Chapter 20


1
It was a pleasant afternoon. Frémont’s Peak was lighted pinkly by the setting sun, and Faye could see it from her window. From over on Castroville Street came the sweet sound of jingling horse bells from an eight-horse grain team down from the ridge. The cook was fighting pots in the kitchen. There was a rubbing sound on the wall and then a gentle tap on the door.
“Come in, Cotton Eye,” Faye called.
The door opened and the crooked little cotton-eyed piano player stood in the entrance, waiting for a sound to tell him where she was.
“What is it you want?” Faye asked.
He turned to her. “I don’t feel good, Miss Faye. I want to crawl into my bed and not do no playing tonight.”
“You were sick two nights last week, Cotton Eye. Don’t you like your job?”
“I don’t feel good.”
“Well, all right. But I wish you’d take better care of yourself.”
Kate said softly, “Let the gong alone for a couple of weeks, Cotton Eye.”
“Oh, Miss Kate. I didn’t know you was here. I ain’t been smoking.”
“You’ve been smoking,” Kate said.
“Yes, Miss Kate, I sure will let it alone. I don’t feel good.” He closed the door, and they could hear his hand rubbing along the wall to guide him.
Faye said, “He told me he’d stopped.”
“He hasn’t stopped.”
“The poor thing,” said Faye, “he doesn’t have much to live for.”
Kate stood in front of her. “You’re so sweet,” she said. “You believe in everybody. Someday if you don’t watch, or I don’t watch for you, someone will steal the roof.”
“Who’d want to steal from me?” asked Faye.
Kate put her hand on Faye’s plump shoulders. “Not everyone is as nice as you are.”
Faye’s eyes glistened with tears. She picked up a handkerchief from the chair beside her and wiped her eyes and patted delicately at her nostrils. “You’re like my own daughter, Kate,” she said.
“I’m beginning to believe I am. I never knew my mother. She died when I was small.”
Faye drew a deep breath and plunged into the subject.
“Kate, I don’t like you working here.”
“Why not?”
Faye shook her head, trying to find words. “I’m not ashamed. I run a nice house. If I didn’t somebody else might run a bad house. I don’t do anybody any harm. I’m not ashamed.”
“Why should you be?” asked Kate.
“But I don’t like you working. I just don’t like it. You’re sort of my daughter. I don’t like my daughter working.”
“Don’t be a silly, darling,” said Kate. “I have to--here or somewhere else. I told you. I have to have the money.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Of course I do. Where else could I get it?”
“You could be my daughter. You could manage the house. You could take care of things for me and not go upstairs. I’m not always well, you know.”
“I know you’re not, poor darling. But I have to have money.”
“There’s plenty for both of us, Kate. I could give you as much as you make and more, and you’d be worth it.”
Kate shook her head sadly. “I do love you,” she said. “And I wish I could do what you want. But you need your little reserve, and I--well, suppose something should happen to you? No, I must go on working. Do you know, dear, I have five regulars tonight?”
A jar of shock struck Faye. “I don’t want you to work.”
“I have to, Mother.”
The word did it. Faye burst into tears, and Kate sat on the arm of her chair and stroked her cheek and wiped her streaming eyes. The outburst sniffled to a close.
The dusk was settling deeply on the valley. Kate’s face was a glow of lightness under her dark hair. “Now you’re all right. I’ll go and look in on the kitchen and then dress.”
“Kate, can’t you tell your regulars you’re sick?”
“Of course not, Mother.”
“Kate, it’s Wednesday. Probably won’t be anybody in after one o’clock.”
“The Woodmen of the World are having a do.”
“Oh, yes. But on Wednesday--the Woodmen won’t be here after two.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Kate, when you close, you tap on my door. I’ll have a little surprise for you.”
“What kind of a surprise?”
“Oh, a secret surprise! Will you ask the cook to come in as you go by the kitchen?”
“Sounds like a cake surprise.”
“Now don’t ask questions, darling. It’s a surprise.”
Kate kissed her. “What a dear you are, Mother.”
When she had closed the door behind her Kate stood for a moment in the hall. Her fingers caressed her little pointed chin. Her eyes were calm. Then she stretched her arms over her head and strained her body in a luxurious yawn. She ran her hands slowly down her sides from right under her breasts to her hips. Her mouth corners turned up a little, and she moved toward the kitchen.

2
The few regulars drifted in and out and two drummers walked down the Line to look them over, but not a single Woodman of the World showed up. The girls sat yawning in the parlor until two o’clock, waiting.
What kept the Woodmen away was a sad accident. Clarence Monteith had a heart attack right in the middle of the closing ritual and before supper. They laid him out on the carpet and dampened his forehead until the doctor came. Nobody felt like sitting down to the doughnut supper. After Dr. Wilde had arrived and looked Clarence over, the Woodmen made a stretcher by putting flagpoles through the sleeves of two overcoats. On the way home Clarence died, and they had to go for Dr. Wilde again. And by the time they had made plans for the funeral and written the piece for the Salinas Journal, nobody had any heart for a whorehouse.
The next day, when they found out what had happened, the girls all remembered what Ethel had said at ten minutes to two.
“My God!” Ethel had said. “I never heard it so quiet. No music, cat’s got Kate’s tongue. It’s like setting up with a corpse.”
Later Ethel was impressed with having said it--almost as if she knew.
Grace had said, “I wonder what cat’s got Kate’s tongue. Don’t you feel good? Kate--I said, don’t you feel good?”
Kate started. “Oh! I guess I was thinking of something.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Grace. “I’m sleepy. Why don’t we close up? Let’s ask Faye if we can’t lock up. There won’t even be a Chink in tonight. I’m going to ask Faye.”
Kate’s voice cut in on her. “Let Faye alone. She’s not well. We’ll close up at two.”
“That clock’s way wrong,” said Ethel. “What’s the matter with Faye?”
Kate said, “Maybe that’s what I was thinking about. Faye’s not well. I’m worried to death about her. She won’t show it if she can help it.”
“I thought she was all right,” Grace said.
Ethel hit the jackpot again. “Well, she don’t look good to me. She’s got a kind of flush. I noticed it.”
Kate spoke very softly. “Don’t you girls ever let her know I told you. She wouldn’t want you to worry. What a dear she is!”
“Best goddam house I ever hustled,” said Grace.
Alice said, “You better not let her hear you talk words like that.”
“Balls!” said Grace. “She knows all the words.”
“She don’t like to hear them--not from us.”
Kate said patiently, “I want to tell you what happened. I was having tea with her late this afternoon and she fainted dead away. I do wish she’d see a doctor.”
“I noticed she had a kind of bright flush,” Ethel repeated. “That clock’s way wrong but I forget which way.”
Kate said, “You girls go on to bed. I’ll lock up.”
When they were gone Kate went to her room and put on her pretty new print dress that made her look like a little girl. She brushed and braided her hair and let it hang behind in one thick pigtail tied with a little white bow. She patted her cheeks with Florida water. For a moment she hesitated, and then from the top bureau drawer she took a little gold watch that hung from a fleur-de-lis pin. She wrapped it in one of her fine lawn handkerchiefs and went out of the room.
The hall was very dark, but a rim of light showed under Faye’s door. Kate tapped softly.
Faye called, “Who is it?”
“It’s Kate.”
“Don’t you come in yet. You wait outside. I’ll tell you when.” Kate heard a rustling and a scratching in the room. Then Faye called, “All right. Come in.”
The room was decorated. Japanese lanterns with candles in them hung on bamboo sticks at the corners, and red crepe paper twisted in scallops from the center to the corners to give the effect of a tent. On the table, with candlesticks around it, was a big white cake and a box of chocolates, and beside these a basket with a magnum of champagne peeking out of crushed ice. Faye wore her best lace dress and her eyes were shiny with emotion.
“What in the world?” Kate cried. She closed the door. “Why, it looks like a party!”
“It is a party. It’s a party for my dear daughter.”
“It’s not my birthday.” Faye said, “In a way maybe it is.”
“I don’t know what you mean. But I brought you a present.” She laid the folded handkerchief in Faye’s lap. “Open it carefully,” she said.
Faye held the watch up. “Oh, my dear, my dear! You crazy child! No, I can’t take it.” She opened the face and then picked open the back with her fingernail. It was engraved.--”To C. with all my heart from A.”
“It was my mother’s watch,” Kate said softly. “I would like my new mother to have it.”
“My darling child! My darling child!”
“Mother would be glad.”
“But it’s my party. I have a present for my dear daughter--but I’ll have to do it in my own way. Now, Kate, you open the bottle of wine and pour two glasses while I cut the cake. I want it to be fancy.”
When everything was ready Faye took her seat behind the table. She raised her glass. “To my new daughter--may you have long life and happiness.” And when they had drunk Kate proposed, “To my mother.” Faye said, “You’ll make me cry--don’t make me cry. Over on the bureau, dear. Bring the little mahogany box. There that’s the one. Now put it on the table here and open it.”
In the polished box lay a rolled white paper tied with a red ribbon. “What in the world is it?” Kate asked. “It’s my gift to you. Open it.”
Kate very carefully untied the red ribbon and unrolled the tube. It was written elegantly with shaded letters, and it was well and carefully drawn and witnessed by the cook.
“All my worldly goods without exception to Kate Albey because I regard her as my daughter.”
It was simple, direct, and legally irreproachable. Kate read it three times, looked back at the date, studied the cook’s signature. Faye watched her, and her lips were parted in expectation. When Kate’s lips moved, reading, Faye’s lips moved.
Kate rolled the paper and tied the ribbon around it and put it in the box and closed the lid. She sat in her chair.
Faye said at last, “Are you pleased?”
Kate’s eyes seemed to peer into and beyond Faye’s eyes--to penetrate the brain behind the eyes. Kate said quietly, “I’m trying to hold on, Mother. I didn’t know anyone could be so good. I’m afraid if I say anything too quickly or come too close to you, I’ll break to pieces.”
It was more dramatic than Faye had anticipated, quiet and electric. Faye said, “It’s a funny present, isn’t it?”
“Funny? No, it isn’t funny.”
“I mean, a will is a strange present. But it means more than that. Now you are my real daughter I can tell you. I--no, we--have cash and securities in excess of sixty thousand dollars. In my desk are notations of accounts and safe-deposit boxes. I sold the place in Sacramento for a very good price. Why are you so silent, child? Is something bothering you?”
“A will sounds like death. That’s thrown a pall.”
“But everyone should make a will.”
“I know, Mother.” Kate smiled ruefully. “A thought crossed my mind. I thought of all your kin coming in angrily to break such a will as this. You can’t do this.”
“My poor little girl, is that what’s bothering you? I have no folks. As far as I know I have no kin. And if I did have some--who would know? Do you think you are the only one with secrets? Do you think I use the name I was born with?”
Kate looked long and levelly at Faye.
“Kate,” she cried, “Kate, it’s a party. Don’t be sad! Don’t be frozen!”
Kate got up, gently pulled the table aside, and sat down on the floor. She put her cheek on Faye’s knee. Her slender fingers traced a gold thread on the skirt through its intricate leaf pattern. And Faye stroked Kate’s cheek and hair and touched her strange ears. Shyly Faye’s fingers explored to the borders of the scar.
“I think I’ve never been so happy before,” said Kate.
“My darling. You make me happy too. Happier than I have ever been. Now I don’t feel alone. Now I feel safe.”
Kate picked delicately at the gold thread with her fingernails.
They sat in the warmth for a long time before Faye stirred. “Kate,” she said, “we’re forgetting. It’s a party. We’ve forgotten the wine. Pour it, child. We’ll have a little celebration.”
Kate said uneasily, “Do we need it, Mother?”
“It’s good. Why not? I like to take on a little load. It lets the poison out. Don’t you like champagne, Kate?”
“Well, I never have drunk much, it’s not good for me.”
“Nonsense. Pour it, darling.”
Kate got up from the floor and filled the glasses.
Faye said, “Now drink it down. I’m watching you. You’re not going to let an old woman get silly by herself.”
“You’re not an old woman, Mother.”
“Don’t talk--drink it. I won’t touch mine until yours is empty.” She held her glass until Kate had emptied hers, then gulped it. “Good, that’s good,” she said. “Fill them up. Now, come on dear--down the rat hole. After two or three the bad things go away.”
Kate’s chemistry screamed against the wine. She remembered, and she was afraid.
Faye said, “Now let me see the bottom, child--there. You see how good it is? Fill up again.”
The transition came to Kate almost immediately after the second glass. Her fear evaporated, her fear of anything disappeared. This was what she had been afraid of, and now it was too late. The wine had forced a passage through all the carefully built barriers and defenses and deceptions, and she didn’t care. The thing she had learned to cover and control was lost. Her voice became chill and her mouth was thin. Her wide-set eyes slitted and grew watchful and sardonic.
“Now you drink--Mother--while I watch,” she said. “There’s a--dear. I’ll bet you can’t drink two without stopping.”
“Don’t bet me, Kate. You’d lose. I can drink six without stopping.”
“Let me see you.”
“If I do, will you?”
“Of course.”
The contest started, and a puddle of wine spread out over the tabletop and the wine went down in the magnum.
Faye giggled. “When I was a girl--I could tell you stories maybe you wouldn’t believe.”
Kate said, “I could tell stories nobody would believe.”
“You? Don’t be silly. You’re a child.”
Kate laughed. “You never saw such a child. This is a child--yes--a child!” She laughed with a thin penetrating shriek.
The sound got through the wine that was muffling Faye. She centered her eyes on Kate. “You look so strange,” she said. “I guess it’s the lamplight. You look different.”
“I am different.”
“Call me ‘Mother,’ dear.”
“Mother--dear.”
“Kate, we’re going to have such a good life.”
“You bet we are. You don’t even know. You don’t know.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Europe. We could get on a ship and have nice clothes--dresses from Paris.”
“Maybe we’ll do that--but not now.”
“Why not, Kate? I have plenty of money.”
“We’ll have plenty more.”
Faye spoke pleadingly, “Why don’t we go now? We could sell the house. With the business we’ve got, we could get maybe ten thousand dollars for it.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? It’s my house. I can sell it.”
“Did you forget I’m your daughter?”
“I don’t like your tone, Kate. What’s the matter with you? Is there any more wine?”
“Sure, there’s a little. Look at it through the bottle. Here, drink it out of the bottle. That’s right--Mother--spill it down your neck. Get it in under your corset, Mother, against your fat stomach.”
Faye wailed, “Kate, don’t be mean! We were feeling so nice. What do you want to go and spoil it for?”
Kate wrenched the bottle from her hand. “Here, give me that.” She tipped it up and drained it and dropped it on the floor. Her face was sharp and her eyes glinted. The lips of her little mouth were parted to show her small sharp teeth, and the canines were longer and more pointed than the others. She laughed softly. “Mother--dear Mother--I’m going to show you how to run a whorehouse. We’ll fix the gray slugs that come in here and dump their nasty little loads--for a dollar. We’ll give them pleasure, Mother dear.”
Faye said sharply. “Kate, you’re drunk. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t, Mother dear? Do you want me to tell you?”
“I want you to be sweet. I want you to be like you were.”
“Well, it’s too late. I didn’t want to drink the wine. But you, you nasty fat worm, you made me. I’m your dear, sweet daughter--don’t you remember? Well, I remember how surprised you were that I had regulars. Do you think I’ll give them up? Do you think they give me a mean little dollar in quarters? No, they give me ten dollars, and the price is going up all the time. They can’t go to anybody else. Nobody else is any good for them.”
Faye wept like a child. “Kate,” she said, “don’t talk like that. You’re not like that. You’re not like that.”
“Dear Mother, sweet fat Mother, take down the pants of one of my regulars. Look at the heelmarks on the groin--very pretty. And the little cuts that bleed for a long time. Oh, Mother dear, I’ve got the sweetest set of razors all in a case--and so sharp, so sharp.”
Faye struggled to get out of her chair. Kate pushed her back. “And do you know, Mother dear, that’s the way this whole house is going to be. The price will be twenty dollars, and we’ll make the bastards take a bath. We’ll catch the blood on white silk handkerchiefs--Mother dear--blood from the little knotted whips.”
In her chair Faye began to scream hoarsely. Kate was on her instantly with a hard hand cupped over her mouth. “Don’t make a noise. There’s a good darling. Get snot all over your daughter’s hand--but no noise.” Tentatively she took her hand away and wiped it on Faye’s skirt.
Faye whispered, “I want you out of the house. I want you out. I run a good house without nastiness. I want you out.”
“I can’t go, Mother. I can’t leave you alone, poor dear.” Her voice chilled. “Now I’m sick of you. Sick of you.” She took a wineglass from the table, went to the bureau, and poured paregoric until the glass was half full. “Here, Mother, drink it. It will be good for you.”
“I don’t want to.”
“There’s a good dear. Drink it.” She coaxed the fluid into Faye. “Now one more swallow--just one more.”
Faye mumbled thickly for a while and then she relaxed in her chair and slept, snoring thickly.

3
Dread began to gather in the corners of Kate’s mind, and out of dread came panic. She remembered the other time and a nausea swept through her. She gripped her hands together, and the panic grew. She lighted a candle from the lamp and went unsteadily down the dark hall to the kitchen. She poured dry mustard in a glass, stirred water into it until it was partly fluid, and drank it. She held on to the edge of the sink while the paste went burning down. She retched and strained again and again. At the end of it, her heart was pounding and she was weak--but the wine was overcome and her mind was clear.
She went over the evening in her mind, moving from scene to scene like a sniffing animal. She bathed her face and washed out the sink and put the mustard back on the shelf. Then she went back to Faye’s room.
The dawn was coming, lighting up the back of Frémont’s Peak so that it stood black against the sky. Faye was still snoring in her chair. Kate watched her for a few moments and then she fixed Faye’s bed. Kate dragged and strained and lifted the dead weight of the sleeping woman. On the bed Kate undressed Faye and washed her face and put her clothes away.
The day was coming fast. Kate sat beside the bed and watched the relaxed face, the mouth open, lips blowing in and out.
Faye made a restless movement and her dry lips slobbered a few thick words and sighed off to a snore again.
Kate’s eyes become alert. She opened the top bureau drawer and examined the bottles which constituted the medicine chest of the house--paregoric, Pain Killer, Lydia Pinkham, iron wine tonic, Hall’s Cream Salve, Epsom salts, castor oil, ammonia. She carried the ammonia bottle to the bed, saturated a handkerchief, and, standing well away, held the cloth over Faye’s nose and mouth.
The strangling, shocking fumes went in, and Faye came snorting and fighting out of her black web. Her eyes were wide and terrified.
Kate said, “It’s all right, Mother. It’s all right. You had a nightmare. You had a bad dream.”
“Yes, a dream,” and then sleep overcame her again and she fell back and began to snore, but the shock of the ammonia had lifted her up nearer consciousness and she was more restless. Kate put the bottle back in its drawer. She straightened the table, mopped up the spilled wine, and carried the glasses to the kitchen.
The house was dusky with dawnlight creeping in around the edges of the blinds. The cook stirred in his lean-to behind the kitchen, groping for his clothes and putting on his clodhopper shoes.
Kate moved quietly. She drank two glasses of water and filled the glass again and carried it back to Faye’s room and closed the door. She lifted Faye’s right eyelid, and the eye looked rakishly up at her but it was not rolled back in her head. Kate acted slowly and precisely. She picked up the handkerchief and smelled it. Some of the ammonia had evaporated but the smell was still sharp. She laid the cloth lightly over Faye’s face, and when Faye twisted and turned and came near to waking, Kate took the handkerchief away and let Faye sink back. This she did three times. She put the handkerchief away and picked up an ivory crochet hook from the marble top of the bureau. She turned down the cover and pressed the blunt end of the ivory against Faye’s flabby breast with a steady, increasing pressure until the sleeping woman whined and writhed. Then Kate explored the sensitive places of the body with the hook--under the arm, the groin, the ear, the clitoris, and always she removed the pressure just before Faye awakened fully.
Faye was very near the surface now. She whined and sniffled and tossed. Kate stroked her forehead and ran smooth fingers over her inner arm and spoke softly to her.
“Dear--dear. You’re having a bad dream. Come out of the bad dream, Mother.”
Faye’s breathing grew more regular. She heaved a great sigh and turned on her side and settled down with little grunts of comfort.
Kate stood up from the bed and a wave of dizziness rose in her head. She steadied herself, then went to the door and listened, slipped out, and moved cautiously to her own room. She undressed quickly and put on her nightgown and a robe and slippers. She brushed her hair and put it up and covered it with a sleeping cap, and she sponged her face with Florida water. She went quietly back to Faye’s room.
Faye was still sleeping peacefully on her side. Kate opened the door to the hall. She carried the glass of water to the bed and poured cold water in Faye’s ear.
Faye screamed, and screamed again. Ethel’s frightened face looked out of her room in time to see Kate in robe and slippers at Faye’s door. The cook was right behind Kate, and he put out his hand to stop her.
“Now don’t go in there, Miss Kate. You don’t know what’s in there.”
“Nonsense, Faye’s in trouble.” Kate burst in and ran to the bed.
Faye’s eyes were wild and she was crying and moaning.
“What is it? What is it, dear?”
The cook was in the middle of the room, and three sleep-haggard girls stood in the doorway.
“Tell me, what is it?” Kate cried.
“Oh, darling--the dreams, the dreams! I can’t stand them!”
Kate turned to the door. “She’s had a nightmare--she’ll be all night. You go back to bed. I’ll stay with her a while. Alex, bring a pot of tea.”
Kate was tireless. The other girls remarked on it. She put cold towels on Faye’s aching head and held her shoulders and the cup of tea for her. She petted and babied her, but the look of horror would not go out of Faye’s eyes. At ten o’clock Alex brought in a can of beer and without a word put it on the bureau top. Kate held a glass of it to Faye’s lips.
“It will help, darling. Drink it down.”
“I never want another drink.”
“Nonsense! Drink it down like medicine. That’s a good girl. Now just lie back and go to sleep.”
“I’m afraid to sleep.”
“Were the dreams so bad?”
“Horrible, horrible!”
“Tell me about them, Mother. Maybe that will help.”
Faye shrank back. “I wouldn’t tell anyone. How I could have dreamed them! They weren’t like my dreams.”
“Poor little Mother! I love you,” Kate said. “You go to sleep. I’ll keep the dreams away.”
Gradually Faye did slip off to sleep. Kate sat beside the bed, studying her.

Chapter 21


1
In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.
What made Kate so effective was the fact that she had either learned it or had been born with the knowledge. Kate never hurried. If a barrier arose, she waited until it had disappeared before continuing. She was capable of complete relaxation between the times for action. Also, she was mistress of a technique which is the basis of good wrestling--that of letting your opponent do the heavy work toward his own defeat, or of guiding his strength toward his weaknesses.
Kate was in no hurry. She thought to the end very quickly and then put it out of her mind. She set herself to work on method. She built a structure and attacked it, and if it showed the slightest shakiness she tore it down and started fresh. This she did only late at night or otherwise when she was completely alone, so that no change or preoccupation was noticeable in her manner. Her building was constructed of personalities, materials, knowledge, and time. She had access to the first and last, and she set about getting knowledge and materials, but while she did that she set in motion a series of imperceptible springs and pendulums and left them to pick up their own momenta.
First the cook told about the will. It must have been the cook. He thought he did anyway. Kate heard about it from Ethel, and she confronted him in the kitchen where he was kneading bread, his hairy big arms floured to the elbows and his hands yeast bleached.
“Do you think it was a good thing to tell about being a witness?” she said mildly. “What do you think Miss Faye is going to think?”
He looked confused. “But I didn’t--”
“You didn’t what--tell about it or think it would hurt?”
“I don’t think I--”
“You don’t think you told? Only three people knew. Do you think I told? Or do you think Miss Faye did?” She saw the puzzled look come into his eyes and knew that by now he was far from sure that he had not told. In a moment he would be sure that he had.
Three of the girls questioned Kate about the will, coming to her together for mutual strength.
Kate said, “I don’t think Faye would like me to discuss it. Alex should have kept his mouth shut.” Their wills wavered, and she said, “Why don’t you ask Faye?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t do that!”
“But you dare to talk behind her back! Come on now, let’s go in to her and you can ask her the questions.”
“No, Kate, no.”
“Well, I’ll have to tell her you asked. Wouldn’t you rather be there? Don’t you think she would feel better if she knew you weren’t talking behind her back?”
“Well--”
“I know I would. I always like a person who comes right out.” Quietly she surrounded and nudged and pushed until they stood in Faye’s room.
Kate said, “They asked me about a certain you-know-what. Alex admits he let it out.”
Faye was slightly puzzled. “Well, dear, I can’t see that it’s such a secret.”
Kate said, “Oh, I’m glad you feel that way. But you can see that I couldn’t mention it until you did.”
“You think it’s bad to tell, Kate?”
“Oh, not at all. I’m glad, but it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be loyal of me to mention it before you did.”
“You’re sweet, Kate. I don’t see any harm. You see, girls, I’m alone in the world and I have taken Kate as my daughter. She takes such care of me. Get the box, Kate.”
And each girl took the will in her own hands and inspected it. It was so simple they could repeat it word for word to the other girls.
They watched Kate to see how she would change, perhaps become a tyrant, but if anything, she was nicer to them.
A week later when Kate became ill, she went right on with her supervision of the house, and no one would have known if she hadn’t been found standing rigid in the hall with agony printed on her face. She begged the girls not to tell Faye, but they were outraged, and it was Faye who forced her to bed and called Dr. Wilde.
He was a nice man and a pretty good doctor. He looked at her tongue, felt her pulse, asked her a few intimate questions, and then tapped his lower lip.
“Right here?” he asked and exerted a little pressure on the small of her back. “No? Here? Does this hurt? So. Well, I think you just need a kidney flushing.” He left yellow, green, and red pills to be taken in sequence. The pills did good work.
She did have one little flare up. She told Faye, “I’ll go to the doctor’s office.”
“I’ll ask him to come here.”
“To bring me some more pills? Nonsense. I’ll go in the morning.”

2

Dr. Wilde was a good man and an honest man. He was accustomed to say of his profession that all he was sure of was that sulphur would cure the itch. He was not casual about his practice. Like so many country doctors, he was a combination doctor, priest, psychiatrist to his town. He knew most of the secrets, weaknesses, and the braveries of Salinas. He never learned to take death easily. Indeed the death of a patient always gave him a sense of failure and hopeless ignorance. He was not a bold man, and he used surgery only as a last and fearful resort. The drugstore was coming in to help the doctors, but Dr. Wilde was one of the few to maintain his own dispensary and to compound his own prescriptions. Many years of overwork and interrupted sleep had made him a little vague and preoccupied.
At eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning Kate walked up Main Street, climbed the stairs of the Monterey County Bank Building, and walked along the corridor until she found the door which said, “Dr. Wilde--Office Hours 11-2.”
At nine-thirty Dr. Wilde put his buggy in the livery stable and wearily lifted out his black bag. He had been out in the Alisal presiding at the disintegration of old, old lady German. She had not been able to terminate her life neatly. There were codicils. Even now Dr. Wilde wondered whether the tough, dry, stringy life was completely gone out of her. She was ninety-seven and a death certificate meant nothing to her. Why, she had corrected the priest who prepared her. The mystery of death was on him. It often was. Yesterday, Allen Day, thirty-seven, six feet one inch, strong as a bull and valuable to four hundred acres and a large family, had meekly surrendered his life to pneumonia after a little exposure and three days of fever. Dr. Wilde knew it was a mystery. His eyelids felt grainy. He thought he would take a sponge bath and have a drink before his first office patients arrived with their stomach aches.
He climbed the stairs and put his worn key in the lock of his office door. The key would not turn. He set his bag on the floor and exerted pressure. The key refused to budge. He grabbed the doorknob and pulled outward and rattled the key. The door was opened from within. Kate stood in front of him.
“Oh, good morning. Lock was stuck. How did you get in?”
“It wasn’t locked. I was early and came in to wait.”
“Wasn’t locked?” He turned the key the other way and saw that, sure enough, the little bar slipped out easily.
“I’m getting old, I guess,” he said. “I’m forgetful.” He sighed. “I don’t know why I lock it anyway. You could get in with a piece of baling wire. And who’d want to get in anyway?” He seemed to see her for the first time. “I don’t have office hours until eleven.”
Kate said, “I needed some more of those pills and I couldn’t come later.”
“Pills? Oh, yes. You’re the girl from down at Faye’s.”
“That’s right.”
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, the pills help.”
“Well, they can’t hurt,” he said. “Did I leave the door to the dispensary open too?”
“What’s a dispensary?”
“Over there--that door.”
“I guess you must have.”
“Getting old. How is Faye?”
“Well, I’m worried about her. She was real sick a while ago. Had cramps and went a little out of her head.”
“She’s had a stomach disorder before,” Dr. Wilde said. “You can’t live like that and eat at all hours and be very well. I can’t anyway. We just call it stomach trouble. Comes from eating too much and staying up all night. Now--the pills. Do you remember what color?”
“There were three kinds, yellow, red, and green.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.”
While he poured pills into a round cardboard box she stood in the door.
“What a lot of medicines!”
Dr. Wilde said, “Yes--and the older I get, the fewer I use. I got some of those when I started to practice. Never used them. That’s a beginner’s stock. I was going to experiment--alchemy.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Here you are. Tell Faye to get some sleep and eat some vegetables. I’ve been up all night. Let yourself out, will you?” He went wavering back into the surgery.
Kate glanced after him and then her eyes flicked over the lines of bottles and containers. She closed the dispensary door and looked around the outer office. One book in the case was out of line. She pushed it back until it was shoulder to shoulder with its brothers.
She picked up her big handbag from the leather sofa and left.
In her own room Kate took five small bottles and a strip of scribbled paper from her handbag. She put the whole works in the toe of a stocking, pushed the wad into a rubber overshoe, and stood it with its fellow in the back of her closet.

3

During the following months a gradual change came over Faye’s house. The girls were sloppy and touchy. If they had been told to clean themselves and their rooms a deep resentment would have set in and the house would have reeked of ill temper. But it didn’t work that way.
Kate said at table one evening that she had just happened to look in Ethel’s room and it was so neat and pretty she couldn’t help buying her a present. When Ethel unwrapped the package right at the table it was a big bottle of Hoyt’s German, enough to keep her smelling sweet for a long time. Ethel was pleased, and she hoped Kate hadn’t seen the dirty clothes under the bed. After supper she not only got the clothes out but brushed the floors and swept the cobwebs out of the corners.
Then Grace looked so pretty one afternoon that Kate couldn’t help giving her the rhinestone butterfly pin she was wearing. And Grace had to rush up and put on a clean shirtwaist to set it off.
Alex in the kitchen, who, if he had believed what was usually said of him would have considered himself a murderer, found that he had a magic hand with biscuits. He discovered that cooking was something you couldn’t learn. You had to feel it.
Cotton Eye learned that nobody hated him. His tub-thumping piano playing changed imperceptibly.
He told Kate, “It’s funny what you remember when you think back.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Well, like this,” and he played for her.
“That’s lovely,” she said. “What is it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I think it’s Chopin. If I could just see the music!”
He told her how he had lost his sight, and he had never told anyone else. It was a bad story. That Saturday night he took the chain off the piano strings and played something he had been remembering and practicing in the morning, something called “Moonlight,” a piece by Beethoven, Cotton Eye thought.
Ethel said it sounded like moonlight and did he know the words.
“It don’t have words,” said Cotton Eye.
Oscar Trip, up from Gonzales for Saturday night, said, “Well, it ought to have. It’s pretty.”
One night there were presents for everyone because Faye’s was the best house, the cleanest, and nicest in the whole county--and who was responsible for that? Why, the girls--who else? And did they ever taste seasoning like in that stew?
Alex retired into the kitchen and shyly wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. He bet he could make a plum pudding would knock their eyes out.
Georgia was getting up at ten every morning and taking piano lessons from Cotton Eye and her nails were clean.
Coming back from eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning, Grace said to Trixie, “And I was about ready to get married and give up whoring. Can you imagine?”
“It’s sure nice,” said Trixie. “Jenny’s girls came over for Faye’s birthday cake and they couldn’t believe their eyes. They don’t talk about nothing else but how it is at Faye’s. Jenny’s sore.”
“Did you see the score on the blackboard this morning?”
“Sure I did--eighty-seven tricks in one week. Let Jenny or the Nigger match that when there ain’t no holidays!”
“No holidays, hell. Have you forgot it’s Lent? They ain’t turning a trick at Jenny’s.”
After her illness and her evil dreams Faye was quiet and depressed. Kate knew she was being watched, but there was no help for that. And she had made sure the rolled paper was still in the box and all the girls had seen it or heard about it.
One afternoon Faye looked up from her solitaire game as Kate knocked and entered the room.
“How do you feel, Mother?”
“Fine, just fine.” Her eyes were secretive. Faye wasn’t very clever. “You know, Kate, I’d like to go to Europe.”
“Well, how wonderful! And you deserve it and you can afford it.”
“I don’t want to go alone. I want you to go with me.”
Kate looked at her in astonishment. “Me? You want to take me?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Oh, you sweet dear! When can we go?”
“You want to?”
“I’ve always dreamed of it. When can we go? Let’s go soon.”
Faye’s eyes lost their suspicion and her face relaxed. “Maybe next summer,” she said. “We can plan it for next summer. Kate!”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You--you don’t turn any tricks any more, do you?”
“Why should I? You take such good care of me.”
Faye slowly gathered up the cards, and tapped them square, and dropped them in the table drawer.
Kate pulled up a chair. “I want to ask your advice about something.”
“What is it?”
“Well, you know I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re doing everything, darling.”
“You know our biggest expense is food, and it gets bigger in the winter.”
“Yes.”
“Well, right now you can buy fruit and all kinds of vegetables for two bits a lug. And in the winter you know what we pay for canned peaches and canned string beans.”
“You aren’t planning to start preserving?”
“Well, why shouldn’t we?”
“What will Alex say to that?”
“Mother, you can believe it or not, or you can ask him. Alex suggested it.”
“No!”
“Well, he did. Cross my heart.”
“Well, I’ll be damned--Oh, I’m sorry, sweet. It slipped out.”
The kitchen turned into a cannery and all the girls helped. Alex truly believed it was his idea. At the end of the season he had a silver watch with his name engraved on the back to prove it.
Ordinarily both Faye and Kate had their supper at the long table in the dining room, but on Sunday nights when Alex was off and the girls dined on thick sandwiches, Kate served supper for two in Faye’s room. It was pleasant and a ladylike time. There was always some little delicacy, very special and good--foie gras or a tossed salad, pastry bought at Lang’s Bakery just across Main Street. And instead of the white oilcloth and paper napkins of the dining room, Faye’s table was covered with a white damask cloth and the napkins were linen. It had a party feeling too, candles and--something rare in Salinas--a bowl of flowers. Kate could make pretty floral arrangements using only the blossoms from weeds she picked in the fields.
“What a clever girl she is,” Faye would say. “She can do anything and she can make do with anything. We’re going to Europe. And did you know Kate speaks French? Well, she can. When you get her alone ask her to say something in French. She’s teaching me. Know how you say bread in French?” Faye was having a wonderful time. Kate gave her excitement and perpetual planning.

4

On Saturday the fourteenth of October the first wild ducks went over Salinas. Faye saw them from her window, a great wedge flying south. When Kate came in before supper, as she always did, Faye told her about it. “I guess the winter’s nearly here,” she said. “We’ll have to get Alex to set up the stoves.”
“Ready for your tonic, Mother dear?”
“Yes, I am. You’re making me lazy, waiting on me.”
“I like to wait on you,” said Kate. She took the bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound from the drawer and held it up to the light. “Not much left,” she said. “We’ll have to get some more.”
“Oh, I think I have three bottles left of the dozen in my closet.”
Kate picked up the glass. “There’s a fly in the glass,” she said. “I’ll just go and wash it out.”
In the kitchen she rinsed the glass. From her pocket she took the eye-dropper. The end was closed with a little piece of potato, the way you plug the spout of a kerosene can. She carefully squeezed a few drops of clear liquid into the glass, a tincture of nux vomica.
Back in Faye’s room she poured the three tablespoons of vegetable compound in the glass and stirred it.
Faye drank her tonic and licked her lips. “It tastes bitter,” she said.
“Does it, dear? Let nie taste.” Kate took a spoonful from the bottle and made a face. “So it does,” she said. “I guess it’s been standing around too long. I’m going to throw it out. Say, that is bitter. Let me get you a glass of water.”
At supper Faye’s face was flushed. She stopped eating and seemed to be listening.
“What’s the matter?” Kate asked. “Mother, what’s the matter?”
Faye seemed to tear her attention away. “Why, I don’t know. I guess a little heart flutter. Just all of a sudden I felt afraid and my heart got to pounding.”
“Don’t you want me to help you to your room?”
“No, dear, I feel all right now.”
Grace put down her fork. “Well, you got a real high flush, Faye.”
Kate said, “I don’t like it. I wish you’d see Dr. Wilde.”
“No, it’s all right now.”
“You frightened me,” said Kate. “Have you ever had it before?”
“Well, I’m a little short of breath sometimes. I guess I’m getting too stout.”
Faye didn’t feel very good that Saturday night and about ten o’clock Kate persuaded her to go to bed. Kate looked in several times until she was sure Faye was asleep.
The next day Faye felt all right. “I guess I’m just short-winded,” she said.
“Well, we’re going to have invalid food for my darling,” said Kate. “I’ve made some chicken soup for you, and we’ll have a string-bean salad--the way you like it, just oil and vinegar, and a cup of tea.”
“Honest to God, Kate. I feel pretty good.”
“It wouldn’t hurt either of us to eat a little light. You frightened me last night. I had an aunt who died of heart trouble. And that leaves a memory, you know.”
“I never had any trouble with my heart. Just a little short-winded when I climb the stairs.”
In the kitchen Kate set the supper on two trays. She measured out the French dressing in a cup and poured it on the string-bean salad. On Faye’s tray she put her favorite cup and set the soup forward on the stove to heat. Finally she took the eye-dropper from her pocket and squeezed two drops of crotón oil on the string beans and stirred it in. She went to her room and swallowed the contents of a small bottle of Cascara Sagrada and hurried back to the kitchen. She poured the hot soup in the cups, filled the teapot with boiling water, and carried the trays to Faye’s room.
“I didn’t think I was hungry,” Faye said. “But that soup smells good.”
“I made a special salad dressing for you,” said Kate. “It’s an old recipe, rosemary and thyme. See if you like it.”
“Why, it’s delicious,” said Faye. “Is there anything you can’t do darling?”
Kate was stricken first. Her forehead beaded with perspiration and she doubled over, crying with pain. Her eyes were staring and the saliva ran from her mouth. Faye ran to the hallway, screaming for help. The girls and a few Sunday customers crowded into the room. Kate was writhing on the floor. Two of the regulars lifted her onto Faye’s bed and tried to straighten her out, but she screamed and doubled up again. The sweat poured from her body and wet her clothes.
Faye was wiping Kate’s forehead with a towel when the pain struck her.
It was an hour before Dr. Wilde could be found playing euchre with a friend. He was dragged down to the Line by two hysterical whores. Faye and Kate were weak from vomiting and diarrhea and the spasms continued at intervals.
Dr. Wilde said, “What did you eat?” And then he noticed the trays. “Are these string beans home canned?” he demanded.
“Sure,” said Grace. “We did them right here.”
“Did any of you have them?”
“Well, no. You see--”
“Go out and break every jar,” Dr. Wilde said. “Goddam the string beans!” And he unpacked his stomach pump.
On Tuesday he sat with the two pale weak women. Kate’s bed had been moved into Faye’s room. “I can tell you now,” he said. “I didn’t think you had a chance. You’re pretty lucky. And let home-made string beans alone. Buy canned ones.”
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“Botulism. We don’t know much about it, but damn few ever get over it. I guess it’s because you’re young and she’s tough.” He asked Faye, “Are you still bleeding from the bowels?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Well, here are some morphine pills. They’ll bind you up. You’ve probably ruptured something. But they say you can’t kill a whore. Now take it easy, both of you.”
That was October 17.
Faye was never really well again. She would make a little gain and then go to pieces. She had a bad time on December 3, and it took even longer for her to gain her strength. February 12 the bleeding became violent and the strain seemed to have weakened Faye’s heart. Dr. Wilde listened a long time through his stethoscope.
Kate was haggard and her slender body had shrunk to bones. The girls tried to spell her with Faye, but Kate would not leave.
Grace said, “God knows when’s the last sleep she had. If Faye was to die I think it would kill that girl.”
“She’s just as like to blow her brains out,” said Ethel.
Dr. Wilde took Kate into the day-darkened parlor and put his black bag on the chair. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “Her heart just can’t take the strain, I’m afraid. She’s all torn up inside. That goddam botulism. Worse than a rattlesnake.” He looked away from Kate’s haggard face. “I thought it would be better to tell you so you can prepare yourself,” he said lamely and put his hand on her bony shoulder. “Not many people have such loyalty. Give her a little warm milk if she can take it.”
Kate carried a basin of warm water to the table beside the bed. When Trixie looked in, Kate was bathing Faye and using the fine linen napkins to do it. Then she brushed the lank blond hair and braided it.
Faye’s skin had shrunk, clinging to jaw and skull, and her eyes were huge and vacant.
She tried to speak, and Kate said, “Shush! Save your strength. Save your strength.”
She went to the kitchen for a glass of warm milk and put it on the bedside table. She took two little bottles from her pocket and sucked a little from each one into the eye-dropper. “Open up, Mother. This is a new kind of medicine. Now be brave, dear. This will taste bad.” She squeezed the fluid far back on Faye’s tongue and held up her head so she could drink a little milk to take away the taste. “Now you rest and I’ll be back in a little while.”
Kate slipped quietly out of the room. The kitchen was dark. She opened the outer door and crept out and moved back among the weeds. The ground was damp from the spring rains. At the back of the lot she dug a small hole with a pointed stick. She dropped in a number of small thin bottles and an eye-dropper. With the stick she crushed the glass to bits and scraped dirt over them. Rain was beginning to fall as Kate went back to the house.
At first they had to tie Kate down to keep her from hurting herself. From violence she went into a gloomy stupor. It was a long time before she regained her health. And she forgot completely about the will. It was Trixie who finally remembered.

Chapter 22


1
On the Trask place Adam drew into himself. The unfinished Sanchez house lay open to wind and rain, and the new floorboards buckled and warped with moisture. The laid-out vegetable gardens rioted with weeds.
Adam seemed clothed in a viscosity that slowed his movements and held his thoughts down. He saw the world through gray water. Now and then his mind fought its way upward, and when the light broke in it brought him only a sickness of the mind, and he retired into the grayness again. He was aware of the twins because he heard them cry and laugh, but he felt only a thin distaste for them. To Adam they were symbols of his loss. His neighbors drove up into his little valley, and every one of them would have understood anger or sorrow--and so helped him. But they could do nothing with the cloud that hung over him. Adam did not resist them. He simply did not see them, and before long the neighbors stopped driving up the road under the oaks.
For a time Lee tried to stimulate Adam to awareness, but Lee was a busy man. He cooked and washed, he bathed the twins and fed them. Through his hard and constant work he grew fond of the two little boys. He talked to them in Cantonese, and Chinese words were the first they recognized and tried to repeat.
Samuel Hamilton went back twice to try to wedge Adam up and out of his shock. Then Liza stepped in.
“I want you to stay away from there,” she said. “You come back a changed man. Samuel, you don’t change him. He changes you. I can see the look of him in your face.”
“Have you thought of the two little boys, Liza?” he asked.
“I’ve thought of your own family,” she said snappishly. “You lay a crepe on us for days after.”
“All right, Mother,” he said, but it saddened him because Samuel could not mind his own business when there was pain in any man. It was no easy thing for him to abandon Adam to his desolation.
Adam had paid him for his work, had even paid him for the windmill parts and did not want the windmills. Samuel sold the equipment and sent Adam the money. He had no answer.
He became aware of an anger at Adam Trask. It seemed to Samuel that Adam might be pleasuring himself with sadness. But there was little leisure to brood. Joe was off to college--to that school Leland Stanford had built on his farm near Palo Alto. Tom worried his father, for Tom grew deeper and deeper into books. He did his work well enough, but Samuel felt that Tom had not joy enough.
Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.
Samuel wrote to Joe, saying, “I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you’d take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven’t even got a shovel yet.”
Liza was getting old. Samuel saw it in her face, and he could not feel old himself, white beard or no. But Liza was living backwards, and that’s the proof.
There was a time when she looked on his plans and prophecies as the crazy shoutings of a child. Now she felt that they were unseemly in a grown man. They three, Liza and Tom and Samuel, were alone on the ranch. Una was married to a stranger and gone away. Dessie had her dressmaking business in Salinas. Olive had married her young man, and Mollie was married and living, believe it or not, in an apartment in San Francisco. There was perfume, and a white bearskin rug in the bedroom in front of the fireplace, and Mollie smoked a gold-tipped cigarette--Violet Milo--with her coffee after dinner.
One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.
In King City, Dr. Tilson felt him over. The doctor grew more testy with his overworked years.
“You sprained your back.”
“That I did,” said Samuel.
“And you drove all the way in to have me tell you that you sprained your back and charge you two dollars?”
“Here’s your two dollars.”
“And you want to know what to do about it?”
“Sure I do.”
“Don’t sprain it any more. Now take your money back. You’re not a fool, Samuel, unless you’re getting childish.”
“But it hurts.”
“Of course it hurts. How would you know it was strained if it didn’t?”
Samuel laughed. “You’re good for me,” he said. “You’re more than two dollars good for me. Keep the money.”
The doctor looked closely at him. “I think you’re telling the truth, Samuel. I’ll keep the money.”
Samuel went in to see Will in his fine new store. He hardly knew his son, for Will was getting fat and prosperous and he wore a coat and vest and a gold ring on his little finger.
“I’ve got a package made up for Mother,” Will said. “Some little cans of things from France. Mushrooms and liver paste and sardines so little you can hardly see them.”
“She’ll just send them to Joe,” said Samuel.
“Can’t you make her eat them?”
“No,” said his father. “But she’ll enjoy sending them to Joe.”
Lee came into the store and his eyes lighted up. “How do, Missy,” he said.
“Hello, Lee. How are the boys?”
“Boys fine.”
Samuel said, “I’m going to have a glass of beer next door, Lee. Be glad to have you join me.”
Lee and Samuel sat at the little round table in the barroom and Samuel drew figures on the scrubbed wood with the moisture of his beer glass. “I’ve wanted to go to see you and Adam but I didn’t think I could do any good.”
“Well, you can’t do any harm. I thought he’d get over it. But he still walks around like a ghost.”
“It’s over a year, isn’t it?” Samuel asked.
“Three months over.”
“Well, what do you think I can do?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “Maybe you could shock him out of it. Nothing else has worked.”
“I’m not good at shocking. I’d probably end up by shocking myself. By the way, what did he name the twins?”
“They don’t have any names.”
“You’re making a joke, Lee.”
“I am not making jokes.”
“What does he call them?”
“He calls them ‘they.’ ”
“I mean when he speaks to them.”
“When he speaks to them he calls them ‘you,’ one or both.”
“This is nonsense,” Samuel said angrily. “What kind of fool is the man?”
“I’ve meant to come and tell you. He’s a dead man unless you can wake him up.”
Samuel said, “I’ll come. I’ll bring a horse whip. No names! You’re damn right I’ll come Lee.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’ll kill a chicken,” said Lee. “You’ll like the twins, Mr. Hamilton. They’re fine-looking boys. I won’t tell Mr. Trask you’re coming.”

2

Shyly Samuel told his wife he wanted to visit the Trask place. He thought she would pile up strong walls of objection, and for one of the few times in his life he would disobey her wish no matter how strong her objection. It gave him a sad feeling in the stomach to think of disobeying his wife. He explained his purpose almost as though he were confessing. Liza put her hands on her hips during the telling and his heart sank. When he was finished she continued to look at him, he thought, coldly.
Finally she said, “Samuel, do you think you can move this rock of a man?”
“Why, I don’t know, Mother.” He had not expected this. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think it is such an important matter that those babies have names right now?”
“Well, it seemed so to me,” he said lamely.
“Samuel, do you think why you want to go? Is it your natural incurable nosiness? Is it your black inability to mind your own business?”
“Now, Liza, I know my failings pretty well. I thought it might be more than that.”
“It had better be more than that,” she said. “This man has not admitted that his sons live. He has cut them off mid-air.”
“That’s the way it seems to me, Liza.”
“If he tells you to mind your own business--what then?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
Her jaw snapped shut and her teeth clicked. “If you do not get those boys named, there’ll be no warm place in this house for you. Don’t you dare come whining back, saying he wouldn’t do it or he wouldn’t listen. If you do I’ll have to go myself.”
“I’ll give him the back of my hand,” Samuel said.
“No, that you won’t do. You fall short in savagery, Samuel. I know you. You’ll give him sweet-sounding words and you’ll come dragging back and try to make me forget you ever went.”
“I’ll beat his brains out,” Samuel shouted.
He slammed into the bedroom, and Liza smiled at the panels.
He came out soon in his black suit and his hard shiny shirt and collar. He stooped down to her while she tied his black string tie. His white beard was brushed to shining.
“You’d best take a swab at your shoes with a blacking brush,” she said.
In the midst of painting the blacking on his worn shoes he looked sideways up at her. “Could I take the Bible along?” he asked. “There’s no place for getting a good name like the Bible.”
“I don’t much like it out of the house,” she said uneasily. “And if you’re late coming home, what’ll I have for my reading? And the children’s names are in it.” She saw his face fall. She went into the bedroom and came back with a small Bible, worn and scuffed, its cover held on by brown paper and glue. “Take this one,” she said.
“But that’s your mother’s.”
“She wouldn’t mind. And all the names but one in here have two dates.”
“I’ll wrap it so it won’t get hurt,” said Samuel.
Liza spoke sharply. “What my mother would mind is what I mind, and I’ll tell you what I mind. You’re never satisfied to let the Testament alone. You’re forever picking at it and questioning it. You turn it over the way a ’coon turns over a wet rock, and it angers me.”
“I’m just trying to understand it, Mother.”
“What is there to understand? Just read it. There it is in black and white. Who wants you to understand it? If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He’d have given you to understand or He’d have set it down different.”
“But, Mother--”
“Samuel,” she said, “you’re the most contentious man this world has ever seen.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Don’t agree with me all the time. It hints of insincerity. Speak up for yourself.”
She looked after his dark figure in the buggy as he drove away. “He’s a sweet husband,” she said aloud, “but contentious.”
And Samuel was thinking with wonder, Just when I think I know her she does a thing like that.

3

On the last half-mile, turning out of the Salinas Valley and driving up the unscraped road under the great oak trees, Samuel tried to plait a rage to take care of his embarrassment. He said heroic words to himself.
Adam was more gaunt than Samuel remembered. His eyes were dull, as though he did not use them much for seeing. It took a little time for Adam to become aware that Samuel was standing before him. A grimace of displeasure drew down his mouth.
Samuel said, “I feel small now--coming uninvited as I have.”
Adam said, “What do you want? Didn’t I pay you?”
“Pay?” Samuel asked. “Yes, you did. Yes, by God, you did. And I’ll tell you that pay has been more than I’ve merited by the nature of it.”
“What? What are you trying to say?”
Samuel’s anger grew and put out leaves. “A man, his whole life, matches himself against pay. And how, if it’s my whole life’s work to find my worth, can you, sad man, write me down instant in a ledger?”
Adam exclaimed, “I’ll pay. I tell you I’ll pay. How much? I’ll pay.”
“You have, but not to me.”
“Why did you come then? Go away!”
“You once invited me.”
“I don’t invite you now.”
Samuel put his hands on his hips and leaned forward. “I’ll tell you now, quiet. In a bitter night, a mustard night that was last night, a good thought came and the dark was sweetened when the day sat down. And this thought went from evening star to the late dipper on the edge of the first light--that our betters spoke of. So I invite myself.”
“You are not welcome.”
Samuel said, “I’m told that out of some singular glory your loins got twins.”
“What business is that of yours?”
A kind of joy lighted Samuel’s eyes at the rudeness. He saw Lee lurking inside the house and peeking out at him. “Don’t, for the love of God, put violence on me. I’m a man hopes there’ll be a picture of peace on my hatchments.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“How could you? Adam Trask, a dog wolf with a pair of cubs, a scrubby rooster with sweet paternity for a fertilized egg! A dirty clod!”
A darkness covered Adam’s cheeks and for the first time his eyes seemed to see. Samuel joyously felt hot rage in his stomach. He cried, “Oh, my friend, retreat from me! Please, I beg of you!” The saliva dampened the corners of his mouth. “Please!” he cried. “For the love of any holy thing you can remember, step back from me. I feel murder nudging my gizzard.”
Adam said, “Get off my place. Go on--get off. You’re acting crazy. Get off. This is my place. I bought it.”
“You bought your eyes and nose,” Samuel jeered. “You bought your uprightness. You bought your thumb on sideways. Listen to me, because I’m like to kill you after. You bought! You bought out of some sweet inheritance. Think now--do you deserve your children, man?”
“Deserve them? They’re here--I guess. I don’t understand you.”
Samuel wailed, “God save me, Liza! It’s not the way you think, Adam! Listen to me before my thumb finds the bad place at your throat. The precious twins--untried, unnoticed, undirected--and I say it quiet with my hands down--undiscovered.”
“Get off,” said Adam hoarsely. “Lee, bring a gun! This man is crazy. Lee!”
Then Samuel’s hands were on Adam’s throat, pressing the throbbing up to his temples, swelling his eyes with blood. And Samuel was snarling at him. “Tear away with your jelly fingers. You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them. You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.” Suddenly he plucked his hard thumbs out of his neighbor’s throat.
Adam stood panting. He felt his throat where the blacksmith hands had been. “What is it you want of me?”
“You have no love.”
“I had--enough to kill me.”
“No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much.”
“Stay away from me. I can fight back. Don’t think I can’t defend myself.”
“You have two weapons, and they not named.”
“I’ll fight you, old man. You are an old man.”
Samuel said, “I can’t think in my mind of a dull man picking up a rock, who before evening would not put a name to it--like Peter. And you--for a year you’ve lived with your heart’s draining and you’ve not even laid a number to the boys.”
Adam said, “What I do is my own business.”
Samuel struck him with a work-heavy fist, and Adam sprawled out in the dust. Samuel asked him to rise, and when Adam accepted struck him again, and this time Adam did not get up. He looked stonily at the menacing old man.
The fire went out of Samuel’s eyes and he said quietly, “Your sons have no names.”
Adam replied, “Their mother left them motherless.”
“And you have left them fatherless. Can’t you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don’t you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?”
“I didn’t do it,” Adam said.
“Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.” He stooped down and put his arms around Adam’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. “We’ll give them names,” he said. “We’ll think long and find good names to clothe them.” He whipped the dust from Adam’s shirt with his hands.
Adam wore a faraway yet intent look, as though he were listening to some wind-carried music, but his eyes were not dead as they had been. He said, “It’s hard to imagine I’d thank a man for insults and for shaking me out like a rug. But I’m grateful. It’s a hurty thanks, but it’s thanks.”
Samuel smiled, crinkle-eyed. “Did it seem natural? Did I do it right?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in a way I promised my wife I’d do it. She didn’t believe I would. I’m not a fighting man, you see. The last time I clobbered a human soul it was over a red-nosed girl and a Schoolbook in County Derry.”
Adam stared at Samuel, but in his mind he saw and felt his brother Charles, black and murderous, and that sight switched to Cathy and the quality of her eyes over the gun barrel. “There wasn’t any fear in it,” Adam said. “It was more like a weariness.”
“I guess I was not angry enough.”
“Samuel, I’ll ask just once and then no more. Have you heard anything? Has there been any news of her--any news at all?”
“I’ve heard nothing.”
“It’s almost a relief,” said Adam.
“Do you have hatred?”
“No. No--only a kind of sinking in the heart. Maybe later I’ll sort it out to hatred. There was no interval from loveliness to horror, you see. I’m confused, confused.”
Samuel said, “One day we’ll sit and you’ll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now--why, you can’t find all the cards.”
From behind the shed there came the indignant shrieking of an outraged chicken and then a dull thump.
“There’s something at the hens,” said Adam.
A second shrieking started. “It’s Lee at the hens,” said Samuel. “You know, if chickens had government and church and history, they would take a distant and distasteful view of human joy. Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.”
Now the two men were silent, breaking it only with small false courtesies--meaningless inquiries about health and weather, with answers unlistened to. And this might have continued until they were angry at each other again if Lee had not interfered.
Lee brought out a table and two chairs and set the chairs facing each other. He made another trip for a pint of whisky and two glasses and set a glass on the table in front of each chair. Then he carried out the twins, one under each arm, and put them on the ground beside the table and gave each boy a stick for his hand to shake and make shadows with.
The boys sat solemnly and looked about, stared at Samuel’s beard and searched for Lee. The strange thing about them was their clothing, for the boys were dressed in the straight trousers and the frogged and braided jackets of the Chinese. One was in turquoise blue and the other in a faded rose pink, and the frogs and braid were black. On their heads sat round black silken hats, each with a bright red button on its flat top.
Samuel asked, “Where in the world did you get those clothes, Lee?”
“I didn’t get them,” Lee said testily. “I had them. The only other clothes they have I made myself, out of sail cloth. A boy should be well dressed on his naming day.”
“You’ve dropped the pidgin, Lee.”
“I hope for good. Of course I use it in King City.” He addressed a few short sung syllables to the boys on the ground, and they both smiled up at him and waved their sticks in the air. Lee said, “I’ll pour you a drink. It’s some that was here.”
“It’s some you bought yesterday in King City,” said Samuel.
Now that Samuel and Adam were seated together and the barriers were down, a curtain of shyness fell on Samuel. What he had beaten in with his fists he could not supplement easily. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on. His mind grinned inward at itself.
The two sat looking at the twin boys in their strange bright-colored clothes. Samuel thought, Sometimes your opponent can help you more than your friend. He lifted his eyes to Adam.
“It’s hard to start,” he said. “And it’s like a put-off letter that gathers difficulties to itself out of the minutes. Could you give me a hand?”
Adam looked up for a moment and then back at the boys on the ground. “There’s a crashing in my head,” he said. “Like sounds you hear under water. I’m having to dig myself out of a year.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me how it was and that will get us started.”
Adam tossed down his drink and poured another and rolled the glass at an angle in his hand. The amber whisky moved high on the side and the pungent fruit odor of its warming filled the air. “It’s hard to remember,” he said. “It was not agony but a dullness. But no--there were needles in it. You said I had not all the cards in the deck--and I was thinking of that. Maybe I’ll never have all the cards.”
“Is it herself trying to come out? When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
“Maybe it’s that. She’s all mixed up with the dullness, and I can’t remember much except the last picture drawn in fire.”
“She did shoot you, didn’t she, Adam?”
His lips grew thin and his eyes black.
Samuel said, “There’s no need to answer.”
“There’s no reason not to,” Adam replied. “Yes, she did.”
“Did she mean to kill you?”
“I’ve thought of that more than anything else. No, I don’t think she meant to kill me. She didn’t allow me that dignity. There was no hatred in her, no passion at all. I learned about that in the army. If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach. No, she hit me where she intended. I can see the gun barrel moving over. I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had wanted my death. That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.”
“You’ve given it a lot of thought,” said Samuel.
“I’ve had lots of time for it. I want to ask you something. I can’t remember behind the last ugly thing. Was she very beautiful, Samuel?”
“To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her--only your own creation.”
Adam mused aloud, “I wonder who she was--what she was. I was content not to know.”
“And now you want to?”
Adam dropped his eyes. “It’s not curiosity. But I would like to know what kind of blood is in my boys. When they grow up--won’t I be looking for something in them?”
“Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them.”
“But their blood--”
“I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”
“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”
“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
“No one hereabouts would agree with you. I think even Mrs. Hamilton would not.”
“That’s exactly right. She most of all would disagree, and so I would not say it to her and let loose the thunder of her disagreement. She wins all arguments by the use of vehemence and the conviction that a difference of opinion is a personal affront. She’s a fine woman, but you have to learn to feel your way with her. Let’s speak of the boys.”
“Will you have another drink?”
“That I will, thank you. Names are a great mystery. I’ve never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this--whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong. How do you favor the standard names--John or James or Charles?”
Adam was looking at the twins and suddenly with the mention of the name he saw his brother peering out of the eyes of one of the boys. He leaned forward.
“What is it?” Samuel asked.
“Why,” Adam cried, “these boys are not alike! They don’t look alike.”
“Of course they don’t. They’re not identical twins.”
“That one--that one looks like my brother. I just saw it. I wonder if the other looks like me.”
“Both of them do. A face has everything in it right back to the beginning.”
“It’s not so much now,” said Adam. “But for a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost.”
“Maybe that’s what ghosts are,” Samuel observed.
Lee brought dishes out and put them on the table.
“Do you have Chinese ghosts?” Samuel asked.
“Millions,” said Lee. “We have more ghosts than anything else. I guess nothing in China ever dies. It’s very crowded. Anyway, that’s the feeling I got when I was there.”
Samuel said, “Sit down, Lee. We’re trying to think of names.”
“I’ve got chicken frying. It will be ready pretty soon.”
Adam looked up from the twins and his eyes were warmed and softened. “Will you have a drink, Lee?”
“I’m nipping at the og-ka-py in the kitchen,” said Lee and went back to the house.
Samuel leaned down and gathered up one of the boys and held him on his lap. “Take that one up,” he said to Adam. “We ought to see whether there’s something that draws names to them.”
Adam held the other child awkwardly on his knee. “They look some alike,” he said, “but not when you look close. This one has rounder eyes than that one.”
“Yes, and a rounder head and bigger ears,” Samuel added. “But this one is more like--like a bullet. This one might go farther but not so high. And this one is going to be darker in the hair and skin. This one will be shrewd, I think, and shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd. See how this one supports himself! He’s farther along than that one--better developed. Isn’t it strange how different they are when you look close?”
Adam’s face was changing as though he had opened and come out on his surface. He held up his finger, and the child made a lunge for it and missed and nearly fell off his lap. “Whoa!” said Adam. “Take it easy. Do you want to fall?”
“It would be a mistake to name them for qualities we think they have,” Samuel said. “We might be wrong--so wrong. Maybe it would be good to give them a high mark to shoot at--a name to live up to. The man I’m named for had his name called clear by the Lord God, and I’ve been listening all my life. And once or twice I’ve thought I heard my name called--but not clear, not clear.”
Adam, holding the child by his upper arm, leaned over and poured whisky in both glasses. “I thank you for coming, Samuel,” he said. “I even thank you for hitting me. That’s a strange thing to say.”
“It was a strange thing for me to do. Liza will never believe it, and so I’ll never tell her. An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion. I haven’t the courage for that.”
Adam said, “I’ve wondered why a man of your knowledge would work a desert hill place.”
“It’s because I haven’t courage,” said Samuel. “I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called His name--but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It’s not an uncommon disease. But it’s nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.”
“I’d think there are degrees of greatness,” Adam said.
“I don’t think so,” said Samuel. “That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other--cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He’s suffering over the choosing right now. It’s a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn’t that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.”
Adam chuckled. “This naming is no simple business, I see.”
“Did you think it would be?”
“I didn’t know it could be so pleasant,” said Adam.
Lee came out with a platter of fried chicken, a bowl of smoking boiled potatoes, and a deep dish of pickled beets, all carried on a pastry board. “I don’t know how good it will be,” he said. “The hens are a little old. We don’t have any pullets. The weasels got the baby chicks this year.”
“Pull up,” said Samuel.
“Wait until I get my ng-ka-py,” said Lee.
While he was gone Adam said, “It’s strange to me--he used to speak differently.”
“He trusts you now,” Samuel said. “He has a gift of resigned loyalty without -hope of reward. He’s maybe a much better man than either of us could dream of being.”
Lee came back and took his seat at the end of the table. “Just put the boys on the ground,” he said.
The twins protested when they were set down. Lee spoke to them sharply in Cantonese and they were silent.
The men ate quietly as nearly all country people do. Suddenly Lee got up and hurried into the house. He came back with a jug of red wine. “I forgot it,” he said. “I found it in the house.”
Adam laughed. “I remember drinking wine here before I bought the place. Maybe I bought the place because of the wine. The chicken’s good, Lee. I don’t think I’ve been aware of the taste of food for a long time.”
“You’re getting well,” Samuel said. “Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.”

4

Lee cleared the table and gave each of the boys a clean drumstick. They sat solemnly holding their greasy batons and alternately inspecting and sucking them. The wine and the glasses stayed on the table.
“We’d best get on with the naming,” Samuel said. “I can feel a little tightening on my halter from Liza.”
“I can’t think what to name them,” Adam said.
“You have no family name you want--no inviting trap for a rich relative, no proud name to re-create?”
“No, I’d like them to start fresh, insofar as that is possible.”
Samuel knocked his forehead with his knuckles. “What a shame,” he said. “What a shame it is that the proper names for them they cannot have.”
“What do you mean?” Adam asked.
“Freshness, you said. I thought last night--” He paused. “Have you thought of your own name?”
“Mine?”
“Of course. Your first-born--Cain and Abel.”
Adam said, “Oh, no. No, we can’t do that.”
“I know we can’t. That would be tempting whatever fate there is. But isn’t it odd that Cain is maybe the best-known name in the whole world and as far as I know only one man has ever borne it?”
Lee said, “Maybe that’s why the name has never changed its emphasis.”
Adam looked into the ink-red wine in his glass. “I got a shiver when you mentioned it,” he said.
“Two stories have haunted us and followed us from our beginning,” Samuel said. “We carry them along with us like invisible tails--the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel. And I don’t understand either of them. I don’t understand them at all but I feel them. Liza gets angry with me. She says I should not try to understand them. She says why should we try to explain a verity. Maybe she’s right--maybe she’s right. Lee, Liza says you’re a Presbyterian--do you understand the Garden of Eden and Cain and Abel?”
“She thought I should be something, and I went to Sunday School long ago in San Francisco. People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
Adam said, “He asked you if you understood.”
“I think I understand the Fall. I could perhaps feel that in myself. But the brother murder--no. Well, maybe I don’t remember the details very well.”
Samuel said, “Most people don’t read the details. It’s the details that astonish me. And Abel had no children.” He looked up at the sky. “Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life--so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do. No,” he said, “I’m having enjoyment. And I made a promise to myself that I would not consider enjoyment a sin. I take a pleasure in inquiring into things. I’ve never been content to pass a stone without looking under it. And it is a black disappointment to me that I can never see the far side of the moon.”
“I don’t have a Bible,” Adam said. “I left the family one in Connecticut.”
“I have,” said Lee. “I’ll get it.”
“No need,” said Samuel. “Liza let me take her mother’s. It’s here in my pocket.” He took out the package and unwrapped the battered book. “This one has been scraped and gnawed at,” he said. “I wonder what agonies have settled here. Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers. Liza wears a Bible down evenly. Here we are--this oldest story. If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves.”
“I haven’t heard it since I was a child,” said Adam.
“You think it’s long then, and it’s very short,” said Samuel. “I’ll read it through and then we’ll go back. Give me a little wine, my throat’s dried out with wine. Here it is--such a little story to have made so deep a wound.” He looked down at the ground. “See!” he said. “The boys have gone to their sleep, there in the dust.”
Lee got up. “I’ll cover them,” he said.
“The dust is warm,” said Samuel. “Now it goes this way. ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” ’ ”
Adam started to speak and Samuel looked up at him and he was silent and covered his eyes with his hand. Samuel read, “ ‘And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.’ ”
Lee said, “Now there--no, go on, go on. We’ll come back.”
Samuel read, “ ‘And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said unto Cain, “Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”
“ ‘And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” And he said, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” And he said, “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” And Cain said unto the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid. And I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth me shall slay me.” And the Lord said unto him, “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.’ ”
Samuel closed the loose cover of the book almost with weariness. “There it is,” he said. “Sixteen verses, no more. And oh, Lord! I had forgotten how dreadful it is--no single tone of encouragement. Maybe Liza’s right. There’s nothing to understand.”
Adam sighed deeply. “It’s not a comforting story, is it?”
Lee poured a tumbler full of dark liquor from his round stone bottle and sipped it and opened his mouth to get the double taste on the back of his tongue. “No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have!”
Samuel said to Adam, “And you have tried to take it all.”
Lee said, “So do I, so does everyone. We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.”
Aron broke in, “It makes me feel better, not worse.”
“How do you mean?” Samuel asked.
“Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.”
“Yes, I see. But how does this story make it better?”
“Because,” Adam said excitedly, “we are descended from this. This is our father. Some of our guilt is absorbed in our ancestry. What chance did we have? We are the children of our father. It means we aren’t the first. It’s an excuse, and there aren’t enough excuses in the world.”
“Not convincing ones anyway,” said Lee. “Else we would long ago have wiped out guilt, and the world would not be filled with sad, punished people.”
Samuel said, “But do you think of another frame to this picture? Excuse or not, we are snapped back to our ancestry. We have guilt.”
Adam said, “I remember being a little outraged at God. Both Cain and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing. I never understood it. Do you?”
“Maybe we think out of a different background,” said Lee. “I remember that this story was written by and for a shepherd people. They were not farmers. Wouldn’t the god of shepherds find a fat lamb more valuable than a sheaf of barley? A sacrifice must be the best and most valuable.”
“Yes, I can see that,” said Samuel. “And Lee, let me caution you about bringing your Oriental reasoning to Liza’s attention.”
Adam was excited. “Yes, but why did God condemn Cain? That’s an injustice.”
Samuel said, “There’s an advantage to listening to the words. God did not condemn Cain at all. Even God can have a preference, can’t he? Let’s suppose God liked lamb better than vegetables. I think I do myself. Cain brought him a bunch of carrots maybe. And God said, ‘I don’t like this. Try again. Bring me something I like and I’ll set you up alongside your brother.’ But Cain got mad. His feelings were hurt. And when a man’s feelings are hurt he wants to strike at something, and Abel was in the way of his anger.”
Lee said, “St. Paul says to the Hebrews that Abel had faith.”
“There’s no reference to it in Genesis,” Samuel said. “No faith or lack of faith. Only a hint of Cain’s temper.”
Lee asked, “How does Mrs. Hamilton feel about the paradoxes of the Bible?”
“Why, she does not feel anything because she does not admit they are there.”
“But--”
“Hush, man. Ask her. And you’ll come out of it older but not less confused.”
Adam said, “You two have studied this. I only got it through my skin and not much of it stuck. Then Cain was driven out for murder?”
“That’s right--for murder.”
“And God branded him?”
“Did you listen? Cain bore the mark not to destroy him but to save him. And there’s a curse called down on any man who shall kill him. It was a preserving mark.”
Adam said, “I can’t get over a feeling that Cain got the dirty end of the stick.”
“Maybe he did,” said Samuel. “But Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain’s children. And isn’t it strange that three grown men, here in a century so many thousands of years away, discuss this crime as though it happened in King City yesterday and hadn’t come up for trial?”
One of the twins awakened and yawned and looked at Lee and went to sleep again.
Lee said, “Remember, Mr. Hamilton, I told you I was trying to translate some old Chinese poetry into English? No, don’t worry. I won’t read it. Doing it, I found some of the old things as fresh and clear as this morning. And I wondered why. And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule--a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.”
Samuel said, “Apply that to the Cain-Abel story.”
And Adam said, “I didn’t kill my brother--” Suddenly he stopped and his mind went reeling back in time.
“I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now--don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt--and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there--the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world--and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul--the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr. Trask, you said you did not kill your brother and then you remembered something. I don’t want to know what it was, but was it very far apart from Cain and Abel? And what do you think of my Oriental patter, Mr. Hamilton? You know I am no more Oriental than you are.”
Samuel had leaned his elbows on the table and his hands covered his eyes and his forehead. “I want to think,” he said. “Damn you, I want to think. I’ll want to take this off alone where I can pick it apart and see. Maybe you’ve tumbled a world for me. And I don’t know what I can build in my world’s place.”
Lee said softly, “Couldn’t a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn’t some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?”
“I don’t know, damn you. You’ve disturbed my pretty universe. You’ve taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone--let me think! Your damned bitch is having pups in my brain already. Oh, I wonder what my Tom will think of this! He’ll cradle it in the palm of his mind. He’ll turn it slow in his brain like a roast of pork before the fire. Adam, come out now. You’ve been long enough in whatever memory it was.”
Adam started. He sighed deeply. “Isn’t it too simple?” he asked. “I’m always afraid of simple things.”
“It isn’t simple at all,” said Lee. “It’s desperately complicated. But at the end there’s light.”
“There’s not going to be light long,” Samuel said. “We’ve sat and let the evening come. I drove over to help name the twins and they’re not named. We’ve swung ourselves on a pole. Lee, you better keep your complications out of the machinery of the set-up churches or there might be a Chinese with nails in his hands and feet. They like complications but they like their own. I’ll have to be driving home.”
Adam said desperately, “Name me some names.”
“From the Bible?”
“From anyplace.”
“Well, let’s see. Of all the people who started out of Egypt only two came to the Promised Land. Would you like them for a symbol?”
“Who?”
“Caleb and Joshua.”
“Joshua was a soldier--a general. I don’t like soldiering.”
“Well, Caleb was a captain.”
“But not a general. I kind of like Caleb--Caleb Trask.”
One of the twins woke up and without interval began to wail.
“You called his name,” said Samuel. “You don’t like Joshua, and Caleb’s named. He’s the smart one--the dark one. See, the other one is awake too. Well, Aaron I’ve always liked, but he didn’t make it to the Promised Land.”
The second boy almost joyfully began to cry.
“That’s good enough,” said Adam.
Suddenly Samuel laughed. “In two minutes,” he said, “and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron--now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.”
Lee took the boys up under his arms. “Have you got them straight?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Adam. “That one is Caleb and you are Aaron.”
Lee lugged the yelling twins toward the house in the dusk.
“Yesterday I couldn’t tell them apart,” said Adam. “Aaron and Caleb.”
“Thank the good Lord we had produce from our patient thought,” Samuel said. “Liza would have preferred Joshua. She loves the crashing walls of Jericho. But she likes Aaron too, so I guess it’s all right. I’ll go and hitch up my rig.”
Adam walked to the shed with him. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “There’s a weight off me.”
Samuel slipped the bit in Doxology’s reluctant mouth, set the brow band, and buckled the throatlatch. “Maybe you’ll now be thinking of the garden in the flat land,” he said. “I can see it there the way you planned it.”
Adam was long in answering. At last he said, “I think that kind of energy is gone out of me. I can’t feel the pull of it. I have money enough to live. I never wanted it for myself. I have no one to show a garden to.”
Samuel wheeled on him and his eyes were filled with tears. “Don’t think it will ever die,” he cried. “Don’t expect it. Are you better than other men? I tell you it won’t ever die until you do.” He stood panting for a moment and then he climbed into the rig and whipped Doxology and he drove away, his shoulders hunched, without saying good-by.

Part Three


Chapter 23


1
The Hamiltons were strange, high-strung people, and some of them were tuned too high and they snapped. This happens often in the world.
Of all his daughters Una was Samuel’s greatest joy. Even as a little girl she hungered for learning as a child does for cookies in the late afternoon. Una and her father had a conspiracy about learning--secret books were borrowed and read and their secrets communicated privately.
Of all the children Una had the least humor. She met and married an intense dark man--a man whose fingers were stained with chemicals, mostly silver nitrate. He was one of those men who live in poverty so that their lines of questioning may continue. His question was about photography. He believed that the exterior world could be transferred to paper--not in the ghost shadings of black and white but in the colors the human eye perceives.
His name was Anderson and he had little gift for communication. Like most technicians, he had a terror and a contempt for speculation. The inductive leap was not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain. He had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings--and they got some bad falls that way.
Anderson never fell, never slipped back, never flew. His steps moved slowly, slowly upward, and in the end, it is said, he found what he wanted--color film. He married Una, perhaps, because she had little humor, and this reassured him. And because her family frightened and embarrassed him, he took her away to the north, and it was black and lost where he went--somewhere on the borders of Oregon. He must have lived a very primitive life with his bottles and papers.
Una wrote bleak letters without joy but also without self-pity. She was well and she hoped her family was well. Her husband was near to his discovery.
And then she died and her body was shipped home.
I never knew Una. She was dead before I remember, but George Hamilton told me about it many years later and his eyes filled with tears and his voice croaked in the telling.
“Una was not a beautiful girl like Mollie,” he said. “But she had the loveliest hands and feet. Her ankles were as slender as grass and she moved like grass. Her fingers were long and the nails narrow and shaped like almonds. And Una had lovely skin too, translucent, even glowing.
“She didn’t laugh and play like the rest of us. There was something set apart about her. She seemed always to be listening. When she was reading, her face would be like the face of one listening to music. And when we asked her any question, why, she gave the answer, if she knew it--not pointed up and full of color and ‘maybes’ and ‘it-might-bes’ the way the rest of us would. We were always full of bull. There was some pure simple thing in Una,” George said.
“And then they brought her home. Her nails were broken to the quick and her fingers cracked and all worn out. And her poor, dear feet--” George could not go on for a while, and then he said with the fierceness of a man trying to control himself, “Her feet were broken and gravel-cut and briar-cut. Her dear feet had not worn shoes for a long time. And her skin was rough as rawhide.
“We think it was an accident,” he said. “So many chemicals around. We think it was.”
But Samuel thought and mourned in the thought that the accident was pain and despair.
Una’s death struck Samuel like a silent earthquake. He said no brave and reassuring words, he simply sat alone and rocked himself. He felt that it was his neglect had done it.
And now his tissue, which had fought joyously against time, gave up a little. His young skin turned old, his clear eyes dulled, and a little stoop came to his great shoulders. Liza with her acceptance could take care of tragedy; she had no real hope this side of Heaven. But Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una’s death breached his battlements. He became an old man.
His other children were doing well. George was in the insurance business. Will was getting rich. Joe had gone east and was helping to invent a new profession called advertising. Joe’s very faults were virtues in this field. He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming--and, properly applied, that is all advertising is. Joe was a big man in a new field.
The girls were married, all except Dessie, and she had a successful dressmaking business in Salinas. Only Tom had never got started.
Samuel told Adam Trask that Tom was arguing with greatness. And the father watched his son and could feel the drive and the fear, the advance and the retreat, because he could feel it in himself.
Tom did not have his father’s lyric softness or his gay good looks. But you could feel Tom when you came near to him--you could feel strength and warmth and an iron integrity. And under all of this was a shrinking--a shy shrinking. He could be as gay as his father, and suddenly in the middle it would be cut the way you would cut a violin string, and you could watch Tom go whirling into darkness.
He was a dark-faced man; his skin, perhaps from sun, was a black red, as though some Norse or perhaps Vandal blood was perpetuated in him. His hair and beard and mustache were dark red too, and his eyes gleamed startlingly blue against his coloring. He was powerful, heavy of shoulders and arm, but his hips were slim. He could lift and run and hike and ride with anyone, but he had no sense of competition whatever. Will and George were gamblers and often tried to entice their brother into the joys and sorrows of venture.
Tom said, “I’ve tried and it just seems tiresome. I’ve thought why this must be. I get no great triumph when I win and no tragedy when I lose. Without these it is meaningless. It is not a way to make money, that we know, and unless it can simulate birth and death, joy and sorrow, it seems, at least to me--it feels--it doesn’t feel at all. I would do it if I felt anything--good or bad.”
Will did not understand this. His whole life was competitive and he lived by one kind of gambling or another. He loved Tom and he tried to give him the things he himself found pleasant. He took him into business and tried to inoculate him with the joys of buying and selling, of outwitting other men, of judging them for a bluff, of living by maneuver.
Always Tom came back to the ranch, puzzled, not critical, but feeling that somewhere he had lost track. He felt that he should take joy in the man-pleasures of contest, but he could not pretend to himself that he did.
Samuel had said that Tom always took too much on his plate, whether it was beans or women. And Samuel was wise, but I think he knew only one side of Tom. Maybe Tom opened up a little more for children. What I set down about him will be the result of memory plus what I know to be true plus conjecture built on the combination. Who knows whether it will be correct?
We lived in Salinas and we knew when Tom had arrived--I think he always arrived at night--because under our pillows, Mary’s and mine, there would be packages of gum. And gum was valuable in those days just as a nickel was valuable. There were months when he did not come, but every morning as soon as we awakened we put our hands under our pillows to see. And I still do it, and it has been many years since there has been gum there.
My sister Mary did not want to be a girl. It was a misfortune she could not get used to. She was an athlete, a marble player, a pitcher of one-o’-cat, and the trappings of a girl inhibited her. Of course this was long before the compensations for being a girl were apparent to her.
Just as we knew that somewhere on our bodies, probably under the arm, there was a button which if pressed just right would permit us to fly, so Mary had worked out a magic for herself to change her over into the tough little boy she wanted to be. If she went to sleep in a magical position, knees crooked just right, head at a magical angle, fingers all crossed one over the other, in the morning she would be a boy. Every night she tried to find exactly the right combination, but she never could. I used to help her cross her fingers like shiplap.
She was despairing of ever getting it right when one morning there was gum under the pillow. We each peeled a stick and solemnly chewed it; it was Beeman’s peppermint, and nothing so delicious has been made since.
Mary was pulling on her long black ribbed stockings when she said with great relief, “Of course.”
“Of course what?” I asked.
“Uncle Tom,” she said and chewed her gum with great snapping sounds.
“Uncle Tom what?” I demanded.
“He’ll know how to get to be a boy.”
There it was--just as simple as that. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself.
Mother was in the kitchen overseeing a new little Danish girl who worked for us. We had a series of girls. New-come Danish farm families put their daughters out to service with American families, and they learned not only English but American cooking and table setting and manners and all the little niceties of high life in Salinas. At the end of a couple of years of this, at twelve dollars a month, the girls were highly desirable wives for American boys. Not only did they have American manners but they could still work like horses in the fields. Some of the most elegant families in Salinas today are descended from these girls.
It would be flaxen-haired Mathilde in the kitchen, with Mother clucking over her like a hen.
We charged in. “Is he up?”
“Sh!” said Mother. “He got in late. You let him sleep.”
But the water was running in the basin of the back bedroom so we knew he was up. We crouched like cats at his door, waiting for him to emerge.
There was always a little diffidence between us at first. I think Uncle Tom was as shy as we were. I think he wanted to come running out and toss us in the air, but instead we were all formal.
“Thank you for the gum, Uncle Tom.”
“I’m glad you liked it.”
“Do you think we’ll have an oyster loaf late at night while you’re here?”
“We’ll certainly try, if your mother will let you.”
We drifted into the sitting room and sat down. Mother’s voice called from the kitchen, “Children, you let him alone.”
“They’re all right, Ollie,” he called back.
We sat in a triangle in the living room. Tom’s face was so dark and his eyes so blue. He wore good clothes but he never seemed well dressed. In this he was very different from his father. His red mustache was never neat and his hair would not lie down and his hands were hard from work.
Mary said, “Uncle Tom, how do you get to be a boy?”
“How? Why, Mary, you’re just born a boy.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. How do I get to be a boy?”
Tom studied her gravely. “You?” he asked.
Her words poured out. “I don’t want to be a girl, Uncle Tom. I want to be a boy. A girl’s all kissing and dolls. I don’t want to be a girl. I don’t want to.” Tears of anger welled up in Mary’s eyes.
Tom looked down at his hands and picked at a loose piece of callus with a broken nail. He wanted to say something beautiful, I think. He wished for words like his father’s words, sweet winged words, cooing and lovely. “I wouldn’t like you to be a boy,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I like you as a girl.”
An idol was crashing in Mary’s temple. “You mean you like girls?”
“Yes, Mary, I like girls very much.”
A look of distaste crossed Mary’s face. If it were true, Tom was a fool. She put on her don’t-give-me-any-of-that-crap tone. “All right,” she said, “but how do I go about being a boy?”
Tom had a good ear. He knew he was reeling down in Mary’s estimation and he wanted her to love him and to admire him. At the same time there was a fine steel wire of truthfulness in him that cut off the heads of fast-traveling lies. He looked at Mary’s hair, so light that it was almost white, and braided tight to be out of the way, and dirty at the end of the braid, for Mary wiped her hands on her braid before she made a difficult marble shot. Tom studied her cold and hostile eyes.
“I don’t think you really want to change.”
“I do.”
Tom was wrong--she really did.
“Well,” he said, “you can’t. And someday you’ll be glad.”
“I won’t be glad,” said Mary, and she turned to me and said with frigid contempt, “He doesn’t know!”
Tom winced and I shivered at the immensity of her criminal charge. Mary was braver and more ruthless than most. That’s why she won every marble in Salinas.
Tom said uneasily, “If your mother says it’s all right, I’ll order the oyster loaf this morning and pick it up tonight.”
“I don’t like oyster loaves,” said Mary and stalked to our bedroom and slammed the door.
Tom looked ruefully after her. “She’s a girl all right,” he said.
Now we were alone together and I felt that I had to heal the wound Mary had made. “I love oyster loaves,” I said.
“Sure you do. So does Mary.”
“Uncle Tom, don’t you think there’s some way for her to be a boy?”
“No, I don’t,” he said sadly. “I would have told her if I had known.”
“She’s the best pitcher in the West End.”
Tom sighed and looked down at his hands again, and I could see his failure on him and I was sorry for him, aching sorry. I brought out my hollowed cork with pins stuck down to make bars. “Would you like to have my fly cage, Uncle Tom?”
Oh, he was a great gentleman. “Do you want me to have it?”
“Yes. You see, you pull up a pin to get the fly in and then he sits in there and buzzes.”
“I’d like to have it very much. Thank you, John.”
He worked all day with a sharp tiny pocketknife on a small block of wood, and when we came home from school he had carved a little face. The eyes and ears and lips were movable, and little perches connected them with the inside of the hollow head. At the bottom of the neck there was a hole closed by a cork. And this was very wonderful. You caught a fly and eased him through the hole and set the cork. And suddenly the head became alive. The eyes moved and the lips talked and the ears wiggled as the frantic fly crawled over the little perches. Even Mary forgave him a little, but she never really trusted him until after she was glad she was a girl, and then it was too late. He gave the head not to me but to us. We still have it put away somewhere, and it still works.
Sometimes Tom took me fishing. We started before the sun came up and drove in the rig straight toward Frémont’s Peak, and as we neared the mountains the stars would pale out and the light would rise to blacken the mountains. I can remember riding and pressing my ear and cheek against Tom’s coat. And I can remember that his arm would rest lightly over my shoulders and his hand pat my arm occasionally. Finally we would pull up under an oak tree and take the horse out of the shafts, water him at the stream side, and halter him to the back of the rig.
I don’t remember that Tom talked. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember the sound of his voice or the kind of words he used. I can remember both about my grandfather, but when I think of Tom it is a memory of a kind of warm silence. Maybe he didn’t talk at all. Tom had beautiful tackle and made his own flies. But he didn’t seem to care whether we caught trout or not. He needed not to triumph over animals.
I remember the five-fingered ferns growing under the little waterfalls, bobbing their green fingers as the droplets struck them. And I remember the smells of the hills, wild azalea and a very distant skunk and the sweet cloy of lupin and horse sweat on harness. I remember the sweeping lovely dance of high buzzards against the sky and Tom looking long up at them, but I can’t remember that he ever said anything about them. I remember holding the bight of a line while Tom drove pegs and braided a splice. I remember the smell of crushed ferns in the creel and the delicate sweet odor of fresh damp rainbow trout lying so prettily on the green bed. And finally I can remember coming back to the rig and pouring rolled barley into the leather feed-bag and buckling it over the horse’s head behind the ears. And I have no sound of his voice or words in my ear; he is dark and silent and hugely warm in my memory.
Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.
Samuel said that Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son’s quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him, for Samuel had no violence--even when he hit Adam Trask with his fist he had no violence. And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly--well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
Violence and shyness--Tom’s loins needed women and at the same time he did not think himself worthy of a woman. For long periods he would welter in a howling celibacy, and then he would take a train to San Francisco and roll and wallow in women, and then he would come silently back to the ranch, feeling weak and unfulfilled and unworthy, and he would punish himself with work, would plow and plant unprofitable land, would cut tough oakwood until his back was breaking and his arms were weary rags.
It is probable that his father stood between Tom and the sun, and Samuel’s shadow fell on him. Tom wrote secret poetry, and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracized. Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so. No one knows whether Tom’s poetry was any good or not, for he showed it to only one person, and before he died he burned every word. From the ashes in the stove there must have been a great deal of it.
Of all his family Tom loved Dessie best. She was gay. Laughter lived on her doorstep.
Her shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman’s world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves--smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie’s, the sacred corsets that molded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie’s they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.
Men could hear the laughter through the closed door and were properly frightened at what was going on, feeling, perhaps, that they were the butt of the laughter which to a large extent was true.
I can see Dessie now, her gold pince-nez wobbling on a nose not properly bridged for pince-nez, her eyes streaming with hilarious tears, and her whole front constricted with muscular spasms of laughter. Her hair would come down and drift between her glasses and her eyes, and the glasses would fall off her wet nose and spin and swing at the end of their black ribbon.
You had to order a dress from Dessie months in advance, and you made twenty visits to her shop before you chose material and pattern. Nothing so healthy as Dessie had ever happened to Salinas. The men had their lodges, their clubs, their whorehouses; the women nothing but the Altar Guild and the mincing coquetry of the minister until Dessie came along.
And then Dessie fell in love. I do not know any details of her love affair--who the man was or what the circumstances, whether it was religion or a living wife, a disease or a selfishness. I guess my mother knew, but it was one of those things put away in the family closet and never brought out. And if other people in Salinas knew, they must have kept it a loyal town secret. All I do know is that it was a hopeless thing, gray and terrible. After a year of it the joy was all drained out of Dessie and the laughter had ceased.
Tom raged crazily through the hills like a lion in horrible pain. In the middle of a night he saddled and rode away, not waiting for the morning train, to Salinas. Samuel followed him and sent a telegram from King City to Salinas.
And when in the morning Tom, his face black, spurred his spent horse up John Street in Salinas, the sheriff was waiting for him. He disarmed Tom and put him in a cell and fed him black coffee and brandy until Samuel came for him.
Samuel did not lecture Tom. He took him home and never mentioned the incident. And a stillness fell on the Hamilton place.