Chapter 27


1
That year the rains had come so gently that the Salinas River did not overflow. A slender stream twisted back and forth in its broad bed of gray sand, and the water was not milky with silt but clear and pleasant. The willows that grow in the river bed were well leafed, and the wild blackberry vines were thrusting their spiky new shoots along the ground.
It was very warm for March, and the kite wind blew steadily from the south and turned up the silver undersides of the leaves.
Against the perfect cover of vine and bramble and tangled drift sticks, a little gray brush rabbit sat quietly in the sun, drying his breast fur, wet by the grass dew of his early feeding. The rabbit’s nose crinkled, and his ears slewed around now and then, investigating small sounds that might possibly be charged with danger to a brush rabbit. There had been a rhythmic vibration in the ground audible through the paws, so that ears swung and nose wrinkled, but that had stopped. Then there had been a movement of willow branches twenty-five years away and downwind, so that no odor of fear came to the rabbit.
For the last two minutes there had been sounds of interest but not of danger--a snap and then a whistle like that of the wings of a wild dove. The rabbit stretched out one hind leg lazily in the warm sun. There was a snap and a whistle and a grunting thud on fur. The rabbit sat perfectly still and his eyes grew large. A bamboo arrow was through his chest, and its iron tip deep in the ground on the other side. The rabbit slumped over on his side and his feet ran and scampered in the air for a moment before he was still.
From the willow two crouching boys crept. They carried four-foot bows, and tufts of arrows stuck their feathers up from the quivers behind their left shoulders. They were dressed in overalls and faded blue shirts, but each boy wore one perfect turkey tailfeather tied with tape against his temple.
The boys moved cautiously, bending low, self-consciously toeing-in like Indians. The rabbit’s flutter of death was finished when they bent over to examine their victim.
“Right through the heart,” said Cal as though it could not be any other way. Aron looked down and said nothing. “I’m going to say you did it,” Cal went on. “I won’t take credit. And I’ll say it was a hard shot.”
“Well, it was,” said Aron.
“Well, I’m telling you. I’ll give you credit to Lee and to Father.”
“I don’t know as I want credit--not all of it,” said Aron. “Tell you what. If we get another one we’ll say we each hit one, and if we don’t get any more, why don’t we say we both shot together and we don’t know who hit?”
“Don’t you want credit?” Cal asked subtly.
“Well, not full credit. We could divide it up.”
“After all, it was my arrow,” said Cal.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“You look at the feathers. See that nick? That’s mine.”
“How did it get in my quiver? I don’t remember any nick.”
“Maybe you don’t remember. But I’m going to give you credit anyway.”
Aron said gratefully, “No, Cal. I don’t want that. We’ll say we both shot at once.”
“Well, if that’s what you want. But suppose Lee sees it was my arrow?”
“We’ll just say it was in my quiver.”
“You think he’ll believe that? He’ll think you’re lying.”
Aron said helplessly, “If he thinks you shot it, why, we’ll just let him think that.”
“I just wanted you to know,” said Cal. “Just in case he’d think that.” He drew the arrow through the rabbit so that the white feathers were dark red with heart blood. He put the arrow in his quiver. “You can carry him,” he said magnanimously.
“We ought to start back,” said Aron. “Maybe Father is back by now.”
Cal said, “We could cook that old rabbit and have him for our supper and stay out all night.”
“It’s too cold at night, Cal. Don’t you remember how you shivered this morning?”
“It’s not too cold for me,” said Cal. “I never feel cold.”
“You did this morning.”
“No, I didn’t. I was just making fun of you, shivering and chattering like a milk baby. Do you want to call me a liar?”
“No,” said Aron. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Afraid to fight?”
“No. I just don’t want to.”
“If I was to say you was scared, would you want to call me a liar?”
“No.”
“Then you’re scared, aren’t you?”
“I guess so.”
Aron wandered slowly away, leaving the rabbit on the ground. His eyes were very wide and he had a beautiful soft mouth. The width between his blue eyes gave him an expression of angelic innocence. His hair was fine and golden. The sun seemed to light up the top of his head.
He was puzzled--but he was often puzzled. He knew his brother was getting at something, but he didn’t know what. Cal was an enigma to him. He could not follow the reasoning of his brother, and he was always surprised at the tangents it took.
Cal looked more like Adam. His hair was dark brown. He was bigger than his brother, bigger of bone, heavier in the shoulder, and his jaw had the square sternness of Adam’s jaw. Cal’s eyes were brown and watchful, and sometimes they sparkled as though they were black. But Cal’s hands were very small for the size of the rest of him. The fingers were short and slender, the nails delicate. Cal protected his hands. There were few things that could make him cry, but a cut finger was one of them. He never ventured with his hands, never touched an insect or carried a snake about. And in a fight he picked up a rock or a stick to fight with.
As Cal watched his brother walking away from him there was a small sure smile on his lips. He called, “Aron, wait for me!”
When he caught up with his brother he held out the rabbit. “You can carry it,” he said kindly, putting his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Don’t be mad with me.”
“You always want to fight,” said Aron.
“No, I don’t. I was only making a joke.”
“Were you?”
“Sure. Look--you can carry the rabbit. And we’ll start back now if you want.”
Aron smiled at last. He was always relieved when his brother let the tension go. The two boys trudged up out of the river bottom and up the crumbling cliff to the level land. Aron’s right trouser leg was well bloodied from the rabbit.
Cal said, “They’ll be surprised we got a rabbit. If Father’s home, let’s give it to him. He likes a rabbit for his supper.”
“All right,” Aron said happily. “Tell you what. We’ll both give it to him and we won’t say which one hit it.”
“All right, if you want to,” said Cal.
They walked along in silence for a time and then Cal said, “All this is our land--way to hell over the river.”
“It’s Father’s.”
“Yes, but when he dies it’s going to be ours.”
This was a new thought to Aron. “What do you mean, when he dies?”
“Everybody dies,” said Cal. “Like Mr. Hamilton. He died.”
“Oh, yes,” Aron said. “Yes, he died.” He couldn’t connect the two--the dead Mr. Hamilton and the live father.
“They put him in a box and then they dig a hole and put the box in,” said Cal.
“I know that.” Aron wanted to change the subject, to think of something else.
Cal said, “I know a secret.”
“What is it?”
“You’d tell.”
“No, I wouldn’t, if you said not.”
“I don’t know if I ought.”
“Tell me,” Aron begged.
“You won’t tell?”
“No, I won’t.”
Cal said, “Where do you think our mother is?”
“She’s dead.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“She is too.”
“She ran away,” said Cal. “I heard some men talking.”
“They were liars.”
“She ran away,” said Cal. “You won’t tell I told you?”
“I don’t believe it,” said Aron. “Father said she was in Heaven.”
Cal said quietly, “Pretty soon I’m going to run away and find her. I’ll bring her back.”
“Where did the men. say she is?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find her.”
“She’s in Heaven,” said Aron. “Why would Father tell a lie?” He looked at his brother, begging him silently to agree. Cal didn’t answer him. “Don’t you think she’s in Heaven with the angels?” Aron insisted. And when Cal still did not answer, “Who were the men who said it?”
“Just some men. In the post office at King City. They didn’t think I could hear. But I got good ears. Lee says I can hear the grass grow.”
Aron said, “What would she want to run away for?”
“How do I know? Maybe she didn’t like us.”
Aron inspected this heresy. “No,” he said. “The men were liars. Father said she’s in Heaven. And you know how he don’t like to talk about her.”
“Maybe that’s because she ran away.”
“No. I asked Lee. Know what Lee said? Lee said, ‘Your mother loved you and she still does.’ And Lee gave me a star to look at. He said maybe that was our mother and she would love us as long as that light was there. Do you think Lee is a liar?” Through his gathering tears Aron could see his brother’s eyes, hard and reasonable. There were no tears in Cal’s eyes.
Cal felt pleasantly excited. He found another implement, another secret tool, to use for any purpose he needed. He studied Aron, saw his quivering lips, but he noticed in time the flaring nostrils. Aron would cry, but sometimes, pushed to tears, Aron would fight too. And when Aron cried and fought at the same time he was dangerous. Nothing could hurt him and nothing could stop him. Once Lee had held him in his lap, clasping his still flailing fists to his sides, until after a long time he relaxed. And his nostrils had flared then.
Cal put his new tool away. He could bring it out anytime, and he knew it was the sharpest weapon he had found. He would inspect it at his ease and judge just when and how much to use it.
He made his decision almost too late. Aron leaped at him and the limp body of the rabbit slashed against his face. Cal jumped back and cried, “I was just joking. Honest, Aron, it was only a joke.”
Aron stopped. Pain and puzzlement were on his face. “I don’t like that joke,” he said, and he sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
Cal came close to him and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “I won’t do it any more,” he said.
The boys trudged along silently for a while. The light of day began to withdraw. Cal looked over his shoulder at a thunderhead sailing blackly over the mountains on the nervous March wind. “Going to storm,” he said. “Going to be a bastard.” Aron said, “Did you really hear those men?”
“Maybe I only thought I did,” Cal said quickly. “Jesus, look at that cloud!”
Aron turned around to look at the black monster. It ballooned in great dark rolls above, and beneath it drew a long trailing skirt of rain, and as they looked the cloud rumbled and flashed fire. Borne on the wind, the cloudburst drummed hollowly on the fat wet hills across the valley and moved out over the flat lands. The boys turned and ran for home, and the cloud boomed at their backs and the lightning shattered the air into quaking pieces. The cloud caught up with them, and the first stout drops plopped on the ground out of the riven sky. They could smell the sweet odor of ozone. Running, they sniffed the thunder smell.
As they raced across the country road and onto the wheel tracks that led to their own home draw the water struck them. The rain fell in sheets and in columns. Instantly they were soaked through, and their hair plastered down on their foreheads and streamed into their eyes, and the turkey feathers at their temples bent over with the weight of water.
Now that they were as wet as they could get the boys stopped running. There was no reason to run for cover. They looked at each other and laughed for joy. Aron wrung out the rabbit and tossed it in the air and caught it and threw it to Cal. And Cal, feeling silly, put it around his neck with the head and hind feet under his chin. Both boys leaned over and laughed hysterically. The rain roared on the oak trees in the home draw and the wind disturbed their high dignity.

2

The twins came in sight of the ranch buildings in time to see Lee, his head through the center hole of a yellow oilskin poncho, leading a strange horse and a flimsy rubber-tired buggy toward the shed. “Somebody’s here,” said Cal. “Will you look at that rig?”
They began to run again, for there was a certain deliciousness about visitors. Near the steps they slowed down, moved cautiously around the house, for there was a certain fearsomeness about visitors too. They went in the back way and stood dripping in the kitchen. They heard voices in the living room--their father’s voice and another, a man’s voice. And then a third voice stiffened their stomachs and rippled a little chill up their spines. It was a woman’s voice. These boys had had very little experience with women. They tiptoed into their own room and stood looking at each other.
“Who do you ’spose it is?” Cal asked.
An emotion like a light had burst in Aron. He wanted to shout, “Maybe it’s our mother. Maybe she’s come back.” And then he remembered that she was in Heaven and people do not come back from there. He said, “I don’t know. I’m going to put on dry clothes.”
The boys put on dry clean clothes, which were exact replicas of the sopping clothes they were taking off. They took off the wet turkey feathers and combed their hair back with their fingers. And all the while they could hear the voices, mostly low pitched, and then the high woman’s voice, and once they froze, listening, for they heard a child’s voice--a girl’s voice--and this was such an excitement that they did not even speak of hearing it.
Silently they edged into the hall and crept toward the door to the living room. Cal turned the doorknob very, very slowly and lifted it up so that no creak would betray them.
Only the smallest crack was open when Lee came in the back door, shuffled along the hall, getting out of his poncho, and caught them there. “Lilly boy peek?” he said in pidgin, and when Cal closed the door and the latch clicked Lee said quickly, “Your father’s home. You’d better go in.”
Aron whispered hoarsely, “Who else is there?”
“Just some people going by. The rain drove them in.” Lee put his hand over Cal’s on the doorknob and turned it and opened the door.
“Boys come long home,” he said and left them there, exposed in the opening.
Adam cried, “Come in, boys! Come on in!”
The two carried their heads low and darted glances at the strangers and shuffled their feet. There was a man in city clothes and a woman in the fanciest clothes ever. Her duster and hat and veil lay on a chair beside her, and she seemed to the boys to be clad entirely in black silk and lace. Black lace even climbed up little sticks and hugged her throat. That was enough for one day, but it wasn’t all. Beside the woman sat a girl, a little younger maybe than the twins, but not much. She wore a blue-checked sunbonnet with lace around the front. Her dress was flowery, and a little apron with pockets was tied around her middle. Her skirt was turned back, showing a petticoat of red knitted yarn with tatting around the edge. The boys could not see her face because of the sunbonnet, but her hands were folded in her lap, and it was easy to see the little gold seal ring she wore on her third finger.
Neither boy had drawn a breath and the red rings were beginning to flare in back of their eyes from holding their breath.
“These are my boys,” their father said. “They’re twins. That’s Aron and this is Caleb. Boys, shake hands with our guests.”
The boys moved forward, heads down, hands up, in a gesture very like surrender and despair. Their limp fins were pumped by the gentleman and then by the lacy lady. Aron was first, and he turned away from the little girl, but the lady said, “Aren’t you going to say how do to my daughter?”
Aron shuddered and surrendered his hand in the direction of the girl with the hidden face. Nothing happened. His lifeless sausages were not gripped, or wrung, or squeezed, or racheted. His hand simply hung in the air in front of her. Aron peeked up through his eyelashes to see what was going on.
Her head was down too, and she had the advantage of the sunbonnet. Her small right hand with the signet ring on the middle finger was stuck out too, but it made no move toward Aron’s hand.
He stole a glance at the lady. She was smiling, her lips parted. The room seemed crushed with silence. And then Aron heard a ripping snicker from Cal.
Aron reached out and grabbed her hand and pumped it up and down three times. It was as soft as a handful of petals. He felt a pleasure that burned him. He dropped her hand and concealed his in his overall pocket. As he backed hastily away he saw Cal step up and shake hands formally and say, “How do.” Aron had forgotten to say it, so he said it now, after his brother, and it sounded strange. Adam and his guests laughed.
Adam said, “Mr. and Mrs. Bacon nearly got caught in the rain.”
“We were lucky to be lost here,” Mr. Bacon said. “I was looking for the Long ranch.”
“That’s farther. You should have taken the next left turn off the county road to the south.” Adam continued to the boys, “Mr. Bacojti is a county supervisor.”
“I don’t know why, but I take the job very seriously,” said Mr. Bacon, and he too addressed the boys. “My daughter’s name is Abra, boys. Isn’t that a funny name?” He used the tone adults employ with children. He turned to Adam and said in poetic singsong, “ ‘Abra was ready ere I called her name; And though I called another, Abra came.’ Matthew Prior. I won’t say I hadn’t wanted a son--but Abra’s such a comfort. Look up, dear.”
Abra did not move. Her hands were again clasped in her lap. Her father repeated with relish, “ ‘And though I called another, Abra came.’ ”
Aron saw his brother looking at the little sunbonnet without an ounce of fear. And Aron said hoarsely, “I don’t think Abra’s a funny name.”
“He didn’t mean funny that way,” Mrs. Bacon explained. “He only meant curious.” And she explained to Adam, “My husband gets the strangest things out of books. Dear, shouldn’t we be going?”
Adam said eagerly, “Oh, don’t go yet, ma’am. Lee is making some tea. It will warm you up.”
“Well, how pleasant!” Mrs. Bacon said, and she continued, “Children, it isn’t raining any more. Go outside and play.” Her voice had such authority that they filed out--Aron first and Cal second and Abra following.

3

In the living room Mr. Bacon crossed his legs. “You have a fine prospect here,” he said. “Is it a sizable piece?”
Adam said, “I have a good strip. I cross the river to the other side. It’s a good piece.”
“That’s all yours across the county road then?”
“Yes, it is. I’m kind of ashamed to admit it. I’ve let it go badly. I haven’t farmed it at all. Maybe I got too much farming as a child.”
Both Mr. and Mrs. Bacon were looking at Adam now, and he knew he had to make some explanation for letting his good land run free. He said, “I guess I’m a lazy man. And my father didn’t help me when he left me enough to get along on without working.” He dropped his eyes but he could feel the relief on the part of the Bacons. It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.
“Who takes care of the boys?” Mrs. Bacon asked.
Adam laughed. “What taking care of they get, and it isn’t much, is Lee’s work.”
“Lee?”
Adam became a little irritated with the questioning. “I only have one man,” he said shortly.
“You mean the Chinese we saw?” Mrs. Bacon was shocked.
Adam smiled at her. She had frightened him at first, but now he was moje comfortable. “Lee raised the boys, and he has taken care of me,” he said.
“But didn’t they ever have a woman’s care?”
“No, they didn’t.”
“The poor lambs,” she said.
“They’re wild but I guess they’re healthy,” Adam said. “I guess we’ve all gone wild like the land. But now Lee is going away. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Mr. Bacon carefully cleared the phlegm from his throat so it wouldn’t be run over by his pronouncement. “Have you thought about the education of your sons?”
“No--I guess I haven’t thought about it much.”
Mrs. Bacon said, “My husband is a believer in education.”
“Education is the key to the future,” Mr. Bacon said.
“What kind of education?” asked Adam.
Mr. Bacon went on, “All things come to men who know. Yes, I’m a believer in the torch of learning.” He leaned close and his voice became confidential. “So long as you aren’t going to farm your land, why don’t you rent it and move to the county seat--near our good public schools?”
For just a second Adam thought of saying, “Why don’t you mind your own goddam business?” but instead he asked, “You think that would be a good idea?”
“I think I could get you a good reliable tenant,” Mr. Bacon said. “No reason why you shouldn’t have something coming in from your land if you don’t live on it.”
Lee made a great stir coming in with the tea. He had heard enough of the tones through the door to be sure Adam was finding them tiresome. Lee was pretty certain they didn’t like tea, and if they did, they weren’t likely to favor the kind he had brewed. And when they drank it with compliments he knew the Bacons had their teeth in something. Lee tried to catch Adam’s eye but could not. Adam was studying the rug between his feet.
Mrs. Bacon was saying, “My husband has served on his school board for many years--” but Adam didn’t hear the discussion that followed.
He was thinking of a big globe of the world, suspended and swaying from a limb of one of his oak trees. And for no reason at all that he could make out, his mind leaped to his father, stumping about on his wooden leg, rapping on his leg for attention with a walking stick. Adam could see the stern and military face of his father as he forced his sons through drill and made them carry heavy packs to develop their shoulders. Through his memory Mrs. Bacon’s voice droned on. Adam felt the pack loaded with rocks. He saw Charles’ face grinning sardonically--Charles--the mean, fierce eyes, the hot temper. Suddenly Adam wanted to see Charles. He would take a trip--take the boys. He slapped his leg with excitement.
Mr. Bacon paused in his talk. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Adam said. “I just remembered something I’ve neglected to do.” Both Bacons were patiently, politely waiting for his explanation. Adam thought, Why not? I’m not running for supervisor. I’m not on the school board. Why not? He said to his guests, “I just remembered that I have forgotten to write to my brother for over ten years.” They shuddered under his statement and exchanged glances.
Lee had been refilling the teacups. Adam saw his cheeks puff out and heard his happy snort as he passed to the safety of the hallway. The Bacons didn’t want to comment on the incident. They wanted to be alone to discuss it.
Lee anticipated that it would be this way. He hurried out to harness up and bring the rubber-tired buggy to the front door.

4

When Abra and Cal and Aron went out, they stood side by side on the small covered porch, looking at the rain splashing and dripping down from the wide-spreading oak trees. The cloudburst had passed into a distant echoing thunder roll, but it had left a rain determined to go on for a long time.
Aron said, “That lady told us the rain was stopped.”
Abra answered him wisely. “She didn’t look. When she’s talking she never looks.”
Cal demanded, “How old are you?”
“Ten, going on eleven,” said Abra.
“Ho!” said Cal. “We’re eleven, going on twelve.”
Abra pushed her sunbonnet back. It framed her head like a halo. She was pretty, with dark hair in two braids. Her little forehead was round and domed, and her brows were level. One day her nose would be sweet and turned up where now it still was button-form. But two features would be with her always. Her chin was firm and her mouth was as sweet as a flower and very wide and pink. Her hazel eyes were sharp and intelligent and completely fearless. She looked straight into the faces of the boys, straight into their eyes, one after the other, and there was no hint of the shyness she had pretended inside the house.
“I don’t believe you’re twins,” she said. “You don’t look alike.”
“We are too,” said Cal.
“We are too,” said Aron.
“Some twins don’t look alike,” Cal insisted.
“Lots of them don’t,” Aron said. “Lee told us how it is. If the lady has one egg, the twins look alike. If she has two eggs, they don’t.”
“We’re two eggs,” said Cal.
Abra smiled with amusement at the myths of these country boys. “Eggs,” she said. “Ho! Eggs.” She didn’t say it loudly or harshly, but Lee’s theory tottered and swayed and then she brought it crashing down. “Which one of you is fried?” she asked. “And which one is poached?”
The boys exchanged uneasy glances. It was their first experience with the inexorable logic of women, which is overwhelming even, or perhaps especially, when it is wrong. This was new to them, exciting and frightening.
Cal said, “Lee is a Chinaman.”
“Oh, well,” said Abra kindly, “why don’t you say so? Maybe you’re china eggs then, like they put in a nest.” She paused to let her shaft sink in. She saw opposition, struggle, disappear. Abra had taken control. She was the boss.
Aron suggested, “Let’s go to the old house and play there. It leaks a little but it’s nice.”
They ran under the dripping oaks to the old Sanchez house and plunged in through its open door, which squeaked restlessly on rusty hinges.
The ’dobe house had entered its second decay. The great sala all along the front was half plastered, the line of white halfway around and then stopping, just as the workmen had left it over ten years before. And the deep windows with their rebuilt sashes remained glassless. The new floor was streaked with water stain, and a clutter of old papers and darkened nail bags with their nails rusted to prickly balls filled the corner of the room.
As the children stood in the entrance a bat flew from the rear of the house. The gray shape swooped from side to side and disappeared through the doorway.
The boys conducted Abra through the house--opened closets to show wash basins and toilets and chandeliers, still crated and waiting to be installed. A smell of mildew and of wet paper was in the air. The three children walked on tiptoe, and they did not speak for fear of the echoes from the walls of the empty house.
Back in the big sala the twins faced their guest. “Do you like it?” Aron asked softly because of the echo.
“Yee-es,” she admitted hesitantly.
“Sometimes we play here,” Cal said boldly. “You can come here and play with us if you like.”
“I live in Salinas,” Abra said in such a tone that they knew they were dealing with a superior being who hadn’t time for bumpkin pleasures.
Abra saw that she had crushed their highest treasure, and while she knew the weaknesses of men she still liked them, and, besides, she was a lady. “Sometimes, when we are driving by, I’ll come and play with you--a little,” she said kindly, and both boys felt grateful to her.
“I’ll give you my rabbit,” said Cal suddenly. “I was going to give it to my father, but you can have it.”
“What rabbit?”
“The one we shot today--right through the heart with an arrow. He hardly even kicked.”
Aron looked at him in outrage. “It was my--”
Cal interrupted, “We will let you have it to take home. It’s a pretty big one.”
Abra said, “What would I want with a dirty old rabbit all covered with blood?”
Aron said, “I’ll wash him off and put him in a box and tie him with string, and if you don’t want to eat him, you can have a funeral when you get time--in Salinas.”
“I go to real funerals,” said Abra. “Went to one yesterday. There was flowers high as this roof.”
“Don’t you want our rabbit?” Aron asked.
Abra looked at his sunny hair, tight-curled now, and at his eyes that seemed near to tears, and she felt the longing and the itching burn in her chest that is the beginning of love. Also, she wanted to touch Aron, and she did. She put her hand on his arm and felt him shiver under her fingers. “If you put it in a box,” she said.
Now that she had got herself in charge, Abra looked around and inspected her conquests. She was well above vanity now that no male principle threatened her. She felt kindly toward these boys. She noticed their thin washed-out clothes patched here and there by Lee. She drew on her fairy tales. “You poor children,” she said, “does your father beat you?”
They shook their heads. They were interested but bewildered.
“Are you very poor?”
“How do you mean?” Cal asked. “Do you sit in the ashes and have to fetch water and faggots?”
“What’s faggots?” Aron asked. She avoided that by continuing. “Poor darlings,” she began, and she seemed to herself to have a little wand in her hand tipped by a twinkling star. “Does your wicked stepmother hate you and want to kill you?”
“We don’t have a stepmother,” said Cal. “We don’t have any kind,” said Aron. “Our mother’s dead.”
His words destroyed the story she was writing but almost immediately supplied her with another. The wand was gone but she wore a big hat with an ostrich plume and she carried an enormous basket from which a turkey’s feet protruded.
“Little motherless orphans,” she said sweetly. “I’ll be your mother. I’ll hold you and rock you and tell you stories.”
“We’re too big,” said Cal. “We’d overset you.”
Abra looked away from his brutality. Aron, she saw, was caught up in her story. His eyes were smiling and he seemed almost to be rocking in her arms, and she felt again the tug of love for him. She said pleasantly, “Tell me, did your mother have a nice funeral?”
“We don’t remember,” said Aron. “We were too little.”
“Well, where is she buried? You could put flowers on her grave. We always do that for Grandma and Uncle Albert.”
“We don’t know,” said Aron.
Cal’s eyes had a new interest, a gleaming interest that was close to triumph. He said naively, “I’ll ask our father where it is so we can take flowers.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Abra. “I can make a wreath. I’ll show you how.” She noticed that Aron had not spoken. “Don’t you want to make a wreath?”
“Yes,” he said.
She had to touch him again. She patted his shoulder and then touched his cheek. “Your mama will like that,” she said. “Even in Heaven they look down and notice. My father says they do. He knows a poem about it.”
Aron said, “I’ll go wrap up the rabbit. I’ve got the box my pants came in.” He ran out of the old house. Cal watched him go. He was smiling.
“What are you laughing at?” Abra asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. Cal’s eyes stayed on her.
She tried to stare him down. She was an expert at staring down, but Cal did not look away. At the very first he had felt a shyness, but that was gone now, and the sense of triumph at destroying Abra’s control made him laugh. He knew she preferred his brother, but that was nothing new to him. Nearly everyone preferred Aron with his golden hair and the openness that allowed his affection to plunge like a puppy. Cal’s emotions hid deep in him and peered out, ready to retreat or attack. He was starting to punish Abra for liking his brother, and this was nothing new either. He had done it since he first discovered he could. And secret punishment had grown to be almost a creative thing with him.
Maybe the difference between the two boys can best be described in this way. If Aron should come upon an anthill in a little clearing in the brush, he would lie on his stomach and watch the complications of ant life--he would see some of them bringing food in the ant roads and others carrying the white eggs. He would see how two members of the hill on meeting put their antennas together and talked. For hours he would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground.
If, on the other hand, Cal came upon the same anthill, he would kick it to pieces and watch while the frantic ants took care of their disaster. Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.
Cal did not question the fact that people liked his brother better, but he had developed a means for making it all right with himself. He planned and waited until one time that admiring person exposed himself, and then something happened and the victim never knew how or why. Out of revenge Cal extracted a fluid of power, and out of power, joy. It was the strongest, purest emotion he knew. Far from disliking Aron, he loved him because he was usually the cause for Cal’s feelings of triumph. He had forgotten--if he had ever known--that he punished because he wished he could be loved as Aron was loved. It had gone so far that he preferred what he had to what Aron had.
Abra had started a process in Cal by touching Aron and by the softness of her voice toward him. Cal’s reaction was automatic. His brain probed for a weakness in Abra, and so clever was he that he found one almost at once in her words. Some children want to be babies and some want to be adults. Few are content with their age. Abra wanted to be an adult. She used adult words and simulated, insofar as she was able, adult attitudes and emotions. She had left babyhood far behind, and she was not capable yet of being one of the grownups she admired. Cal sensed this, and it gave him the instrument to knock down her anthill.
He knew about how long it would take his brother to find the box. He could see in his mind what would happen. Aron would try to wash the blood off the rabbit, and this would take time. Finding string would take more time, and the careful tying of the bow knots still more time. And meanwhile Cal knew he was beginning to win. He felt Abra’s certainty wavering and he knew that he could prod it further.
Abra looked away from him at last and said, “What do you stare at a person for?”
Cal looked at her feet and slowly raised his eyes, going over her as coldly as if she were a chair. This, he knew, could make even an adult nervous.
Abra couldn’t stand it. She said, “See anything green?”
Cal asked, “Do you go to school?”
“Of course I do.”
“What grade?”
“High fifth.”
“How old are you?”
“Going on eleven.”
Cal laughed.
“What’s wrong with that?” she demanded. He didn’t answer her. “Come on, tell me! What’s wrong with that?” Still no answer. “You think you’re mighty smart,” she said, and when he continued to laugh at her she said uneasily, “I wonder what’s taking your brother so long. Look, the rain’s stopped.”
Cal said, “I guess he’s looking around for it.”
“You mean, for the rabbit?”
“Oh, no. He’s got that all right--it’s dead. But maybe he can’t catch the other. It gets away.”
“Catch what? What gets away?”
“He wouldn’t want me to tell,” said Cal. “He wants it to be a surprise. He caught it last Friday. It bit him too.”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
“You’ll see,” said Cal, “when you open the box. I bet he tells you not to open it right off.” This was not a guess. Cal knew his brother.
Abra knew she was losing not only the battle but the whole war. She began to hate this boy. In her mind she went over the deadly retorts she knew and gave them all up in helplessness, feeling they would have no effect. She retired into silence. She walked out of the door and looked toward the house where her parents were.
“I think I’ll go back,” she said.
“Wait,” said Cal.
She turned as he came up with her. “What do you want?” she asked coldly.
“Don’t be mad with me,” he said. “You don’t know what goes on here. You should see my brother’s back.”
His change of pace bewildered her. He never let her get set in an attitude, and he had properly read her interest in romantic situations. His voice was low and secret. She lowered her voice to match his.
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with his back?”
“All scars,” said Cal. “It’s the Chinaman.”
She shivered and tensed with interest. “What does he do? Does he beat him?”
“Worse than that,” said Cal.
“Why don’t you tell your father?”
“We don’t dare. Do you know what would happen if we told?”
“No. What?”
He shook his head. “No”--he seemed to think carefully--“I don’t even dare tell you.”
At that moment Lee came from the shed leading the Bacons’ horse hitched to the high spindly rig with rubber tires. Mr. and Mrs. Bacon came out of the house and automatically they all looked up at the sky. Cal said, “I can’t tell you now. The Chinaman would know if I told.”
Mrs. Bacon called, “Abra! Hurry! We’re going.” Lee held the restive horse while Mrs. Bacon was helped up into the rig.
Aron came dashing around the house, carrying a cardboard box intricately tied with string in fancy bow knots. He thrust it at Abra. “Here,” he said. “Don’t untie it until you get home.”
Cal saw revulsion on Abra’s face. Her hands shrank away from the box.
“Take it, dear,” her father said. “Hurry, we’re very late.” He thrust the box into her hands.
Cal stepped close to her. “I want to whisper,” he said. He put his mouth to her ear. “You’ve wet your pants,” he said. She blushed and pulled the sunbonnet up over her head. Mrs. Bacon picked her up under the arms and passed her into the buggy.
Lee and Adam and the twins watched the horse pick up a fine trot.
Before the first turn Abra’s hand came up and the box went sailing backward into the road. Cal watched his brother’s face and saw misery come into Aron’s eyes. When Adam had gone back into the house and Lee was moving out with a pan of grain to feed the chickens, Cal put his arm around his brother’s shoulders and hugged him reassuringly.
“I wanted to marry her,” Aron said. “I put a letter in the box, asking her.”
“Don’t be sad,” said Cal. “I’m going to let you use my rifle.”
Aron’s head jerked around. “You haven’t got a rifle.”
“Haven’t I?” Cal said. “Haven’t I though?”

Chapter 28


1
It was at the supper table that the boys discovered the change in their father. They knew him as a presence--as ears that heard but did not listen, eyes that looked and did not notice. He was a cloud of a father. The boys had never learned to tell him of their interests and discoveries, or of their needs. Lee had been their contact with the adult world, and Lee had managed not only to raise, feed, clothe, and discipline the boys, but he had also given them a respect for their father. He was a mystery to the boys, and his word, his law, was carried down by Lee, who naturally made it up himself and ascribed it to Adam.
This night, the first after Adam’s return from Salinas, Cal and Aron were first astonished and then a little embarrassed to find that Adam listened to them and asked questions, looked at them and saw them. The change made them timid.
Adam said, “I hear you were hunting today.”
The boys became cautious as humans always are, faced with a new situation. After a pause Aron admitted, “Yes, sir.”
“Did you get anything?”
This time a longer pause, and then, “Yes, sir.”
“What did you get?”
“A rabbit.”
“With bows and arrows? Who got him?”
Aron said, “We both shot. We don’t know which one hit.”
Adam said, “Don’t you know your own arrows? We used to mark our arrows when I was a boy.”
This time Aron refused to answer and get into trouble. And Cal, after waiting, said, “Well, it was my arrow, all right, but we think it might have got in Aron’s quiver.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know,” Cal said. “But I think it was Aron hit the rabbit.”
Adam swung his eyes. “And what do you think?”
“I think maybe I hit it--but I’m not sure.”
“Well, you both seem to handle the situation very well.”
The alarm went out of the faces of the boys. It did not seem to be a trap.
“Where is the rabbit?” Adam asked.
Cal said, “Aron gave it to Abra as a present.”
“She threw it out,” said Aron.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to marry her too.”
“You did?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How about you, Cal?”
“I guess I’ll let Aron have her,” said Cal.
Adam laughed, and the boys could not recall ever having heard him laugh. “Is she a nice little girl?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Aron. “She’s nice, all right. She’s good and nice.”
“Well, I’m glad of that if she’s going to be my daughter-in-law.”
Lee cleared the table and after a quick rattling in the kitchen he came back. “Ready to go to bed?” he asked the boys.
They glared in protest. Adam said, “Sit down and let them stay a while.”
“I’ve got the accounts together. We can go over them later,” said Lee.
“What accounts, Lee?”
“The house and ranch accounts. You said you wanted to know where you stood.”
“Not the accounts for over ten years, Lee!”
“You never wanted to be bothered before.”
“I guess that’s right. But sit a while. Aron wants to marry the little girl who was here today.”
“Are they engaged?” Lee asked.
“I don’t think she’s accepted him yet,” said Adam. “That may give us some time.”
Cal had quickly lost his awe of the changed feeling in the house and had been examining this anthill with calculating eyes, trying to determine just how to kick it over. He made his decision.
“She’s a real nice girl,” he said. “I like her. Know why? Well, she said to ask you where our mother’s grave is, so we can take some flowers.”
“Could we, Father?” Aron asked. “She said she would teach us how to make wreaths.”
Adam’s mind raced. He was not good at lying to begin with, and he hadn’t practiced. The solution frightened him, it came so quickly to his mind and so glibly to his tongue. Adam said, “I wish we could do that, boys. But I’ll have to tell you. Your mother’s grave is clear across the country where she came from.”
“Why?” Aron asked.
“Well, some people want to be buried in the place they came from.”
“How did she get there?” Cal asked. “We put her on a train and sent her home--didn’t we, Lee?”
Lee nodded. “It’s the same with us,” he said. “Nearly all Chinese get sent home to China after they die.”
“I know that,” said Aron. “You told us that before.”
“Did I?” Lee asked.
“Sure you did,” said Cal. He was vaguely disappointed.
Adam quickly changed the subject. “Mr. Bacon made a suggestion this afternoon,” he began. “I’d like you boys to think about it. He said it might be better for you if we moved to Salinas--better schools and lots of other children to play with.”
The thought stunned the twins. Cal asked, “How about here?”
“Well, we’d keep the ranch in case we want to come back.”
Aron said, “Abra lives in Salinas.” And that was enough for Aron. Already he had forgotten the sailing box. All he could think of was a small apron and a sunbonnet and soft little fingers.
Adam said, “Well, you think about it. Maybe you should go to bed now. Why didn’t you go to school today?”
“The teacher’s sick,” said Aron.
Lee verified it. “Miss Gulp has been sick for three days,” he said. “They don’t have to go back until Monday. Come on, boys.”
They followed him obediently from the room.

2
Adam sat smiling vaguely at the lamp and tapping his knee with a forefinger until Lee came back. Adam said, “Do they know anything?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee.
“Well, maybe it was just the little girl.”
Lee went to the kitchen and brought back a big cardboard box. “Here are the accounts. Every year has a rubber band around it. I’ve been over it. It’s complete.”
“You mean all accounts?”
Lee said, “You’ll find a book for each year and receipted bills for everything. You wanted to know how you stood. Here it is--all of it. Do you really think you’ll move?”
“Well, I’m thinking of it.”
“I wish there were some way you could tell the boys the truth.”
“That would rob them of the good thoughts about their mother, Lee.”
“Have you thought of the other danger?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, suppose they find out the truth. Plenty of people know.”
“Well, maybe when they’re older it will be easier for them.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Lee. “But that’s not the worst danger.”
“I guess I don’t follow you, Lee.”
“It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.”
“Yes, I see. But what can I tell them? I couldn’t tell them the whole truth.”
“Maybe you can tell then a part truth, enough so that you won’t suffer if they find out.”
“I’ll have to think about that, Lee.”
“If you go to live in Salinas it will be more dangerous.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
Lee went on insistently, “My father told me about my mother when I was very little, and he didn’t spare me. He told me a number of times as I was growing. Of course it wasn’t the same, but it was pretty dreadful. I’m glad he told me though. I wouldn’t like not to know.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“No, I don’t want to. But it might persuade you to make some change for your own boys. Maybe if you just said she went away and you don’t know where.”
“But I do know.”
“Yes, there’s the trouble. It’s bound to be all truth or part lie. Well, I can’t force you.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Adam. “What’s the story about your mother?”
“You really want to hear?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I’ll make it very short,” said Lee. “My first memory is of living in a little dark shack alone with my father in the middle of a potato field, and with it the memory of my father telling me the story of my mother. His language was Cantonese, but whenever he told the story he spoke in high and beautiful Mandarin. All right then. I’ll tell you--” And Lee looked back in time.
“I’ll have to tell you first that when you built the railroads in the West the terrible work of grading and laying ties and spiking the rails was done by many thousands of Chinese. They were cheap, they worked hard, and if they died no one had to worry. They were recruited largely from Canton, for the Cantonese are short and strong and durable, and also they are not quarrelsome. They were brought in by contract, and perhaps the history of my father was a fairly typical one.
“You must know that a Chinese must pay all of his debts on or before our New Year’s day. He starts every year clean. If he does not, he loses face; but not only that--his family loses face. There are no excuses.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Adam.
“Well, good or bad, that’s the way it was. My father had some bad luck. He could not pay a debt. The family met and discussed the situation. Ours is an honorable family. The bad luck was nobody’s fault, but the unpaid debt belonged to the whole family. They paid my father’s debt and then he had to repay them, and that was almost impossible.
“One thing the recruiting agents for the railroad companies did--they paid down a lump of money on the signing of the contract. In this way they caught a great many men who had fallen into debt. All of this was reasonable and honorable. There was only one black sorrow.
“My father was a young man recently married, and his tie to his wife was very strong and deep and warm, and hers to him must have been--overwhelming. Nevertheless, with good manners they said good-by in the presence of the heads of the family. I have often thought that perhaps formal good manners may be a cushion against heartbreak.
“The herds of men went like animals into the black hold of a ship, there to stay until they reached San Francisco six weeks later. And you can imagine what those holes were like. The merchandise had to be delivered in some kind of working condition so it was not mistreated. And my people have learned through the ages to live close together, to keep clean and fed under intolerable conditions.
“They were a week at sea before my father discovered my mother. She was dressed like a man and she had braided her hair in a man’s queue. By sitting very still and not talking, she had not been discovered, and of course there were no examinations or vaccinations then. She moved her mat close to my father. They could not talk except mouth to ear in the dark. My father was angry at her disobedience, but he was glad too.
“Well, there it was. They were condemned to hard labor for five years. It did not occur to them to run away once they were in America, for they were honorable people and they had signed the contract.”
Lee paused. “I thought I could tell it in a few sentences,” he said. “But you don’t know the background. I’m going to get a cup of water--do you want some?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. How could a woman do that kind of work?”
“I’ll be back in a moment,” said Lee, and he went to the kitchen. He brought back tin cups of water and put them on the table. He. asked, “Now what did you want to know?”
“How could your mother do a man’s work?”
Lee smiled. “My father said she was a strong woman, and I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.”
Adam made a wry grimace.
Lee said, “You’ll see one day, you’ll see.”
“I didn’t mean to think badly,” said Adam. “How could I know out of one experience? Go on.”
“One thing my mother did not whisper in my father’s ear during that long miserable crossing. And because a great many were deadly seasick, no remark was made of her illness.”
Adam cried, “She wasn’t pregnant!”
“She was pregnant,” said Lee. “And she didn’t want to burden my father with more worries.”
“Did she know about it when she started?”
“No, she did not. I set my presence in the world at the most inconvenient time. It’s a longer story than I thought.”
“Well, you can’t stop now,” said Adam.
“No, I suppose not. In San Francisco the flood of muscle and bone flowed into cattle cars and the engines puffed up the mountains. They were going to dig hills aside in the Sierras and burrow tunnels under the peaks. My mother got herded into another car, and my father didn’t see her until they got to their camp on a high mountain meadow. It was very beautiful, with green grass and flowers and the snow mountains all around. And only then did she tell my father about me.
“They went to work. A woman’s muscles harden just as a man’s do, and my mother had a muscular spirit too. She did the pick and shovel work expected of her, and it must have been dreadful. But a panic worry settled on them about how she was going to have the baby.”
Adam said, “Were they ignorant? Why couldn’t she have gone to the boss and told him she was a woman and pregnant? Surely they would have taken care of her.”
“You see?” said Lee. “I haven’t told you enough. And that’s why this is so long. They were not ignorant. These human cattle were imported for one thing only--to work. When the work was done, those who were not dead were to be shipped back. Only males were brought--no females. The country did not want them breeding. A man and a woman and a baby have a way of digging in, of pulling the earth where they are about them and scratching out a home. And then it takes all hell to root them out. But a crowd of men, nervous, lusting, restless, half sick with loneliness for women--why, they’ll go anywhere, and particularly will they go home. And my mother was the only woman in this pack of half-crazy, half-savage men. The longer the men worked and ate, the more restless they became. To the bosses they were not people but animals which could be dangerous if not controlled. You can see why my mother did not ask for help. Why, they’d have rushed her out of the camp and--who knows?--perhaps shot and buried her like a diseased cow. Fifteen men were shot for being a little mutinous.
“No--they kept order the way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them--always the whip, the rope, and the rifle. I wish I hadn’t started to tell you this--”
“Why should you not tell me?” Adam asked.
“I can see my father’s face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain. Telling it, my father had to stop and gain possession of himself, and when he continued he spoke sternly and he used hard sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them.
“These two managed to stay close together by claiming she was my father’s nephew. The months went by and fortunately for them there was very little abdominal swelling, and she worked in pain and out of it. My father could only help her a little, apologizing, ‘My nephew is young and his bones are brittle.’ They had no plan. They did not know what to do.
“And then my father figured out a plan. They would run into the high mountains to one of the higher meadows, and there beside a lake they would make a burrow for the birthing, and when my mother was safe and the baby born, my father would come back and take his punishment. And he would sign for an extra five years to pay for his delinquent nephew. Pitiful as their escape was, it was all they had, and it seemed a brightness. The plan had two requirements--the timing had to be right and a supply of food was necessary.”
Lee said, “My parents”--and he stopped, smiling over his use of the word, and it felt so good that he warmed it up--”my dear parents began to make their preparations. They saved a part of their daily rice and hid it under their sleeping mats. My father found a length of string and filed out a hook from a piece of wire, for there were trout to be caught in the mountain lakes. He stopped smoking to save the matches issued. And my mother collected every tattered scrap of cloth she could find and unraveled edges to make thread and sewed this ragbag together with a splinter to make swaddling clothes for me. I wish I had known her.”
“So do I,” said Adam. “Did you ever tell this to Sam Hamilton?”
“No I didn’t. I wish I had. He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like a personal triumph to him.”
“I hope they got there,” said Adam.
“I know. And when my father would tell me I would say to him, ‘Get to that lake--get my mother there--don’t let it happen again, not this time. Just once let’s tell it: how you got to the lake and built a house of fir boughs.’ And my father became very Chinese then. He said, There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.’ ”
“Get on with it,” Adam said irritably.
Lee got up and went to the window, and he finished the story, looking out at the stars that winked and blew in the March wind.
“A little boulder jumped down a hill and broke my father’s leg. They set the leg and gave him cripples’ work, straightening used nails with a hammer on a rock. And whether with worry or work--it doesn’t matter--my mother went into early labor. And then the half-mad men knew and they went all mad. One hunger sharpened another hunger, and one crime blotted out the one before it, and the little crimes committed against those starving men flared into one gigantic maniac crime.
“My father heard the shout ‘Woman’ and he knew. He tried to run and his leg rebroke under him and he crawled up the ragged slope to the roadbed where it was happening.
“When he got there a kind of sorrow had come over the sky, and the Canton men were creeping away to hide and to forget that men can be like this. My father came to her on the pile of shale. She had not even eyes to see out of, but her mouth still moved and she gave him his instructions. My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails. She died on the shale in the afternoon.”
Adam was breathing hard. Lee continued in a singsong cadence, “Before you hate those men you must know this. My father always told it at the last: No child ever had such care as I. The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty--a dreadful kind of beauty. And now good night. I can’t talk any more.”

3
Adam restlessly opened drawers and looked up at the shelves and raised the lids of boxes in his house and at last he was forced to call Lee back and ask, “Where’s the ink and the pen?”
“You don’t have any,” said Lee. “You haven’t written a word in years. I’ll lend you mine if you want.” He went to his room and brought back a squat bottle of ink and a stub pen and a pad of paper and an envelope and laid them on the table.
Adam asked, “How do you know I want to write a letter?”
“You’re going to try to write to your brother, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“It will be a hard thing to do after so long,” said Lee.
And it was hard. Adam nibbled and munched on the pen and his mouth made strained grimaces. Sentences were written and the page thrown away and another started. Adam scratched his head with the penholder. “Lee, if I wanted to take a trip east, would you stay with the twins until I get back?”
“It’s easier to go than to write,” said Lee. “Sure I’ll stay.”
“No. I’m going to write.”
“Why don’t you ask your brother to come out here?”
“Say, that’s a good idea, Lee. I didn’t think of it.”
“It also gives you a reason for writing, and that’s a good thing.”
The letter came fairly easily then, was corrected and copied fair. Adam read it slowly to himself before he put it in the envelope.
“Dear brother Charles,” it said. “You will be surprised to hear from me after so long. I have thought of writing many times, but you know how a man puts it off.
“I wonder how this letter finds you. I trust in good health. For all I know you may have five or even ten children by now. Ha! Ha! I have two sons and they are twins. Their mother is not here. Country life did not agree with her. She lives in a town nearby and I see her now and then.
“I have got a fine ranch, but I am ashamed to say I do not keep it up very well. Maybe I will do better from now on. I always did make good resolutions. But for a number of years I felt poorly. I am well now.
“How are you and how do you prosper? I would like to see you. Why don’t you come to visit here? It is a great country and you might even find a place where you would like to settle. No cold winters here. That makes a difference to ‘old men’ like us. Ha! Ha!
“Well, Charles, I hope you will think about it and let me know. The trip would do you good. I want to see you. I have much to tell you that I can’t write down.
“Well, Charles, write me a letter and tell me all the news of the old home. I suppose many things have happened. As you get older you hear mostly about people you knew that died. I guess that is the way of the world. Write quick and tell me if you will come to visit. Your brother Adam.”
He sat holding the letter in his hand and looking over it at his brother’s dark face and its scarred forehead. Adam could see the glinting heat in the brown eyes, and as he looked he saw the lips writhe back from the teeth and the blind destructive animal take charge. He shook his head to rid his memory of the vision, and he tried to rebuild the face smiling. He tried to remember the forehead before the scar, but he could not bring either into focus. He seized the pen and wrote below his signature, “P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother.”
Adam folded the letter and forced the creases sharp with his fingernails. He sealed the envelope flap with his fist. “Lee!” he called, “Oh, Lee!”
The Chinese looked in through the door.
“Lee, how long does it take a letter to go east--clear east?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “Two weeks maybe.”

Chapter 29


1
After his first letter to his brother in over ten years was mailed Adam became impatient for an answer. He forgot how much time had elapsed. Before the letter got as far as San Francisco he was asking aloud in Lee’s hearing, “I wonder why he doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s mad at me for not writing. But he didn’t write either. No--he didn’t know where to write. Maybe he’s moved away.”
Lee answered, “It’s only been gone a few days. Give it time.”
“I wonder whether he would really come out here?” Adam asked himself, and he wondered whether he wanted Charles. Now that the letter was gone, Adam was afraid Charles might accept. He was like a restless child whose fingers stray to every loose article. He interfered with the twins, asked them innumerable questions about school.
“Well, what did you learn today?”
“Nothing!”
“Oh, come! You must have learned something. Did you read?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you read?”
“That old one about the grasshopper and the ant.”
“Well, that’s interesting.”
“There’s one about an eagle carries a baby away.”
“Yes, I remember that one. I forget what happens.”
“We aren’t to it yet. We saw the pictures.”
The boys were disgusted. During one of Adam’s moments of fatherly bungling Cal borrowed his pocketknife, hoping he would forget to ask for it back. But the sap was beginning to run freely in the willows. The bark would slip easily from a twig. Adam got his knife back to teach the boys to make willow whistles, a thing Lee had taught them three years before. To make it worse, Adam had forgotten how to make the cut. He couldn’t get a peep out of his whistles.
At noon one day Will Hamilton came roaring and bumping up the road in a new Ford. The engine raced in its low gear, and the high top swayed like a storm-driven ship. The brass radiator and the Prestolite tank on the running board were blinding with brass polish.
Will pulled up the brake lever, turned the switch straight down, and sat back in the leather seat. The car backfired several times without ignition because it was overheated.
“Here she is!” Will called with a false enthusiasm. He hated Fords with a deadly hatred, but they were daily building his fortune.
Adam and Lee hung over the exposed insides of the car while Will Hamilton, puffing under the burden of his new fat, explained the workings of a mechanism he did not understand himself.
It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.
Will Hamilton explained the car and went back and explained it again. His customers were wide-eyed, interested as terriers, cooperative, and did not interrupt, but as he began for the third time Will saw that he was getting no place.
“Tell you what!” he said brightly. “You see, this isn’t my line. I wanted you to see her. and listen to her before I made delivery. Now, I’ll go back to town and tomorrow I’ll send out this car with an expert, and he’ll tell you more in a few minutes than I could in a week. But I just wanted you to see her.”
Will had forgotten some of his own instructions. He cranked for a while and then borrowed a buggy and a horse from Adam and drove to town, but he promised to have a mechanic out the next day.

2
There was no question of sending the twins to school the next day. They wouldn’t have gone. The Ford stood tall and aloof and dour under the oak tree where Will had stopped it. Its new owners circled it and touched it now and then, the way you touch a dangerous horse to soothe him.
Lee said, “I wonder whether I’ll ever get used to it.”
“Of course you will,” Adam said without conviction. “Why, you’ll be driving all over the county first thing you know.”
“I will try to understand it,” Lee said. “But drive it I will not.”
The boys made little dives in and out, to touch something and leap away. “What’s this do-hickey, Father?”
“Get your hands off that.”
“But what’s it for?”
“I don’t know, but don’t touch it. You don’t know what might happen.”
“Didn’t the man tell you?”
“I don’t remember what he said. Now you boys get away from it or I’ll have to send you to school. Do you hear me, Cal? Don’t open that.”
They had got up and were ready very early in the morning. By eleven o’clock hysterical nervousness had set in. The mechanic drove up in the buggy in time for the midday meal. He wore box-toed shoes and Duchess trousers and his wide square coat came almost to his knees. Beside him in the buggy was a satchel in which were his working clothes and tools. He was nineteen and chewed tobacco, and from his three months in automobile school he had gained a great though weary contempt for human beings. He spat and threw the lines at Lee.
“Put this hayburner away,” he said, “How do you tell which end is the front?” And he climbed down from the rig as an ambassador comes out of a state train. He sneered at the twins and turned coldly to Adam, “I hope I’m in time for dinner,” he said.
Lee and Adam stared at each other. They had forgotten about the noonday meal.
In the house the godling grudgingly accepted cheese and bread and cold meat and pie and coffee and a piece of chocolate cake.
“I’m used to a hot dinner,” he said. “You better keep those kids away if you want any car left.” After a leisurely meal and a short rest on the porch the mechanic took his satchel into Adam’s bedroom. In a few minutes he emerged, dressed in striped overalls and a white cap which had “Ford” printed on the front of its crown.
“Well,” he said. “Done any studying?”
“Studying?” Adam said.
“Ain’t you even read the litature in the book under the seat?”
“I didn’t know it was there,” said Adam.
“Oh, Lord,” said the young man disgustedly. With a courageous gathering of his moral forces he moved with decision toward the car. “Might as well get started,” he said. “God knows how long it’s going to take if you ain’t studied.”
Adam said, “Mr. Hamilton couldn’t start it last night.”
“He always tries to start it on the magneto,” said the sage. “All right! All right, come along. Know the principles of a internal combustion engine?”
“No,” said Adam.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” He lifted the tin flaps. “This-here is a internal combustion engine,” he said.
Lee said quietly, “So young to be so erudite.”
The boy swung around toward him, scowling. “What did you say?” he demanded, and he asked Adam, “What did the Chink say?”
Lee spread his hands and smiled blandly. “Say velly smaht fella,” he observed quietly. “Mebbe go college. Velly wise.”
“Just call me Joe!” the boy said for no reason at all, and he added, “College! What do them fellas know? Can they set a timer, huh? Can they file a point? College!” And he spat a brown disparaging comment on the ground. The twins regarded him with admiration, and Cal collected spit on the back of his tongue to practice.
Adam said, “Lee was admiring your grasp of the subject.”
The truculence went out of the boy and a magnanimity took its place. “Just call me Joe,” he said. “I ought to know it. Went to automobile school in Chicago. That’s a real school--not like no college.” And he said, “My old man says you take a good Chink, I mean a good one--why, he’s about as good as anybody. They’re honest.”
“But not the bad ones,” said Lee.
“Hell no! Not no highbinders nor nothing like that. But good Chinks.”
“I hope I may be included in that group?”
“You look like a good Chink to me. Just call me Joe.”
Adam was puzzled at the conversation, but the twins weren’t. Cal said experimentally to Aron, “Jus’ call me Joe,” and Aron moved his lips, trying out, “Jus’ call me Joe.”
The mechanic became professional again but his tone was kinder. An amused friendliness took the place of his former contempt. “This-here,” he said, “is a internal combustion engine.” They looked down at the ugly lump of iron with a certain awe.
Now the boy went on so rapidly that the words ran together into a great song of the new era. “Operates through the explosion of gases in a enclosed space. Power of explosion is exerted on piston and through connecting rod and crankshaft through transmission thence to rear wheels. Got that?” They nodded blankly, afraid to stop the flow. “They’s two kinds, two cycle and four cycle. This-here is four cycle. Got that?”
Again they nodded. The twins, looking up into his face with adoration, nodded.
“That’s interesting,” said Adam.
Joe went on hurriedly, “Main difference of a Ford automobile from other kinds is its planetary transmission which operates on a rev-rev-a-lu-shun-ary principle.” He pulled up for a moment, his face showing strain. And when his four listeners nodded again he cautioned them, “Don’t get the idea you know it all. The planetary system is, don’t forget, rev-a-lu-shun-ary. You better study up on it in the book. Now, if you got all that we’ll go on to Operation of the Automobile.” He said this in boldface type, capital letters. He was obviously glad to be done with the first part of his lecture, but he was no gladder than his listeners. The strain of concentration was beginning to tell on them, and it was not made any better by the fact that they had not understood one single word.
“Come around here,” said the boy. “Now you see that-there? That’s the ignition key. When you turn that-there you’re ready to go ahead. Now, you push this do-hickey to the left. That puts her on battery--see, where it says Bat. That means battery.” They craned their necks into the car. The twins were standing on the running board.
“No--wait. I got ahead of myself. First you got to retard the spark and advance the gas, else she’ll kick your goddam arm off. This-here--see it?--this-here’s the spark. You push it up--get it?--up. Clear up. And this-here’s the gas--you push her down. Now I’m going to explain it and then I’m going to do it. I want you to pay attention. You kids get off the car. You’re in my light. Get down, goddam it.” The boys reluctantly climbed down from the running board; only their eyes looked over the door.
He took a deep breath. “Now you ready? Spark retarded, gas advanced. Spark up, gas down. Now switch to battery--left, remember--left.” A buzzing like that of a gigantic bee sounded. “Hear that? That’s the contact in one of the coil boxes. If you don’t get that, you got to adjust the points or maybe file them.” He noticed a look of consternation on Adam’s face. “You can study up on that in the book,” he said kindly.
He moved to the front of the car. “Now this-here is the crank and--see this little wire sticking out of the radiator?--that’s the choke. Now watch careful while I show you. You grab the crank like this and push till she catches. See how my thumb is turned down? If I grabbed her the other way with my thumb around her, and she was to kick, why, she’d knock my thumb off. Got it?”
He didn’t look up but he knew they were nodding.
“Now,” he said, “look careful. I push in and bring her up until I got compression, and then, why, I pull out this wire and I bring her around careful to suck gas in. Hear that sucking sound? That’s choke. But don’t pull her too much or you’ll flood her. Now, I let go the wire and I give her a hell of spin, and as soon as she catches I run around and advance the spark and retard the gas and I reach over and throw the switch quick over to magneto--see where it says Mag?--and there you are.”
His listeners were limp. After all this they had just got the engine started.
The boy kept at them. “I want you to say after me now so you learn it. Spark up--gas down.”
They repeated in chorus, “Spark up--gas down.”
“Switch to Bat.”
“Switch to Bat.”
“Crank to compression, thumb down.”
“Crank to compression, thumb down.”
“Easy over--choke out.”
“Easy over--choke out.”
“Spin her.”
“Spin her.”
“Spark down--gas up.”
“Spark down--gas up.”
“Switch to Mag.”
“Switch to Mag.”
“Now, we’ll go over her again. Just call me Joe.”
“Just call you Joe.”
“Not that. Spark up--gas down.”
A kind of weariness settled on Adam as they went over the litany for the fourth time. The process seemed silly to him. He was relieved when a short time later Will Hamilton drove up in his low sporty red car. The boy looked at the approaching vehicle. “That-there’s got sixteen valves,” he said in a reverent tone. “Special job.”
Will leaned out of his car. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Just fine,” said the mechanic. “They catch on quick.”
“Look, Roy, I’ve got to take you in. The new hearse knocked out a bearing. You’ll have to work late to get it ready for Mrs. Hawks at eleven tomorrow.”
Roy snapped to efficient attention. “I’ll get my clos’,” he said and ran for the house. As he tore back with his satchel Cal stood in his way.
“Hey,” Cal said, “I thought your name was Joe.”
“How do you mean, Joe?”
“You told us to call you Joe. Mr. Hamilton says you’re Roy.”
Roy laughed and jumped into the roadster. “Know why I say call me Joe?”
“No. Why?”
“Because my name is Roy.” In the midst of his laughter he stopped and said sternly to Adam, “You get that book under the seat and you study up. Hear me?”
“I will,” said Adam.

Chapter 30


1
Even as in Biblical times, there were miracles on the earth in those days. One week after the lesson a Ford bumped up the main street of King City and pulled to a shuddering stop in front of the post office. Adam sat at the wheel with Lee beside him and the two boys straight and grand in the back seat.
Adam looked down at the floorboards, and all four chanted in unison, “Brake on--advance gas--switch off.” The little engine roared and then stopped. Adam sat back for a moment, limp but proud, before he got out.
The postmaster looked out between the bars of his golden grill. “I see you’ve got one of the damn things,” he said.
“Have to keep up with the times,” said Adam.
“I predict there’ll come a time when you can’t find a horse, Mr. Trask.”
“Maybe so.”
“They’ll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything,” the postmaster went on. “We even feel it here. Man used to come for his mail once a week. Now he comes every day, sometimes twice a day. He just can’t wait for his damn catalogue. Running around. Always running around.” He was so violent in his dislike that Adam knew he hadn’t bought a Ford yet. It was a kind of jealousy coming out. “I wouldn’t have one around,” the postmaster said, and this meant that his wife was at him to buy one. It was the women who put the pressure on. Social status was involved.
The postmaster angrily shuffled through the letters from the T box and tossed out a long envelope. “Well, I’ll see you in the hospital,” he said viciously.
Adam smiled at him and took his letter and walked out.
A man who gets few letters does not open one lightly. He hefts it for weight, reads the name of the sender on the envelope and the address, looks at the handwriting, and studies the postmark and the date. Adam was out of the post office and across the sidewalk to his Ford before he had done all of these things. The left-hand corner of the envelope had printed on it, Bellows and Harvey, Attorneys at Law, and their address was the town in Connecticut from which Adam had come.
He said in a pleasant tone, “Why, I know Bellows and Harvey, know them well. I wonder what they want?” He looked closely at the envelope. “I wonder how they got my address?” He turned the envelope over and looked at the back. Lee watched him, smiling. “Maybe the questions are answered in the letter.”
“I guess so,” Adam said. Once having decided to open the letter, he took out his pocketknife, opened the big blade, and inspected the envelope for a point of ingress, found none, held the letter up to the sun to make sure not to cut the message, tapped the letter to one end of the envelope, and cut off the other end. He blew in the end and extracted the letter with two fingers. He read the letter very slowly.
“Mr. Adam Trask, King City, California, Dear Sir,” it began testily, “For the last six months we have exhausted every means of locating you. We have advertised in newspapers all over the country without success. It was only when your letter to your brother was turned over to us by the local postmaster that we were able to ascertain your whereabouts.” Adam could feel their impatience with him. The next paragraph began a complete change of mood. “It is our sad duty to inform you that your brother Charles Trask is deceased. He died of a lung ailment October 12 after an illness of two weeks, and his body rests in the Odd Fellows cemetery. No stone marks his grave. We presume you will want to undertake this sorrowful duty yourself.”
Adam drew a deep full breath and held it while he read the paragraph again. He breathed out slowly to keep the release from being a sigh. “My brother Charles is dead,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said Lee.
Cal said, “Is he our uncle?”
“He was your Uncle Charles,” said Adam.
“Mine too?” Aron asked.
“Yours too.”
“I didn’t know we had him,” Aron said. “Maybe we can put some flowers on his grave. Abra would help us. She likes to.”
“It’s a long way off--clear across the country.”
Aron said excitedly, “I know! When we take flowers to our mother we’ll take some to our Uncle Charles.” And he said a little sadly, “I wish’t I knew I had him before he was dead.” He felt that he was growing rich in dead relatives. “Was he nice?” Aron asked.
“Very nice,” said Adam. “He was my only brother, just like Cal is your only brother.”
“Were you twins too?”
“No--not twins.”
Cal asked, “Was he rich?”
“Of course not,” said Adam. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Well, if he was rich we’d get it, wouldn’t we?”
Adam said sternly, “At a time of death it isn’t a nice thing to talk about money. We’re sad because he died.”
“How can I be sad?” said Cal. “I never even saw him.”
Lee covered his mouth with his hand to conceal his smile. Adam looked back at the letter, and again it changed mood with its paragraph.
“As attorneys for the deceased it is our pleasant duty to inform you that your brother through industry and judgment amassed a considerable fortune, which in land, securities, and cash is well in excess of one hundred thousand dollars. His will, which was drawn and signed in this office, is in our hands and will be sent to you on your request. By its terms it leaves all money, property, and securities to be divided equally between you and your wife. In the event that your wife is deceased, the total goes to you. The will also stipulates that if you are deceased, all property goes to your wife. We judge from your letter that you are still in the land of the living and we wish to offer our congratulations. Your obedient servants, Bellows and Harvey, by George B. Harvey.” And at the bottom of the page was scrawled, “Dear Adam: Forget not thy servants in the days of thy prosperity. Charles never spent a dime. He pinched a dollar until the eagle screamed. I hope you and your wife will get some pleasure from the money. Is there an opening out there for a good lawyer? I mean myself. Your old friend, Geo. Harvey.”
Adam looked over the edge of the letter at the boys and at Lee. All three were waiting for him to continue. Adam’s mouth shut to a line. He folded the letter, put it in its envelope, and placed the envelope carefully in his inside pocket.
“Any complications?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“I just thought you looked concerned.”
“I’m not. I’m sad about my brother.” Adam was trying to arrange the letter’s information in his mind, and it was as restless as a setting hen scrounging into the nest. He felt that he would have to be alone to absorb it. He climbed into the car and looked blankly at the mechanism. He couldn’t remember a single procedure.
Lee asked, “Want some help?”
“Funny!” said Adam. “I can’t remember where to start.”
Lee and the boys began softly, “Spark up--gas down, switch over to Bat.”
“Oh, yes. Of course, of course.” And while the loud bee hummed in the coil box Adam cranked the Ford and ran to advance the spark and throw the switch to Mag.
They were driving slowly up the lumpy road of the home draw under the oak trees when Lee said, “We forgot to get meat.”
“Did we? I guess we did. Well, can’t we have something else?”
“How about bacon and eggs?”
“That’s fine. That’s good.”
“You’ll want to mail your answer tomorrow,” said Lee. “You can buy meat then.”
“I guess so,” said Adam.
While dinner was preparing Adam sat staring into space. He knew he would have to have help from Lee, if only the help of a listener to clear his own thinking.
Cal had led his brother outside and conducted him to the wagon shed where the tall Ford rested. Cal opened the door and sat behind the wheel. “Come on, get in!” he said.
Aron protested, “Father told us to stay out of it.”
“He won’t ever know. Get in!”
Aron climbed in timidly and eased back in the seat. Cal turned the wheel from side to side. “Honk, honk,” he said, and then, “Know what I think? I think Uncle Charles was rich.”
“He was not.”
“I bet you anything he was.”
“You think our father’d tell a lie.”
“I won’t say that. I just bet he was rich.” They were silent for a while. Cal steered wildly around imaginary curves. He said, “I bet you I can find out.”
“How do you mean?”
“What you got to bet?”
“Nothing,” said Aron.
“How about your deer’s-leg whistle? I bet you this-here taw against that deer’s-leg whistle that we get sent to bed right after supper. Is it a bet?”
“I guess so,” Aron said vaguely. “I don’t see why.”
Cal said, “Father will want to talk to Lee. And I’m going to listen.”
“You won’t dare.”
“You think I won’t.”
“ ’Spose I was to tell.”
Cal’s eyes turned cold and his face darkened. He leaned so close that his voice dropped to a whisper. “You won’t tell. Because if you do--I’ll tell who stole his knife.”
“Nobody stole his knife. He’s got his knife. He opened the letter with it.”
Cal smiled bleakly. “I mean tomorrow,” he said. And Aron saw what he meant and he knew he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t do anything about it. Cal was perfectly safe.
Cal saw the confusion and helplessness on Aron’s face and felt his power, and it made him glad. He could outthink and outplan his brother. He was beginning to think he could do the same thing to his father. With Lee, Cal’s tricks did not work, for Lee’s bland mind moved effortlessly ahead of him and was always there waiting, understanding, and at the last moment cautioning quietly, “Don’t do it.” Cal had respect for Lee and a little fear of him. But Aron here, looking helplessly at him, was a lump of soft mud in his hands. Cal suddenly felt a deep love for his brother and an impulse to protect him in his weakness. He put his arm around Aron.
Aron did not flinch or respond. He drew back a little to see Cal’s face.
Cal said, “See any green grass growing out of my head?”
Aron said, “I don’t know why you go for to do it.”
“How do you mean? Do what?”
“All the tricky, sneaky things,” said Aron.
“What do you mean, sneaky?”
“Well, about the rabbit, and sneaking here in the car. And you did something to Abra. I don’t know what, but it was you made her throw the box away.”
“Ho,” said Cal. “Wouldn’t you like to know!” But he was uneasy.
Aron said slowly. “I wouldn’t want to know that. I’d like to know why you do it. You’re always at something. I just wonder why you do it. I wonder what’s it good for.”
A pain pierced Cal’s heart. His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him. He knew that his brother had found him out. And he felt a longing for Aron to love him. He felt lost and hungry and he didn’t know what to do.
Aron opened the door of the Ford and climbed down and walked out of the wagon shed. For a few moments Cal twisted the steering wheel and tried to imagine he was racing down the road. But it wasn’t any good, and soon he followed Aron back toward the house.

2
When supper was finished and Lee had washed the dishes Adam said, “I think you boys had better go to bed. It’s been a big day.”
Aron looked quickly at Cal and slowly took his deer’s-leg whistle out of his pocket.
Cal said, “I don’t want it.”
Aron said, “It’s yours now.”
“Well, I don’t want it. I won’t have it.”
Aron laid the bone whistle on the table. “It’ll be here for you,” he said.
Adam broke in, “Say, what is this argument? I said you boys should go to bed.”
Cal put on his “little boy” face. “Why?” he asked. “It’s too early to go to bed.”
Adam said, “That wasn’t quite the truth I told you. I want to talk privately to Lee. And it’s getting dark so you can’t go outside, so I want you boys to go to bed--at least to your room. Do you understand?”
Both boys said, “Yes, sir,” and they followed Lee down the hall to their bedroom at the back of the house. In their nightgowns they returned to say good night to their father.
Lee came back to the living room and closed the door to the hall. He picked up the deer’s-leg whistle and inspected it and laid it down. “I wonder what went on there,” he said.
“How do you mean, Lee?”
“Well, some bet was made before supper, and just after supper Aron lost the bet and paid off. What were we talking about?”
“All I can remember is telling them to go to bed.”
“Well, maybe it will come out later,” said Lee.
“Seems to me you put too much stock in the affairs of children. It probably didn’t mean anything.”
“Yes, it meant something.” Then he said, “Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Adam.
“It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”
“And memory.”
“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us. What did you want to talk to me about?”
Adam took the letter from his pocket and put it on the table. “I want you to read this, to read it carefully, and then--I want to talk about it.” Lee took out his half-glasses and put them on. He opened the letter under the lamp and read it.
Adam asked, “Well?”
“Is there an opening here for a lawyer?”
“How do you mean? Oh, I see. Are you making a joke?”
“No, said Lee, “I was not making a joke. In my obscure but courteous Oriental manner I was indicating to you that I would prefer to know your opinion before I offered mine.”
“Are you speaking sharply to me?”
“Yes, I am,” said Lee. “I’ll lay aside my Oriental manner. I’m getting old and cantankerous. I am growing impatient. Haven’t you heard of all Chinese servants that when they get old they remain loyal but they turn mean?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“They aren’t hurt. You want to talk about this letter. Then talk, and I will know from your talk whether I can offer an honest opinion or whether it is better to reassure you in your own.”
“I don’t understand it,” said Adam helplessly.
“Well, you knew your brother. If you don’t understand it, how can I, who never saw him?”
Adam got up and opened the hall door and did not see the shadow that slipped behind it. He went to his room and returned and put a faded brown daguerreotype on the table in front of Lee. “That is my brother Charles,” he said, and he went back to the hall door and closed it.
Lee studied the shiny metal under the lamp, shifting the picture this way and that to overcome the highlights. “It’s a long time ago,” Adam said. “Before I went into the army.”
Lee leaned close to the picture. “It’s hard to make out. But from his expression I wouldn’t say your brother had much humor.”
“He hadn’t any,” said Adam. “He never laughed.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly what I meant. When I read the terms of your brother’s will it struck me that he might have been a man with a particularly brutal sense of play. Did he like you?”
“I don’t know,” said Adam. “Sometimes I thought he loved me. He tried to kill me once.”
Lee said, “Yes, that’s in his face--both the love and the murder. And the two made a miser of him, and a miser is a frightened man hiding in a fortress of money. Did he know your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Did he love her?”
“He hated her.”
Lee sighed. “It doesn’t really matter. That’s not your problem, is it?”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Would you like to bring the problem out and look at it?”
“That’s what I want.”
“Go ahead then.”
“I can’t seem to get my mind to work clearly.”
“Would you like me to lay out the cards for you? The uninvolved can sometimes do that.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Very well then.” Suddenly Lee grunted and a look of astonishment came over his face. He held his round chin in his thin small hand. “Holy horns!” he said. “I didn’t think of that.”
Adam stirred uneasily. “I wish you’d get off the tack you’re sitting on,” he said irritably. “You make me feel like a column of figures on a blackboard.”
Lee took a pipe from his pocket, a long slender ebony stem with a little cuplike brass bowl. He filled the thimble bowl with tobacco so fine-cut it looked like hair, then lighted the pipe, took four long puffs, and let the pipe go out.
“Is that opium?” Adam demanded.
“No,” said Lee. “It’s a cheap brand of Chinese tobacco, and it has an unpleasant taste.”
“Why do you smoke it then?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “I guess it reminds me of something--something I associate with clarity. Not very complicated.” Lee’s eyelids half closed. “All right then--I’m going to try to pull out your thoughts like egg noodles and let them dry in the sun. The woman is still your wife and she is still alive. Under the letter of the will she inherits something over fifty thousand dollars. That is a great deal of money. A sizable chunk of good or of evil could be done with it. Would your brother, if he knew where she is and what she is doing, want her to have the money? Courts always try to follow the wishes of the testator.”
“My brother would not want that,” said Adam. And then he remembered the girls upstairs in the tavern and Charles’ periodic visits.
“Maybe you’ll have to think for your brother,” said Lee. “What your wife is doing is neither good nor bad. Saints can spring from any soil. Maybe with this money she would do some “fine thing. There’s no springboard to philanthropy like a bad conscience.”
Adam shivered. “She told me what she would do if she had money. It was closer to murder than to charity.”
“You don’t think she should have the money then?”
“She said she would destroy many reputable men in Salinas. She can do it too.”
“I see,” said Lee. “I’m glad I can take a detached view of this. The pants of their reputations must have some thin places. Morally, then, you would be against giving her the money?”
“Yes.”
“Well, consider this. She has no name, no background. A whore springs full blown from the earth. She couldn’t very well claim the money, if she knew about it, without your help.”
“I guess that’s so. Yes, I can see that she might not be able to claim it without my help.”
Lee took up the pipe and picked out the ash with a little brass pin and filled the bowl again. While he drew in the four slow puffs his heavy lids raised and he watched Adam.
“It’s a very delicate moral problem,” he said. “With your permission I shall offer it for the consideration of my honorable relatives--using no names of course. They will go over it as a boy goes over a dog for ticks. I’m sure they will get some interesting results.” He laid his pipe on the table. “But you don’t have any choice, do you?”
“What do you mean by that?” Adam demanded. “Well, do you? Do you know yourself so much less than I do?”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Adam. “I’ll have to give it a lot of thought.”
Lee said angrily, “I guess I’ve been wasting my time. Are you lying to yourself or only to me?”
“Don’t speak to me like that!” Adam said.
“Why not? I have always disliked deception. Your course is drawn. What you will do is written--written in every breath you’ve ever taken. I’ll speak any way I want to. I’m crotchety. I feel sand under my skin. I’m. looking forward to the ugly smell of old books and the sweet smell of good thinking. Faced with two sets of morals, you’ll follow your training. What you call thinking won’t change it. The fact that your wife is a whore in Salinas won’t change a thing.”
Adam got to his feet. His face was angry. “You are insolent now that you’ve decided to go away,” he cried. “I tell you I haven’t made up my mind what to do about the money.”
Lee sighed deeply. He pushed his small body erect with his hands against his knees. He walked wearily to the front door and opened it. He turned back and smiled at Adam. “Bull shit!” he said amiably, and he went out and closed the door behind him.

3
Cal crept quietly down the dark hall and edged into the room where he and his brother slept. He saw the outline of his brother’s head against the pillow in the double bed, but he could not see whether Aron slept. Very gently he eased himself in on his side and turned slowly and laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the myriads of tiny colored dots that make up darkness. The window shade bellied slowly in and then the night wind fell and the worn shade flapped quietly against the window.
A gray, quilted melancholy descended on him. He wished with all his heart that Aron had not walked away from him out of the wagon shed. He wished with all his heart that he had not crouched listening at the hall door. He moved his lips in the darkness and made the words silently in his head and yet he could hear them.
“Dear Lord,” he said, “let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.” Slow warm tears were running down his cheeks. His muscles were tight and he fought against making any crying sound or sniffle.
Aron whispered from his pillow in the dark, “You’re cold. You’ve got a chill.” He stretched out his hand to Cal’s arm and felt the goose bumps there. He asked softly, “Did Uncle Charles have any money?”
“No,” said Cal.
“Well, you were out there long enough. What did Father want to talk about?”
Cal lay still, trying to control his breathing.
“Don’t you want to tell me?” Aron asked. “I don’t care if you don’t tell me.”
“I’ll tell,” Cal whispered. He turned on his side so that his back was toward his brother. “Father is going to send a wreath to our mother. A great big goddam wreath of carnations.”
Aron half sat up in bed and asked excitedly, “He is? How’s he going to get it clear there?”
“On the train. Don’t talk so loud.”
Aron dropped back to a whisper. “But how’s it going to keep fresh?”
“With ice,” said Cal. “They’re going to pack ice all around it.”
Aron asked, “Won’t it take a lot of ice?”
“A whole hell of a lot of ice,” said Cal. “Go to sleep now.”
Aron was silent, and then he said, “I hope it gets there fresh and nice.”
“It will,” said Cal. And in his mind he cried, “Don’t let me be mean.”

Chapter 31


1
Adam brooded around the house all morning, and at noon he went to find Lee, who was spading the dark composted earth of his vegetable garden and planting his spring vegetables, carrots and beets, turnips, peas, and string beans, rutabaga and kale. The rows were straight planted under a tight-stretched string, and the pegs at the row ends carried the seed package to identify the row. On the edge of the garden in a cold frame the tomato and bell pepper and cabbage sets were nearly ready for transplanting, waiting only for the passing of the frost danger.
Adam said, “I guess I was stupid.”
Lee leaned on his spading fork and regarded him quietly.
“When are you going?” he asked.
“I thought I would catch the two-forty. Then I can get the eight o’clock back.”
“You could put it in a letter, you know,” said Lee.
“I’ve thought of that. Would you write a letter?”
“No. You’re right. I’m the stupid one there. No letters.”
“I have to go,” said Adam. “I thought in all directions and always a leash snapped me back.”
Lee said, “You can be unhonest in many ways, but not in that way. Well, good luck. I’ll be interested to hear what she says and does.”
“I’ll take the rig,” said Adam. “I’ll leave it at the stable in King City. I’m nervous about driving the Ford alone.”
It was four-fifteen when Adam climbed the rickety steps and knocked on the weather-beaten door of Kate’s place. A new man opened the door, a square-faced Finn, dressed in shirt and trousers; red silk armbands held up his full sleeves. He left Adam standing on the porch and in a moment came back and led him to the dining room.
It was a large undecorated room, the walls and woodwork painted white. A long square table filled the center of the room, and on the white oilcloth cover the places were set--plates, cups and saucers, and the cups upside down in the saucers.
Kate sat at the head of the table with an account book open before her. Her dress was severe. She wore a green eyeshade, and she rolled a yellow pencil restlessly in her fingers. She looked coldly at Adam as he stood in the doorway.
“What do you want now?” she asked.
The Finn stood behind Adam.
Adam did not reply. He walked to the table and laid the letter in front of her on top of the account book.
“What’s this?” she asked, and without waiting for a reply she read the letter quickly. “Go out and close the door,” she told the Finn.
Adam sat at the table beside her. He pushed the dishes aside to make a place for his hat.
When the door was closed Kate said, “Is this a joke? No, you haven’t got a joke in you.” She considered. “Your brother might be joking. You sure he’s dead?”
“All I have is the letter,” said Adam.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
Adam shrugged his shoulders.
Kate said, “If you want me to sign anything, you’re wasting your time. What do you want?”
Adam drew his finger slowly around his black ribbon hatband. “Why don’t you write down the name of the firm and get in touch with them yourself?”
“What have you told them about me?”
“Nothing,” said Adam. “I wrote to Charles and said you were living in another town, nothing more. He was dead when the letter got there. The letter went to the lawyers. It tells about it.”
“The one who wrote the postscript seems to be a friend of yours. What have you written him?”
“I haven’t answered the letter yet.”
“What do you intend to say when you answer it?”
“The same thing--that you live in another town.”
“You can’t say we’ve been divorced. We haven’t been.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Do you want to know how much it will take to buy me off? I’ll take forty-five thousand in cash.”
“No.”
“What do you mean--no? You can’t bargain.”
“I’m not bargaining. You have the letter, you know as much as I do. Do what you want.”
“What makes you so cocky?”
“I feel safe.”
She peered at him from under the green transparent eyeshade. Little curls of her hair lay on the bill like vines on a green roof. “Adam, you’re a fool. If you had kept your mouth shut nobody would ever have known I was alive.”
“I know that.”
“You know it? Did you think I might be afraid to claim the money? You’re a damn fool if you thought that.”
Adam said patiently, “I don’t care what you do.”
She smiled cynically at him. “You don’t, huh? Suppose I should tell you that there’s a permanent order in the sheriffs office, left there by the old sheriff, that if I ever use your name or admit I’m your wife I’ll get a floater out of the county and out of the state. Does that tempt you?”
“Tempt me to do what?”
“To get me floated and take all the money.”
“I brought you the letter,” Adam said patiently.
“I want to know why.”
Adam said, “I’m not interested in what you think or in what you think of me. Charles left you the money in his will. He didn’t put any strings on it. I haven’t seen the will, but he wanted you to have the money.”
“You’re playing a close game with fifty thousand dollars,” she said, “and you’re not going to get away with it. I don’t know what the trick is, but I’m going to find out.” And then she said, “What am I thinking about? You’re not smart. Who’s advising you?”
“No one.”
“How about that Chinaman? He’s smart.”
“He gave me no advice.” Adam was interested in his own complete lack of emotion. He didn’t really feel that he was here at all. When he glanced at her he surprised an emotion on her face he had never seen before. Kate was afraid--she was afraid of him. But why?
She controlled her face and whipped the fear from it. “You’re just doing it because you’re honest, is that it? You’re just too sugar sweet to live.”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” Adam said. “It’s your money and I’m not a thief. It doesn’t matter to me what you think about it.”
Kate pushed the eyeshade back on her head. “You want me to think you’re just dropping this money in my lap. Well, I’ll find out what you’re up to. Don’t think I won’t take care of myself. Did you think I’d take such a stupid bait?”
“Where do you get your mail?” he asked patiently. “What’s that to you?”
“I’ll write the lawyers where to get in touch with you.”
“Don’t you do it!” she said. She put the letter in the account book and closed the cover. “I’ll keep this. I’ll get legal advice. Don’t think I won’t. You can drop the innocence now.”
“You do that,” Adam said. “I want you to have what is yours. Charles willed you the money. It isn’t mine.”
“I’ll find the trick. I’ll find it.”
Adam said, “I guess you can’t understand it. I don’t much care. There are so many things I don’t understand. I don’t understand how you could shoot me and desert your sons. I don’t understand how you or anyone could live like this.” He waved his hand to indicate the house.
“Who asked you to understand?”
Adam stood up and took his hat from the table. “I guess that’s all,” he said. “Good-by.” He walked toward the door.
She called after him, “You’re changed, Mr. Mouse. Have you got a woman at last?” Adam stopped and slowly turned and his eyes were thoughtful. “I hadn’t considered before,” he said, and he moved toward her until he towered over her and she had to tilt back her head to look into his face. “I said I didn’t understand about you,” he said slowly. “Just now it came to me what you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Mr. Mouse?”
“You know about the ugliness in people. You showed me the pictures. You use all the sad, weak parts of a man, and God knows he has them.”
“Everybody--”
Adam went on, astonished at his own thoughts, “But you--yes, that’s right--you don’t know about the rest. You don’t believe I brought you the letter because I don’t want your money. You don’t believe I loved you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures--you don’t believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think--more than that, you’re sure--that’s all there is.”
She cackled at him derisively. “In sticks and stones. What a sweet dreamer is Mr. Mouse! Give me a sermon, Mr. Mouse.”
“No. I won’t because I seem to know that there’s a part of you missing. Some men can’t see the color green, but they may never know they can’t. I think you are only a part of a human. I can’t do anything about that. But I wonder whether you ever feel that something invisible is all around you. It would be horrible if you knew it was there and couldn’t see it or feel it. That would be horrible.”
Kate pushed back her chair and stood up. Her fists were clenched at her sides and hiding in the folds of her skirt. She tried to prevent the shrillness that crept into her voice.
“Our Mouse is a philosopher,” she said. “But our Mouse is no better at that than he is at other things. Did you ever hear of hallucinations? If there are things I can’t see, don’t you think it’s possible that they are dreams manufactured in your own sick mind?”
“No, I don’t,” said Adam. “No, I don’t. And I don’t think you do either.” He turned and went out and closed the door behind him.
Kate sat down and stared at the closed door. She was not aware that her fists beat softly on the White oilcloth. But she did know that the square white door was distorted by tears and that her body shook with something that felt like rage and also felt like sorrow.

2
When Adam left Kate’s place he had over two hours to wait for the train back to King City. On an impulse he turned off Main Street and walked up Central Avenue to number 130, the high white house of Ernest Steinbeck. It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and catoneasters lapped against its white walls.
Adam walked up the wide veranda steps and rang the bell. Olive came to the door and opened it a little, while Mary and John peeked around the edges of her.
Adam took off his hat. “You don’t know me. I’m Adam Trask. Your father was a friend of mine. I thought I’d like to pay my respects to Mrs. Hamilton. She helped me with the twins.”
“Why, of course,” Olive said and swung the wide doors open. “We’ve heard about you. Just a moment. You see, we’ve made a kind of retreat for Mother.”
She knocked on a door off the wide front hall and called, “Mother! There’s a friend to see you.”
She opened the door and showed Adam into the pleasant room where Liza lived. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said to Adam. “Catrina’s frying chicken and I have to watch her. John! Mary! Come along. Come along.”
Liza seemed smaller than ever. She sat in a wicker rocking chair and she was old and old. Her dress was a full wide-skirted black alpaca, and at her throat she wore a pin which spelled “Mother” in golden script.
The pleasant little bed-sitting room was crowded with photographs, bottles of toilet water, lace pincushions, brushes and combs, and the china and silver bureau-knacks of many birthdays and Christmases.
On the wall hung a huge tinted photograph of Samuel, which had captured a cold and aloof dignity, a scrubbed and dressed remoteness, which did not belong to him living. There was no twinkle in the picture of him, nor any of his inspective joyousness. The picture hung in a heavy gold frame, and to the consternation of all children its eyes followed a child about the room.
On a wicker table beside Liza was the cage of Polly parrot. Tom had bought the parrot from a sailor. He was an old bird, reputed to be fifty years old, and he had lived a ribald life and acquired the vigorous speech of a ship’s fo’c’sle. Try as she would, Liza could not make him substitute psalms for the picturesque vocabulary of his youth.
Polly cocked his head sideways, inspecting Adam, and scratched the feathers at the base of his beak with a careful foreclaw. “Come off it, you bastard,” said Polly unemotionally.
Liza frowned at him. “Polly,” she said sternly, “that’s not polite.”
“Bloody bastard!” Polly observed.
Liza ignored the vulgarity. She held out her tiny hand. “Mr. Trask,” she said, “I’m glad to see you. Sit down, won’t you?”
“I was passing by, and I wanted to offer my condolences.”
“We got your flowers.” And she remembered, too, every bouquet after all this time. Adam had sent a fine pillow of everlastings.
“It must be hard to rearrange your life.”
Liza’s eyes brimmed over and she snapped her little mouth shut on her weakness.
Adam said, “Maybe I shouldn’t bring up your hurt, but I miss him.”
Liza turned her head away. “How is everything down your way?” she asked.
“Good this year. Lots of rainfall. The feed’s deep already.”
“Tom wrote me,” she said.
“Button up,” said the parrot, and Liza scowled at him as she had at her growing children when they were mutinous.
“What brings you up to Salinas, Mr. Trask?” she asked.
“Why, some business.” He sat down in a wicker chair and it cricked under his weight. “I’m thinking of moving up here. Thought it might be better for my boys. They get lonely on the ranch.”
“We never got lonely on the ranch,” she said harshly.
“I thought maybe the schools would be better here. My twins could have the advantages.”
“My daughter Olive taught at Peachtree and Pleyto and the Big Sur.” Her tone made it clear that there were no better schools than those. Adam began to feel a warm admiration for her iron gallantry.
“Well, I was just thinking about it,” he said.
“Children raised in the country do better.” It was the law, and she could prove it by her own boys. Then she centered closely on him. “Are you looking for a house in Salinas?”
“Well, yes, I guess I am.”
“Go see my daughter Dessie,” she said. “Dessie wants to move back to the ranch with Tom. She’s got a nice little house up the street next to Reynaud’s Bakery.”
“I’ll certainly do that,” said Adam. “I’ll go now. I’m glad to see you doing so well.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m comfortable.” Adam was moving toward the door when she said, “Mr. Trask, do you ever see my son Tom?”
“Well, no, I don’t. You see, I haven’t been off the ranch.”
“I wish you would go and see him,” she said quickly. “I think he’s lonely.” She stopped as though horrified at this breaking over.
“I will. I surely will. Good-by, ma’am.”
As he closed the door he heard the parrot say, “Button up, you bloody bastard!” And Liza, “Polly, if you don’t watch your language, I’ll thrash you.”
Adam let himself out of the house and walked up the evening street toward Main. Next to Reynaud’s French Bakery he saw Dessie’s house set back in its little garden. The yard was so massed with tall privets that he couldn’t see much of the house. A neatly painted sign was screwed to the front gate. It read: Dessie Hamilton, Dressmaker.
The San Francisco Chop House was on the corner of Main and Central and its windows were on both streets. Adam went in to get some dinner. Will Hamilton sat at the corner table, devouring a rib steak. “Come and sit with me,” he called to Adam. “Up on business?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “I went to pay a call on your mother.”
Will laid down his fork. “I’m just up here for an hour. I didn’t go to see her because it gets her excited. And my sister Olive would tear the house down getting a special dinner for me. I just didn’t want to disturb them. Besides, I have to go right back. Order a rib steak. They’ve got good ones. How is Mother?”
“She’s got great courage,” said Adam. “I find I admire her more all the time.”
“That she has. How she kept her good sense with all of us and with my father, I don’t know.”
“Rib steak, medium,” said Adam to the waiter.
“Potatoes?”
“No--yes, french fried. Your mother is worried about Tom. Is he all right?”
Will cut off the edging of fat from his steak and pushed it to the side of his plate. “She’s got reason to worry,” he said. “Something’s the matter with Tom. He’s moping around like a monument.”
“I guess he depended on Samuel.”
“Too much,” said Will. “Far too much. He can’t seem to come out of it. In some ways Tom is a great big baby.”
“I’ll go and see him. Your mother says Dessie is going to move back to the ranch.”
Will laid his knife and fork down on the tablecloth and stared at Adam. “She can’t do it,” he said. “I won’t let her do it.”
“Why not?”
Will covered up. “Well,” he said, “she’s got a nice business here. Makes a good living. It would be a shame to throw it away.” He picked up his knife and fork, cut off a piece of the fat, and put it in his mouth.
“I’m catching the eight o’clock home,” Adam said.
“So am I,” said Will. He didn’t want to talk any more.

Chapter 32


1
Dessie was the beloved of the family. Mollie the pretty kitten, Olive the strong-headed, Una with clouds on her head, all were loved, but Dessie was the warm-beloved. Hers was the twinkle and the laughter infectious as chickenpox, and hers the gaiety that colored a day and spread to people so that they carried it away with them.
I can put it this way. Mrs. Clarence Morrison of 122 Church Street, Salinas, had three children and a husband who ran a dry goods store. On certain mornings, at breakfast, Agnes Morrison would say, “I’m going to Dessie Hamilton’s for a fitting after dinner.”
The children would be glad and would kick their copper toes against the table legs until cautioned. And Mr. Morrison would rub his palms together and go to his store, hoping some drummer would come by that day. And any drummer who did come by was likely to get a good order. Maybe the children and Mr. Morrison would forget why it was a good day with a promise on its tail.
Mrs. Morrison would go to the house next to Reynaud’s Bakery at two o’clock and she would stay until four. When she came out her eyes would be wet with tears and her nose red and streaming. Walking home, she would dab her nose and wipe her eyes and laugh all over again. Maybe all Dessie had done was to put several black pins in a cushion to make it look like the Baptist minister, and then had the pincushion deliver a short dry sermon. Maybe she had recounted a meeting with Old Man Taylor, who bought old houses and moved them to a big vacant lot he owned until he had so many it looked like a dry-land Sargasso Sea. Maybe she had read a poem from Chatterbox with gestures. It didn’t matter. It was warm-funny, it was catching funny.
The Morrison children, coming home from school, would find no aches, no carping, no headache. Their noise was not a scandal nor their dirty faces a care. And when the giggles overcame them, why, their mother was giggling too.
Mr. Morrison, coming home, would tell of the day and get listened to, and he would try to retell the drummer’s stories--some of them at least. The supper would be delicious--omelets never fell and cakes rose to balloons of lightness, biscuits fluffed up, and no one could season a stew like Agnes Morrison. After supper, when the children had laughed themselves to sleep, like as not Mr. Morrison would touch Agnes on the shoulder in their old, old signal and they would go to bed and make love and be very happy.
The visit to Dessie might carry its charge into two days more before it petered out and the little headaches came back and business was not so good as last year. That’s how Dessie was and that’s what she could do. She carried excitement in her arms just as Samuel had. She was the darling, she was the beloved of the family.
Dessie was not beautiful. Perhaps she wasn’t even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it. You would have thought that in time she would have got over her first love affair and found another love, but she did not. Come to think of it, none of the Hamiltons, with all their versatility, had any versatility in love. None of them seemed capable of light or changeable love.
Dessie did not simply throw up her hands and give up. It was much worse than that. She went right on doing and being what she was--without the glow. The people who loved her ached for her, seeing her try, and they got to trying for her.
Dessie’s friends were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad. In time the Mrs. Morrisons found unassailable reasons for not going to the little house by the bakery. They weren’t disloyal. They didn’t want to be sad as much as they wanted to be happy. It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.
Dessie’s business began to fall off. And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness. Times were changing and the ready-made dress was becoming popular. It was no longer a disgrace to wear one. If Mr. Morrison was stocking ready-mades, it was only reasonable that Agnes Morrison should be seen in them.
The family was worried about Dessie, but what could you do when she would not admit there was anything wrong with her? She did admit to pains in her side, quite fierce, but they lasted only a little while and came only at intervals.
Then Samuel died and the world shattered like a dish. His sons and daughters and friends groped about among the pieces, trying to put some kind of world together again.
Dessie decided to sell her business and go back to the ranch to live with Tom. She hadn’t much of any business to sell out. Liza knew about it, and Olive, and Dessie had written to Tom. But Will, sitting scowling at the table in the San Francisco Chop House, had not been told. Will frothed inwardly and finally he balled up his napkin and got up. “I forgot something,” he said to Adam. “I’ll see you on the train.”
He walked the half-block to Dessie’s house and went through the high grown garden and rang Dessie’s bell.
She was having her dinner alone, and she came to the door with her napkin in her hand. “Why, hello, Will,” she said and put up her pink cheek for him to kiss. “When did you get in town?”
“Business,” he said. “Just here between trains. I want to talk to you.”
She led him back to her kitchen and dining-room combined, a warm little room papered with flowers. Automatically she poured a cup of coffee and placed it for him and put the sugar bowl and the cream pitcher in front of it.
“Have you seen Mother?” she asked.
“I’m just here over trains,” he said gruffly. “Dessie, is it true you want to go back to the ranch?”
“I was thinking of it.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
She smiled uncertainly. “Why not? What’s wrong with that? Tom’s lonely down there.”
“You’ve got a nice business here,” he said.
“I haven’t any business here,” she replied. “I thought you knew that.”
“I don’t want you to go,” he repeated sullenly.
Her smile was wistful and she tried her best to put a little mockery in her manner. “My big brother is masterful. Tell Dessie why not.”
“It’s too lonely down there.”
“It won’t be as lonely with the two of us.”
Will pulled at his lips angrily. He blurted, “Tom’s not himself. You shouldn’t be alone with him.”
“Isn’t he well? Does he need help?”
Will said, “I didn’t want to tell you--I don’t think Tom’s ever got over--the death. He’s strange.”
She smiled affectionately. “Will, you’ve always thought he was strange. You thought he was strange when he didn’t like business.”
“That was different. But now he’s broody. He doesn’t talk. He goes walking alone in the hills at night. I went out to see him and--he’s been writing poetry--pages of it all over the table.”
“Didn’t you ever write poetry, Will?”
“I did not.”
“I have,” said Dessie. “Pages and pages of it all over the table.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Let me decide,” she said softly. “I’ve lost something. I want to try to find it again.”
“You’re talking foolish.”
She came around the table and put her arms around his neck. “Dear brother,” she said, “please let me decide.”
He went angrily out of the house and barely caught his train.

2
Tom met Dessie at the King City station. She saw him out of the train window, scanning every coach for her. He was burnished, his face shaved so close that its darkness had a shine like polished wood. His red mustache was clipped. He wore a new Stetson hat with a flat crown, a tan Norfolk jacket with a belt buckle of mother-of-pearl. His shoes glinted in the noonday light so that it was sure he had gone over them with his handkerchief just before the train arrived. His hard collar stood up against his strong red neck, and he wore a pale blue knitted tie with a horseshoe tie pin. He tried to conceal his excitement by clasping his rough brown hands in front of him.
Dessie waved wildly out the window, crying, “Here I am, Tom, here I am!” though she knew he couldn’t hear her over the grinding wheels of the train as the coach slid past him. She climbed down the steps and saw him looking frantically about in the wrong direction. She smiled and walked up behind him.
“I beg your pardon, stranger,” she said quietly. “Is there a Mister Tom Hamilton here?”
He spun around and he squealed with pleasure and picked her up in a bear hug and danced around her. He held her off the ground with one arm and spanked her bottom with his free hand. He nuzzled her cheek with his harsh mustache. Then he held her back by the shoulders and looked at her. Both of them threw back their heads and howled with laughter.
The station agent leaned out his window and rested his elbows, protected with black false sleeves, on the sill. He said over his shoulder to the telegrapher, “Those Hamiltons! Just look at them!”
Tom and Dessie, fingertips touching, were doing a courtly heel-and-toe while he sang Doodle-doodle-doo and Dessie sang Deedle-deedle-dee, and then they embraced again.
Tom looked down at her. “Aren’t you Dessie Hamilton? I seem to remember you. But you’ve changed. Where are your pigtails?”
It took him quite a fumbling time to get her luggage checks, to lose them in his pockets, to find them and pick up the wrong pieces. At last he had her baskets piled in the back of the buckboard. The two bay horses pawed the hard ground and threw up their heads so that the shined pole jumped and the doubletrees squeaked. The harness was polished and the horse brasses glittered like gold. There was a red bow tied halfway up the buggy whip and red ribbons were braided into the horses’ manes and tails.
Tom helped Dessie into the seat and pretended to peek coyly at her ankle. Then he snapped up the check reins and unfastened the leather tie reins from the bits. He unwrapped the lines from the whip stock, and the horses turned so sharply that the wheel screamed against the guard.
Tom said, “Would you care to make a tour of King City? It’s a lovely town.”
“No,” she said. “I think I remember it.” He turned left and headed south and lifted the horses to a fine swinging trot.
Dessie said, “Where’s Will?”
“I don’t know,” he answered gruffly. “Did he talk to you?”
“Yes. He said you shouldn’t come.”
“He told me the same thing,” said Dessie. “He got George to write to me too.”
“Why shouldn’t you come if you want to?” Tom raged. “What’s Will got to do with it?”
She touched his arm. “He thinks you’re crazy. Says you’re writing poetry.”
Tom’s face darkened. “He must have gone in the house when I wasn’t there. What’s he want anyway? He had no right to look at my papers.”
“Gently, gently,” said Dessie. “Will’s your brother. Don’t forget that.”
“How would he like me to go through his papers?” Tom demanded.
“He wouldn’t let you,” Dessie said dryly. “They’d be locked in the safe. Now let’s not spoil the day with anger.”
“All right,” he said. “God knows all right! But he makes me mad. If I don’t want to live his kind of life I’m crazy--just crazy.”
Dessie changed the subject, forced the change. “You know, I had quite a time at the last,” she said. “Mother wanted to come. Have you ever seen Mother cry, Tom?”
“No, not that I can remember. No, she’s not a crier.”
“Well, she cried. Not much, but a lot for her--a choke and two sniffles and a wiped nose and polished her glasses and snapped shut like a watch.”
Tom said, “Oh, Lord, Dessie, it’s good to have you back! It’s good. Makes me feel I’m well from a sickness.”
The horses spanked along the county road. Tom said, “Adam Trask has bought a Ford. Or maybe I should say Will sold him a Ford.”
“I didn’t know about the Ford,” said Dessie. “He’s buying my house. Giving me a very good price for it.” She laughed. “I put a very high price on the house. I was going to come down during negotiations. Mr. Trask accepted the first price. It put me in a fix.”
“What did you do, Dessie?”
“Well, I had to tell him about the high price and that I had planned to be argued down. He didn’t seem to care either way.”
Tom said, “Let me beg you never to tell that story to Will. He’d have you locked up.”
“But the house wasn’t worth what I asked!”
“I repeat what I said about Will. What’s Adam want with your house?”
“He’s going to move there. Wants the twins to go to school in Salinas.”
“What’ll he do with his ranch?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
Tom said, “I wonder what would have happened if Father’d got hold of a ranch like that instead of Old Dry and Dusty.”
“It isn’t such a bad place.”
“Fine for everything except making a living.”
Dessie said earnestly, “Have you ever known any family that had more fun?”
“No, I don’t. But that was the family, not the land.”
“Tom, remember when you took Jenny and Belle Williams to the Peachtree dance on the sofa?”
“Mother never let me forget it. Say, wouldn’t it be good to ask Jenny and Belle down for a visit?”
“They’d come too,” Dessie said. “Let’s do it.”
When they turned off the county road she said, “Somehow I remember it differently.”
“Drier?”
“I guess that’s it. Tom, there’s so much grass.”
“I’m getting twenty head of stock to eat it.”
“You must be rich.”
“No, and the good year will break the price of beef. I wonder what Will would do. He’s a scarcity man. He told me. He said, ‘Always deal in scarcities.’ Will’s smart.”
The rutty road had not changed except that the ruts were deeper and the round stones stuck up higher.
Dessie said, “What’s the card on that mesquite bush?” She picked it off as they drove by, and it said, “Welcome Home.”
“Tom, you did it!”
“I did not. Someone’s been here.”
Every fifty yards there was another card sticking on a bush, or hanging from the branches of a madrone, or tacked to the trunk of a buckeye, and all of them said, “Welcome Home.” Dessie squealed with delight over each one.
They topped the rise above the little valley of the old Hamilton place and Tom pulled up to let her enjoy the view. On the hill across the valley, spelled out in whitewashed stones, were the huge words, “Welcome Home, Dessie.” She put her head against his lapel and laughed and cried at the same time.
Tom looked sternly ahead of him. “Now who could have done that?” he said. “A man can’t leave the place any more.”
In the dawn Dessie was awakened by the chill of pain that came to her at intervals. It was a rustle and a threat of pain; it scampered up from her side and across her abdomen, a nibbling pinch and then a little grab and then a hard catch and finally a fierce grip as though a huge hand had wrenched her. When that relaxed she felt a soreness like a bruise. It didn’t last very long, but while it went on the outside world was blotted out, and she seemed to be listening to the struggle in her body. When only the soreness remained she saw how the dawn had come silver to the windows. She smelled the good morning wind rippling the curtains, bringing in the odor of grass and roots and damp earth. After that sounds joined the parade of perception--sparrows haggling among themselves, a bawling cow monotonously beratine a punching hungry calf, a blue jay’s squawk of false excitement, the sharp warning of a cock quail on guard and the answering whisper of the hen quail somewhere near in the tall grass. The chickenyard boiled with excitement over an egg, and a big lady Rhode Island Red, who weighed four pounds, hypocritically protested the horror of being lustfully pinned to the ground by a scrawny wreck of a rooster she could have blasted with one blow of her wing.
The cooing of pigeons brought memory into the procession. Dessie remembered how her father had said, sitting at the head of the table, “I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and--do you know?--he said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘I like white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.”
And Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.”
“I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said.
And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!”
“Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”
And of course he got white pigeons and waited truculently for sadness and death until he’d proved his point. And here were the great-great-grand squabs cooing in the morning and rising to fly like a whirling white scarf around the wagon shed.
As Dessie remembered, she heard the words and the house around her grew peopled. Sadness and death, she thought, and death and sadness, and it wrenched in her stomach against the soreness. You just have to wait around long enough and it will come.
She heard the air whooshing into the big bellows in the forge and the practice tap for range of hammer on anvil. She heard Liza open the oven door and the thump of a kneaded loaf on the floury board. Then Joe wandered about, looking in unlikely places for his shoes, and at last found them where he had left them under the bed.
She heard Mollie’s sweet high voice in the kitchen, reading a morning text from the Bible, and Una’s full cold throaty correction.
And Tom had cut Mollie’s tongue with his pocketknife and died in his heart when he realized his courage.
“Oh, dear Tom,” she said, and her lips moved.
Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. His violence balanced his tenderness, and himself was a pitted battlefield of his own forces. He was confused now, but Dessie could hold his bit and point him, the way a handler points a thoroughbred at the barrier to show his breeding and his form.
Dessie lay part in pain and a part of her dangled still in sleep while the morning brightened against the window. She remembered that Mollie was going to lead the Grand March at the Fourth of July picnic with no less than Harry Forbes, State Senator. And Dessie had not finished putting the braid on Mollie’s dress. She struggled to get up. There was so much braid, and here she lay drowsing.
She cried, “I’ll get it done, Mollie. It will be ready.”
She got up from her bed and threw her robe around her and walked barefooted through the house crowded with Hamiltons. In the hall they were gone to the bedrooms. In the bedrooms, with the beds neat-made, they were all in the kitchen, and in the kitchen--they dispersed and were gone. Sadness and death. The wave receded and left her in dry awakeness.
The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it--the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight and there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table when a book was moved.
The stove was warming, with orange light showing around the lids and the soft thunder of drafty flame leaping past the open damper. The kitchen clock flashed its pendulum behind its glass skirt, and it ticked like a little wooden hammer striking on an empty wooden box.
From outside came a whistle as wild and raucous as a reed and pitched high and strange. The whistling scattered a savage melody. Then Tom’s steps sounded on the porch, and he came in with an armload of oakwood so high he could not see over it. He cascaded the wood into the woodbox.
“You’re up,” he said. “That was to wake you if you were still sleeping.” His face was lighted with joy. “This is a morning light as down and no time to be slugging.”
“You sound like your father,” Dessie said, and she laughed with him.
His joy hardened to fierceness. “Yes,” he said loudly. “And we’ll have that time again, right here. I’ve been dragging myself in misery like a spine-broken snake. No wonder Will thought I was cracked. But now you’re back, and I’ll show you. I’ll breathe life into life again. Do you hear? This house is going to be alive.”
“I’m glad I came,” she said, and she thought in desolation how brittle he was now and how easy to shatter, and how she would have to protect him.
“You must have worked day and night to get the house so clean,” she said.
“Nothing,” said Tom. “A little twist with the fingers.”
“I know that twist, but it was with bucket and mop and on your knees--unless you’ve invented some way to do it by chicken power or the harnessed wind.”
“Invented--now that’s why I have no time. I’ve invented a little slot that lets a necktie slip around freely in a stiff collar.”
“You don’t wear stiff collars.”
“I did yesterday. That’s when I invented it. And chickens--I’m going to raise millions of them--little houses all over the ranch and a ring on the roof to dip them in a whitewash tank. And eggs will come through on a little conveyor belt--here! I’ll draw it.”
“I want to draw some breakfast,” Dessie said. “What’s the shape of a fried egg? How would you color the fat and lean of a strip of bacon?”
“You’ll have it,” he cried, and he opened the stove lid and assaulted the fire with the stove lifter until the hairs on his hand curled and charred. He pitched wood in and started his high whistling.
Dessie said, “You sound like some goat-foot with a wheat flute on a hill in Greece.”
“What do you think I am?” he shouted.
Dessie thought miserably, If his is real, why can’t my heart be light? Why can’t I climb out of my gray ragbag? I will, she screeched inside herself. If he can--I will.
She said, “Tom!”
“Yes.”
“I want a purple egg.”

Chapter 33


1
The green lasted on the hills far into June before the grass turned yellow. The heads of the wild oats were so heavy with seed that they hung over on their stalks. The little springs trickled on late in the summer. The range cattle staggered under their fat and their hides shone with health. It was a year when the people of the Salinas Valley forgot the dry years. Farmers bought more land than they could afford and figured their profits on the covers of their checkbooks.
Tom Hamilton labored like a giant, not only with his strong arms and rough hands but also with his heart and spirit. The anvil rang in the forge again. He painted the old house white and whitewashed the sheds. He went to King City and studied a flush toilet and then built one of craftily bent tin and carved wood. Because the water came so slowly from the spring, he put a redwood tank beside the house and pumped the water up to it with a handmade windmill so cleverly made that it turned in the slightest wind. And he made metal and wood models of two ideas to be sent to the patent office in the fall.
That was not all--he labored with humor and good spirits. Dessie had to rise very early to get in her hand at the housework before Tom had it all done. She watched his great red happiness, and it was not light as Samuel’s happiness was light. It did not rise out of his roots and come floating up. He was manufacturing happiness as cleverly as he knew how, molding it and shaping it.
Dessie, who had more friends than anyone in the whole valley, had no confidants. When her trouble had come upon her she had not talked about it. And the pains were a secret in herself.
When Tom found her rigid and tight from the grabbing pain and cried in alarm, “Dessie, what’s the matter?” she controlled her face and said, “A little crick, that’s all. Just a little crick. I’m all right now.” And in a moment they were laughing.
They laughed a great deal, as though to reassure themselves. Only when Dessie went to her bed did her loss fall on her, bleak and unendurable. And Tom lay in the dark of his room, puzzled as a child. He could hear his heart beating and rasping a little in its beat. His mind fell away from thought and clung for safety to little plans, designs, machines.
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.
It was startling to both of them when Dessie said one evening on the hill, “Tom, why don’t you get married?”
He looked quickly at her and away. He said, “Who’d have me?”
“Is that a joke or do you really mean it?”
“Who’d have me?” he said again. “Who’d want a thing like me?”
“It sounds to me as though you really mean it.” Then she violated their unstated code. “Have you been in love with someone?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“I wish I knew,” she said as though he had not answered.
Tom did not speak again as they walked down the hill. But on the porch he said suddenly, “You’re lonely here. You don’t want to stay.” He waited for a moment. “Answer me. Isn’t that true?”
“I want to stay here more than I want to stay anyplace else.” She asked, “Do you ever go to women?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Is it any good to you?”
“Not much.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
In silence they went back to the house. Tom lighted the lamp in the old living room. The horsehair sofa he had rebuilt raised its gooseneck against the wall, and the green carpet had tracks worn light between the doors.
Tom sat down by the round center table. Dessie sat on the sofa, and she could see that he was still embarrassed from his last admission. She thought, How pure he is, how unfit for a world that even she knew more about than he did. A dragon killer, he was, a rescuer of damsels, and his small sins seemed so great to him that he felt unfit and unseemly. She wished her father were here. Her father had felt greatness in Tom. Perhaps he would know now how to release it out of its darkness and let it fly free.
She took another tack to see whether she could raise some spark in him. “As long as we’re talking about ourselves, have you ever thought that our whole world is the valley and a few trips to San Francisco, and have you ever been farther south than San Luis Obispo? I never have.”
“Neither have I,” said Tom.
“Well, isn’t that silly?”
“Lots of people haven’t,” he said.
“But it’s not a law. We could go to Paris and to Rome or to Jerusalem. I would dearly love to see the Colosseum.”
He watched her suspiciously, expecting some kind of joke. “How could we?” he asked. “That takes a lot of money.”
“I don’t think it does,” she said. “We wouldn’t have to stay in fancy places. We could take the cheapest boats and the lowest class. That’s how our father came here from Ireland. And we could go to Ireland.”
Still he watched her, but a burning was beginning in his eyes.
Dessie went on, “We could take a year for work, save every penny. I can get some sewing to do in King City. Will would help us. And next summer you could sell all the stock and we could go. There’s no law forbids it.”
Tom got up and went outside. He looked up at the summer stars, at blue Venus and red Mars. His hands flexed at his sides, closed to fists and opened. Then he turned and went back into the house. Dessie had not moved.
“Do you want to go, Dessie?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Then we will go!”
“Do you want to go?”
“More than anything in the world,” he said, and then, “Egypt--have you given a thought to Egypt?”
“Athens,” she said.
“Constantinople!”
“Bethlehem!”
“Yes, Bethlehem,” said he suddenly, “Go to bed. We’ve got a year of work--a year. Get some rest. I’m going to borrow money from Will to buy a hundred shoats.”
“What will you feed them?”
“Acorns,” said Tom. “I’ll make a machine to gather acorns.”
After he had gone to his room she could hear him knocking around and talking softly to himself. Dessie looked out her window at the starlit night and she was glad. But she wondered whether she really wanted to go, or whether Tom did. And as she wondered the whisper of pain grew up from her side.
When Dessie got up in the morning Tom was already at his drawing board, beating his forehead with his fist and growling to himself. Dessie looked over his shoulder. “Is it the acorn machine?”
“It should be easy,” he said. “But how to get out the sticks and rocks?”
“I know you’re the inventor, but I invented the greatest acorn picker in the world and it’s ready to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Children,” she said. “Those restless little hands.”
“They wouldn’t do it, not even for pay.”
“They would for prizes. A prize for everyone and a big prize for the winner--maybe a hundred-dollar prize. They’d sweep the valley clean. Will you let me try?”
He scratched his head. “Why not?” he said. “But how would you collect the acorns?”
“The children will bring them in,” said Dessie. “Just let me take care of it. I hope you have plenty of storage space.”
“It would be exploiting the young, wouldn’t it?”
“Certainly it would,” Dessie agreed. “When I had my shop I exploited the girls who wanted to learn to sew--and they exploited me. I think I will call this The Great Monterey County Acorn Contest. And I won’t let everyone in. Maybe bicycles for prizes--wouldn’t you pick up acorns in hope of a bicycle, Tom?”
“Sure I would,” he said. “But couldn’t we pay them too?”
“Not with money,” Dessie said. “That would reduce it to labor, and they will not labor if they can help it, Nor will I.”
Tom leaned back from his board and laughed. “Nor will I,” he said. “All right, you are in charge of acorns and I am in charge of pigs.”
Dessie said, “Tom, wouldn’t it be ridiculous if we made money, we of all people?”
“But you made money in Salinas,” he said.
“Some--not much. But oh, I was rich in promises. If the bills had ever been paid we wouldn’t need pigs. We could go to Paris tomorrow.”
“I’m going to drive in and talk to Will,” said Tom. He pushed his chair back from the drawing board. “Want to come with me?”
“No, I’ll stay and make my plans. Tomorrow I start The Great Acorn Contest.”

2
On the ride back to the ranch in the late afternoon Tom was depressed and sad. As always, Will had managed to chew up and spit out his enthusiasm. Will had pulled his lip, rubbed his eyebrows, scratched his nose, cleaned his glasses, and made a major operation of cutting and lighting a cigar. The pig proposition was full of holes, and Will was able to put his fingers in the holes.
The Acorn Contest wouldn’t work although he was not explicit about why it wouldn’t. The whole thing was shaky, particularly in these times. The very best Will was able to do was to agree to think about it.
At one time during the talk Tom had thought to tell Will about Europe, but a quick instinct stopped him. The idea of traipsing around Europe, unless, of course, you were retired and had your capital out in good securities, would be to Will a craziness that would make the pig plan a marvel of business acumen. Tom did not tell him, and he left Will to “think it over,” knowing that the verdict would be against the pigs and the acorns.
Poor Tom did not know and could not learn that dissembling successfully is one of the creative joys of a businessman. To indicate enthusiasm was to be idiotic. And Will really did mean to think it over. Parts of the plan fascinated him. Tom had stumbled on a very interesting thing. If you could buy shoats on credit, fatten them on food that cost next to nothing, sell them, pay off your loan, and take your profit, you would really have done something. Will would not rob his brother. He would cut him in on the profits, but Tom was a dreamer and could not be trusted with a good sound plan. Tom, for instance, didn’t even know the price of pork and its probable trend. If it worked out, Will could be depended on to give Tom a very substantial present--maybe even a Ford. And how about a Ford as first and only prize for acorns? Everybody in the whole valley would pick acorns.
Driving up the Hamilton road, Tom wondered how to break it to Dessie that their plan was no good. The best way would be to have another plan to substitute for it. How could they make enough money in one year to go to Europe? And suddenly he realized that he didn’t know how much they’d need. He didn’t know the price of a steamship ticket. They might spend the evening figuring.
He half expected Dessie to run out of the house when he drove up. He would put on his best face and tell a joke. But Dessie didn’t run out. Maybe taking a nap, he thought. He watered the horses and stabled them and pitched hay into the manger.
Dessie was lying on the gooseneck sofa when Tom came in. “Taking a nap?” he asked, and then he saw the color of her face. “Dessie,” he cried, “what’s the matter?”
She rallied herself against pain. “Just a stomach ache,” she said. “A pretty severe one.”
“Oh,” said Tom. “You scared me. I can fix up a stomach ache.” He went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of pearly liquid. He handed it to her.
“What is it, Tom?”
“Good old-fashioned salts. It may gripe you a little but it’ll do the job.”
She drank it obediently and made a face. “I remember that taste,” she said. “Mother’s remedy in green apple season.”
“Now you lie still,” Tom said. “I’ll rustle up some dinner.”
She could hear him knocking about in the kitchen. The pain roared through her body. And on top of the pain there was fear. She could feel the medicine burn down to her stomach. After a while she dragged herself to the new homemade flush toilet and tried to vomit the salts. The perspiration ran from her forehead and blinded her. When she tried to straighten up the muscles over her stomach were set, and she could not break free.
Later Tom brought her some scrambled eggs. She shook her head slowly. “I can’t,” she said, smiling. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“The salts should work pretty soon,” Tom assured her. “Then you’ll be all right.” He helped her to bed. “What do you suppose you ate to cause it?”
Dessie lay in her bedroom and her will battled the pain. About ten o’clock in the evening her will began to lose its fight. She called, “Tom! Tom!” He opened the door. He had the World Almanac in his hand. “Tom,” she said, “I’m sorry. But I’m awfully sick, Tom. I’m terribly sick.”
He sat on the edge of her bed in the half-darkness. “Are the gripes bad?”
“Yes, awful.”
“Can you go to the toilet now?”
“No, not now.”
“I’ll bring a lamp and sit with you,” he said. “Maybe you can get some sleep. It’ll be gone in the morning. The salts will do the job.”
Her will took hold again and she lay still while Tom read bits out of the Almanac to soothe her. He stopped reading when he thought she was sleeping, and he dozed in his chair beside the lamp.
A thin scream awakened him. He stepped beside the struggling bedclothes. Dessie’s eyes were milky and crazy, like those of a maddened horse. Her mouth corners erupted thick bubbles and her face was on fire. Tom put his hand under the cover and felt muscles knotted like iron. And then her struggle stopped and her head fell back and the light glinted on her half-closed eyes.
Tom put only a bridle on the horse and flung himself on bareback. He groped and ripped out his belt to beat the frightened horse to an awkward run over the stony, rutted wheel track.
The Duncans, asleep upstairs in their two-story house on the county road, didn’t hear the banging on their door, but they heard the bang and ripping sound as their front door came off, carrying lock and hinges with it. By the time Red Duncan got downstairs with a shotgun Tom was screaming into the wall telephone at the King City central. “Dr. Tusón! Get him! I don’t care. Get him! Get him, goddam it.” Red Duncan sleepily had the gun on him.
Dr. Tilson said, “Yes! Yes--yes, I hear. You’re Tom Hamilton. What’s the matter with her? Is her stomach hard? What did you do? Salts! You goddam fool!”
Then the doctor controlled his anger. “Tom,” he said, “Tom, boy. Pull yourself together. Go back and lay cold cloths--cold as you can get them. I don’t suppose you have any ice. Well, keep changing the cloths. I’ll be out as fast as I can. Do you hear me? Tom, do you hear me?”
He hung the receiver up and dressed. In angry weariness he opened the wall cabinet and collected scalpels and clamps, sponges and tubes and sutures, to put in his bag. He shook his gasoline pressure lantern to make sure it was full and arranged ether can and mask beside it on his bureau. His wife in boudoir cap and nightgown looked in. Dr. Tilson said, “I’m walking over to the garage. Call Will Hamilton. Tell him I want him to drive me to his father’s place. If he argues tell him his sister is--dying.”

3
Tom came riding back to the ranch a week after Dessie’s funeral, riding high and prim, his shoulders straight and chin in, like a guardsman on parade. Tom had done everything slowly, perfectly. His horse was curried and brushed, and his Stetson hat was square on his head. Not even Samuel could have held himself in more dignity than Tom as he rode back to the old house. A hawk driving down on a chicken with doubled fists did not make him turn his head.
At the barn he dismounted, watered his horse, held him a moment at the door, haltered him, and put rolled barley in the box beside the manger. He took off the saddle and turned the blanket inside out to dry. Then the barley was finished and he led the bay horse out and turned him free to graze on every unfenced inch of the world.
In the house the furniture, chairs, and stove seemed to shrink back and away from him in distaste. A stool avoided him as he went to the living room. His matches were soft and damp, and with a feeling of apology he went to the kitchen for more. The lamp in the living room was fair and lonely. Tom’s first match flame ran quickly around the Rochester wick and then stood up a full inch of yellow flame.
Tom sat down in the evening and looked around. His eyes avoided the horsehair sofa. A slight noise of mice in the kitchen made him turn, and he saw his shadow on the wall and his hat was on. He removed it and laid it on the table beside him.
He thought dawdling, protective thoughts, sitting under the lamp, but he knew that pretty soon his name would be called and he would have to go up before the bench with himself as judge and his own crimes as jurors.
And his name was called, shrilly in his ears. His mind walked in to face the accusers: Vanity, which charged him with being ill dressed and dirty and vulgar; and Lust, slipping him the money for his whoring; Dishonesty, to make him pretend to talent and thought he did not have; Laziness and Gluttony arm in arm. Tom felt comforted by these because they screened the great Gray One in the back seat, waiting--the gray and dreadful crime. He dredged up lesser things, used small sins almost like virtues to save himself. There were Covetousness of Will’s money, Treason toward his mother’s God, Theft of time and hope, sick Rejection of love.
Samuel spoke softly but his voice filled the room. “Be good, be pure, be great, be Tom Hamilton.”
Tom ignored his father. He said, “I’m busy greeting my friends,” and he nodded to Discourtesy and Ugliness and Unfilial Conduct and Unkempt Fingernails. Then he started with Vanity again. The Gray One shouldered up in front. It was too late to stall with baby sins. This Gray One was Murder.
Tom’s hand felt the chill of the glass and saw the pearly liquid with the dissolving crystals still turning over and lucent bubbles rising, and he repeated aloud in the empty, empty room, “This will do the job. Just wait till morning. You’ll feel fine then.” That’s how it had sounded, exactly how, and the walls and chairs and the lamp had all heard it and they could prove it. There was no place in the whole world for Tom Hamilton to live. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. He shuffled possibilities like cards. London? No! Egypt--pyramids in Egypt and the Sphinx. No! Paris? No! Now wait--they do all your sins lots better there. No! Well, stand aside and maybe we’ll come back to you. Bethlehem? Dear God, no! It would be lonely there for a stranger.
And here interpolated--it’s so hard to remember how you die or when. An eyebrow raised or a whisper--they may be it; or a night mottled with splashed light until powder-driven lead finds your secret and lets out the fluid in you.
Now this is true, Tom Hamilton was dead and he had only to do a few decent things to make it final.
The sofa cricked in criticism, and Tom looked at it and at the smoking lamp to which the sofa referred. “Thank you,” Tom said to the sofa. “I hadn’t noticed it,” and he turned down the wick until the smoking stopped.
His mind dozed. Murder slapped him aware again. Now Red Tom, Gum Tom, was too tired to kill himself. That takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.
He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved--bad manners, cowardice, and sin. It was almost as bad as adultery or stealing--maybe just as bad. There must be a way to avoid Liza’s disapproval. She could make one suffer if she disapproved.
Samuel wouldn’t make it hard, but on the other hand you couldn’t avoid Samuel because he was in the air every place. Tom had to tell Samuel. He said, “My father, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. You overestimated me. You were wrong. I wish I could justify the love and the pride you squandered on me. Maybe you could figure a way out, but I can’t. I cannot live. I’ve killed Dessie and I want to sleep.”
And his mind spoke for his father absent, saying, “Why, I can understand how that would be. There are so many patterns to choose from in the arc from birth back to birth again. But let’s think how we can make it all right with Mother. Why are you so impatient, dear?”
“I can’t wait, that’s why,” Tom said. “I can’t wait any more.”
“Why, sure you can, my son, my darling. You’re grown great as I knew you would. Open the table drawer and then make use of that turnip you call your head.”
Tom opened the drawer and saw a tablet of Crane’s Linen Lawn and a package of envelopes to match and two gnawed and crippled pencils and in the dust corner at the back a few stamps. He laid out the tablet and sharpened the pencils with his pocketknife.
He wrote, “Dear Mother, I hope you keep yourself well. I am going to plan to spend more time with you. Olive asked me for Thanksgiving and you know I’ll be there. Our little Olive can cook a turkey nearly to match yours, but I know you will never believe that. I’ve had a stroke of good luck. Bought a horse for fifteen dollars--a gelding, and he looks like a blood-horse to me. I got him cheap because he has taken a dislike to mankind. His former owner spent more time on his own back than on the gelding’s. I must say he’s a pretty cute article. He’s thrown me twice but I’ll get him yet, and if I break him I’ll have one of the best horses in the whole county. And you can be sure I’ll break him if it takes all winter. I don’t know why I go on about him, only the man I bought him from said a funny thing. He said, ‘That horse is so mean he’d eat a man right off his back.’ Well, remember what Father used to say when we went rabbit hunting? ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ I’ll see you Thanksgiving. Your son Tom.”
He wondered whether it was good enough, but he was too tired to do it again. He added, “P.S. I notice that Polly has not reformed one bit. That parrot makes me blush.”
On another sheet he wrote, “Dear Will, No matter what you yourself may think--please help me now. For Mother’s sake--please. I was killed by a horse--thrown and kicked in the head--please! Your brother Tom.”
He stamped the letters and put them in his pocket and he asked Samuel, “Is that all right?”
In his bedroom he broke open a new box of shells and put one of them in the cylinder of his well-oiled Smith and Wesson .38 and he set the loaded chamber one space to the left of the firing pin.
His horse standing sleepily near the fence came to his whistle and stood drowsing while he saddled up.
It was three o’clock in the morning when he dropped the letters in the post office at King City and mounted and turned his horse south toward the unproductive hills of the old Hamilton place.
He was a gallant gentlemen.