What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.
G.E. Woodberry
ePub
A4Chương 3-4
C
hapter 31
Adam Trask was born on a farm on the outskirts of a little town which was not far from a big town in
Connecticut. He was an only son, and he was born six months after his father was mustered into a
Connecticut regiment in 1862. Adam’s mother ran the farm, bore Adam, and still had time to embrace
a primitive theosophy. She felt that her husband would surely be killed by the wild and barbarous
rebels, and she prepared herself to get in touch with him in what she called the beyond. He came home
six weeks after Adam was born. His right leg was off at the knee. He stumped in on a crude wooden
leg he himself had carved out of beechwood. And already it was splitting. He had in his pocket and
placed on the parlor table the lead bullet they had given him to bite while they cut off his frayed leg.
Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart
too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military
career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the
drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of
replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel
girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did
not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eightthirty
he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair.
Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus
Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off
square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was
considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that
day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about
on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at
him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully
knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was
going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and
get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I
finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out
after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus
was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to
Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
Mrs. Trask was a pale, inside-herself woman. No heat of sun ever reddened her cheeks, and no
open laughter raised the corners of her mouth. She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world
and of herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had
developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new
unhappiness. Her search was quickly rewarded by the infection Cyrus brought home from the war.
And as soon as she was aware that a condition existed, she devised a new theology. Her god of
communication became a god of vengeance—to her the most satisfactory deity she had devised so far
—and, as it turned out, the last. It was quite easy for her to attribute her condition to certain dreams
she had experienced while her husband was away. But the disease was not punishment enough for her
nocturnal philandering. Her new god was an expert in punishment. He demanded of her a sacrifice.
She searched her mind for some proper egotistical humility and almost happily arrived at the sacrifice
—herself. It took her two weeks to write her last letter with revisions and corrected spelling. In it she
confessed to crimes she could not possibly have committed and admitted faults far beyond her
capacity. And then, dressed in a secretly made shroud, she went out on a moonlight night and drowned
herself in a pond so shallow that she had to get down on her knees in the mud and hold her head under
water. This required great will power. As the warm unconsciousness finally crept over her, she was
thinking with some irritation of how her white lawn shroud would have mud down the front when they
pulled her out in the morning. And it did.
Cyrus Trask mourned for his wife with a keg of whisky and three old army friends who had
dropped in on their way home to Maine. Baby Adam cried a good deal at the beginning of the wake,
for the mourners, not knowing about babies, had neglected to feed him. Cyrus soon solved the
problem. He dipped a rag in whisky and gave it to the baby to suck, and after three or four dippings
young Adam went to sleep. Several times during the mourning period he awakened and complained
and got the dipped rag again and went to sleep. The baby was drunk for two days and a half. Whatever
may have happened in his developing brain, it proved beneficial to his metabolism: from that two and
a half days he gained an iron health. And when at the end of three days his father finally went out and
bought a goat, Adam drank the milk greedily, vomited, drank more, and was on his way. His father did
not find the reaction alarming, since he was doing the same thing.
Within a month Cyrus Trask’s choice fell on the seventeen-year-old daughter of a neighboring
farmer. The courtship was quick and realistic. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind about his
intentions. They were honorable and reasonable. Her father abetted the courtship. He had two younger
daughters, and Alice, the eldest, was seventeen. This was her first proposal.
Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a
servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money
—unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and
impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man
to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.
Alice Trask had a number of admirable qualities. She was a deep scrubber and a corner-cleaner in
the house. She was not very pretty, so there was no need to watch her. Her eyes were pale, her
complexion sallow, and her teeth crooked, but she was extremely healthy and never complained
during her pregnancy. Whether she liked children or not no one ever knew. She was not asked, and she
never said anything unless she was asked. From Cyrus’s point of view this was possibly the greatest of
her virtues. She never offered any opinion or statement, and when a man was talking she gave a vague
impression of listening while she went about doing the housework.
The youth, inexperience, and taciturnity of Alice Trask all turned out to be assets for Cyrus. While
he continued to operate his farm as such farms were operated in the neighborhood, he entered on a
new career—that of the old soldier. And that energy which had made him wild now made him
thoughtful. No one now outside of the War Department knew the quality and duration of his service.
His wooden leg was at once a certificate of proof of his soldiering and a guarantee that he wouldn’t
ever have to do it again. Timidly he began to tell Alice about his campaigns, but as his technique grew
so did his battles. At the very first he knew he was lying, but it was not long before he was equally
sure that every one of his stories was true. Before he had entered the service he had not been much
interested in warfare; now he bought every book about war, read every report, subscribed to the New
York papers, studied maps. His knowledge of geography had been shaky and his information about the
fighting nonexistent; now he became an authority. He knew not only the battles, movements,
campaigns, but also the units involved, down to the regiments, their colonels, and where they
originated. And from telling he became convinced that he had been there.
All of this was a gradual development, and it took place while Adam was growing to boyhood and
his young half-brother behind him. Adam and little Charles would sit silent and respectful while their
father explained how every general thought and planned and where they had made their mistakes and
what they should have done. And then—he had known it at the time—he had told Grant and McClellan
where they were wrong and had begged them to take his analysis of the situation. Invariably they
refused his advice and only afterward was he proved right.
There was one thing Cyrus did not do, and perhaps it was clever of him. He never once promoted
himself to noncommissioned rank. Private Trask he began, and Private Trask he remained. In the total
telling, it made him at once the most mobile and ubiquitous private in the history of warfare. It made
it necessary for him to be in as many as four places at once. But perhaps instinctively he did not tell
those stories close to each other. Alice and the boys had a complete picture of him: a private soldier,
and proud of it, who not only happened to be where every spectacular and important action was taking
place but who wandered freely into staff meetings and joined or dissented in the decisions of general
officers.
The death of Lincoln caught Cyrus in the pit of the stomach. Always he remembered how he felt
when he first heard the news. And he could never mention it or hear of it without quick tears in his
eyes. And while he never actually said it, you got the indestructible impression that Private Cyrus
Trask was one of Lincoln’s closest, warmest, and most trusted friends. When Mr. Lincoln wanted to
know about the army, the real army, not those prancing dummies in gold braid, he turned to Private
Trask. How Cyrus managed to make this understood without saying it was a triumph of insinuation.
No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth
coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.
Quite early he began to write letters and then articles about the conduct of the war, and his
conclusions were intelligent and convincing. Indeed, Cyrus developed an excellent military mind. His
criticisms both of the war as it had been conducted and of the army organization as it persisted were
irresistibly penetrating. His articles in various magazines attracted attention. His letters to the War
Department, printed simultaneously in the newspapers, began to have a sharp effect in decisions on
the army. Perhaps if the Grand Army of the Republic had not assumed political force and direction his
voice might not have been heard so clearly in Washington, but the spokesman for a block of nearly a
million men was not to be ignored. And such a voice in military matters Cyrus Trask became. It came
about that he was consulted in matters of army organization, in officer relationships, in personnel and
equipment. His expertness was apparent to everyone who heard him. He had a genius for the military.
More than that, he was one of those responsible for the organization of the G.A.R. as a cohesive and
potent force in the national life. After several unpaid offices in that organization, he took a paid
secretaryship which he kept for the rest of his life. He traveled from one end of the country to the
other, attending conventions, meetings, and encampments. So much for his public life.
His private life was also laced through with his new profession. He was a man devoted. His house
and farm he organized on a military basis. He demanded and got reports on the conduct of his private
economy. It is probable that Alice preferred it this way. She was not a talker. A terse report was
easiest for her. She was busy with the growing boys and with keeping the house clean and the clothes
washed. Also, she had to conserve her energy, though she did not mention this in any of her reports.
Without warning her energy would leave her, and she would have to sit down and wait until it came
back. In the night she would be drenched with perspiration. She knew perfectly well that she had what
was called consumption, would have known even if she was not reminded by a hard, exhausting cough.
And she did not know how long she would live. Some people wasted on for quite a few years. There
wasn’t any rule about it. Perhaps she didn’t dare to mention it to her husband. He had devised a
method for dealing with sickness which resembled punishment. A stomach ache was treated with a
purge so violent that it was a wonder anyone survived it. If she had mentioned her condition, Cyrus
might have started a treatment which would have killed her off before her consumption could have
done it. Besides, as Cyrus became more military, his wife learned the only technique through which a
soldier can survive. She never made herself noticeable, never spoke unless spoken to, performed what
was expected and no more, and tried for no promotions. She became a rear rank private. It was much
easier that way. Alice retired to the background until she was barely visible at all.
It was the little boys who really caught it. Cyrus had decided that even though the army was not
perfect, it was still the only honorable profession for a man. He mourned the fact that he could not be
a permanent soldier because of his wooden leg, but he could not imagine any career for his sons
except the army. He felt a man should learn soldiering from the ranks, as he had. Then he would know
what it was about from experience, not from charts and textbooks. He taught them the manual of arms
when they could barely walk. By the time they were in grade school, close-order drill was as natural as
breathing and as hateful as hell. He kept them hard with exercises, beating out the rhythm with a stick
on his wooden leg. He made them walk for miles, carrying knapsacks loaded with stones to make their
shoulders strong. He worked constantly on their marksmanship in the woodlot behind the house.
2
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not
have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences
just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one
sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into
green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is
never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Adam found his father out. It wasn’t that his father changed but that some new quality came to
Adam. He had always hated the discipline, as every normal animal does, but it was just and true and
inevitable as measles, not to be denied or cursed, only to be hated. And then—it was very fast, almost
a click in the brain—Adam knew that, for him at least, his father’s methods had no reference to
anything in the world but his father. The techniques and training were not designed for the boys at all
but only to make Cyrus a great man. And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not
a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong-willed and concentrated little man wearing a huge
busby. Who knows what causes this—a look in the eye, a lie found out, a moment of hesitation?—then
god comes crashing down in a child’s brain.
Young Adam was always an obedient child. Something in him shrank from violence, from
contention, from the silent shrieking tensions that can rip at a house. He contributed to the quiet he
wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since
there is some violence in everyone. He covered his life with a veil of vagueness, while behind his
quiet eyes a rich full life went on. This did not protect him from assault but it allowed him an
immunity.
His half-brother Charles, only a little over a year younger, grew up with his father’s assertiveness.
Charles was a natural athlete, with instinctive timing and coordination and the competitor’s will to
win over others, which makes for success in the world.
Young Charles won all contests with Adam whether they involved skill, or strength, or quick
intelligence, and won them so easily that quite early he lost interest and had to find his competition
among other children. Thus it came about that a kind of affection grew up between the two boys, but it
was more like an association between brother and sister than between brothers. Charles fought any boy
who challenged or slurred Adam and usually won. He protected Adam from his father’s harshness
with lies and even with blame-taking. Charles felt for his brother the affection one has for helpless
things, for blind puppies and new babies.
Adam looked out of his covered brain—out the long tunnels of his eyes—at the people of his
world: His father, a one-legged natural force at first, installed justly to make little boys feel littler and
stupid boys aware of their stupidity; and then—after god had crashed—he saw his father as the
policeman laid on by birth, the officer who might be circumvented, or fooled, but never challenged.
And out of the long tunnels of his eyes Adam saw his half-brother Charles as a bright being of another
species, gifted with muscle and bone, speed and alertness, quite on a different plane, to be admired as
one admires the sleek lazy danger of a black leopard, not by any chance to be compared with one’s
self. And it would no more have occurred to Adam to confide in his brother—to tell him the hunger,
the gray dreams, the plans and silent pleasures that lay at the back of the tunneled eyes—than to share
his thoughts with a lovely tree or a pheasant in flight. Adam was glad of Charles the way a woman is
glad of a fat diamond, and he depended on his brother in the way that same woman depends on the
diamond’s glitter and the self-security tied up in its worth; but love, affection, empathy, were beyond
conception.
Toward Alice Trask, Adam concealed a feeling that was akin to a warm shame. She was not his
mother—that he knew because he had been told many times. Not from things said but from the tone in
which other things were said, he knew that he had once had a mother and that she had done some
shameful thing, such as forgetting the chickens or missing the target on the range in the woodlot. And
as a result of her fault she was not here. Adam thought sometimes that if he could only find out what
sin it was she had committed, why, he would sin it too—and not be here.
Alice treated the boys equally, washed them and fed them, and left everything else to their father,
who had let it be known clearly and with finality that training the boys physically and mentally was
his exclusive province. Even praise and reprimand he would not delegate. Alice never complained,
quarreled, laughed, or cried. Her mouth was trained to a line that concealed nothing and offered
nothing too. But once when Adam was quite small he wandered silently into the kitchen. Alice did not
see him. She was darning socks and she was smiling. Adam retired secretly and walked out of the
house and into the woodlot to a sheltered place behind a stump that he knew well. He settled deep
between the protecting roots. Adam was as shocked as though he had come upon her naked. He
breathed excitedly, high against his throat. For Alice had been naked—she had been smiling. He
wondered how she had dared such wantonness. And he ached toward her with a longing that was
passionate and hot. He did not know what it was about, but all the long lack of holding, of rocking, of
caressing, the hunger for breast and nipple, and the softness of a lap, and the voice-tone of love and
compassion, and the sweet feeling of anxiety—all of these were in his passion, and he did not know it
because he did not know that such things existed, so how could he miss them?
Of course it occurred to him that he might be wrong, that some misbegotten shadow had fallen
across his face and warped his seeing. And so he cast back to the sharp picture in his head and knew
that the eyes were smiling too. Twisted light could do one or the other but not both.
He stalked her then, game-wise, as he had the wood-chucks on the knoll when day after day he had
lain lifeless as a young stone and watched the old wary chucks bring their children out to sun. He spied
on Alice, hidden, and from unsuspected eye-corner, and it was true. Sometimes when she was alone,
and knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled. And it was
wonderful to see how quickly she could drive the smile to earth the way the woodchucks holed their
children.
Adam concealed his treasure deep in his tunnels, but he was inclined to pay for his pleasure with
something. Alice began to find gifts—in her sewing basket, in her worn-out purse, under her pillow—
two cinnamon pinks, a bluebird’s tailfeather, half a stick of green sealing wax, a stolen handkerchief.
At first Alice was startled, but then that passed, and when she found some unsuspected present the
garden smile flashed and disappeared the way a trout crosses a knife of sunshine in a pool. She asked
no questions and made no comment.
Her coughing was very bad at night, so loud and disturbing that Cyrus had at last to put her in
another room or he would have got no sleep. But he did visit her very often—hopping on his one bare
foot, steadying himself with hand on wall. The boys could hear and feel the jar of his body through the
house as he hopped to and from Alice’s bed.
As Adam grew he feared one thing more than any other. He feared the day he would be taken and
enlisted in the army. His father never let him forget that such a time would come. He spoke of it often.
It was Adam who needed the army to make a man of him. Charles was pretty near a man already. And
Charles was a man, and a dangerous man, even at fifteen, and when Adam was sixteen.
3
The affection between the two boys had grown with the years. It may be that part of Charles’ feeling
was contempt, but it was a protective contempt. It happened that one evening the boys were playing
peewee, a new game to them, in the dooryard. A small pointed stick was laid on the ground, then
struck near one end with a bat. The small stick flew into the air and then was batted as far as possible.
Adam was not good at games. But by some accident of eye and timing he beat his brother at
peewee. Four times he drove the peewee farther than Charles did. It was a new experience to him, and
a wild flush came over him, so that he did not watch and feel out his brother’s mood as he usually did.
The fifth time he drove the peewee it flew humming like a bee far out in the field. He turned happily
to face Charles and suddenly he froze deep in his chest. The hatred in Charles’ face frightened him. “I
guess it was just an accident,” he said lamely. “I bet I couldn’t do it again.”
Charles set his peewee, struck it, and, as it rose into the air, swung at it and missed. Charles moved
slowly toward Adam, his eyes cold and noncommittal. Adam edged away in terror. He did not dare to
turn and run for his brother could outrun him. He backed slowly away, his eyes frightened and his
throat dry. Charles moved close and struck him in the face with his bat. Adam covered his bleeding
nose with his hands, and Charles swung his bat and hit him in the ribs, knocked the wind out of him,
swung at his head and knocked him out. And as Adam lay unconscious on the ground Charles kicked
him heavily in the stomach and walked away.
After a while Adam became conscious. He breathed shallowly because his chest hurt. He tried to
sit up and fell back at the wrench of the torn muscles over his stomach. He saw Alice looking out, and
there was something in her face that he had never seen before. He did not know what it was, but it was
not soft or weak, and it might be hatred. She saw that he was looking at her, dropped the curtains into
place, and disappeared. When Adam finally got up from the ground and moved, bent over, into the
kitchen, he found a basin of hot water standing ready for him and a clean towel beside it. He could
hear his stepmother coughing in her room.
Charles had one great quality. He was never sorry—ever. He never mentioned the beating,
apparently never thought of it again. But Adam made very sure that he didn’t win again—at anything.
He had always felt the danger in his brother, but now he understood that he must never win unless he
was prepared to kill Charles. Charles was not sorry. He had very simply fulfilled himself.
Charles did not tell his father about the beating, and Adam did not, and surely Alice did not, and
yet he seemed to know. In the months that followed he turned a gentleness on Adam. His speech
became softer toward him. He did not punish him any more. Almost nightly he lectured him, but not
violently. And Adam was more afraid of the gentleness than he had been at the violence, for it seemed
to him that he was being trained as a sacrifice, almost as though he was being subjected to kindness
before death, the way victims intended to the gods were cuddled and flattered so that they might go
happily to the stone and not outrage the gods with unhappiness.
Cyrus explained softly to Adam the nature of a soldier. And though his knowledge came from
research rather than experience, he knew and he was accurate. He told his son of the sad dignity that
can belong to a soldier, how he is necessary in the light of all the failures of man—the penalty of our
frailties. Perhaps Cyrus discovered these things in himself as he told them. It was very different from
the flag-waving, shouting bellicosity of his younger days. The humilities are piled on a soldier, so
Cyrus said, in order that he may, when the time comes, be not too resentful of the final humility—a
meaningless and dirty death. And Cyrus talked to Adam alone and did not permit Charles to listen.
Cyrus took Adam to walk with him one late afternoon, and the black conclusions of all of his study
and his thinking came out and flowed with a kind of thick terror over his son. He said, “I’ll have you
know that a soldier is the most holy of all humans because he is the most tested—most tested of all.
I’ll try to tell you. Look now—in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil
thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe
the worst sin we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him,
‘Use it well, use it wisely.’ We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or
classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of
your early training.”
Adam wet his dry lips and tried to ask and failed and tried again. “Why do they have to do it?” he
said. “Why is it?”
Cyrus was deeply moved and he spoke as he had never spoken before. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I’ve studied and maybe learned how things are, but I’m not even close to why they are. And you must
not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way
a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws in a stream to fool dogs. A fox can’t say why he does it, and
what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again? When I knew you had to go I thought to leave
the future open so you could dig out your own findings, and then it seemed better if I could protect
you with the little I know. You’ll go in soon now—you’ve come to the age.”
“I don’t want to,” said Adam quickly.
“You’ll go in soon,” his father went on, not hearing. “And I want to tell you so you won’t be
surprised. They’ll first strip off your clothes, but they’ll go deeper than that. They’ll shuck off any
little dignity you have—you’ll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to
live. They’ll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up
again you’ll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can’t even wear a scrap or pin a note on
your breast to say, ‘This is me—separate from the rest.’ ”
“I don’t want to do it,” said Adam.
“After a while,” said Cyrus, “you’ll think no thought the others do not think. You’ll know no word
the others can’t say. And you’ll do things because the others do them. You’ll feel the danger in any
difference whatever—a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.”
“What if I don’t?” Adam demanded.
“Yes,” said Cyrus, “sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won’t do what is
demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the
destruction of his difference. They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with
iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can’t finally give in, they’ll vomit
you up and leave you stinking outside—neither part of themselves nor yet free. It’s better to fall in
with them. They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully
senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it. Within itself, if you do not hold it up to other
things for comparison and derision, you’ll find slowly, surely, a reason and a logic and a kind of
dreadful beauty. A man who can accept it is not a worse man always, and sometimes is a much better
man. Pay good heed to me for I have thought long about it. Some men there are who go down the
dismal wrack of soldiering, surrender themselves, and become faceless. But these had not much face
to start with. And maybe you’re like that. But there are others who go down, submerge in the common
slough, and then rise more themselves than they were, because—because they have lost a littleness of
vanity and have gained all the gold of the company and the regiment. If you can go down so low, you
will be able to rise higher than you can conceive, and you will know a holy joy, a companionship
almost like that of a heavenly company of angels. Then you will know the quality of men even if they
are inarticulate. But until you have gone way down you can never know this.”
As they walked back toward the house Cyrus turned left and entered the woodlot among the trees,
and it was dusk. Suddenly Adam said, “You see that stump there, sir? I used to hide between the roots
on the far side. After you punished me I used to hide there, and sometimes I went there just because I
felt bad.”
“Let’s go and see the place,” his father said. Adam led him to it, and Cyrus looked down at the
nestlike hole between the roots. “I knew about it long ago,” he said. “Once when you were gone a long
time I thought you must have such a place, and I found it because I felt the kind of place you would
need. See how the earth is tamped and the little grass is torn? And while you sat in there you stripped
little pieces of bark to shreds. I knew it was the place when I came upon it.”
Adam was staring at his father in wonder. “You never came here looking for me,” he said.
“No,” Cyrus replied. “I wouldn’t do that. You can drive a human too far. I wouldn’t do that.
Always you must leave a man one escape before death. Remember that! I knew, I guess, how hard I
was pressing you. I didn’t want to push you over the edge.”
They moved restlessly off through the trees. Cyrus said, “So many things I want to tell you. I’ll
forget most of them. I want to tell you that a soldier gives up so much to get something back. From the
day of a child’s birth he is taught by every circumstance, by every law and rule and right, to protect
his own life. He starts with that great instinct, and everything confirms it. And then he is a soldier and
he must learn to violate all of this—he must learn coldly to put himself in the way of losing his own
life without going mad. And if you can do that—and, mind you, some can’t—then you will have the
greatest gift of all. Look, son,” Cyrus said earnestly, “nearly all men are afraid, and they don’t even
know what causes their fear—shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a
faceless death. But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, described and
recognizable, by bullet or saber, arrow or lance, then you need never be afraid again, at least not the
same way you were before. Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men
may cry in terror. This is the great reward. Maybe this is the only reward. Maybe this is the final
purity all ringed with filth. It’s nearly dark. I’ll want to talk to you again tomorrow night when both of
us have thought about what I’ve told you.”
But Adam said, “Why don’t you talk to my brother? Charles will be going. He’ll be good at it,
much better than I am.”
“Charles won’t be going,” Cyrus said. “There’d be no point in it.”
“But he would be a better soldier.”
“Only outside on his skin,” said Cyrus. “Not inside, Charles is not afraid so he could never learn
anything about courage. He does not know anything outside himself so he could never gain the things
I’ve tried to explain to you. To put him in an army would be to let loose things which in Charles must
be chained down, not let loose. I would not dare to let him go.”
Adam complained, “You never punished him, you let him live his life, you praised him, you did
not haze him, and now you let him stay out of the army.” He stopped, frightened at what he had said,
afraid of the rage or the contempt or the violence his words might let loose.
His father did not reply. He walked on out of the woodlot, and his head hung down so that his chin
rested on his chest, and the rise and fall of his hip when his wooden leg struck the ground was
monotonous. The wooden leg made a side semicircle to get ahead when its turn came.
It was completely dark by now, and the golden light of the lamps shone out from the open kitchen
door. Alice came to the doorway and peered out, looking for them, and then she heard the uneven
footsteps approaching and went back to the kitchen.
Cyrus walked to the kitchen stoop before he stopped and raised his head. “Where are you?” he
asked.
“Here—right behind you—right here.”
“You asked a question. I guess I’ll have to answer. Maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad to answer
it. You’re not clever. You don’t know what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other
people walk over you. Sometimes I think you’re a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does
that answer your question? I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but
it’s true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you? Now shut
your mouth and go to your supper. I’ll talk to you tomorrow night. My leg aches.”
4
There was no talk at supper. The quiet was disturbed only by the slup of soup and gnash of chewing,
and his father waved his hand to try to drive the moths away from the chimney of the kerosene lamp.
Adam thought his brother watched him secretly. And he caught an eye flash from Alice when he
looked up suddenly. After he had finished eating Adam pushed back his chair. “I think I’ll go for a
walk,” he said.
Charles stood up. “I’ll go with you.”
Alice and Cyrus watched them go out the door, and then she asked one of her rare questions. She
asked nervously, “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Will you make him go?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
Cyrus stared bleakly out the open door into the darkness. “Yes, he knows.”
“He won’t like it. It’s not right for him.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus said, and he repeated loudly, “It doesn’t matter,” and his tone said,
“Shut your mouth. This is not your affair.” They were silent a moment, and then he said almost in a
tone of apology, “It isn’t as though he were your child.”
Alice did not reply.
The boys walked down the dark rutty road. Ahead they could see a few pinched lights where the
village was.
“Want to go in and see if anything’s stirring at the inn?” Charles asked.
“I hadn’t thought of it,” said Adam.
“Then what the hell are you walking out at night for?”
“You didn’t have to come,” said Adam.
Charles moved close to him. “What did he say to you this afternoon? I saw you walking together.
What did he say?”
“He just talked about the army—like always.”
“Didn’t look like that to me,” Charles said suspiciously. “I saw him leaning close, talking the way
he talks to men—not telling, talking.”
“He was telling,” Adam said patiently, and he had to control his breath, for a little fear had begun
to press up against his stomach. He took as deep a gulp of air as he could and held it to push back at
the fear.
“What did he tell you?” Charles demanded again.
“About the army and how it is to be a soldier.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Charles. “I think you’re a goddam mealy-mouthed liar. What’re you
trying to get away with?”
“Nothing,” said Adam.
Charles said harshly, “Your crazy mother drowned herself. Maybe she took a look at you. That’d
do it.”
Adam let out his breath gently, pressing down the dismal fear. He was silent.
Charles cried, “You’re trying to take him away! I don’t know how you’re going about it. What do
you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing,” said Adam.
Charles jumped in front of him so that Adam had to stop, his chest almost against his brother’s
chest. Adam backed away, but carefully, as one backs away from a snake.
“Look at his birthday!” Charles shouted. “I took six bits and I bought him a knife made in
Germany—three blades and a corkscrew, pearl-handled. Where’s that knife? Do you ever see him use
it? Did he give it to you? I never even saw him hone it. Have you got that knife in your pocket? What
did he do with it? ‘Thanks,’ he said, like that. And that’s the last I heard of a pearl-handled German
knife that cost six bits.”
Rage was in his voice, and Adam felt the creeping fear; but he knew also that he had a moment
left. Too many times he had seen the destructive machine that chopped down anything standing in its
way. Rage came first and then a coldness, a possession; noncommittal eyes and a pleased smile and no
voice at all, only a whisper. When that happened murder was on the way, but cool, deft murder, and
hands that worked precisely, delicately. Adam swallowed saliva to dampen his dry throat. He could
think of nothing to say that would be heard, for once in rage his brother would not listen, would not
even hear. He bulked darkly in front of Adam, shorter, wider, thicker, but still not crouched. In the
starlight his lips shone with wetness, but there was no smile yet and his voice still raged.
“What did you do on his birthday? You think I didn’t see? Did you spend six bits or even four bits?
You brought him a mongrel pup you picked up in the woodlot. You laughed like a fool and said it
would make a good bird dog. That dog sleeps in his room. He plays with it while he’s reading. He’s
got it all trained. And where’s the knife? ‘Thanks,’ he said, just Thanks.’ ” Charles spoke in a whisper,
and his shoulders dropped.
Adam made one desperate jump backward and raised his hands to guard his face. His brother
moved precisely, each foot planted firmly. One fist lanced delicately to get the range, and then the
bitter-frozen work—a hard blow in the stomach, and Adam’s hands dropped; then four punches to the
head. Adam felt the bone and gristle of his nose crunch. He raised his hands again and Charles drove
at his heart. And all this time Adam looked at his brother as the condemned look hopelessly and
puzzled at the executioner.
Suddenly to his own surprise Adam launched a wild, overhand, harmless swing which had neither
force nor direction. Charles ducked in and under it and the helpless arm went around his neck. Adam
wrapped his arms around his brother and hung close to him, sobbing. He felt the square fists whipping
nausea into his stomach and still he held on. Time was slowed to him. With his body he felt his
brother move sideways to force his legs apart. And he felt the knee come up, past his knees, scraping
his thighs, until it crashed against his testicles and flashing white pain ripped and echoed through his
body. His arms let go. He bent over and vomited, while the cold killing went on.
Adam felt the punches on temples, cheeks, eyes. He felt his lip split and tatter over his teeth, but
his skin seemed thickened and dull, as though he were encased in heavy rubber. Dully he wondered
why his legs did not buckle, why he did not fall, why unconsciousness did not come to him. The
punching continued eternally. He could hear his brother panting with the quick explosive breath of a
sledgehammer man, and in the sick starlit dark he could see his brother through the tear-watered blood
that flowed from his eyes. He saw the innocent, noncommittal eyes, the small smile on wet lips. And
as he saw these things—a flash of light and darkness.
Charles stood over him, gulping air like a run-out dog. And then he turned and walked quickly
back, toward the house, kneading his bruised knuckles as he went.
Consciousness came back quick and frightening to Adam. His mind rolled in a painful mist. His
body was heavy and thick with hurt. But almost instantly he forgot his hurts. He heard quick footsteps
on the road. The instinctive fear and fierceness of a rat came over him. He pushed himself up on his
knees and dragged himself off the road to the ditch that kept it drained. There was a foot of water in
the ditch, and the tall grass grew up from its sides. Adam crawled quietly into the water, being very
careful to make no splash.
The footsteps came close, slowed, moved on a little, came back. From his hiding place Adam
could see only a darkness in the dark. And then a sulphur match was struck and burned a tiny blue
until the wood caught, lighting his brother’s face grotesquely from below. Charles raised the match
and peered around, and Adam could see the hatchet in his right hand.
When the match went out the night was blacker than before. Charles moved slowly on and struck
another match, and on and struck another. He searched the road for signs. At last he gave it up. His
right hand rose and he threw the hatchet far off into the field. He walked rapidly away toward the
pinched lights of the village.
For a long time Adam lay in the cool water. He wondered how his brother felt, wondered whether
now that his passion was chilling he would feel panic or sorrow or sick conscience or nothing. These
things Adam felt for him. His conscience bridged him to his brother and did his pain for him the way
at other times he had done his homework.
Adam crept out of the water and stood up. His hurts were stiffening and the blood was dried in a
crust on his face. He thought he would stay outside in the darkness until his father and Alice went to
bed. He felt that he could not answer any questions, because he did not know any answers, and trying
to find one was harsh to his battered mind. Dizziness edged with blue lights came fringing his
forehead, and he knew that he would be fainting soon.
He shuffled slowly up the road with wide-spread legs. At the stoop he paused, looked in. The lamp
hanging by its chain from the ceiling cast a yellow circle and lighted Alice and her mending basket on
the table in front of her. On the other side his father chewed a wooden pen and dipped it in an open ink
bottle and made entries in his black record book.
Alice, glancing up, saw Adam’s bloody face. Her hand rose to her mouth and her fingers hooked
over her lower teeth.
Adam dragfooted up one step and then the other and supported himself in the doorway.
Then Cyrus raised his head. He looked with a distant curiosity. The identity of the distortion came
to him slowly. He stood up, puzzled and wondering. He stuck the wooden pen in the ink bottle and
wiped his fingers on his pants. “Why did he do it?” Cyrus asked softly.
Adam tried to answer, but his mouth was caked and dry. He licked his lips and started them
bleeding again. “I don’t know,” he said.
Cyrus stumped over to him and grasped him by the arm so fiercely that he winced and tried to pull
away. “Don’t lie to me! Why did he do it? Did you have an argument?”
“No.”
Cyrus wrenched at him. “Tell me! I want to know. Tell me! You’ll have to tell me. I’ll make you
tell me! Goddam it, you’re always protecting him! Don’t you think I know that? Did you think you
were fooling me? Now tell me, or by God I’ll keep you standing there all night!”
Adam cast about for an answer. “He doesn’t think you love him.”
Cyrus released the arm and hobbled back to his chair and sat down. He rattled the pen in the ink
bottle and looked blindly at his record book. “Alice,” he said, “help Adam to bed. You’ll have to cut
his shirt off, I guess. Give him a hand.” He got up again, went to the corner of the room where the
coats hung on nails, and, reaching behind the garments, brought out his shotgun, broke it to verify its
load, and clumped out of the door.
Alice raised her hand as though she would hold him back with a rope of air. And her rope broke
and her face hid her thoughts. “Go in your room,” she said. “I’ll bring some water in a basin.”
Adam lay on the bed, a sheet pulled up to his waist, and Alice patted the cuts with a linen
handkerchief dipped in warm water. She was silent for a long time and then she continued Adam’s
sentence as though there had never been an interval, “He doesn’t think his father loves him. But you
love him—you always have.”
Adam did not answer her.
She went on quietly, “He’s a strange boy. You have to know him—all rough shell, all anger until
you know.” She paused to cough, leaned down and coughed, and when the spell was over her cheeks
were flushed and she was exhausted. “You have to know him,” she repeated. “For a long time he has
given me little presents, pretty things you wouldn’t think he’d even notice. But he doesn’t give them
right out. He hides them where he knows I’ll find them. And you can look at him for hours and he
won’t ever give the slightest sign he did it. You have to know him.”
She smiled at Adam and he closed his eyes.
Chapter 4
1
Charles stood at the bar in the village inn and Charles was laughing delightedly at the funny stories the
night-stranded drummers were telling. He got out his tobacco sack with its meager jingle of silver and
bought the men a drink to keep them talking. He stood and grinned and rubbed his split knuckles. And
when the drummers, accepting his drink, raised their glasses and said, “Here’s to you,” Charles was
delighted. He ordered another drink for his new friends, and then he joined them for some kind of
deviltry in another place.
When Cyrus stumped out into the night he was filled with a kind of despairing anger at Charles.
He looked on the road for his son, and he went to the inn to look for him, but Charles was gone. It is
probable that if he had found him that night he would have killed him, or tried to. The direction of a
big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped
over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
Naturally it was not long before Charles was told that his father was looking for him with a
shotgun. He hid out for two weeks, and when he finally did return, murder had sunk back to simple
anger and he paid his penalty in overwork and a false theatrical humility.
Adam lay four days in bed, so stiff and aching that he could not move without a groan. On the third
day his father gave evidence of his power with the military. He did it as a poultice to his own pride
and also as a kind of prize for Adam. Into the house, into Adam’s bedroom, came a captain of cavalry
and two sergeants in dress uniform of blue. In the dooryard their horses were held by two privates.
Lying in his bed, Adam was enlisted in the army as a private in the cavalry. He signed the Articles of
War and took the oath while his father and Alice looked on. And his father’s eyes glistened with tears.
After the soldiers had gone his father sat with him a long time. “I’ve put you in the cavalry for a
reason,” he said. “Barrack life is not a good life for long. But the cavalry has work to do. I made sure
of that. You’ll like going for the Indian country. There’s action coming. I can’t tell you how I know.
There’s fighting on the way.”
“Yes, sir,” Adam said.
2
It has always seemed strange to me that it is usually men like Adam who have to do the soldiering. He
did not like fighting to start with, and far from learning to love it, as some men do, he felt an
increasing revulsion for violence. Several times his officers looked closely at him for malingering, but
no charge was brought. During these five years of soldiering Adam did more detail work than any man
in the squadron, but if he killed any enemy it was an accident of ricochet. Being a marksman and
sharpshooter, he was peculiarly fitted to miss. By this time the Indian fighting had become like
dangerous cattle drives—the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen
remnants settled on starvation lands. It was not nice work but, given the pattern of the country’s
development, it had to be done.
To Adam who was an instrument, who saw not the future farms but only the torn bellies of fine
humans, it was revolting and useless. When he fired his carbine to miss he was committing treason
against his unit, and he didn’t care. The emotion of nonviolence was building in him until it became a
prejudice like any other thought-stultifying prejudice. To inflict any hurt on anything for any purpose
became inimical to him. He became obsessed with this emotion, for such it surely was, until it blotted
out any possible thinking in its area. But never was there any hint of cowardice in Adam’s army
record. Indeed he was commended three times and then decorated for bravery.
As he revolted more and more from violence, his impulse took the opposite direction. He ventured
his life a number of times to bring in wounded men. He volunteered for work in field hospitals even
when he was exhausted from his regular duties. He was regarded by his comrades with contemptuous
affection and the unspoken fear men have of impulses they do not understand.
Charles wrote to his brother regularly—of the farm and the village, of sick cows and a foaling
mare, of the added pasture and the lightning-struck barn, of Alice’s choking death from her
consumption and his father’s move to a permanent paid position in the G.A.R. in Washington. As with
many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his
perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
During the time Adam was away he knew his brother better than ever before or afterward. In the
exchange of letters there grew a closeness neither of them could have imagined.
Adam kept one letter from his brother, not because he understood it completely but because it
seemed to have a covered meaning he could not get at. “Dear Brother Adam,” the letter said, “I take
my pen in hand to hope you are in good health”—he always started this way to ease himself gently
into the task of writing. “I have not had your answer to my last letter but I presume you have other
things to do—ha! ha! The rain came wrong and damned the apple blossoms. There won’t be many to
eat next winter but I will save what I can. Tonight I cleaned the house, and it is wet and soapy and
maybe not any cleaner. How do you suppose Mother kept it the way she did? It does not look the
same. Something settles down on it. I don’t know what, but it will not scrub off. But I have spread the
dirt around more evenly anyways. Ha! ha!
“Did Father write you anything about his trip? He’s gone clean out to San Francisco in California
for an encampment of the Grand Army. The Secty. of War is going to be there, and Father is to
introduce him. But this is not any great shucks to Father. He has met the President three, four times
and even been to supper to the White House. I would like to see the White House. Maybe you and me
can go together when you come home. Father could put us up for a few days and he would be wanting
to see you anyways.
“I think I better look around for a wife. This is a good farm, and even if I’m no bargain there’s
girls could do worse than this farm. What do you think? You did not say if you are going to come live
home when you get out of the army. I hope so. I miss you.”
The writing stopped there. There was a scratch on the page and a splash of ink, and then it went on
in pencil, but the writing was different.
In pencil it said, “Later. Well, right there the pen gave out. One of the points broke off. I’ll have to
buy another penpoint in the village—rusted right through.”
The words began to flow more smoothly. “I guess I should wait for a new penpoint and not write
with a pencil. Only I was sitting here in the kitchen with the lamp on and I guess I got to thinking and
it come on late—after twelve, I guess, but I never looked. Old Black Joe started crowing out in the
henhouse. Then Mother’s rocking chair cricked for all the world like she was sitting in it. You know I
don’t take truck with that, but it set me minding backward, you know how you do sometimes. I guess
I’ll tear this letter up maybe, because what’s the good of writing stuff like this.”
The words began to race now as though they couldn’t get out fast enough. “If I’m to throw it away
I’d just as well set it down,” the letter said. “It’s like the whole house was alive and had eyes
everywhere, and like there was people behind the door just ready to come in if you looked away. It
kind of makes my skin crawl. I want to say—I want to say—I mean, I never understood—well, why
our father did it. I mean, why didn’t he like that knife I bought for him on his birthday. Why didn’t
he? It was a good knife and he needed a good knife. If he had used it or even honed it, or took it out of
his pocket and looked at it—that’s all he had to do. If he’d liked it I wouldn’t have took out after you.
I had to take out after you. Seems like to me my mother’s chair is rocking a little. It’s just the light. I
don’t take any truck with that. Seems like to me there’s something not finished. Seems like when you
half finished a job and can’t think what it was. Something didn’t get done. I shouldn’t be here. I ought
to be wandering around the world instead of sitting here on a good farm looking for a wife. There is
something wrong, like it didn’t get finished, like it happened too soon and left something out. It’s me
should be where you are and you here. I never thought like this before. Maybe because it’s late—it’s
later than that. I just looked out and it’s first dawn. I don’t think I fell off to sleep. How could the
night go so fast? I can’t go to bed now. I couldn’t sleep anyways.”
The letter was not signed. Maybe Charles forgot he had intended to destroy it and sent it along. But
Adam saved it for a time, and whenever he read it again it gave him a chill and he didn’t know why.
