2

On Thanksgiving of 1911 the family gathered at the ranch--all the children except Joe, who was in New York, and Lizzie, who had left the family and joined another, and Una, who was dead. They arrived with presents and more food than even this clan could eat. They were all married save Dessie and Tom. Their children filled the Hamilton place with riot. The home place flared up--noisier than it had ever been. The children cried and screamed and fought. The men made many trips to the forge and came back self-consciously wiping their mustaches.
Liza’s little round face grew redder and redder. She organized and ordered. The kitchen stove never went out. The beds were full, and comforters laid on pillows on the floor were for children.
Samuel dug up his old gaiety. His sardonic mind glowed and his speech took on its old singing rhythm. He hung on with the talk and the singing and the memories, and then suddenly, and it not midnight, he tired. Weariness came down on him, and he went to his bed where Liza had been for two hours. He was puzzled at himself, not that he had to go to bed but that he wanted to.
When the mother and father were gone, Will brought the whisky in from the forge and the clan had a meeting in the kitchen with whisky passed around in round-bottomed jelly glasses. The mothers crept to the bedrooms to see that the children were covered and then came back. They all spoke softly, not to disturb the children and the old people. There were Tom and Dessie, George and his pretty Mamie, who had been a Dempsey, Mollie and William J. Martin, Olive and Ernest Steinbeck, Will and his Deila.
They all wanted to say the same thing--all ten of them. Samuel was ah old man. It was as startling a discovery as the sudden seeing of a ghost. Somehow they had not believed it could happen. They drank their whisky and talked softly of the new thought.
His shoulders--did you see how they slump? And there’s no spring in his step.
His toes drag a little, but it’s not that--it’s in his eyes. His eyes are old.
He never would go to bed until last.
Did you notice he forgot what he was saying right in the middle of a story?
It’s his skin told me. It’s gone wrinkled, and the backs of his hands have turned transparent.
He favors his right leg.
Yes, but that’s the one the horse broke.
I know, but he never favored it before.
They said these things in outrage. This can’t happen, they were saying. Father can’t be an old man. Samuel is young as the dawn--the perpetual dawn.
He might get old as midday maybe, but sweet God! the evening cannot come, and the night--? Sweet God, no!
It was natural that their minds leaped on and recoiled, and they would not speak of that, but their minds said, There can’t be any world without Samuel.
How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it?
What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn’t be a Christmas.
Their minds shrank away from such thinking and they looked for a victim--someone to hurt because they were hurt. They turned on Tom.
You were here. You’ve been here all along!
How did this happen? When did it happen?
Who did this to him?
Have you by any chance done this with your craziness?
And Tom could stand it because he had been with it. “It was Una,” he said hoarsely. “He couldn’t get over Una. He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing.”
“Why didn’t you tell us? Maybe we could have done something.”
Tom leaped up, violent and cringing. “Goddam it! What was there to tell? That he was dying of sorrow? That the marrow had melted out of his bones? What was there to tell? You weren’t here. I had to look at it and see his eyes die down--goddam it.” Tom went out of the room and they heard his clodhopper feet knocking on the flinty ground outside.
They were ashamed. Will Martin said, “I’ll go out and bring him back.”
“Don’t do it,” George said quickly, and the blood kin nodded. “Don’t do it. Let him alone. We know him from the insides of ourselves.”
In a little while Tom came back. “I want to apologize,” he said. “I’m very sorry. Maybe I’m a little drunk. Father calls it ‘jolly’ when I do it. One night I rode home”--it was a confession--”and I came staggering across the yard and I fell into the rosebush and crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees and I was sick on the floor beside my bed. In the morning I tried to tell him I was sorry, and do you know what he said? ‘Why, Tom, you were just jolly.’ ‘Jolly,’ if I did it. A drunken man didn’t crawl home. Just jolly.”
George stopped the crazy flow of talk. “We want to apologize to you, Tom,” he said. “Why, we sounded as though we were blaming you and we didn’t mean to. Or maybe we did mean to. And we’re sorry.”
Will Martin said realistically, “It’s too hard a life here. Why don’t we get him to sell out and move to town? He could have a long and happy life. Mollie and I would like them to come and live with us.”
“I don’t think he’d do it,” said Will. “He’s stubborn as a mule and proud as a horse. He’s got a pride like brass.”
Olive’s husband, Ernest, said, “Well, there’d be no harm in asking him. We would like to have him--or both of them--with us.”
Then they were silent again, for the idea of not having the ranch, the dry, stony desert of heartbreaking hillside and unprofitable hollow, was shocking to them.
Will Hamilton from instinct and training in business had become a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women. He said, “If we ask him to close up shop it will be like asking him to close his life, and he won’t do it.”
“You’re right, Will,” George agreed. “He would think it was like quitting. He’d feel it was a cowardice. No, he will never sell out, and if he did I don’t think he would live a week.”
Will said, “There’s another way. Maybe he could come for a visit. Tom can run the ranch. It’s time Father and Mother saw something of the world. All kinds of things are happening. It would freshen him, and then he could come back and go to work again. And after a while maybe he wouldn’t have to. He says himself that thing about time doing the job dynamite can’t touch.”
Dessie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I wonder if you really think he’s that stupid,” she said.
And Will said out of his experience, “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. We can try it anyway. What do you all think?”
There was a nodding of heads in the kitchen, and only Tom sat rocklike and brooding.
“Tom, wouldn’t you be willing to take over the ranch?” George asked.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Tom. “It’s no trouble to run the ranch because the ranch doesn’t run--never has.”
“Then why don’t you agree?”
“I’d find a reluctance to insult my father,” Tom said. “He’d know.”
“But where’s the harm in suggesting it?”
Tom rubbed his ears until he forced the blood out of them and for a moment they were white. “I don’t forbid you,” he said. “But I can’t do it.”
George said, “We could write it in a letter--a kind of invitation, full of jokes. And when he got tired of one of us, why, he could go to another. There’s years of visiting among the lot of us.” And that was how they left it.

3

Tom brought Olive’s letter from King City, and because he knew what it contained he waited until he caught Samuel alone before he gave it to him. Samuel was working in the forge and his hands were black. He took the envelope by a tiny corner and put it on the anvil, and then he scrubbed his hands in the half-barrel of black water into which he plunged hot iron. He slit the letter open with the point of a horseshoe nail and went into the sunlight to read it. Tom had the wheels off the buckboard and was buttering the axles with yellow axle grease. He watched his father from the corners of his eyes.
Samuel finished the letter and folded it and put it back in its envelope. He sat down on the bench in front of the shop and stared into space. Then he opened the letter and read it again and folded it again and put it in his blue shirt pocket. Then Tom saw him stand up and walk slowly up the eastern hill, kicking at the flints on the ground.
There had been a little rain and a fuzz of miserly grass had started up. Halfway up the hill Samuel squatted down and took up a handful of the harsh gravelly earth in his palm and spread it with his forefinger, flint and sandstone and bits of shining mica and a frail rootlet and a veined stone. He let it slip from his hand and brushed his palms. He picked a spear of grass and set it between his teeth and stared up the hill to the sky. A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain.
Samuel stood up and sauntered down the hill. He looked into the tool shed and patted the four-by-four supports. He paused near Tom and spun one of the free-running wheels of the buckboard, and he inspected Tom as though he saw him for the first time. “Why, you’re a grown-up man,” he said.
“Didn’t you know?”
“I guess I did--I guess I did,” said Samuel and sauntered on. There was the sardonic look on his face his family knew so well--the joke on himself that made him laugh inwardly. He walked by the sad little garden and all around the house--not a new house any more. Even the last added lean-to bedrooms were old and weathered and the putty around the windowpanes had shrunk away from the glass. At the porch he turned and surveyed the whole home cup of the ranch before he went inside.
Liza was rolling out pie crust on the floury board. She was so expert with the rolling pin that the dough seemed alive. It flattened out and then pulled back a little from tension in itself. Liza lifted the pale sheet of it and laid it over one of the pie tins and trimmed the edges with a knife. The prepared berries lay deep in red juice in a bowl.
Samuel sat down in a kitchen chair and crossed his legs and looked at her. His eyes were smiling.
“Can’t you find something to do this time of day?” she asked.
“Oh, I guess I could, Mother, if I wanted to.”
“Well, don’t sit there and make me nervous. The paper’s in the other room if you’re feeling day-lazy.”
“I’ve read it,” said Samuel.
“All of it?”
“All I want to.”
“Samuel, what’s the matter with you? You’re up to something. I can see it in your face. Now tell it, and let me get on with my pies.”
He swung his leg and smiled at her. “Such a little bit of a wife,” he said. “Three of her is hardly a bite.”
“Samuel, now you stop this. I don’t mind a joke in the evening sometimes, but it’s not eleven o’clock. Now you go along.”
Samuel said, “Liza, do you know the meaning of the English word ‘vacation’?”
“Now don’t you make jokes in the morning.”
“Do you, Liza?”
“Of course I do. Don’t play me for a fool.”
“What does it mean?”
“Going away for a rest to the sea and the beach. Now, Samuel, get out with your fooling.”
“I wonder how you know the word.”
“Will you tell me what you’re after? Why shouldn’t I know?”
“Did you ever have one, Liza?”
“Why, I--” She stopped.
“In fifty years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?”
“Samuel, please go out of my kitchen,” she said apprehensively.
He took the letter from his pocket and unfolded it. “It’s from Ollie,” he said. “She wants us to come and visit in Salinas. They’ve fixed over the upstairs rooms. She wants us to get to know the children. She’s got us tickets for the Chautauqua season. Billy Sunday’s going to wrestle with the Devil and Bryan is going to make his Cross of Gold speech. I’d like to hear that. It’s an old fool of a speech but they say he gives it in a way to break your heart.”
Liza rubbed her nose and floured it with her finger. “Is it very costly?” she asked anxiously.
“Costly? Ollie has bought the tickets. They’re a present.”
“We can’t go,” said Liza. “Who’d run the ranch?”
“Tom would--what running there is to do in the winter.”
“He’d be lonely.”
“George would maybe come out and stay a while to go quail hunting. See what’s in the letter, Liza.”
“What are those?”
“Two tickets to Salinas on the train. Ollie says she doesn’t want to give us a single escape.”
“You can just turn them in and send her back the money.”
“No, I can’t. Why, Liza--Mother--now don’t. Here--here’s a handkerchief.”
“That’s a dish towel,” said Liza.
“Sit here, Mother. There! I guess the shock of taking a rest kind of threw you. Here! I know it’s a dish towel. They say that Billy Sunday drives the Devil all over the stage.”
“That’s a blasphemy,” said Liza.
“But I’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? What did you say? Hold up your head. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I said yes,” said Liza.
Tom was making a drawing when Samuel came in to him. Tom looked at his father with veiled eyes, trying to read the effect of Olive’s letter.
Samuel looked at the drawing. “What is it?”
“I’m trying to work out a gate-opener so a man won’t have to get out of his rig. Here’s the pull-rod to open the latch.”
“What’s going to open it?”
“I figured a strong spring.”
Samuel studied the drawing. “Then what’s going to close it?”
“This bar here. It would slip to this spring with the tension the other way.”
“I see,” said Samuel. “It might work too, if the gate was truly hung. And it would only take twice as much time to make and keep up as twenty years of getting out of the rig and opening the gate.”
Tom protested, “Sometimes with a skittish horse--”
“I know,” said his father. “But the main reason is that it’s fun.”
Tom grinned. “Caught me,” he said.
“Tom, do you think you could look after the ranch if your mother and I took a little trip?”
“Why, sure,” said Tom. “Where do you plan to go?”
“Ollie wants us to stay with her for a while in Salinas.”
“Why, that would be fine,” said Tom. “Is Mother agreeable?”
“She is, always forgetting the expense.”
“That’s fine,” said Tom. “How long do you plan to be gone?”
Samuel’s jeweled, sardonic eyes dwelt on Tom’s face until Tom said, “What’s the matter, Father?”
“It’s the little tone, son--so little that I could barely hear it. But it was there. Tom, my son, if you have a secret with your brothers and sisters, I don’t mind. I think that’s good.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Tom.
“You may thank God you didn’t want to be an actor, Tom, because you would have been a very bad one. You worked it out at Thanksgiving, I guess, when you were all together. And it’s working smooth as butter. I see Will’s hand in this. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I wasn’t in favor of it,” said Tom.
“It doesn’t sound like you,” his father said. “You’d be for scattering the truth out in the sun for me to see. Don’t tell the others I know.” He turned away and then came back and put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth, my son. It’s not clever but it’s more permanent.”
“I’m glad you’re going.”
Samuel stood in the doorway of the forge and looked at the land. “They say a mother loves best an ugly child,” he said, and he shook his head sharply. “Tom, I’ll trade you honor for honor. You will please hold this in your dark secret place, nor tell any of your brothers and sisters--I know why I’m going--and, Tom, I know where I’m going, and I am content.”

Chapter 24


1
I have wondered why it is that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death than others. Una’s death cut the earth from under Samuel’s feet and opened his defended keep and let in old age. On the other hand Liza, who surely loved her family as deeply as did her husband, was not destroyed or warped. Her life continued evenly. She felt sorrow but she survived it.
I think perhaps Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all of its paradoxes and its reverses. She did not like death but she knew it existed, and when it came it did not surprise her.
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, hut he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
To Liza it was simply death--the thing promised and expected. She could go on and in her sorrow put a pot of beans in the oven, bake six pies, and plan to exactness how much food would be necessary properly to feed the funeral guests. And she could in her sorrow see that Samuel had a clean white shirt and that his black broadcloth was brushed and free of spots and his shoes blacked. Perhaps it takes these two kinds to make a good marriage, riveted with several kinds of strengths.
Once Samuel accepted, he could probably go farther than Liza, but the process of accepting tore him to pieces. Liza watched him closely after the decision to go to Salinas. She didn’t quite know what he was up to but, like a good and cautious mother, she knew he was up to something. She was a complete realist. Everything else being equal, she was glad to be going to visit her children. She was curious about them and their children. She had no love of places. A place was only a resting stage on the way to Heaven. She did not like work for itself, but she did it because it was there to be done. And she was tired. Increasingly it was more difficult to fight the aches and stiffnesses which tried to keep her in bed in the morning--not that they ever succeeded.
And she looked forward to Heaven as a place where clothes did not get dirty and where food did not have to be cooked and dishes washed. Privately there were some things in Heaven of which she did not quite approve. There was too much singing, and she didn’t see how even the Elect could survive for very long the celestial laziness which was promised. She would find something to do in Heaven. There must be something to take up one’s time--some clouds to darn, some weary wings to rub with liniment. Maybe the collars of the robes needed turning now and then, and when you come right down to it, she couldn’t believe that even in Heaven there would not be cobwebs in some corner to be knocked down with a cloth-covered broom.
She was gay and frightened about the visit to Salinas. She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it. And the Chautauqua? Well, she didn’t have to go and probably wouldn’t. Samuel would run wild--she would have to watch him. She never lost her feeling that he was young and helpless. It was a good thing that she did not know what went on in his mind, and, through his mind, what happened to his body.
Places were very important to Samuel. The ranch was a relative, and when he left it he plunged a knife into a darling. But having made up his mind, Samuel set about doing it well. He made formal calls on all of his neighbors, the old-timers who remembered how it used to be and how it was. And when he drove away from his old friends they knew they would not see him again, although he did not say it. He took to gazing at the mountains and the trees, even at faces, as though to memorize them for eternity.
He saved his visit to the Trask place for last. He had not been there for months. Adam was not a young man any more. The boys were eleven years old, and Lee--well, Lee did not change much. Lee walked to the shed with Samuel.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time,” said Lee. “But there’s so much to do. And I try to get to San Francisco at least once a month.”
“You know how it is,” Samuel said. “When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he’s gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.”
“I heard about your daughter. I’m sorry.”
“I got your letter, Lee. I have it. You said good things.”
“Chinese things,” said Lee. “I seem to get more Chinese as I get older.”
“There’s something changed about you, Lee. What is it?”
“It’s my queue, Mr. Hamilton. I’ve cut off my queue.”
“That’s it.”
“We all did. Haven’t you heard? The Dowager Empress is gone. China is free. The Manchus are not overlords and we do not wear queues. It was a proclamation of the new government. There’s not a queue left anywhere.”
“Does it make a difference, Lee?”
“Not much. It’s easier. But there’s a kind of looseness on the scalp that makes me uneasy. It’s hard to get used to the convenience of it.”
“How is Adam?”
“He’s all right. But he hasn’t changed much. I wonder what he was like before.”
“Yes, I’ve wondered about that. It was a short flowering. The boys must be big.”
“They are big. I’m glad I stayed here. I learned a great deal from seeing the boys grow and helping a little.”
“Did you teach them Chinese?”
“No. Mr. Trask didn’t want me to. And I guess he was right. It would have been a needless complication. But I’m their friend--yes, I’m their friend. They admire their father, but I think they love me. And they’re very different. You can’t imagine how different.”
“In what way, Lee?”
“You’ll see when they come home from school. They’re like two sides of a medal. Cal is sharp and dark and watchful, and his brother--well, he’s a boy you like before he speaks and like more afterwards.”
“And you don’t like Cal?”
“I find myself defending him--to myself. He’s fighting for his life and his brother doesn’t have to fight.”
“I have the same thing in my brood,” said Samuel. “I don’t understand it. You’d think with the same training and the same blood they’d be alike, but they’re not--not at all.”
Later Samuel and Adam walked down the oak-shadowed road to the entrance to the draw where they could look out at the Salinas Valley.
“Will you stay to dinner?” Adam asked.
“I will not be responsible for the murder of more chickens,” said Samuel.
“Lee’s got a pot roast.”
“Well, in that case--”
Adam still carried one shoulder lower than the other from the old hurt. His face was hard and curtained, and his eyes looked at generalities and did not inspect details. The two men stopped in the road and looked out at the valley, green tinged from the early rains.
Samuel said softly, “I wonder you do not feel a shame at leaving that land fallow.”
“I had no reason to plant it,” Adam said. “We had that out before. You thought I would change. I have not changed.”
“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
A slight anger came into Adam’s voice. “Why do you come to lecture me? I’m glad you’ve come, but why do you dig into me?”
“To see whether I can raise a little anger in you. I’m a nosy man. But there’s all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let life lie fallow?”
“What else could I do?”
“You could try again.”
Adam faced him. “I’m afraid to, Samuel,” he said. “I’d rather just go about it this way. Maybe I haven’t the energy or the courage.”
“How about your boys--do you love them?”
“Yes--yes.”
“Do you love one more than the other?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Something about your tone.”
“Let’s go back to the house,” said Adam. They strolled back under the trees. Suddenly Adam said, “Did you ever hear that Cathy was in Salinas? Did you ever hear such a rumor?”
“Did you?”
“Yes--but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Samuel walked silently in the sandy wheel rut of the road. His mind turned sluggishly in the pattern of Adam and almost wearily took up a thought he had hoped was finished. He said at last, “You have never let her go.”
“I guess not. But I’ve let the shooting go. I don’t think about it any more.”
“I can’t tell you how to live your life,” Samuel said, “although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining--small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
Adam’s face was bent down, and his jawbone jutted below his temples from clenching.
Samuel glanced at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Set your teeth in it. How we do defend a wrongness! Shall I tell you what you do, so you will not think you invented it? When you go to bed and blow out the lamp--then she stands in the doorway with a little light behind her, and you can see her nightgown stir. And she comes sweetly to your bed, and you, hardly breathing, turn back the covers to receive her and move your head over on the pillow to make room for her head beside yours. You can smell the sweetness of her skin, and it smells like no other skin in the world--”
“Stop it,” Adam shouted at him. “Goddam you, stop it! Stop nosing over my life! You’re like a coyote sniffing around a dead cow.”
“The way I know,” Samuel said softly, “is that one came to me that selfsame way--night after month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I’ll never know that. I think she would maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.”
Adam’s hands were clenched and the blood was driven out of his white knuckles. “You make me doubt myself,” he said fiercely. “You always have. I’m afraid of you. What should I do, Samuel? Tell me! I don’t know how you saw the thing so clear. What should I do?”
“I know the ‘shoulds,’ although I never do them, Adam. I always know the ‘shoulds.’ You should try to find a new Cathy. You should let the new Cathy kill the dream Cathy--let the two of them fight it out. And you, sitting by, should marry your mind to the winner. That’s the second-best should. The best would be to search out and find some fresh new loveliness to cancel out the old.”
“I’m afraid to try,” said Adam.
“That’s what you’ve said. And now I’m going to put a selfishness on you. I’m going away, Adam. I came to say good-by.”
“What do you mean?”
“My daughter Olive has asked Liza and me to visit with her in Salinas, and we’re going--day after tomorrow.”
“Well, you’ll be back.”
Samuel went on, “After we’ve visited with Olive for maybe a month or two, there will come a letter from George. And his feelings will be hurt if we don’t visit him in Paso Robles. And after that Mollie will want us in San Francisco, and then Will, and maybe even Joe in the East, if we should live so long.”
“Well, won’t you like that? You’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard enough on that dust heap of yours.”
“I love that dust heap,” Samuel said. “I love it the way a bitch loves her runty pup. I love every flint, the plow-breaking outcroppings, the thin and barren top-soil, the waterless heart of her. Somewhere in my dust heap there’s a richness.”
“You deserve a rest.”
“There, you’ve said it again,” said Samuel. “That’s what I had to accept,” and I have accepted. When you say I deserve a rest, you are saying that my life is over.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That’s what I have accepted.”
Adam said excitedly, “You can’t do that. Why, if you accept that you won’t live!”
“I know,” said Samuel.
“But you can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I’m a nosy old man, Adam. And the sad thing to me is that I’m losing my nosiness. That’s maybe how I know it’s time to visit my children. I’m having to pretend to be nosy a good deal of the time.”
“I’d rather you worked your guts out on your dust heap.”
Samuel smiled at him. “What a nice thing to hear! And I thank you. It’s a good thing to be loved, even late.”
Suddenly Adam turned in front of him so that Samuel had to stop. “I know what you’ve done for me,” Adam said. “I can’t return anything. But I can ask you for one more thing. If I asked you, would you do me one more kindness, and maybe save my life?”
“I would if I could.”
Adam swung out his hand and made an arc over the west. “That land out there--would you help me to make the garden we talked of, the windmills and the wells and the flats of alfalfa? We could raise flower-seeds. There’s money in that. Think what it would be like, acres of sweet peas and gold squares of calendulas. Maybe ten acres of roses for the gardens of the West. Think how they would smell on the west wind!”
“You’re going to make me cry,” Samuel said, “and that would be an unseemly thing in an old man.” And indeed his eyes were wet. “I thank you, Adam,” he said. “The sweetness of your offer is a good smell on the west wind.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“No, I will not do it. But I’ll see it in my mind when I’m in Salinas, listening to William Jennings Bryan. And maybe I’ll get to believe it happened.”
“But I want to do it.”
“Go and see my Tom. He’ll help you. He’d plant the world with roses, poor man, if he could.”
“You know what you’re doing, Samuel?”
“Yes, I know what I’m doing, know so well that it’s half done.”
“What a stubborn man you are!”
“Contentious,” said Samuel. “Liza says I am contentious, but now I’m caught in a web of my children--and I think I like it.”

2

The dinner table was set in the house. Lee said, “I’d have liked to serve it under the tree like the other times, but the air is chilly.”
“So it is, Lee,” said Samuel.
The twins came in silently and stood shyly staring at their guest.
“It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, boys. But we named you well. You’re Caleb, aren’t you?”
“I’m Cal.”
“Well, Cal then.” And he turned to the other. “Have you found a way to rip the backbone out of your name?”
“Sir?”
“Are you called Aaron?”
“Yes, sir.”
Lee chuckled. “He spells it with one a. The two a’s seem a little fancy to his friends.”
“I’ve got thirty-five Belgian hares, sir,” Aron said. “Would you like to see them, sir? The hutch is up by the spring. I’ve got eight newborns--just born yesterday.”
“I’d like to see them, Aron.” His mouth twitched. “Cal, don’t tell me you’re a gardener?”
Lee’s head snapped around and he inspected Samuel. “Don’t do that,” Lee said nervously.
Cal said, “Next year my father is going to let me have an acre in the flat.”
Aron said, “I’ve got a buck rabbit weighs fifteen pounds. I’m going to give it to my father for his birthday.”
They heard Adam’s bedroom door opening. “Don’t tell him,” Aron said quickly. “It’s a secret.”
Lee sawed at the pot roast. “Always you bring trouble for my mind, Mr. Hamilton,” he said. “Sit down, boys.”
Adam came in, turning down his sleeves, and took his seat at the head of the table. “Good evening, boys,” he said, and they replied in unison, “Good evening, Father.”
And, “Don’t you tell,” said Aron.
“I won’t,” Samuel assured him. “Don’t tell what?” Adam asked. Samuel said, “Can’t there be a privacy? I have a secret with your son.”
Cal broke in, “I’ll tell you a secret too, right after dinner.”
“I’ll like to hear it,” said Samuel. “And I do hope I don’t know already what it is.”
Lee looked up from his carving and glared at Samuel. He began piling meat on the plates.
The boys ate quickly and quietly, wolfed their food. Aron said, “Will you excuse us, Father?”
Adam nodded, and the two boys went quickly out. Samuel looked after them. “They seem older than eleven,” he said. “I seem to remember that at eleven my brood were howlers and screamers and runners in circles. These seem like grown men.”
“Do they?” Adam asked.
Lee said, “I think I see why that is. There is no woman in the house to put a value on babies. I don’t think men care much for babies, and so it was never an advantage to these boys to be babies. There was nothing to gain by it. I don’t know whether that is good or bad.”
Samuel wiped up the remains of gravy in his plate with a slice of bread. “Adam, I wonder whether you know what you have in Lee. A philosopher who can cook, or a cook who can think? He has taught me a great deal. You must have learned from him, Adam.”
Adam said, “I’m afraid I didn’t listen enough--or maybe he didn’t talk.”
“Why didn’t you want the boys to learn Chinese, Adam?”
Adam thought for a moment. “It seems a time for honesty,” he said at last. “I guess it was plain jealousy. I gave it another name, but maybe I didn’t want them to be able so easily to go away from me in a direction I couldn’t follow.”
“That’s reasonable, enough and almost too human,” said Samuel. “But knowing it--that’s a great jump. I wonder whether I have ever gone so far.”
Lee brought the gray enameled coffeepot to the table and filled the cups and sat down. He warmed the palm of his hand against the rounded side of his cup. And then Lee laughed. “You’ve given me great trouble, Mr. Hamilton, and you’ve disturbed the tranquillity of China.”
“How do you mean, Lee?”
“It almost seems that I have told you this,” said Lee. “Maybe I only composed it in my mind, meaning to tell you. It’s an amusing story anyway.”
“I want to hear,” said Samuel, and he looked at Adam. “Don’t you want to hear, Adam? Or are you slipping into your cloud bath?”
“I was thinking of that,” said Adam. “It’s funny--a kind of excitement is coming over me.”
“That’s good,” said Samuel. “Maybe that’s the best of all good things that can happen to a human. Let’s hear your story, Lee.”
The Chinese reached to the side of his neck and he smiled. “I wonder whether I’ll ever get used to the lack of a queue,” he said. “I guess I used it more than I knew. Yes, the story. I told you, Mr. Hamilton, that I was growing more Chinese. Do you ever grow more Irish?”
“It comes and goes,” said Samuel.
“Do you remember when you read us the sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis and we argued about them?”
“I do indeed. And that’s a long time ago.”
“Ten years nearly,” said Lee. “Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have--and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this--it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says, ‘If thou doest well, shall 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.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin.”
Samuel nodded. “And his children didn’t do it entirely,” he said.
Lee sipped his coffee. “Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order. And I began to stew about it. I wondered what the original word of the original writer had been that these very different translations could be made.”
Samuel put his palms down on the table and leaned forward and the old young light came into his eyes. “Lee,” he said, “don’t tell me you studied Hebrew!”
Lee said, “I’m going to tell you. And it’s a fairly long story. Will you have a touch of ng-ka-py?”
“You mean the drink that tastes of good rotten apples?”
“Yes. I can talk better with it.”
“Maybe I can listen better,” said Samuel.
While Lee went to the kitchen Samuel asked, “Adam, did you know about this?”
“No,” said Adam. “He didn’t tell me. Maybe I wasn’t listening.”
Lee came back with his stone bottle and three little porcelain cups so thin and delicate that the light shone through them. “Dlinkee Chinee, fashion,” he said and poured the almost black liquor. “There’s a lot of wormwood in this. It’s quite a drink,” he said. “Has about the same effect as absinthe if you drink enough of it.”
Samuel sipped the drink. “I want to know why you were so interested,” he said.
“Well, it seemed to me that the man who could conceive this great story would know exactly what he wanted to say and there would be no confusion in his statement.”
“You say ‘the man.’ Do you then not think this is a divine book written by the inky finger of God?”
“I think the mind that could think this story was a curiously divine mind. We have had a few such minds in China too.”
“I just wanted to know,” said Samuel. “You’re not a Presbyterian after all.”
“I told you I was getting more Chinese. Well, to go on, I went to San Francisco to the headquarters of our family association. Do you know about them? Our great families have centers where any member can get help or give it. The Lee family is very large. It takes care of its own.”
“I have heard of them,” said Samuel.
“You mean Chinee hatchet man fightee Tong war over slave girl?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s a little different from that, really,” said Lee. “I went there because in our family there are a number of ancient reverend gentlemen who are great scholars. They are thinkers in exactness. A man may spend many years pondering a sentence of the scholar you call Confucius. I thought there might be experts in meaning who could advise me.
“They are fine old men. They smoke their two pipes of opium in the afternoon and it rests and sharpens them, and they sit through the night and their minds are wonderful. I guess no other people have been able to use opium well.”
Lee dampened his tongue in the black brew. “I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long.”
Lee laughed. “I guess it’s funny,” he said. “I know I wouldn’t dare tell it to many people. Can you imagine four old gentlemen, the youngest is over ninety now, taking on the study of Hebrew? They engaged a learned rabbi. They took to the study as though they were children. Exercise books, grammar, vocabulary, simple sentences. You should see Hebrew written in Chinese ink with a brush! The right to left didn’t bother them as much as it would you, since we write up to down. Oh, they were perfectionists! They went to the root of the matter.”
“And you?” said Samuel.
“I went along with them, marveling at the beauty of their proud clean brains. I began to love my race, and for the first time I wanted to be Chinese. Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing. I bought every known Hebrew dictionary. But the old gentlemen were always ahead of me. It wasn’t long before they were ahead of our rabbi; he brought a colleague in. Mr. Hamilton, you should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking--the beautiful thinking.
“After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too--’Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’ The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek.”
Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”
Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel--‘Thou mayest’--that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’--it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”
“Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”
“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But “Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.
Adam said, “Do you believe that, Lee?”
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”
Adam said, “Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?”
Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this--this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”
Adam said, “I don’t see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this.”
“Neither do I,” said Lee. “But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing--maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed--because ‘Thou mayest.’ ”

3

Lee and Adam walked out to the shed with Samuel to see him off. Lee carried a tin lantern to light the way, for it was one of those clear early winter nights when the sky riots with stars and the earth seems doubly dark because of them. A silence lay on the hills. No animal moved about, neither grass-eater nor predator, and the air was so still that the dark limbs and leaves of the live oaks stood unmoving against the Milky Way. The three men were silent. The bail of the tin lantern squeaked a little as the light swung in Lee’s hand.
Adam asked, “When do you think you’ll be back from your trip?”
Samuel did not answer.
Doxology stood patiently in the stall, head down, his milky eyes staring at the straw under his feet.
“You’ve had that horse forever,” Adam said.
“He’s thirty-three,” said Samuel. “His teeth are worn off. I have to feed him warm mash with my fingers. And he has bad dreams. He shivers and cries sometimes in his sleep.”
“He’s about as ugly a crow bait as I ever saw,” Adam said.
“I know it. I think that’s why I picked him when he was a colt. Do you know I paid two dollars for him thirty-three years ago? Everything was wrong with him, hoofs like flapjacks, a hock so thick and short and straight there seems no joint at all. He’s hammerheaded and swaybacked. He has a pinched chest and a big behind. He has an iron mouth and he still fights the crupper. With a saddle he feels as though you were riding a sled over a gravel pit. He can’t trot and he stumbles over his feet when he walks. I have never in thirty-three years found one good thing about him. He even has an ugly disposition. He is selfish and quarrelsome and mean and disobedient. To this day I don’t dare walk behind him because he will surely take a kick at me. When I feed him mash he tries to bite my hand. And I love him.”
Lee said, “And you named him ‘Doxology.’ ”
“Surely,” said Samuel, “so ill endowed a creature deserved, I thought, one grand possession. He hasn’t very long now.”
Adam said, “Maybe you should put him out of his misery.”
“What misery?” Samuel demanded. “He’s one of the few happy and consistent beings I’ve ever met.”
“He must have aches and pains.”
“Well, he doesn’t think so. Doxology still thinks he’s one hell of a horse. Would you shoot him, Adam?”
“Yes, I think I would. Yes, I would.”
“You’d take the responsibility?”
“Yes, I think I would. He’s thirty-three. His lifespan is long over.”
Lee had set his lantern on the ground. Samuel squatted beside it and instinctively stretched his hands for warmth to the butterfly of yellow light.
“I’ve been bothered by something, Adam,” he said.
“What is that?”
“You would really shoot my horse because death might be more comfortable?”
“Well, I meant--”
Samuel said quickly, “Do you like your life, Adam?”
“Of course not.”
“If I had a medicine that might cure you and also might kill you, should I give it to you? Inspect yourself, man.”
“What medicine?”
“No,” said Samuel. “If I tell you, believe me when I say it may kill you.”
Lee said, “Be careful, Mr. Hamilton. Be careful.”
“What is this?” Adam demanded. “Tell me what you’re thinking of.”
Samuel said softly, “I think for once I will not be careful. Lee, if I am wrong--listen--if I am mistaken, I accept the responsibility and I will take what blame there is to take.”
“Are you sure you’re right?” Lee asked anxiously.
“Of course I’m not sure. Adam, do you want the medicine?”
“Yes. I don’t know what it is but give it to me.”
“Adam, Cathy is in Salinas. She owns a whorehouse, the most vicious and depraved in this whole end of the country. The evil and ugly, the distorted and slimy, the worst things humans can think up are for sale there. The crippled and crooked come there for satisfaction. But it is worse than that. Cathy, and she is now called Kate, takes the fresh and young and beautiful and so maims them that they can never be whole again. Now, there’s your medicine. Let’s see what it does to you.”
“You’re a liar!” Adam said.
“No, Adam. Many things I am, but a liar I am not.”
Adam whirled on Lee. “Is this true?”
“I’m no antidote,” said Lee. “Yes. It’s true.”
Adam stood swaying in the lantern light and then he turned and ran. They could hear his heavy steps running and tripping. They heard him falling over the brush and scrambling and clawing his way upward on the slope. The sound of him stopped only when he had gone over the brow of the hill.
Lee said, “Your medicine acts like poison.”
“I take responsibility,” said Samuel. “Long ago I learned this: When a dog has eaten strychnine and is going to die, you must get an ax and carry him to a chopping block. Then you must wait for his next convulsion, and in that moment--chop off his tail. Then, if the poison has not gone too far, your dog may recover. The shock of pain can counteract the poison. Without the shock he will surely die.”
“But how do you know this is the same?” Lee asked.
“I don’t. But without it he would surely die.”
“You’re a brave man,” Lee said.
“No, I’m an old man. And if I should have anything on my conscience it won’t be for long.”
Lee asked, “What do you suppose he’ll do?”
“I don’t know,” said Samuel, “but at least he won’t sit around and mope. Here, hold the lantern for me, will you?”
In the yellow light Samuel slipped the bit in Doxology’s mouth, a bit worn so thin that it was a flake of steel. The check rein had been abandoned long ago. The old hammerhead was free to drag his nose if he wished, or to pause and crop grass beside the road. Samuel didn’t care. Tenderly he buckled the crupper, and the horse edged around to try to kick him.
When Dox was between the shafts of the cart Lee asked, “Would you mind if I rode along with you a little? I’ll walk back.”
“Come along,” said Samuel, and he tried not to notice that Lee helped him up into the cart.
The night was very dark, and Dox showed his disgust for night-traveling by stumbling every few steps.
Samuel said, “Get on with it, Lee. What is it you want to say?”
Lee did not appear surprised. “Maybe I’m nosy the way you say you are. I get to thinking. I know probabilities, but tonight you fooled me completely. I would have taken any bet that you of all men would not have told Adam.”
“Did you know about her?”
“Of course,” said Lee,
“Do the boys know?”
“I don’t think so, but that’s only a matter of time. You know how cruel children are. Someday in the schoolyard it will be shouted at them.”
“Maybe he ought to take them away from here,” said Samuel. “Think about that, Lee.”
“My question isn’t answered, Mr. Hamilton. How were you able to do what you did?”
“Do you think I was that wrong?”
“No, I don’t mean that at all. But I’ve never thought of you as taking any strong unchanging stand on anything. This has been my judgment. Are you interested?”
“Show me the man who isn’t interested in discussing himself,” said Samuel. “Go on.”
“You’re a kind man, Mr. Hamilton. And I’ve always thought it was the kindness that comes from not wanting any trouble. And your mind is as facile as a young lamb leaping in a daisy field. You have never to my knowledge taken a bulldog grip on anything. And then tonight you did a thing that tears down my whole picture of you.”
Samuel wrapped the lines around a stick stuck in the whip socket, and Doxology stumbled on down the rutty road. The old man stroked his beard, and it shone very white in the starlight. He took off his black hat and laid it in his lap. “I guess it surprised me as much as it did you,” he said. “But if you want to know why--look into yourself.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“If you had only told me about your studies earlier it might have made a great difference, Lee.”
“I still don’t understand you.”
“Careful, Lee, you’ll get me talking. I told you my Irish came and went. It’s coming now.”
Lee said, “Mr. Hamilton, you’re going away and you’re not coming back. You do not intend to live very much longer.”
“That’s true, Lee. How did you know?”
“There’s death all around you. It shines from you.”
“I didn’t know anyone could see it,” Samuel said. “You know, Lee, I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only--and that note unchanging sorrow. I’m not alone in my attitude, Lee. It seems to me that too many of us conceive of a life as ending in defeat.”
Lee said, “Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”
“It was your two-word retranslation, Lee--”Thou mayest.’ It took me by the throat and shook me. And when the dizziness was over, a path was open, new and bright. And my life which is ending seems to be going on to an ending wonderful. And my music has a new last melody like a bird song in the night.”
Lee was peering at him’ through the darkness. “That’s what it did to those old men of my family.”
“ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles--only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. ‘Thou mayest, Thou mayest!’ What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before. Do you see now why I told Adam tonight? I exercised the choice. Maybe I was wrong, but by telling him I also forced him to live or get off the pot. What is that word, Lee?”
“Timshel,” said Lee. “Will you stop the cart?”
“You’ll have a long walk back.”
Lee climbed down. “Samuel!” he said.
“Here am I.” The old man chuckled. “Liza hates for me to say that.”
“Samuel, you’ve gone beyond me.”
“It’s time, Lee.”
“Good-by, Samuel,” Lee said, and he walked hurriedly back along the road. He heard the iron tires of the cart grinding on the road. He turned and looked after it, and on the slope he saw old Samuel against the sky, his white hair shining with starlight.

Chapter 25


1
It was a deluge of a winter in the Salinas Valley, wet and wonderful. The rains fell gently and soaked in and did not freshet. The feed was deep in January, and in February the hills were fat with grass and the coats of the cattle looked tight and sleek. In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sank beneath the ground. Then warmth flooded the valley and the earth burst into bloom--yellow and blue and gold.
Tom was alone on the ranch, and even that dust heap was rich and lovely and the flints were hidden in grass and the Hamilton cows were fat and the Hamilton sheep sprouted grass from their damp backs.
At noon on March 15 Tom sat on the bench outside the forge. The sunny morning was over, and gray water-bearing clouds sailed in over the mountains from the ocean, and their shadows slid under them on the bright earth.
Tom heard a horse’s clattering hoofs and he saw a small boy, elbows flapping, urging a tired horse toward the house. He stood up and walked toward the road. The boy galloped up to the house, yanked off his hat, flung a yellow envelope on the ground, spun his horse around, and kicked up a gallop again.
Tom started to call after him, and then he leaned wearily down and picked up the telegram. He sat in the sun on the bench outside the forge, holding the telegram in his hand. And he looked at the hills and at the old house, as though to save something, before he tore open the envelope and read the inevitable four words, the person, the event, and the time.
Tom slowly folded the telegram and folded it again and again until it was a square no larger than his thumb. He walked to the house, through the kitchen, through the little living room, and into his bedroom. He took his dark suit out of the clothespress and laid it over the back of a chair, and he put a white shirt and a black tie on the seat of the chair. And then he lay down on the bed and turned his face to the wall.

2

The surreys and the buggies had driven out of the Salinas cemetery. The family and friends went back to Olive’s house on Central Avenue to eat and to drink coffee, to see how each one was taking it, and to do and say the decent things.
George offered Adam Trask a lift in his rented surrey, but Adam refused. He wandered around the cemetery and sat down on the cement curb of the Williams family plot. The traditional dark cypresses wept around the edge of the cemetery, and white violets ran wild in the pathways. Someone had brought them in and they had become weeds.
The cold wind blew over the tombstones and cried in the cypresses. There were many cast-iron stars, marking the graves of Grand Army men, and on each star a small wind-bitten flag from a year ago Decoration Day.
Adam sat looking at the mountains to the east of Salinas, with the noble point of Frémont’s Peak dominating. The air was crystalline as it sometimes is when rain is coming. And then the light rain began to blow on the wind although the sky was not properly covered with cloud.
Adam had come up on the morning train. He had not intended to come at all, but something drew him beyond his power to resist. For one thing, he could not believe that Samuel was dead. He could hear the rich, lyric voice in his ears, the tones rising and falling in their foreignness, and the curious music of oddly chosen words tripping out so that you were never sure what the next word would be. In the speech of most men you are absolutely sure what the next word will be.
Adam had looked at Samuel in his casket and knew that he didn’t want him to be dead. And since the face in the casket did not look like Samuel’s face, Adam walked away to be by himself and to preserve the man alive.
He had to go to the cemetery. Custom would have been outraged else. But he stood well back where he could not hear the words, and when the sons filled in the grave he had walked away and strolled in the paths where the white violets grew.
The cemetery was deserted and the dark crooning of the wind bowed the heavy cypress trees. The rain droplets grew larger and drove stinging along.
Adam stood up, shivered, and walked slowly over the white violets and past the new grave. The flowers had been laid evenly to cover the mound of new-turned damp earth, and already the wind had frayed the blossoms and flung the smaller bouquets out into the path. Adam picked them up and laid them back on the mound.
He walked out of the cemetery. The wind and the rain were at his back, and he ignored the wetness that soaked through his black coat. Romie Lane was muddy with pools of water standing in the new wheel ruts, and the tall wild oats and mustard grew beside the road, with wild turnip forcing its boisterous way up and stickery beads of purple thistles rising above the green riot of the wet spring.
The black ’dobe mud covered Adam’s shoes and splashed the bottoms of his dark trousers. It was nearly a mile to the Monterey road. Adam was dirty and soaking when he reached it and turned east into the town of Salinas. The water was standing in the curved brim of his derby hat and his collar was wet and sagging.
At John Street the road angled and became Main Street. Adam stamped the mud off his shoes when he reached the pavement. The buildings cut the wind from him and almost instantly he began to shake with a chill. He increased his speed. Near the other end of Main Street he turned into the Abbot House bar. He ordered brandy and drank it quickly and his shivering increased.
Mr. Lapierre behind the bar saw the chill. “You’d better have another one,” he said. “You’ll get a bad cold. Would you like a hot rum? That will knock it out of you.”
“Yes, I would,” said Adam.
“Well, here. You sip another cognac while I get some hot water.”
Adam took his glass to a table and sat uncomfortably in his wet clothes. Mr. Lapierre brought a steaming kettle from the kitchen. He put the squat glass on a tray and brought it to the table. “Drink it as hot as you can stand it,” he said. “That will shake the chill out of an aspen.” He drew a chair up, sat down, then stood up. “You’ve made me cold,” he said. “I’m going to have one myself.” He brought his glass back to the table and sat across from Adam. “It’s working,” he said. “You were so pale you scared me when you came in. You’re a stranger?”
“I’m from near King City,” Adam said.
“Come up for the funeral?”
“Yes--he was an old friend.”
“Big funeral?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’m not surprised. He had lots of friends. Too bad it couldn’t have been a nice day. You ought to have one more and then go to bed.”
“I will,” said Adam. “It makes me comfortable and peaceful.”
“That’s worth something. Might have saved you from pneumonia too.”
After he had served another toddy he brought a damp cloth from behind the bar. “You can wipe off some of that mud,” he said. “A funeral isn’t very gay, but when it gets rained on--that’s really mournful.”
“It didn’t rain till after,” said Adam. “It was walking back I got wet.”
“Why don’t you get a nice room right here? You get into bed and I’ll send a toddy up to you, and in the morning you’ll be fine.”
“I think I’ll do that,” said Adam. He could feel the blood stinging his cheeks and running hotly in his arms, as though it were some foreign warm fluid taking over his body. Then the warmth melted through into the cold concealed box where he stored forbidden thoughts, and the thoughts came timidly up to the surface like children who do not know whether they will be received. Adam picked up the damp cloth and leaned down to sponge off the bottoms of his trousers. The blood pounded behind his eyes. “I might have one more toddy,” he said.
Mr. Lapierre said, “If it’s for cold, you’ve had enough. But if you just want a drink I’ve got some old Jamaica rum. I’d rather you’d have that straight. It’s fifty years old. The water would kill the flavor.”
“I just want a drink,” said Adam.
“I’ll have one with you. I haven’t opened that jug in months. Not much call for it. This is a whisky-drinking town.”
Adam wiped off his shoes and dropped the cloth on the floor. He took a drink of the dark rum and coughed. The heavy-muscled drink wrapped its sweet aroma around his head and struck at the base of his nose like a blow. The room seemed to tip sideways and then right itself.
“Good, isn’t it?” Mr. Lapierre asked. “But it can knock you over. I wouldn’t have more than one--unless of course you want to get knocked over. Some do.”
Adam leaned his elbows on the table. He felt a garrulousness coming on him and he was frightened at the impulse. His voice did not sound like his voice, and his words amazed him.
“I don’t get up here much,” he said. “Do you know a place called Kate’s?”
“Jesus! That rum is better than I thought,” Mr. Lapierre said, and he went on sternly, “You live on a ranch?”
“Yes. Got a place near King City. My name’s Trask.”
“Glad to meet you. Married?”
“No. Not now.”
“Widower?”
“Yes.”
“You go to Jenny’s. Let Kate alone. That’s not good for you. Jenny’s is right next door. You go there and you’ll get everything you need.”
“Right next door?”
“Sure, you go east a block and a half and turn right. Anybody’ll tell you where the Line is.”
Adam’s tongue was getting thick. “What’s the matter with Kate’s?”
“You go to Jenny’s,” said Mr. Lapierre.

3

It was a dirty gusty evening. Castroville Street was deep in sticky mud, and Chinatown was so flooded that its inhabitants had laid planks across the narrow street that separated their hutches. The clouds against the evening sky were the gray of rats, and the air was not damp but dank. I guess the difference is that dampness comes down but dankness rises up out of rot and fermentation. The afternoon wind had dropped away and left the air raw and wounded. It was cold enough to shake out the curtains of rum in Adam’s head without restoring his timidity. He walked quickly down the unpaved sidewalks, his eyes on the ground to avoid stepping in puddles. The row was dimly lit by the warning lantern where the railroad crossed the street and by one small carbon-filamented globe that burned on the porch of Jenny’s.
Adam had his instructions. He counted two houses and nearly missed the third, so high and unbridled were the dark bushes in front of it. He looked in through the gateway at the dark porch, slowly opened the gate, and went up the overgrown path. In the half-darkness he could see the sagging dilapidated porch and the shaky steps.
The paint had long disappeared from the clapboard walls and no work had ever been done on the garden. If it had not been for the vein of light around the edges of the drawn shades he would have passed on, thinking the house deserted. The stair treads seemed to crumple under his weight and the porch planks squealed as he crossed them.
The front door opened, and he could see a dim figure holding the knob.
A soft voice said, “Won’t you come in?”
The reception room was dimly lighted by small globes set under rose-colored shades. Adam could feel a thick carpet under his feet. He could see the shine of polished furniture and the gleam of gold picture frames. He got a quick impression of richness and order.
The soft voice said, “You should have worn a raincoat. Do we know you?”
“No, you don’t,” said Adam.
“Who sent you?”
“A man at the hotel.” Adam peered at the girl before him. She was dressed in black and wore no ornaments. Her face was sharp--pretty and sharp. He tried to think of what animal, what night prowler, she reminded him. It was some secret and predatory animal.
The girl said, “I’ll move nearer to a lamp if you like.”
“No.”
She laughed. “Sit down--over here. You did come here for something, didn’t you? If you’ll tell me what you want I’ll call the proper girl.” The low voice had a precise and husky power. And she picked her words as one picks flowers in a mixed garden and took her time choosing.
She made Adam seem clumsy to himself. He blurted out, “I want to see Kate.”
“Miss Kate is busy now. Does she expect you?”
“No.”
“I can take care of you, you know.”
“I want to see Kate.”
“Can you tell me what you want to see her about?”
“No.”
The girl’s voice took on the edge of a blade sharpened on a stone. “You can’t see her. She’s busy. If you don’t want a girl or something else, you’d better go away.”
“Well, will you tell her I’m here?”
“Does she know you?”
“I don’t know.” He felt his courage going. This was a remembered cold. “I don’t know. But will you tell her that Adam Trask would like to see her? She’ll know then whether I know her or not.”
“I see. Well, I’ll tell her.” She moved silently to a door on the right and opened it. Adam heard a few muffled words and a man looked through the door. The girl left the door open so that Adam would know he was not alone. On one side of the room heavy dark portieres hung over a doorway. The girl parted the deep folds and disappeared. Adam sat back in his chair. Out of the side of his eyes he saw the man’s head thrust in and then withdrawn.
Kate’s private room was comfort and efficiency. It did not look at all like the room where Faye had lived. The walls were clad in saffron silk and the drapes were apple green. It was a silken room--deep chairs with silk-upholstered cushions, lamps with silken shades, a broad bed at the far end of the room with a gleaming white satin cover on which were piled gigantic pillows. There was no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind. A dressing table near the bed had no bottle or vial on its ebony top, and its sheen was reflected in triple mirrors. The rug was old and deep and Chinese, an apple-green dragon on saffron. One end of the room was bedroom, the center was social, and the other end was office--filing cabinets of golden oak, a large safe, black with gold lettering, and a rolltop desk with a green-hooded double lamp over it, a swivel chair behind it and a straight chair beside it.
Kate sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. She was still pretty. Her hair was blond again. Her mouth was little and firm and turned up at the corners as always. But her outlines were not sharp anywhere. Her shoulders had become plump while her hands grew lean and wrinkled. Her cheeks were chubby and the skin under her chin was crepe. Her breasts were still tiny, but a padding of fat protruded her stomach a little. Her hips were slender, but her legs and feet had thickened so that a bulge hung over her low shoes. And through her stockings, faintly, could be seen the wrappings of elastic bandage to support the veins.
Still, she was pretty and neat. Only her hands had really aged, the palms and fingerpads shining and tight, the backs wrinkled and splotched with brown. She was dressed severely in a dark dress with long sleeves, and the only contrast was billowing white lace at her wrists and throat.
The work of the years had been subtle. If one had been near by it is probable that no change at all would have been noticed. Kate’s cheeks were unlined, her eyes sharp and shallow, her nose delicate, and her lips thin and firm. The scar on her forehead was barely visible. It was covered with a powder tinted to match Kate’s skin.
Kate inspected a sheaf of photographs on her rolltop desk, all the same size, all taken by the same camera and bright with flash powder. And although the characters were different in each picture, there was a dreary similarity about their postures. The faces of the women were never toward the camera.
Kate arranged the pictures in four piles and slipped each pile into a heavy manila envelope. When the knock came on her door she put the envelopes in a pigeonhole of her desk. “Come in. Oh, come in, Eva. Is he here?”
The girl came to the desk before she replied. In the increased light her face showed tight and her eyes were shiny. “It’s a new one, a stranger. He says he wants to see you.”
“Well, he can’t, Eva. You know who’s coming.”
“I told him you couldn’t see him. He said he thought he knew you.”
“Well, who is he, Eva?”
“He’s a big gangly man, a little bit drunk. He says his name is Adam Trask.”
Although Kate made no movement or sound Eva knew something had struck home. The fingers of Kate’s right hand slowly curled around the palm while the left hand crept like a lean cat toward the edge of the desk. Kate sat still as though she held her breath. Eva was jittery. Her mind went to the box in her dresser drawer where her hypodermic needle lay.
Kate said at last, “Sit over there in that big chair, Eva. Just sit still a minute.” When the girl did not move Kate whipped one word at her. “Sit!” Eva cringed and went to the big chair.
“Don’t pick your nails,” said Kate.
Eva’s hands separated, and each one clung to an arm of the chair.
Kate stared straight ahead at the green glass shades of her desk lamp. Then she moved so suddenly that Eva jumped and her lips quivered. Kate opened the desk drawer and took out a folded paper. “Here! Go to your room and fix yourself up. Don’t take it all--no, I won’t trust you.” Kate tapped the paper and tore it in two; a little white powder spilled before she folded the ends and passed one to Eva. “Now hurry up! When you come downstairs, tell Ralph I want him in the hall close enough to hear the bell but not the voices. Watch him to see he doesn’t creep up. If he hears the bell--no, tell him--no, let him do it his own way. After that bring Mr. Adam Trask to me.”
“Will you be all right, Miss Kate?”
Kate looked at her until she turned away. Kate called after her, “You can have the other half as soon as he goes. Now hurry up.”
After the door had closed Kate opened the right-hand drawer of her desk and took out a revolver with a short barrel. She swung the cylinder sideways and looked at the cartridges, snapped it shut and put it on her desk, and laid a sheet of paper over it. She turned off one of the lights and settled back in her chair. She clasped her hands on the desk in front of her.
When the knock came on the door she called, “Come in,” hardly moving her lips.
Eva’s eyes were wet, and she was relaxed. “Here he is,” she said and closed the door behind Adam.
He glanced quickly about before he saw Kate sitting so quietly behind the desk. He stared at her, and then he moved slowly toward her.
Her hands unclasped and her right hand moved toward the paper. Her eyes, cold and expressionless, remained on his eyes.
Adam saw her hair, her scar, her lips, her creping throat, her arms and shoulders and flat breasts. He sighed deeply.
Kate’s hand shook a little. She said, “What do you want?”
Adam sat down in the straight chair beside the desk. He wanted to shout with relief, but he said, “Nothing now. I just wanted to see you. Sam Hamilton told me you were here.”
The moment he sat down the shake went out of her hand. “Hadn’t you heard before?”
“No,” he said. “I hadn’t heard. It made me a little crazy at first, but now I’m all right.”
Kate relaxed and her mouth smiled and her little teeth showed, the long canines sharp and white. She said, “You frightened me.”
“Why?”
“Well, I didn’t know what you’d do.”
“Neither did I,” said Adam, and he continued to stare at her as though she were not alive.
“I expected you for a long time, and when you didn’t come I guess I forgot you.”
“I didn’t forget you,” he said. “But now I can.”
“What do you mean?”
He laughed pleasantly. “Now I see you, I mean. You know, I guess it was Samuel said I’d never seen you, and it’s true. I remember your face but I had never seen it. Now I can forget it.”
Her lips closed and straightened and her wide-set eyes narrowed with cruelty. “You think you can?”
“I know I can.”
She changed her manner. “Maybe you won’t have to,” she said. “If you feel all right about everything, maybe we could get together.”
“I don’t think so,” said Adam.
“You were such a fool,” she said. “Like a child. You didn’t know what things to do with yourself. I can teach you now. You seem to be a man.”
“You have taught me,” he said. “It was a pretty sharp lesson.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I can smell your breath--you’ve been drinking rum.” She got up and went to a cabinet for a bottle and two glasses, and when she turned back she noticed that he was looking at her fattened ankles. Her quick rage did not change the little smile on her lips.
She carried the bottle to the round table in the middle of the room and filled the two small glasses with rum. “Come, sit over here,” she said. “It’s more comfortable.” As he moved to a big chair she saw that his eyes were on her protruding stomach. She handed him a glass, sat down, and folded her hands across her middle.
He sat holding his glass, and she said, “Drink it. It’s very good rum.” He smiled at her, a smile she had never seen. She said, “When Eva told me you were here I thought at first I would have you thrown out.”
“I would have come back,” he said. “I had to see you--not that I mistrusted Samuel, but just to prove it to myself.”
“Drink your rum,” she said.
He glanced at her glass.
“You don’t think I’d poison you--” She stopped and was angry that she had said it.
Smiling, he still gazed at her glass. Her anger came through to her face. She picked up her glass and touched her lips to it. “Liquor makes me sick,” she said. “I never drink it. It poisons me.” She shut her mouth tight and her sharp teeth bit down on her lower lip.
Adam continued to smile at her.
Her rage was rising beyond her control. She tossed the rum down her throat and coughed, and her eyes watered and she wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “You don’t trust me very much,” she said.
“No, I don’t.” He raised his glass and drank his rum, then got up and filled both glasses.
“I will not drink any more,” she said in panic.
“You don’t have to,” Adam said. “I’ll just finish this and go along.”
The biting alcohol burned in her throat and she felt the stirring in her that frightened her. “I’m not afraid of you or anyone else,” she said, and she drank off her second glass.
“You haven’t any reason to be afraid of me,” said Adam. “You can forget me now. But you said you had already.” He felt gloriously warm and safe, better than he had for many years. “I came up to Sam Hamilton’s funeral,” he said. “That was a fine man. I’ll miss him. Do you remember, Cathy, he helped you with the twins?”
In Kate the liquor raged. She fought and the strain of the fight showed on her face.
“What’s the matter?” Adam asked.
“I told you it poisoned me. I told you it made me sick.”
“I couldn’t take the chance,” he calmly said. “You shot me once. I don’t know what else you’ve done.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard some scandal,” he said. “Just dirty scandal.”
For the moment she had forgotten her will-fight against the cruising alcohol, and now she had lost the battle. The redness was up in her brain and her fear was gone and in its place was cruelty without caution. She snatched the bottle and filled her glass.
Adam had to get up to pour his own. A feeling completely foreign to him had arisen. He was enjoying what he saw in her. He liked to see her struggling. He felt good about punishing her, but he was also watchful. “Now I must be careful,” he told himself. “Don’t talk, don’t talk.”
He said aloud, “Sam Hamilton has been a good friend to me all the years. I’ll miss him.”
She had spilled some rum, and it moistened the corners of her mouth. “I hated him,” she said. “I would have killed him if I could.”
“Why? He was kind to us.”
“He looked--he looked into me.”
“Why not? He looked into me too, and he helped me.”
“I hate him,” she said. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Might have been good if I had looked into you,” Adam said.
Her lip curled. “You are a fool,” she said. “I don’t hate you. You’re just a weak fool.”
As her tension built up, a warm calm settled on Adam.
“Sit there and grin,” she cried. “You think you’re free, don’t you? A few drinks and you think you’re a man! I could crook my little finger and you’d come back slobbering, crawling on your knees.” Her sense of power was loose and her vixen carefulness abandoned. “I know you,” she said. “I know your cowardly heart.”
Adam went on smiling. He tasted his drink, and that reminded her to pour another for herself. The bottle neck chattered against her glass.
“When I was hurt I needed you,” she said. “But you were slop. And when I didn’t need you any more you tried to stop me. Take that ugly smirk off your face.”
“I wonder what it is you hate so much.”
“You wonder, do you?” Her caution was almost entirely gone. “It isn’t hatred, it’s contempt. When I was a little girl I knew what stupid lying fools they were--my own mother and father pretending goodness. And they weren’t good. I knew them. I could make them do whatever I wanted. I could always make people do what I wanted. When I was half-grown I made a man kill himself. He pretended to be good too, and all he wanted was to go to bed with me--a little girl.”
“But you say he killed himself. He must have been very sorry about something.”
“He was a fool,” said Kate. “I heard him come to the door and beg. I laughed all night.”
Adam said, “I wouldn’t like to think I’d driven anybody out of the world.”
“You’re a fool too. I remember how they talked. ‘Isn’t she a pretty little thing, so sweet, so dainty?’ And no one knew me. I made them jump through hoops, and they never knew it.”
Adam drained his glass. He felt remote and inspective. He thought he could see her impulses crawling like ants and could read them. The sense of deep understanding that alcohol sometimes gives was on him. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether you liked Sam Hamilton. I found him wise. I remember he said one time that a woman who knows all about men usually knows one part very well and can’t conceive the other parts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
“He was a liar and a hypocrite too.” Kate spat out her words. “That’s what I hate, the liars, and they’re all liars. That’s what it is. I love to show them up. I love to rub their noses in their own nastiness.”
Adam’s brows went up. “Do you mean that in the whole world there’s only evil and folly?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I don’t believe it,” Adam said quietly.
“You don’t believe it! You don’t believe it!” She mimicked him. “Would you like me to prove it?”
“You can’t,” he said.
She jumped up, ran to her desk, and brought the brown envelopes to the table. “Take a look at those,” she said.
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll show you anyway.” She took out a photograph. “Look there. That’s a state senator. He thinks he’s going to run for Congress. Look at his fat stomach. He’s got bubs like a woman. He likes whips. That streak there--that’s a whip mark. Look at the expression on his face! He’s got a wife and four kids and he’s going to run for Congress. You don’t believe! Look at this! This piece of white blubber is a councilman; this big red Swede has a ranch out near Blanco. Look here! This is a professor at Berkeley. Comes all the way down here to have the toilet splashed in his face--professor of philosophy. And look at this! This is a minister of the Gospel, a little brother of Jesus. He used to burn a house down to get what he wanted. We give it to him now another way. See that lighted match under his skinny flank?”
“I don’t want to see these,” said Adam.
“Well, you have seen them. And you don’t believe it! I’ll have you begging to get in here. I’ll have you screaming at the moon.” She tried to force her will on him, and she saw that he was detached and free. Her rage congealed to poison. “No one has ever escaped,” she said softly. Her eyes were flat and cold but her fingernails were tearing at the upholstery of the chair, ripping and fraying the silk.
Adam sighed. “If I had those pictures and those men knew it, I wouldn’t think my life was very safe,” he said. “I guess one of those pictures could destroy a man’s whole life. Aren’t you in danger?”
“Do you think I’m a child?” she asked.
“Not any more,” said Adam. “I’m beginning to think you’re a twisted human--or no human at all.”
She smiled. “Maybe you’ve struck it,” she said. “Do you think I want to be human? Look at those pictures! I’d rather be a dog than a human. But I’m not a dog. I’m smarter than humans. Nobody can hurt me. Don’t worry about danger.” She waved at the filing cabinets. “I have a hundred beautiful pictures in there, and those men know that if anything should happen to me--anything--one hundred letters, each one with a picture, would be dropped in the mail, and each letter will go where it will do the most harm. No, they won’t hurt me.”
Adam asked, “But suppose you had an accident, or maybe a disease?”
“That wouldn’t make any difference,” she said. She leaned closer to him. “I’m going to tell you a secret none of those men knows. In a few years I’ll be going away. And when I do--those envelopes will be dropped in the mail anyway.” She leaned back in her chair, laughing.
Adam shivered. He looked closely at her. Her face and her laughter were childlike and innocent. He got up and poured himself another drink, a short drink. The bottle was nearly empty. “I know what you hate. You hate something in them you can’t understand. You don’t hate their evil. You hate the good in them you can’t get at. I wonder what you want, what final thing.”
“I’ll have all the money I need,” she said. “I’ll go to New York and I won’t be old. I’m not old. I’ll buy a house, a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and I’ll have nice servants. And first I will find a man, if he’s still alive, and very slowly and with the greatest attention to pain I will take his life away. If I do it well and carefully, he will go crazy before he dies.”
Adam stamped on the floor impatiently. “Nonsense,” he said. “This isn’t true. This is crazy. None of this is true. I don’t believe any of it.”
She said, “Do you remember when you first saw me?”
His face darkened. “Oh, Lord, yes!”
“You remember my broken jaw and my split lips and my missing teeth?”
“I remember. I don’t want to remember.”
“My pleasure will be to find the man who did that,” she said. “And after that--there will be other pleasures.”
“I have to go,” Adam said.
She said, “Don’t go, dear. Don’t go now, my love. My sheets are silk. I want you to feel those sheets against your skin.”
“You don’t mean that?”
“Oh, I do, my love. I do. You aren’t clever at love, but I can teach you. I will teach you.” She stood up unsteadily and laid her hand on his arm. Her face seemed fresh and young. Adam looked down at her hand and saw it wrinkled as a pale monkey’s paw. He moved away in revulsion.
She saw his gesture and understood it and her mouth hardened.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I know, but I can’t believe. I know I won’t believe it in the morning. It will be a nightmare dream. But no, it--it can’t be a dream--no. Because I remember you are the mother of my boys. You haven’t asked about them. You are the mother of my sons.”
Kate put her elbows on her knees and cupped her hands under her chin so that her fingers covered her pointed ears. Her eyes were bright with triumph. Her voice was mockingly soft. “A fool always leaves an opening,” she said. “I discovered that when I was a child. I am the mother of your sons. Your sons? I am the mother, yes--but how do you know you are the father?”
Adam’s mouth dropped open. “Cathy, what do you mean?”
“My name is Kate,” she said. “Listen, my darling, and remember. How many times did I let you come near enough to me to have children?”
“You were hurt,” he said. “You were terribly hurt.”
“Once,” said Kate, “just once.”
“The pregnancy made you ill,” he protested. “It was hard on you.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “I wasn’t too hurt for your brother.”
“My brother?”
“Have you forgotten Charles?”
Adam laughed. “You are a devil,” he said. “But do you think I could believe that of my brother?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” she said.
Adam said, “I don’t believe it.”
“You will. At first you will wonder, and then you’ll be unsure. You’ll think back about Charles--all about him. I could have loved Charles. He was like me in a way.”
“He was not.”
“You’ll remember,” she said. “Maybe one day you will remember some tea that tasted bitter. You took my medicine by mistake--remember? Slept as you had never slept before and awakened late--thick-headed?”
“You were too hurt to plan a thing like that.”
“I can do anything,” she said. “And now, my love, take off your clothes. And I will show you what else I can do.”
Adam closed his eyes and his head reeled with the rum. He opened his eyes and shook his head violently. “It wouldn’t matter--even if it were true,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter at all.” And suddenly he laughed because he knew that this was so. He stood too quickly and had to grab the back of his chair to steady himself against dizziness.
Kate leaped up and put both of her hands on his elbow. “Let me help you take off your coat.”
Adam twisted her hands from his arm as though they were wire. He moved unsteadily toward the door.
Uncontrolled hatred shone in Kate’s eyes. She screamed, a long and shrill animal screech. Adam stopped and turned toward her. The door banged open. The house pimp took three steps, poised, pivoted with his whole weight, and his fist struck Adam under the ear. Adam crashed to the floor.
Kate screamed, “The boots! Give him the boots!” Ralph moved closer to the fallen man and measured the distance. He noticed Adam’s open eyes staring up at him. He turned nervously to Kate.
Her voice was cold. “I said give him the boots. Break his face!”
Ralph said, “He ain’t fighting back. The fight’s all out of him.”
Kate sat down. She breathed through her mouth. Her hands writhed in her lap. “Adam,” she said, “I hate you. I hate you now for the first time. I hate you! Adam, are you listening? I hate you!”
Adam tried to sit up, fell back, and tried again. Sitting on the floor, he looked up at Kate. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter at all.”
He got to his knees and rested with his knuckles against the floor. He said, “Do you know, I loved you better than anything in the world? I did. It was so strong that it took quite a killing.”
“You’ll come crawling back,” she said. “You’ll drag your belly on the floor--begging, begging!”
“You want the boots now, Miss Kate?” Ralph asked.
She did not answer.
Adam moved very slowly toward the door, balancing his steps carefully. His hand fumbled at the doorjamb.
Kate called, “Adam!”
He turned slowly. He smiled at her as a man might smile at a memory. Then he went out and closed the door gently behind him.
Kate sat staring at the door. Her eyes were desolate.

Chapter 26


1
On the train back to King City from his trip to Salinas, Adam Trask was in a cloud of vague forms and sounds and colors. He was not conscious of any thought at all.
I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the result of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.
Samuel’s funeral and the talk with Kate should have made Adam sad and bitter, but they did not. Out of the gray throbbing an ecstasy arose. He felt young and free and filled with a hungry gaiety. He got off the train in King City, and, instead of going directly to the livery stable to claim his horse and buggy, he walked to Will Hamilton’s new garage.
Will was sitting in his glass-walled office from which he could watch the activity of his mechanics without hearing the clamor of their work. Will’s stomach was beginning to fill out richly.
He was studying an advertisement for cigars shipped direct and often from Cuba. He thought he was mourning for his dead father, but he was not. He did have some little worry about Tom, who had gone directly from the funeral to San Francisco. He felt that it was more dignified to lose oneself in business, as he intended to do, than in alcohol, as Tom was probably doing.
He looked up when Adam came into the office and waved his hand to one of the big leather chairs he had installed to lull his customers past the size of the bills they were going to have to pay.
Adam sat down. “I don’t know whether I offered my condolences,” he said.
“It’s a sad time,” said Will. “You were at the funeral?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “I don’t know whether you know how I felt about your father. He gave me things I will never forget.”
“He was respected,” said Will. “There were over two hundred people at the cemetery--over two hundred.”
“Such a man doesn’t really die,” Adam said, and he was discovering it himself. “I can’t think of him dead. He seems maybe more alive to me than before.”
“That’s true,” said Will, and it was not true to him. To Will, Samuel was dead.
“I think of things he said,” Adam went on. “When he said them I didn’t listen very closely, but now they come back, and I can see his face when he said them.”
“That’s true,” said Will. “I was just thinking the same thing. Are you going back to your place?”
“Yes, I am. But I thought I would come in and talk to you about buying an automobile.”
A subtle change came over Will, a kind of silent alertness. “I would have said you’d be the last man in the valley to get a car,” he observed and watched through half-closed eyes for Adam’s reaction.
Adam laughed. “I guess I deserved that,” he said. “Maybe your father is responsible for a change in me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know as I could explain it. Anyway, let’s talk about a car.”
“I’ll give you the straight dope on it,” said Will. “The truth of the matter is I’m having one hell of a time getting enough cars to fill my orders. Why, I’ve got a list of people who want them.”
“Is that so? Well, maybe I’ll just have to put my name on the list.”
“I’d be glad to do that, Mr. Trask, and--” He paused. “You’ve been so close to the family that--well, if there should be a cancellation I’d be glad to move you up on the list.”
“That’s kind of you,” said Adam.
“How would you like to arrange it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I can arrange it so you pay only so much a month.”
“Isn’t it more expensive that way?”
“Well, there’s interest and carrying charge. Some people find it convenient.”
“I think I’ll pay cash,” said Adam. “There’d be no point in putting it off.”
Will chuckled. “Not very many people feel that way,” he said. “And there’s going to come a time when I won’t be able to sell for cash without losing money.”
“I’d never thought of that,” said Adam. “You will put me on the list though?”
Will leaned toward him. “Mr. Trask, I’m going to put you on the top of the list. The first car that comes in, you’re going to have.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll be glad to do it for you,” said Will.
Adam asked, “How is your mother holding up?”
Will leaned back in his chair and an affectionate smile came on his face. “She’s a remarkable woman,” he said. “She’s like a rock. I think back on all the hard times we had, and we had plenty of them. My father wasn’t very practical. He was always off in the clouds or buried in a book. I think my mother held us together and kept the Hamiltons out of the poorhouse.”
“She’s a fine woman,” Adam said.
“Not only fine. She’s strong. She stands on her two feet. She’s a tower of strength. Did you come back to Olive’s house after the funeral?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well over a hundred people did. And my mother fried all that chicken and saw that everybody had enough.”
“She didn’t!”
“Yes, she did. And when you think--it was her own husband.”
“A remarkable woman,” Adam repeated Will’s phrase.
“She’s practical. She knew they had to be fed and she fed them.”
“I guess she’ll be all right, but it must be a great loss to her.”
“She’ll be all right,” Will said. “And she’ll outlive us all, little tiny thing that she is.”
On his drive back to the ranch Adam found that he was noticing things he had not seen for years. He saw the wildflowers in the heavy grass, and he saw the red cows against the hillsides, moving up the easy ascending paths and eating as they went. When he came to his own land Adam felt a quick pleasure so sharp that he began to examine it. And suddenly he found himself saying aloud in rhythm with his horse’s trotting feet, “I’m free, I’m free. I don’t have to worry any more. I’m free. She’s gone. She’s out of me. Oh, Christ Almighty, I’m free!”
He reached out and stripped the fur from the silver-gray sage beside the road, and when his fingers were sticky with the sap he smelled the sharp penetrating odor on his fingers, breathed it deep into his lungs. He was glad to be going home. He wanted to see how the twins had grown in the two days he had been gone--he wanted to see the twins.
“I’m free, she’s gone,” he chanted aloud.

2

Lee came out of the house to meet Adam, and he stood at the horse’s head while Adam climbed down from the buggy.
“How are the boys?” Adam asked.
“They’re fine. I made them some bows and arrows and they went hunting rabbits in the river bottom. I’m not keeping the pan hot though.”
“Everything all right here?”
Lee looked at him sharply, was about to exclaim, changed his mind. “How was the funeral?”
“Lots of people,” Adam said. “He had lots of friends. I can’t get it through my head that he’s gone.”
“My people bury them with drums and scatter papers to confuse the devils and put roast pigs instead of flowers on the grave. We’re a practical people and always a little hungry. But our devils aren’t very bright. We can outthink them. That’s some progress.”
“I think Samuel would have liked that kind of funeral,” said Adam. “It would have interested him.” He noticed that Lee was staring at him. “Put the horse away, Lee, and then come in and make some tea. I want to talk to you.”
Adam went into the house and took off his black clothes. He could smell the sweet and now sickish odor of rum about himself. He removed all of his clothes and sponged his skin with yellow soap until the odor was gone from his pores. He put on a clean blue shirt and overalls washed until they were soft and pale blue and lighter blue at the knees where the wear came. He shaved slowly and combed his hair while the rattle of Lee at the stove sounded from the kitchen. Then he went to the living room. Lee had set out one cup and a bowl of sugar on the table beside his big chair. Adam looked around at the flowered curtains washed so long that the blossoms were pale. He saw the worn rugs on the floor and the brown path on the linoleum in the hall. And it was all new to him.
When Lee came in with the teapot Adam said, “Bring yourself a cup, Lee. And if you’ve got any of that drink of yours, I could use a little. I got drunk last night.”
Lee said, “You drunk? I can hardly believe it.”
“Well, I was. And I want to talk about it. I saw you looking at me.”
“Did you?” asked Lee, and he went to the kitchen to bring his cup and glasses and his stone bottle of ng-ka-py.
He said when he came back, “The only times I’ve tasted it for years have been with you and Mr. Hamilton.”
“Is that the same one we named the twins with?”
“Yes, it is.” Lee poured the scalding green tea. He grimaced when Adam put two spoonfuls of sugar in his cup.
Adam stirred his tea and watched the sugar crystals whirl and disappear into liquid. He said, “I went down to see her.”
“I thought you might,” said Lee. “As a matter of fact I don’t see how a human man could have waited so long.”
“Maybe I wasn’t a human man.”
“I thought of that too. How was she?”
Adam said slowly, “I can’t understand it. I can’t believe there is such a creature in the world.”
“The trouble with you Occidentals is that you don’t have devils to explain things with. Did you get drunk afterward?”
“No, before and during. I needed it for courage, I guess.”
“You look all right now.”
“I am all right,” said Adam. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He paused and said ruefully, “This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk.”
“Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee. “Maybe that’s what immortality is.”
“I seemed to come out of a sleep,” said Adam. “In some strange way my eyes have cleared. A weight is off me.”
“You even use words that sound like Mr. Hamilton,” said Lee. “I’ll build a theory for my immortal relatives.”
Adam drank his cup of black liquor and licked his lips. “I’m free,” he said. “I have to tell it to someone. I can live with my boys. I might even see a woman. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I know. And I can see it in your eyes and in the way your body stands. A man can’t lie about a thing like that. You’ll like the boys, I think.”
“Well, at least I’m going to give myself a chance. Will you give me another drink and some more tea?”
Lee poured the tea and picked up his cup.
“I don’t know why you don’t scald your mouth, drinking it that hot.”
Lee was smiling inwardly. Adam, looking at him, realized that Lee was not a young man any more. The skin on his cheeks was stretched tight, and its surface shone as though it were glazed. And there was a red irritated rim around his eyes.
Lee studied the shell-thin cup in his hand and his was a memory smile. “Maybe if you’re free, you can free me.”
“What do you mean, Lee?”
“Could you let me go?”
“Why, of course you can go. Aren’t you happy here?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that’s negative.”
Adam said, “Call it that then. Aren’t you contented here?”
Lee said, “I don’t think any man is contented when there are things undone he wishes to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Well, one thing it’s too late for. I wanted to have a wife and sons of my own. Maybe I wanted to hand down the nonsense that passes for wisdom in a parent, to force it on my own helpless children.”
“You’re not too old.”
“Oh, I guess I’m physically able to father a child. That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m too closely married to a quiet reading lamp. You know, Mr. Trask, once I had a wife. I made her up just as you did, only mine had no life outside my mind. She was good company in my little room. I would talk and she would listen, and then she would talk, would tell me all the happenings of a woman’s afternoon. She was very pretty and she made coquettish little jokes. But now I don’t know whether I would listen to her. And I wouldn’t want to make her sad or lonely. So there’s my first plan gone.”
“What was the other?”
“I talked to Mr. Hamilton about that. I want to open a bookstore in Chinatown in San Francisco. I would live in the back, and my days would be full of discussions and arguments. I would like to have in stock some of those dragon-carved blocks of ink from the dynasty of Sung. The boxes are worm-bored, and that ink is made from fir smoke and a glue that comes only from wild asses’ skin. When you paint with that ink it may physically be black but it suggests to your eye and persuades your seeing that it is all the colors in the world. Maybe a painter would come by and we could argue about method and haggle about price.”
Adam said, “Are you making this up?”
“No. If you are well and if you are free, I would like to have my little bookshop at last. I would like to die there.”
Adam sat silently for a while, stirring sugar into his lukewarm tea. Then he said, “Funny. I found myself wishing you were a slave so I could refuse you. Of course you can go if you want to. I’ll even lend you money for your bookstore.”
“Oh, I have the money. I’ve had it a long time.”
“I never thought of your going,” Adam said. “I took you for granted.” He straightened his shoulders. “Could you wait a little while?”
“What for?”
“I want you to help me get acquainted with my boys. I want to put this place in shape, or maybe sell it or rent it. I’ll want to know how much money I have left and what I can do with it.”
“You wouldn’t lay a trap for me?” Lee asked. “My wish isn’t as strong as it once was. I’m afraid I could be talked out of it or, what would be worse, I could be held back just by being needed. Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.”
Adam said, “A lonely man. I must have been far down in myself not to have thought of that.”
“Mr. Hamilton knew,” said Lee. He raised his head and his fat lids let only two sparks from his eyes show through. “We’re controlled, we Chinese,” he said. “We show no emotion. I loved Mr. Hamilton. I would like to go to Salinas tomorrow if you will permit it.”
“Do anything you want,” said Adam. “God knows you’ve done enough for me.”
“I want to scatter devil papers,” Lee said. “I want to put a little roast pig on the grave of my father.”
Adam got up quickly and knocked over his cup and went outside and left Lee sitting there.