color, it is. But no, that’s not it. It’s a look and has no reference to shape or color. Well, why is a look evil then? Maybe such a look may have been sometime on a holy face. Now, stop this romancing and never let it trouble again--ever. He shivered. I’ll have to set up a goose fence around my grave, he thought.
And Samuel Hamilton resolved to help greatly with the Salinas Valley Eden, to make a secret guilt-payment for his ugly thoughts.

2
Liza Hamilton, her apple cheeks flaming red, moved like a caged leopard in front of the stove when Samuel came into the kitchen in the morning. The oakwood fire roared up past an open damper to heat the oven for the bread, which lay white and rising in the pans. Liza had been up before dawn. She always was. It was just as sinful to her to lie abed after light as it was to be abroad after dark. There was no possible virtue in either. Only one person in the world could with impunity and without crime lie between her crisp ironed sheets after dawn, after sunup, even to the far reaches of midmorning, and that was her youngest and last born, Joe. Only Tom and Joe lived on the ranch now. And Tom, big and red, already cultivating a fine flowing mustache, sat at the kitchen table with his sleeves rolled down as he had been mannered. Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanos formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.
Samuel came in from the yard where he had been washing himself. His face and beard gleamed with water, and he turned down the sleeves of his blue shirt as he entered the kitchen. Rolled-up sleeves at the table were not acceptable to Mrs. Hamilton. They indicated either an ignorance or a flouting of the niceties.
“I’m late, Mother,” Samuel said.
She did not look around at him. Her spatula moved like a striking snake and the hot cakes settled their white sides hissing on the soapstone. “What time was it you came home?” she asked.
“Oh, it was late--late. Must have been near eleven. I didn’t look, fearing to waken you.”
“I did not waken,” Liza said grimly. “And maybe you can find it healthy to rove all night, but the Lord God will do what He sees fit about that.” It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject. She turned and reached and a plate of crisp hot cakes lay between Tom’s hands. “How does the Sanchez place look?” she asked.
Samuel went to his wife, leaned down from his height, and kissed her round red cheek. “Good morning, Mother. Give me your blessing.”
“Bless you,” said Liza automatically.
Samuel sat down at the table and said, “Bless you, Tom. Well, Mr. Trask is making great changes. He’s fitting up the old house to live in.”
Liza turned sharply from the stove. “The one where the cows and pigs have slept the years?”
“Oh, he’s ripped out the floors and window casings. All new and new painted.”
“He’ll never get the smell of pigs out,” Liza said firmly. “There’s a pungency left by a pig that nothing can wash out or cover up.”
“Well, I went inside and looked around, Mother, and I could smell nothing except paint.”
“When the paint dries you’ll smell pig,” she said.
“He’s got a garden laid out with spring water running through it, and he’s set a place apart for flowers, roses and the like, and some of the bushes are coming clear from Boston.”
“I don’t see how the Lord God puts up with such waste,” she said grimly. “Not that I don’t like a rose myself.”
“He said he’d try to root some cuttings for me,” Samuel said.
Tom finished his hot cakes and stirred his coffee. “What kind of a man is he, Father?”
“Well, I think he’s a fine man--has a good tongue and a fair mind. He’s given to dreaming--”
“Hear now the pot blackguarding the kettle,” Liza interrupted.
“I know, Mother, I know. But have you ever thought that my dreaming takes the place of something I haven’t? Mr. Trask has practical dreams and the sweet dollars to make them solid. He wants to make a garden of his land, and he will do it too.”
“What’s his wife like?” Liza asked.
“Well, she’s very young and very pretty. She’s quiet, hardly speaks, but then she’s having her first baby soon.”
“I know that,” Liza said. “What was her name before?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, where did she come from?”
“I don’t know.”
She put his plate of hot cakes in front of him and poured coffee in his cup and refilled Tom’s cup. “What did you learn then? How does she dress?”
“Why, very nice, pretty--a blue dress and a little coat, pink but tight about the waist.”
“You’ve an eye for that. Would you say they were made clothes or store bought?”
“Oh, I think store bought.”
“You would not know,” Liza said firmly. “You thought the traveling suit Dessie made to go to San Jose was store bought.”
“Dessie’s the clever love,” said Samuel. “A needle sings in her hands.”
Tom said, “Dessie’s thinking of opening a dressmaking shop in Salinas.”
“She told me,” Samuel said. “She’d make a great success of it.”
“Salinas?” Liza put her hands on her hips. “Dessie didn’t tell me.”
“I’m afraid we’ve done bad service to our dearie,” Samuel said. “Here she wanted to save it for a real tin-plate surprise to her mother and we’ve leaked it like wheat from a mouse-hole sack.”
“She might have told me,” said Liza. “I don’t like surprises. Well, go on--what was she doing?”
“Who?”
“Why, Mrs. Trask of course.”
“Doing? Why, sitting, sitting in a chair under an oak tree. Her time’s not far.”
“Her hands, Samuel, her hands--what was she doing with her hands?”
Samuel searched his memory. “Nothing I guess. I remember--she had little hands and she held them clasped in her lap.”
Liza sniffed. “Not sewing, not mending, not knitting?”
“No, Mother.”
“I don’t know that it’s a good idea for you to go over there. Riches and idleness, devil’s tools, and you’ve not a very sturdy resistance.”
Samuel raised his head and laughed with pleasure. Sometimes his wife delighted him but he could never tell her how. “It’s only the riches I’ll be going there for, Liza. I meant to tell you after breakfast so you could sit down to hear. He wants me to bore four or five wells for him, and maybe put windmills and storage tanks.”
“Is it all talk? Is it a windmill turned by water? Will he pay you or will you come back excusing as usual? ‘He’ll pay when his crop comes in,’ ” she mimicked, “ ‘He’ll pay when his rich uncle dies.’ It’s my experience, Samuel, and should be yours, that if they don’t pay presently they never pay at all. We could buy a valley farm with your promises.”
“Adam Trask will pay,” said Samuel. “He’s well fixed. His father left him a fortune. It’s a whole winter of work, Mother. We’ll lay something by and we’ll have a Christmas to scrape the stars. He’ll pay fifty cents a foot, and the windmills, Mother. I can make everything but the casings right here. I’ll need the boys to help. I want to take Tom and Joe.”
“Joe can’t go,” she said. “You know he’s delicate.”
“I thought I might scrape off some of his delicacy. He can starve on delicacy.”
“Joe can’t go,” she said finally. “And who is to run the ranch while you and Tom are gone?”
“I thought I’d ask George to come back. He doesn’t like a clerk’s job even if it is in King City.”
“Like it he may not, but he can take a measure of discomfort for eight dollars a week.”
“Mother,” Samuel cried, “here’s our chance to scratch our name in the First National Bank! Don’t throw the weight of your tongue in the path of fortune. Please, Mother!”
She grumbled to herself all morning over her work while Tom and Samuel went over the boring equipment, sharpened bits, drew sketches of windmills new in design, and measured for timbers and redwood water tanks. In the midmorning Joe came out to join them, and he became so fascinated that he asked Samuel to let him go.
Samuel said, “Offhand I’d say I’m against it, Joe. Your mother needs you here.”
“But I want to go, Father. And don’t forget, next year I’ll be going, to college in Palo Alto. And that’s going away, isn’t it? Please let me go. I’ll work hard.”
“I’m sure you would if you could come. But I’m against it. And when you talk to your mother about it, I’ll thank you to let it slip that I’m against it. You might even throw in that I refused you.”
Joe grinned, and Tom laughed aloud.
“Will you let her persuade you?” Tom asked.
Samuel scowled at his sons. “I’m a hard-opinioned man,” he said. “Once I’ve set my mind, oxen can’t stir me. I’ve looked at it from all angles and my word is--Joe can’t go. You wouldn’t want to make a liar of my word, would you?”
“I’ll go in and talk to her now,” said Joe.
“Now, son, take it easy,” Samuel called after him. “Use your head. Let her do most of it. Meanwhile I’ll set my stubborn up.”
Two days later the big wagon pulled away, loaded with timbers and tackle. Tom drove four hordes, and beside him Samuel and Joe sat swinging their feet.

Chapter 17


1
When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it. If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can’t know whether she escaped. Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language. Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable. It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.
I’ve built the image in my mind of Cathy, sitting quietly waiting for her pregnancy to be over, living on a farm she did not like, with a man she did not love.
She sat in her chair under the oak tree, her hands clasped each to each in love and shelter. She grew very big--abnormally big, even at a time when women gloried in big babies and counted extra pounds with pride. She was misshapen; her belly, tight and heavy and distended, made it impossible for her to stand without supporting herself with her hands. But the great lump was local. Shoulders, neck, arms, hands, face, were unaffected, slender and girlish. Her breasts did not grow and her nipples did not darken. There was no quickening of milk glands, no physical planning to feed the newborn. When she sat behind a table you could not see that she was pregnant at all.
In that day there was no measuring of pelvic arch, no testing of blood, no building with calcium. A woman gave a tooth for a child. It was the law. And a woman was likely to have strange tastes, some said for filth, and it was set down to the Eve nature still under sentence for original sin.
Cathy’s odd appetite was simple compared to some. The carpenters, repairing the old house, complained that they could not keep the lumps of chalk with which they coated their chalk lines. Again and again the scored hunks disappeared. Cathy stole them and broke them in little pieces. She carried the chips in her apron pocket, and when no one was about she crushed the soft lime between her teeth. She spoke very little. Her eyes were remote. It was as though she had gone away, leaving a breathing doll to conceal her absence.
Activity surged around her. Adam went happily about building and planning his Eden. Samuel and his boys brought in a well at forty feet and put down the newfangled expensive metal casing, for Adam wanted the best.
The Hamiltons moved their rig and started another hole. They slept in a tent beside the work and cooked over a campfire. But there was always one or another of them riding home for a tool or with a message.
Adam fluttered like a bewildered bee confused by too many flowers. He sat by Cathy and chatted about the pieplant roots just come in. He sketched for her the new fan blade Samuel had invented for the windmill. It had a variable pitch and was an unheard-of thing. He rode out to the well rig and slowed the work with his interest. And naturally, as he discussed wells with Cathy, his talk was all of birth and child care at the well head. It was a good time for Adam, the best time. He was the king of his wide and spacious life. And summer passed into a hot and fragrant autumn.

2

The Hamiltons at the well rig had finished their lunch of Liza’s bread and rat cheese and venomous coffee cooked in a can over the fire. Joe’s eyes were heavy and he was considering how he could get away into the brush to sleep for a while.
Samuel knelt in the sandy soil, looking at the torn and broken edges of his bit. Just before they had stopped for lunch the drill had found something thirty feet down that had mangled the steel as though it were lead. Samuel scraped the edge of the blade with his pocketknife and inspected the scrapings in the palm of his hand His eyes shone with a childlike excitement. He held out his hand and poured the scrapings into Tom’s hand.
“Take a look at it, son. What do you think it is?”
Joe wandered over from his place in front of the tent. Tom studied the fragments in his hand. “Whatever it is, it’s hard,” he said. “Couldn’t be a diamond that big. Looks like metal. Do you think we’ve bored into a buried locomotive?”
His father laughed. “Thirty feet down,” he said admiringly.
“It looks like tool steel,” said Tom. “We haven’t got anything that can touch it.” Then he saw the faraway joyous look on his father’s face and a shiver of shared delight came to him. The Hamilton children loved it when their father’s mind went free. Then the world was peopled with wonders.
Samuel said, “Metal, you say. You think, steel. Tom, I’m going to make a guess and then I’m going to get an assay. Now hear my guess--and remember it. I think we’ll find nickel in it, and silver maybe, and carbon and manganese. How I would like to dig it up! It’s in sea sand. That’s what we’ve been getting.”
Tom said, “Say, what do you think it is with--nickel and silver--”
“It must have been long thousand centuries ago,” Samuel said, and his sons knew he was seeing it. “Maybe it was all water here--an inland sea with the seabirds circling and crying. And it would have been a pretty thing if it happened at night. There would come a line of light and then a pencil of white light and then a tree of blinding light drawn in a long arc from heaven. Then there’d be a great water spout and a big mushroom of steam. And your ears would be staggered by the sound because the soaring cry of its coming would be on you at the same time the water exploded. And then it would be black night again, because of the blinding light. And gradually you’d see the killed fish coming up, showing silver in the starlight, and the crying birds would come to eat them. It’s a lonely, lovely thing to think about, isn’t it?”
He made them see it as he always did.
Tom said softly, “You think it’s a meteorite, don’t you?”
“That I do. and we can prove it by assay.”
Joe said eagerly, “Let’s dig it up.”
“You dig it, Joe, while we bore for water.”
Tom said seriously, “If the assay showed enough nickel and silver, wouldn’t it pay to mine it?”
“You’re my own son,” said Samuel. “We don’t know whether it’s big as a house or little as a hat.”
“But we could probe down and see.”
“That we could if we did it secretly and hid our thinking under a pot.”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Now, Tom, have you no kindness toward your mother? We give her enough trouble, son. She’s told me plain that if I spend any more money patenting things, she’ll give us trouble to remember. Have pity on her! Can’t you see her shame when they ask her what we’re doing? She’s a truthful woman, your mother. She’d have to say, ‘They’re at digging up a star.’ ” He laughed happily. “She’d never live it down. And she’d make us smart. No pies for three months.”
Tom said, “We can’t get through it. We’ll have to move to another place.”
“I’ll put some blasting powder down,” said his father, “and if that doesn’t crack it aside we’ll start a new hole.” He stood up. “I’ll have to go home for powder and to sharpen the drill. Why don’t you boys ride along with me and we’ll give Mother a surprise so that she’ll cook the whole night and complain. That way she’ll dissemble her pleasure.”
Joe said, “Somebody’s coming, coming fast.” And indeed they could see a horseman riding toward them at full gallop, but a curious horseman who flopped about on his mount like a tied chicken. When he came a little closer they saw that it was Lee, his elbows waving like wings, his queue lashing about like a snake. It was surprising that he stayed on at all and still drove the horse at full tilt. He pulled up, breathing heavily. “Missy Adam say come! Missy Cathy bad--come quick. Missy yell, scream.”
Samuel said, “Hold on, Lee. When did it start?”
“Mebbe bleakfus time.”
“All right. Calm yourself. How is Adam?”
“Missy Adam clazy. Cly--laugh--make vomit.”
“Sure,” said Samuel. “These new fathers. I was one once. Tom, throw a saddle on for me, will you?”
Joe said, “What is it?”
“Why, Mrs. Trask is about to have her baby. I told Adam I’d stand by.”
“You?” Joe asked.
Samuel leveled his eyes on his youngest son. “I brought both of you into the world,” he said. “And you’ve given no evidence you think I did a bad service to the world. Tom, you get all the tools gathered up. And go back to the ranch and sharpen the metal. Bring back the box of powder that’s on the shelf in the tool shed, and go easy with it as you love your arms and legs. Joe, I want you to stay here and look after things.”
Joe said plaintively, “But what will I do here alone?”
Samuel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Joe, do you love me?”
“Why, sure.”
“If you heard I’d committed some great crime would you turn me over to the police?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would you?”
“No.”
“All right then. In my basket, under my clothes, you’ll find two books--new, so be gentle with them. It’s two volumes by a man the world is going to hear from. You can start reading if you want and it will raise up your lid a little. It’s called The Principles of Psychology and it’s by an Eastern man named William James. No relative to the train robber. And, Joe, if you ever let on about the books I’ll run you off the ranch. If your mother ever found out I spent the money on them she’d run me off the ranch.”
Tom led a saddled horse to him. “Can I read it next?”
“Yes,” said Samuel, and he slipped his leg lightly over the saddle. “Come on, Lee.”
The Chinese wanted to break into a gallop but Samuel restrained him. “Take it easy, Lee. Birthing takes longer than you think, mostly.”
For a time they rode in silence, and then Lee said, “I’m sorry you bought those books. I have the condensed form, in one volume, the textbook. You could have borrowed it.”
“Have you now? Do you have many books?”
“Not many here--thirty or forty. But you’re welcome to any of them you haven’t read.”
“Thank you, Lee. And you may be sure I’ll look the first moment I can. You know, you could talk to my boys. Joe’s a little flighty but Tom’s all right and it would do him good.”
“It’s a hard bridge to cross, Mr. Hamilton. Makes me timid to talk to a new person, but I’ll try if you say so.”
They walked the horses rapidly toward the little draw of the Trask place. Samuel said, “Tell me, how is it with the mother?”
“I’d rather you saw for yourself and thought for yourself,” Lee said. “You know when a man lives alone as much as I do, his mind can go off on an irrational tangent just because his social world is out of kilter.”
“Yes, I know. But I’m not lonely and I’m on a tangent too. But maybe not the same one.”
“You don’t think I imagine it then?”
“I don’t know what it is, but I’ll tell you for your reassurance that I’ve a sense of strangeness.”
“I guess that’s all it is with me too,” said Lee. He smiled. “I’ll tell you how far it got with me though. Since I’ve come here I find myself thinking of Chinese fairy tales my father told me. We Chinese have a well-developed demonology.”
“You think she is a demon?”
“Of course not,” said Lee. “I hope I’m a little beyond such silliness. I don’t know what it is. You know, Mr. Hamilton, a servant develops an ability to taste the wind and judge the climate of the house he works in. And there’s a strangeness here. Maybe that’s what makes me remember my father’s demons.”
“Did your father believe in them?”
“Oh, no. He thought I should know the background. You Occidentals perpetuate a good many myths too.”
Samuel said, “Tell me what happened to set you off. This morning, I mean.”
“If you weren’t coming I would try,” said Lee. “But I would rather not. You can see for yourself. I may be crazy. Of course Mr. Adam is strung so tight he may snap like a banjo string.”
“Give me a little hint. It might save time. What did she do?”
“Nothing. That’s just it. Mr. Hamilton, I’ve been at births before, a good many of them, but this is something new to me.”
“How?”
“It’s--well--I’ll tell you the one thing I can think of. This is much more like a bitter, deadly combat than a birth.”
As they rode into the draw and under the oak trees Samuel said, “I hope you haven’t got me in a state, Lee. It’s a strange day, and I don’t know why.”
“No wind,” said Lee. “It’s the first day in a month when there hasn’t been wind in the afternoon.”
“That’s so. You know I’ve been so close to the details I’ve paid no attention to the clothing of the day. First we find a buried star and now we go to dig up a mint-new human.” He looked up through the oak branches at the yellow-lit hills. “What a beautiful day to be born in!” he said. “If signs have their fingers on a life, it’s a sweet life coming. And, Lee, if Adam plays true, he’ll be in the way. Stay close, will you? In case I need something. Look, the men, the carpenters, are sitting under that tree.”
“Mr. Adam stopped the work. He thought the hammering might disturb his wife.”
Samuel said, “You stay close. That sounds like Adam playing true. He doesn’t know his wife probably couldn’t hear God Himself beating a tattoo on the sky.”
The workmen sitting under the tree waved to him. “How do, Mr. Hamilton. How’s your family?”
“Fine, fine. Say, isn’t that Rabbit Holman? Where’ve you been, Rabbit?”
“Went prospecting, Mr. Hamilton.”
“Find anything, Rabbit?”
“Hell, Mr. Hamilton, I couldn’t even find the mule I went out with.”
They rode on toward the house. Lee said quickly, “If you ever get a minute, I’d like to show you something.”
“What is it, Lee?”
“Well, I’ve been trying to translate some old Chinese poetry into English. I’m not sure it can be done. Will you take a look?”
“I’d like to, Lee. Why, that would be a treat for me.”