If you love someone you would be willing to give up everything for them, but if they loved you back they’d never ask you to.
Anon
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hapter 5On the ranch the little Hamiltons began to grow up, and every year there was a new one. George was a
tall handsome boy, gentle and sweet, who had from the first a kind of courtliness. Even as a little boy
he was polite and what they used to call “no trouble.” From his father he inherited the neatness of
clothing and body and hair, and he never seemed ill dressed even when he was. George was a sinless
boy and grew to be a sinless man. No crime of commission was ever attributed to him, and his crimes
of omission were only misdemeanors. In his middle life, at about the time such things were known
about, it was discovered that he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of
energy.
Behind George, Will grew along, dumpy and stolid. Will had little imagination but he had great
energy. From childhood on he was a hard worker, if anyone would tell him what to work at, and once
told he was indefatigable. He was a conservative, not only in politics but in everything. Ideas he found
revolutionary, and he avoided them with suspicion and distaste. Will liked to live so that no one could
find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
Maybe his father had something to do with Will’s distaste for either change or variation. When
Will was a growing boy, his father had not been long enough in the Salinas Valley to be thought of as
an “old-timer.” He was in fact a foreigner and an Irishman. At that time the Irish were much disliked
in America. They were looked upon with contempt, particularly on the East Coast, but a little of it
must have seeped out to the West. And Samuel had not only variability but was a man of ideas and
innovations. In small cut-off communities such a man is always regarded with suspicion until he has
proved he is no danger to the others. A shining man like Samuel could, and can, cause a lot of trouble.
He might, for example, prove too attractive to the wives of men who knew they were dull. Then there
were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that
could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing. If
Samuel had been a rich man like the Thornes or the Delmars, with their big houses and wide flat lands,
he would have had a great library.
The Delmars had a library—nothing but books in it and paneled in oak. Samuel, by borrowing, had
read many more of the Delmars’ books than the Delmars had. In that day an educated rich man was
acceptable. He might send his sons to college without comment, might wear a vest and white shirt and
tie in the daytime of a weekday, might wear gloves and keep his nails clean. And since the lives and
practices of rich men were mysterious, who knows what they could use or not use? But a poor man—
what need had he for poetry or for painting or for music not fit for singing or dancing? Such things did
not help him bring in a crop or keep a scrap of cloth on his children’s backs. And if in spite of this he
persisted, maybe he had reasons which would not stand the light of scrutiny.
Take Samuel, for instance. He made drawings of work he intended to do with iron or wood. That
was good and understandable, even enviable. But on the edges of the plans he made other drawings,
sometimes trees, sometimes faces or animals or bugs, sometimes just figures that you couldn’t make
out at all. And these caused men to laugh with embarrassed uneasiness. Then, too, you never knew in
advance what Samuel would think or say or do—it might be anything.
The first few years after Samuel came to Salinas Valley there was a vague distrust of him. And
perhaps Will as a little boy heard talk in the San Lucas store. Little boys don’t want their fathers to be
different from other men. Will might have picked up his conservatism right then. Later, as the other
children came along and grew, Samuel belonged to the valley, and it was proud of him in the way a
man who owns a peacock is proud. They weren’t afraid of him any more, for he did not seduce their
wives or lure them out of sweet mediocrity. The Salinas Valley grew fond of Samuel, but by that time
Will was formed.
Certain individuals, not by any means always deserving, are truly beloved of the gods. Things
come to them without their effort or planning. Will Hamilton was one of these. And the gifts he
received were the ones he could appreciate. As a growing boy Will was lucky. Just as his father could
not make money, Will could not help making it. When Will Hamilton raised chickens and his hens
began to lay, the price of eggs went up. As a young man, when two of his friends who ran a little store
came to the point of despondent bankruptcy, Will was asked to lend them a little money to tide them
over the quarter’s bills, and they gave him a one-third interest for a pittance. He was not niggardly. He
gave them what they asked for. The store was on its feet within one year, expanding in two, opening
branches in three, and its descendants, a great mercantile system, now dominate a large part of the
area. Will also took over a bicycle-and-tool shop for a bad debt. Then a few rich people of the valley
bought automobiles, and his mechanic worked on them. Pressure was put on him by a determined poet
whose dreams were brass, cast iron, and rubber. This man’s name was Henry Ford, and his plans were
ridiculous if not illegal. Will grumblingly accepted the southern half of the valley as his exclusive
area, and within fifteen years the valley was two-deep in Fords and Will was a rich man driving a
Marmon.
Tom, the third son, was most like his father. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom
came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn’t discover the world and its
people, he created them. When he read his father’s books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining
and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture,
and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade
surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he
harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.
Tom was as inventive as his father but he was bolder. He would try things his father would not
dare. Also, he had a large concupiscence to put the spurs in his flanks, and this Samuel did not have.
Perhaps it was his driving sexual need that made him remain a bachelor. It was a very moral family he
was born into. It might be that his dreams and his longing, and his outlets for that matter, made him
feel unworthy, drove him sometimes whining into the hills. Tom was a nice mixture of savagery and
gentleness. He worked inhumanly, only to lose in effort his crushing impulses.
The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that
rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long
finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them
defensive always.
When Tom was nine years old he worried because his pretty little sister Möllie had an impediment
in her speech. He asked her to open her mouth wide and saw that a membrane under her tongue caused
the trouble. “I can fix that,” he said. He led her to a secret place far from the house, whetted his
pocketknife on a stone, and cut the offending halter of speech. And then he ran away and was sick.
The Hamilton house grew as the family grew. It was designed to be unfinished, so that lean-tos
could jut out as they were needed. The original room and kitchen soon disappeared in a welter of these
lean-tos.
Meanwhile Samuel got no richer. He developed a very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer
from. He invented a part of a threshing machine, better, cheaper, and more efficient than any in
existence. The patent attorney ate up his little profit for the year. Samuel sent his models to a
manufacturer, who promptly rejected the plans and used the method. The next few years were kept
lean by the suing, and the drain stopped only when he lost the suit. It was his first sharp experience
with the rule that without money you cannot fight money. But he had caught the patent fever, and year
after year the money made by threshing and by smithing was drained off in patents. The Hamilton
children went barefoot, and their overalls were patched and food was sometimes scarce, to pay for the
crisp blueprints with cogs and planes and elevations.
Some men think big and some think little. Samuel and his sons Tom and Joe thought big and
George and Will thought little. Joseph was the fourth son—a kind of mooning boy, greatly beloved
and protected by the whole family. He early discovered that a smiling helplessness was his best
protection from work. His brothers were tough hard workers, all of them. It was easier to do Joe’s
work than to make him do it. His mother and father thought him a poet because he wasn’t any good at
anything else. And they so impressed him with this that he wrote glib verses to prove it. Joe was
physically lazy, and probably mentally lazy too. He daydreamed out his life, and his mother loved him
more than the others because she thought he was helpless. Actually he was the least helpless, because
he got exactly what he wanted with a minimum of effort. Joe was the darling of the family.
In feudal times an ineptness with sword and spear headed a young man for the church: in the
Hamilton family Joe’s inability properly to function at farm and forge headed him for a higher
education. He was not sickly or weak but he did not lift very well; he rode horses badly and detested
them. The whole family laughed with affection when they thought of Joe trying to learn to plow; his
tortuous first furrow wound about like a flatland stream, and his second furrow touched his first only
once and then to cross it and wander off.
Gradually he eliminated himself from every farm duty. His mother explained that his mind was in
the clouds, as though this were some singular virtue.
When Joe had failed at every job, his father in despair put him to herding sixty sheep. This was the
least difficult job of all and the one classically requiring no skill. All he had to do was to stay with the
sheep. And Joe lost them—lost sixty sheep and couldn’t find them where they were huddled in the
shade in a dry gulch. According to the family story, Samuel called the family together, girls and boys,
and made them promise to take care of Joe after he was gone, for if they did not Joe would surely
starve.
Interspersed with the Hamilton boys were five girls: Una the oldest, a thoughtful, studious, dark
girl; Lizzie—I guess Lizzie must have been the oldest since she was named for her mother—I don’t
know much about Lizzie. She early seemed to find a shame for her family. She married young and
went away and thereafter was seen only at funerals. Lizzie had a capacity for hatred and bitterness
unique among the Hamiltons. She had a son, and when he grew up and married a girl Lizzie didn’t like
she did not speak to him for many years.
Then there was Dessie, whose laughter was so constant that everyone near her was glad to be there
because it was more fun to be with Dessie than with anyone else.
The next sister was Olive, my mother. And last was Mollie, who was a little beauty with lovely
blond hair and violet eyes.
These were the Hamiltons, and it was almost a miracle how Liza, skinny little biddy that she was,
produced them year after year and fed them, baked bread, made their clothes, and clothed them with
good manners and iron morals too.
It is amazing how Liza stamped her children. She was completely without experience in the world,
she was unread and, except for the one long trip from Ireland, untraveled. She had no experience with
men save only her husband, and that she looked upon as a tiresome and sometimes painful duty. A
good part of her life was taken up with bearing and raising. Her total intellectual association was the
Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she
had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her
salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it. The many places where it seems
to refute itself did not confuse her in the least. And finally she came to a point where she knew it so
well that she went right on reading it without listening.
Liza enjoyed universal respect because she was a good woman and raised good children. She could
hold up her head anywhere. Her husband and her children and her grandchildren respected her. There
was a nail-hard strength in her, a lack of any compromise, a Tightness in the face of all opposing
wrongness, which made you hold her in a kind of awe but not in warmth.
Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a
crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its
enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a
good lusty love for a drink.
Once when he was very ill Samuel asked, “Liza, couldn’t I have a glass of whisky to ease me?”
She set her little hard chin. “Would you go to the throne of God with liquor on your breath? You
would not!” she said.
Samuel rolled over on his side and went about his illness without ease.
When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and her doctor told her to take a
tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but
it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took
the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and
she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.
Samuel and Liza Hamilton got all of their children raised and well toward adulthood before the
turn of the century. It was a whole clot of Hamiltons growing up on the ranch to the east of King City.
And they were American children and young men and women. Samuel never went back to Ireland and
gradually he forgot it entirely. He was a busy man. He had no time for nostalgia. The Salinas Valley
was the world. A trip to Salinas sixty miles to the north at the head of the valley was event enough for
a year, and the incessant work on the ranch, the care and feeding and clothing of his bountiful family,
took most of his time—but not all. His energy was large.
His daughter Una had become a brooding student, tense and dark. He was proud of her wild,
exploring mind. Olive was preparing to take county examinations after a stretch in the secondary
school in Salinas. Olive was going to be a teacher, an honor like having a priest in the family in
Ireland. Joe was to be sent to college because he was no damn good at anything else. Will was well
along the way to accidental fortune. Tom bruised himself on the world and licked his cuts. Dessie was
studying dressmaking, and Mollie, pretty Mollie, would obviously marry some well-to-do man.
There was no question of inheritance. Although the hill ranch was large it was abysmally poor.
Samuel sunk well after well and could not find water on his own land. That would have made the
difference. Water would have made them comparatively rich. The one poor pipe of water pumped up
from deep near the house was the only source; sometimes it got dangerously low, and twice it went
dry. The cattle had to come from the far fringe of the ranch to drink and then go out again to feed.
All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas
Valley, not poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its
conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. Samuel was well pleased with the fruit of
his loins.
Chapter 6
1
After Adam joined the army and Cyrus moved to Washington, Charles lived alone on the farm. He
boasted about getting himself a wife, but he did not go about doing it by the usual process of meeting
girls, taking them to dances, testing their virtues or otherwise, and finally slipping feebly into
marriage. The truth of it was that Charles was abysmally timid of girls. And, like most shy men, he
satisfied his normal needs in the anonymity of the prostitute. There is great safety for a shy man with
a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be
gay with her and even brutal to her. Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which
shrivels the guts of timid men.
The arrangement was simple and reasonably secret. The owner of the inn kept three rooms on his
top floor for transients, which he rented to girls for two-week periods. At the end of two weeks a new
set of girls took their place. Mr. Hallam, the innkeeper, had no part in the arrangement. He could
almost say with truth that he didn’t know anything about it. He simply collected five times the normal
rent for his three rooms. The girls were assigned, procured, moved, disciplined, and robbed by a
whoremaster named Edwards, who lived in Boston. His girls moved in a slow circuit among the small
towns, never staying anywhere more than two weeks. It was an extremely workable system. A girl was
not in town long enough to cause remark either by citizen or town marshal. They stayed pretty much
in the rooms and avoided public places. They were forbidden on pain of beating to drink or make noise
or to fall in love with anyone. Meals were served in their rooms, and the clients were carefully
screened. No drunken man was permitted to go up to them. Every six months each girl was given one
month of vacation to get drunk and raise hell. On the job, let a girl be disobedient to the rules, and Mr.
Edwards personally stripped her, gagged her, and horsewhipped her within an inch of her life. If she
did it again she found herself in jail, charged with vagrancy and public prostitution.
The two-week stands had another advantage. Many of the girls were diseased, and a girl had nearly
always gone away by the time her gift had incubated in a client. There was no one for a man to get
mad at. Mr. Hallam knew nothing about it, and Mr. Edwards never appeared publicly in his business
capacity. He had a very good thing in his circuit.
The girls were all pretty much alike—big, healthy, lazy, and dull. A man could hardly tell there
had been a change. Charles Trask made it a habit to go to the inn at least once every two weeks, to
creep up to the top floor, do his quick business, and return to the bar to get mildly drunk.
The Trask house had never been gay, but lived in only by Charles it took on a gloomy, rustling
decay. The lace curtains were gray, the floors, although swept, grew sticky and dank. The kitchen was
lacquered—walls, windows, and ceiling—with grease from the frying pans.
The constant scrubbing by the wives who had lived there and the biannual deep-seated scourging
had kept the dirt down. Charles rarely did more than sweep. He gave up sheets on his bed and slept
between blankets. What good to clean the house when there was no one to see it? Only on the nights he
went to the inn did he wash himself and put on clean clothes.
Charles developed a restlessness that got him out at dawn. He worked the farm mightily because
he was lonely. Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep
in the resulting torpor.
His dark face took on the serious expressionlessness of a man who is nearly always alone. He
missed his brother more than he missed his mother and father. He remembered quite inaccurately the
time before Adam went away as the happy time, and he wanted it to come again.
During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was
universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude. For this he
took a powerful purge called Father George’s Elixir of Life.
One accident he did have in the third year of his aloneness. He was digging out rocks and sledding
them to the stone wall. One large boulder was difficult to move. Charles pried at it with a long iron
bar, and the rock bucked and rolled back again and again. Suddenly he lost his temper. The little smile
came on his face, and he fought the stone as though it were a man, in silent fury. He drove his bar deep
behind it and threw his whole weight back. The bar slipped and its upper end crashed against his
forehead. For a few moments he lay unconscious in the field and then he rolled over and staggered,
half-blinded, to the house. There was a long torn welt on his forehead from hairline to a point between
his eyebrows. For a few weeks his head was bandaged over a draining infection, but that did not worry
him. In that day pus was. thought to be benign, a proof that a wound was healing properly. When the
wound did heal, it left a long and crinkled scar, and while most scar tissue is lighter than the
surrounding skin, Charles’ scar turned dark brown. Perhaps the bar had forced iron rust under the skin
and made a kind of tattoo.
The wound had not worried Charles, but the scar did. It looked like a long fingermark laid on his
forehead. He inspected it often in the little mirror by the stove. He combed his hair down over his
forehead to conceal as much of it as he could. He conceived a shame for his scar; he hated his scar. He
became restless when anyone looked at it, and fury rose in him if any question was asked about it. In a
letter to his brother he put down his feeling about it.
“It looks,” he wrote, “like somebody marked me like a cow. The damn thing gets darker. By the
time you get home it will maybe be black. All I need is one going the other way and I would look like
a Papist on Ash Wednesday. I don’t know why it bothers me. I got plenty other scars. It just seems like
I was marked. And when I go into town, like to the inn, why, people are always looking at it. I can hear
them talking about it when they don’t know I can hear. I don’t know why they’re so damn curious
about it. It gets so I don’t feel like going in town at all.”
2
Adam was discharged in 1885 and started to beat his way home. In appearance he had changed little.
There was no military carriage about him. The cavalry didn’t act that way. Indeed some units took
pride in a sloppy posture.
Adam felt that he was sleepwalking. It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you
hate it. In the morning he awakened on a split second and lay waiting for reveille. His calves missed
the hug of leggings and his throat felt naked without its tight collar. He arrived in Chicago, and there,
for no reason, rented a furnished room for a week, stayed in it for two days, went to Buffalo,” changed
his mind, and moved to Niagara Falls. He didn’t want to go home and he put it off as long as possible.
Home was not a pleasant place in his mind. The kind of feelings he had had there were dead in him,
and he had a reluctance to bring them to life. He watched the falls by the hour. Their roar stupefied
and hypnotized him.
One evening he felt a crippling loneliness for the close men in barracks and tent. His impulse was
to rush into a crowd for warmth, any crowd. The first crowded public place he could find was a little
bar, thronged and smoky. He sighed with pleasure, almost nestled in the human clot the way a cat
nestles into a woodpile. He ordered whisky and drank it and felt warm and good. He did not see or
hear. He simply absorbed the contact.
As it grew late and the men began to drift away, he became fearful of the time when he would have
to go home. Soon he was alone with the bartender, who was rubbing and rubbing the mahogany of the
bar and trying with his eyes and his manner to get Adam to go.
“I’ll have one more,” Adam said.
The bartender set the bottle out. Adam noticed him for the first time. He had a strawberry mark on
his forehead.
“I’m a stranger in these parts,” said Adam.
“That’s what we mostly get at the falls,” the bartender said.
“I’ve been in the army. Cavalry.”
“Yeah!” the bartender said.
Adam felt suddenly that he had to impress this man, had to get under his skin some way. “Fighting
Indians,” he said. “Had some great times.”
The man did not answer him.
“My brother has a mark on his head.”
The bartender touched the strawberry mark with his fingers. “Birthmark,” he said. “Gets bigger
every year. Your brother got one?”
“His came from a cut. He wrote me about it.”
“You notice this one of mine looks like a cat?”
“Sure it does.”
“That’s my nickname, Cat. Had it all my life. They say my old lady must of been scared by a cat
when she was having me.”
“I’m on my way home. Been away a long time. Won’t you have a drink?”
“Thanks. Where you staying?”
“Mrs. May’s boarding house.”
“I know her. What they tell is she fills you up with soup so you can’t eat much meat.”
“I guess there are tricks to every trade,” said Adam.
“I guess that’s right. There’s sure plenty in mine.”
“I bet that’s true,” said Adam.
“But the one trick I need I haven’t got. I wisht I knew that one.”
“What is it?”
“How the hell to get you to go home and let me close up.”
Adam stared at him, stared at him and did not speak.
“It’s a joke,” the bartender said uneasily.
“I guess I’ll go home in the morning,” said Adam. “I mean my real home.”
“Good luck,” the bartender said.
Adam walked through the dark town, increasing his speed as though his loneliness sniffed along
behind him. The sagging front steps of his boarding house creaked a warning as he climbed them. The
hall was gloomed with the dot of yellow light from an oil lamp turned down so low that it jerked
expiringly.
The landlady stood in her open doorway and her nose made a shadow to the bottom of her chin.
Her cold eyes followed Adam as do the eyes of a front-painted portrait, and she listened with her nose
for the whisky that was in him.
“Good night,” said Adam.
She did not answer him.
At the top of the first flight he looked back. Her head was raised, and now her chin made a shadow
on her throat and her eyes had no pupils.
His room smelled of dust dampened and dried many times. He picked a match from his block and
scratched it on the side of the block. He lighted the shank of candle in the japanned candlestick and
regarded the bed—as spineless as a hammock and covered with a dirty patchwork quilt, the cotton
batting spilling from the edges.
The porch steps complained again, and Adam knew the woman would be standing in her doorway
ready to spray inhospitality on the new arrival.
Adam sat down in a straight chair and put his elbows on his knees and supported his chin in his
hands. A roomer down the hall began a patient, continuing cough against the quiet night.
And Adam knew he could not go home. He had heard old soldiers tell of doing what he was going
to do.
“I just couldn’t stand it. Didn’t have no place to go. Didn’t know nobody. Wandered around and
pretty soon I got in a panic like a kid, and first thing I knowed I’m begging the sergeant to let me back
in—like he was doing me a favor.”
Back in Chicago, Adam re-enlisted and asked to be assigned to his old regiment. On the train
going west the men of his squadron seemed very dear and desirable.
While he waited to change trains in Kansas City, he heard his name called and a message was
shoved into his hand—orders to report to Washington to the office of the Secretary of War. Adam in
his five years had absorbed rather than learned never to wonder about an order. To an enlisted man the
high far gods in Washington were crazy, and if a soldier wanted to keep his sanity he thought about
generals as little as possible.
In due course Adam gave his name to a clerk and went to sit in an anteroom. His father found him
there. It took Adam a moment to recognize Cyrus, and much longer to get used to him. Cyrus had
become a great man. He dressed like a great man—black broadcloth coat and trousers, wide black hat,
overcoat with a velvet collar, ebony cane which he made to seem a sword. And Cyrus conducted
himself like a great man. His speech was slow and mellow, measured and unexcited, his gestures were
wide, and new teeth gave him a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion.
After Adam had realized that this was his father he was still puzzled. Suddenly he looked down—
no wooden leg. The leg was straight, bent at the knee, and the foot was clad in a polished kid congress
gaiter. When he moved there was a limp, but not a clumping wooden-legged limp.
Cyrus saw the look. “Mechanical,” he said, “Works on a hinge. Got a spring. Don’t even limp
when I set my mind to it. I’ll show it to you when I take it off. Come along with me.”
Adam said, “I’m under orders, sir. I’m to report to Colonel Wells.”
“I know you are. I told Wells to issue the orders. Come along.”
Adam said uneasily, “If you don’t mind, sir, I think I’d better report to Colonel Wells.”
His father reversed himself. “I was testing you,” he said grandly. “I wanted to see whether the
army has any discipline these days. Good boy. I knew it would be good for you. You’re a man and a
soldier, my boy.”
“I’m under orders, sir,” said Adam. This man was a stranger to him. A faint distaste arose in
Adam. Something was not true. And the speed with which doors opened straight to the Colonel, the
obsequious respect of that officer, the words, “The Secretary will see you now, sir,” did not remove
Adam’s feeling.
“This is my son, a private soldier, Mr. Secretary—just as I was—a private soldier in the United
States Army.”
“I was discharged a corporal, sir,” said Adam. He hardly heard the exchange of compliments. He
was thinking, This is the Secretary of War. Can’t he see that this isn’t the way my father is? He’s playacting.
What’s happened to him? It’s funny the Secretary can’t see it.
They walked to the small hotel where Cyrus lived, and on the way Cyrus pointed out the sights, the
buildings, the spots of history, with the expansiveness of a lecturer. “I live in a hotel,” he said. “I’ve
thought of getting a house, but I’m on the move so much it wouldn’t hardly pay. I’m all over the
country most of the time.”
The hotel clerk couldn’t see either. He bowed to Cyrus, called him “Senator,” and indicated that he
would give Adam a room if he had to throw someone out.
“Send a bottle of whisky to my room, please.”
“I can send some chipped ice if you like.”
“Ice!” said Cyrus. “My son is a soldier.” He rapped his leg with his stick and it gave forth a hollow
sound. “I have been a soldier—a private soldier. What do we want ice for?”
Adam was amazed at Cyrus’s accommodations. He had not only a bedroom but a sitting room
beside it, and the toilet was in a closet right in the bedroom.
Cyrus sat down in a deep chair and sighed. He pulled up his trouser leg, and Adam saw the
contraption of iron and leather and hard wood. Cyrus unlaced the leather sheath that held it on his
stump and stood the travesty-on-flesh beside his chair. “It gets to pinching pretty bad,” he said.
With the leg off, his father became himself again, the self Adam remembered. He had experienced
the beginning of contempt, but now the childhood fear and respect and animosity came back to him, so
that he seemed a little boy testing his father’s immediate mood to escape trouble.
Cyrus made his preparations, drank his whisky, and loosened his collar. He faced Adam. “Well?”
“Sir?”
“Why did you re-enlist?”
“I—I don’t know, sir. I just wanted to.”
“You don’t like the army, Adam.”
“No, sir.”
“Why did you go back?”
“I didn’t want to go home.”
Cyrus sighed and rubbed the tips of his fingers on the arms of his chair. “Are you going to stay in
the army?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I can get you into West Point. I have influence. I can get you discharged so you can enter West
Point.”
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Are you defying me?” Cyrus asked quietly.
Adam took a long time to answer, and his mind sought escape before he said, “Yes, sir.”
Cyrus said, “Pour me some whisky, son,” and when he had it he continued, “I wonder if you know
how much influence I really have. I can throw the Grand Army at any candidate like a sock. Even the
President likes to know what I think about public matters. I can get senators defeated and I can pick
appointments like apples. I can make men and I can destroy men. Do you know that?”
Adam knew more than that. He knew that Cyrus was defending himself with threats. “Yes, sir. I’ve
heard.”
“I could get you assigned to Washington—assigned to me even—teach you your way about.”
“I’d rather go back to my regiment, sir.” He saw the shadow of loss darken his father’s face.
“Maybe I made a mistake. You’ve learned the dumb resistance of a soldier.” He sighed. “I’ll get
you ordered to your regiment. You’ll rot in barracks.”
“Thank you, sir.” After a pause Adam asked, “Why don’t you bring Charles here?”
“Because I—No, Charles is better where he is—better where he is.”
Adam remembered his father’s tone and how he looked. And he had plenty of time to remember,
because he did rot in barracks. He remembered that Cyrus was lonely and alone—and knew it.
3
Charles had looked forward to Adam’s return after five years. He had painted the house and the barn,
and as the time approached he had a woman in to clean the house, to clean it to the bone.
She was a clean, mean old woman. She looked at the dust-gray rotting curtains, threw them out,
and made new ones. She dug grease out of the stove that had been there since Charles’ mother died.
And she leached the walls of a brown shiny nastiness deposited by cooking fat and kerosene lamps.
She pickled the floors with lye, soaked the blankets in sal soda, complaining the whole time to herself,
“Men—dirty animals. Pigs is clean compared. Rot in their own juice. Don’t see how no woman ever
marries them. Stink like measles. Look at oven—pie juice from Methuselah.”
Charles had moved into a shed where his nostrils would not be assailed by the immaculate but
painful smells of lye and soda and ammonia and yellow soap. He did, however, get the impression that
she didn’t approve of his housekeeping. When finally she grumbled away from the shining house
Charles remained in the shed. He wanted to keep the house clean for Adam. In the shed where he slept
were the tools of the farm and the tools for their repair and maintenance. Charles found that he could
cook his fried and boiled meals more quickly and efficiently on the forge than he could on the kitchen
stove. The bellows forced quick flaring heat from the coke. A man didn’t have to wait for a stove to
heat up. He wondered why he had never thought of it before.
Charles waited for Adam, and Adam did not come. Perhaps Adam was ashamed to write. It was
Cyrus who told Charles in an angry letter about Adam’s reenlistment against his wishes. And Cyrus
indicated that, in some future, Charles could visit him in Washington, but he never asked him again.
Charles moved back to the house and lived in a kind of savage filth, taking a satisfaction in
overcoming the work of the grumbling woman.
It was over a year before Adam wrote to Charles—a letter of embarrassed newsiness building his
courage to say, “I don’t know why I signed again. It was like somebody else doing it. Write soon and
tell me how you are.”
Charles did not reply until he had received four anxious letters, and then he replied coolly, “I
didn’t hardly expect you anyway,” and he went on with a detailed account of farm and animals.
Time had got in its work. After that Charles wrote right after New Year’s and received a letter
from Adam written right after New Year’s. They had grown so apart that there was little mutual
reference and no questions.
Charles began to keep one slovenly woman after another. When they got on his nerves he threw
them out the way he would sell a pig. He didn’t like them and had no interest in whether or not they
liked him. He grew away from the village. His contacts were only with the inn and the postmaster. The
village people might denounce his manner of life, but one thing he had which balanced his ugly life
even in their eyes. The farm had never been so well run. Charles cleared land, built up his walls,
improved his drainage, and added a hundred acres to the farm. More than that, he was planting
tobacco, and a long new tobacco barn stood impressively behind the house. For these things he kept
the respect of his neighbors. A farmer cannot think too much evil of a good farmer. Charles was
spending most of his money and all of his energy on the farm.
