“How is Adam?”
“He’s all right. But he hasn’t changed much. I won-der what he was like before.”
“Yes, I’ve wondered about that. It was a short flow-ering. The boys must be big.”
“They are big. I’m glad I stayed here. I learned a great deal from seeing the boys grow and
helping a little.”
“Did you teach them Chinese?”
“No. Mr. Trask didn’t want me to. And I guess he was right. It would have been a needless
complication. But I’m their friend—yes, I’m their friend. They ad-mire their father, but I think
they love me. And they’re very different. You can’t imagine how different.”
“In what way, Lee?”
“You’ll see when they come home from school. They’re like two sides of a medal. Cal is sharp
and dark and watchful, and his brother—well, he’s a boy you like before he speaks and like more
afterwards.”
“And you don’t like Cal?”
“I find myself defending him—to myself. He’s fighting for his life and his brother doesn’t have
to fight.”
“I have the same thing in my brood,” said Samuel. “I don’t understand it. You’d think with the
same training and the same blood they’d be alike, but they’re not—not at all.”
Later Samuel and Adam walked down the oak-shadowed road to the entrance to the draw where
they could look out at the Salinas Valley.
“Will you stay to dinner?” Adam asked.
“I will not be responsible for the murder of more chickens,” said Samuel.
“Lee’s got a pot roast.”
“Well, in that case—”
Adam still carried one shoulder lower than the other from the old hurt. His face was hard and
curtained, and his eyes looked at generalities and did not inspect details. The two men stopped in
the road and looked out at the valley, green tinged from the early rains.
Samuel said softly, “I wonder you do not feel a shame at leaving that land fallow.”
“I had no reason to plant it,” Adam said. “We had that out before. You thought I would change. I
have not changed.”
“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as
audience.”
A slight anger came into Adam’s voice. “Why do you come to lecture me? I’m glad you’ve
come, but why do you dig into me?”
“To see whether I can raise a little anger in you. I’m a nosy man. But there’s all that fallow land,
and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste
because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let life lie fallow?”
“What else could I do?”
“You could try again.”
Adam faced him. “I’m afraid to, Samuel,” he said. “I’d rather just go about it this way. Maybe I
haven’t the energy or the courage.”
“How about your boys—do you love them?”
“Yes—yes.”
“Do you love one more than the other?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Something about your tone.”
“Let’s go back to the house,” said Adam. They strolled back under the trees. Suddenly Adam
said, “Did you ever hear that Cathy was in Salinas? Did you ever hear such a rumor?”
“Did you?”
“Yes—but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Samuel walked silently in the sandy wheel rut of the road. His mind turned sluggishly in the
pattern of Adam and almost wearily took up a thought he had hoped was finished. He said at last,
“You have never let her go.”
“I guess not. But I’ve let the shooting go. I don’t think about it any more.”
“I can’t tell you how to live your life,” Samuel said, “although I do be telling you how to live it. I
know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the
winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the
dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining
—small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting
your-self some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
Adam’s face was bent down, and his jawbone jutted below his temples from clenching.
Samuel glanced at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Set your teeth in it. How we do defend a
wrongness! Shall I tell you what you do, so you will not think you in-vented it? When you go to
bed and blow out the lamp—then she stands in the doorway with a little light behind her, and you
can see her nightgown stir. And she comes sweetly to your bed, and you, hardly breath-ing, turn
back the covers to receive her and move your head over on the pillow to make room for her head
beside yours. You can smell the sweetness of her skin, and it smells like no other skin in the world
—”
“Stop it,” Adam shouted at him. “Goddam you, stop it! Stop nosing over my life! You’re like a
coyote sniffing around a dead cow.”
“The way I know,” Samuel said softly, “is that one came to me that selfsame way—night after
month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and
sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her
an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could
wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I’ll never know that. I think she would
maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.”
Adam’s hands were clenched and the blood was driv-en out of his white knuckles. “You make
me doubt myself,” he said fiercely. “You always have. I’m afraid of you. What should I do,
Samuel? Tell me! I don’t know how you saw the thing so clear. What should I do?”
“I know the ‘shoulds,’ although I never do them, Adam. I always know the ‘shoulds.’ You should
try to find a new Cathy. You should let the new Cathy kill the dream Cathy—let the two of them
fight it out. And you, sitting by, should marry your mind to the winner. That’s the second-best
should. The best would be to search out and find some fresh new loveliness to cancel out the old.”
“I’m afraid to try,” said Adam.
“That’s what you’ve said. And now I’m going to put a selfishness on you. I’m going away,
Adam. I came to say good-by.”
“What do you mean?”
“My daughter Olive has asked Liza and me to visit with her in Salinas, and we’re going—day
after tomor-row.”
“Well, you’ll be back.”
Samuel went on, “After we’ve visited with Olive for maybe a month or two, there will come a
letter from George. And his feelings will be hurt if we don’t visit him in Paso Robles. And after
that Mollie will want us in San Francisco, and then Will, and maybe even Joe in the East, if we
should live so long.”
“Well, won’t you like that? You’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard enough on that dust heap of
yours.”
“I love that dust heap,” Samuel said. “I love it the way a bitch loves her runty pup. I love every
flint, the plow-breaking outcroppings, the thin and barren top-soil, the waterless heart of her.
Somewhere in my dust heap there’s a richness.”
“You deserve a rest.”
“There, you’ve said it again,” said Samuel. “That’s what Ihad to accept,” and I have accepted.
When you say I deserve a rest, you are saying that my life is over.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That’s what I have accepted.”
Adam said excitedly, “You can’t do that. Why, if you accept that you won’t live!”
“I know,” said Samuel.
“But you can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I’m a nosy old man, Adam. And the sad thing to me is that I’m losing my nosiness. That’s
maybe how I know it’s time to visit my children. I’m having to pretend to be nosy a good deal of
the time.”
“I’d rather you worked your guts out on your dust heap.”
Samuel smiled at him. “What a nice thing to hear! And I thank you. It’s a good thing to be loved,
even late.”
Suddenly Adam turned in front of him so that Sam-uel had to stop. “I know what you’ve done for
me,” Adam said. “I can’t return anything. But I can ask you for one more thing. If I asked you,
would you do me one more kindness, and maybe save my life?”
“I would if I could.”
Adam swung out his hand and made an arc over the west. “That land out there—would you help
me to make the garden we talked of, the windmills and the wells and the flats of alfalfa? We
could raise flower-seeds. There’s money in that. Think what it would be like, acres of sweet peas
and gold squares of calendulas. Maybe ten acres of roses for the gardens of the West. Think how
they would smell on the west wind!”
“You’re going to make me cry,” Samuel said, “and that would be an unseemly thing in an old
man.” And indeed his eyes were wet. “I thank you, Adam,” he said. “The sweetness of your offer
is a good smell on the west wind.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“No, I will not do it. But I’ll see it in my mind when I’m in Salinas, listening to William Jennings
Bryan. And maybe I’ll get to believe it happened.”
“But I want to do it.”
“Go and see my Tom. He’ll help you. He’d plant the world with roses, poor man, if he could.”
“You know what you’re doing, Samuel?”
“Yes, I know what I’m doing, know so well that it’s half done.”
“What a stubborn man you are!”
“Contentious,” said Samuel. “Liza says I am conten-tious, but now I’m caught in a web of my
children—and I think I like it.”