It was quite dark under the willow tree now. Aron wondered whether he was ready for the big thing, and while he wondered it slipped through and was in.
His mother was alive. Often he had pictured her lying underground, still and cool and unrotted. But this was not so. Somewhere she moved about and spoke, and her hands moved and her eyes were open. And in the midst of his flood of pleasure a sorrow came down on him and a sense of loss, of dreadful loss. Aron was puzzled. He inspected the cloud of sadness. If his mother was alive, his father was a liar. If one was alive, the other was dead. Aron said aloud under the tree, “My mother is dead. She’s buried some place in the East.”
In the darkness he saw Lee’s face and heard Lee’s soft speech. Lee had built very well. Having a respect that amounted to reverence for the truth, he had also its natural opposite, a loathing of a lie. He had made it very clear to the boys exactly what he meant. If something was untrue and you didn’t know it, that was error. But if you knew a true thing and changed it to a false thing, both you and it were loathsome.
Lee’s voice said, “I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.” And Lee had worked patiently and slowly and he had succeeded in building Adam as the center, the foundation, the essence of truth.
Aron shook his head in the dark, shook it hard in disbelief. “If my father is a liar, Lee is a liar too.” He was lost. He had no one to ask. Cal was a liar, but Lee’s conviction had made Cal a clever liar. Aron felt that something had to die—his mother or his world.
His solution lay suddenly before him. Abra had not lied. She had told him only what she had heard, and her parents had only heard it too. He got to his feet and pushed his mother back into death and closed his mind against her.
He was late for supper. “I was with Abra,” he explained. After supper, when Adam sat in his new comfortable chair, reading the Salinas Index, he felt a stroking touch on his shoulder and looked up. “What is it, Aron?” he asked.
“Good night, Father,” Aron said.
Chapter 37
1
February in Salinas is likely to be damp and cold and full of miseries. The heaviest rains fall then, and if the river is going to rise, it rises then. February of 1915 was a year heavy with water.
The Trasks were well established in Salinas. Lee, once he had given up his brackish bookish dream, made a new kind of place for himself in the house beside Reynaud’s Bakery. On the ranch his possessions had never really been unpacked, for Lee had lived poised to go someplace else. Here, for the first time in his life, he built a home for himself, feathered with comfort and permanence.
The large bedroom nearest the street door fell to him. Lee dipped into his savings. He had never before spent a needless penny, since all money had been earmarked for his bookstore. But now he bought a little hard bed and a desk. He built bookshelves and unpacked his books, invested in a soft rug and tacked prints on the walls. He placed a deep and comfortable “Morris chair under the best reading lamp he could find. And last he bought a typewriter and set about learning to use it.
Having broken out of his own Spartanism, he remade the Trask household, and Adam gave him no opposition. A gas stove came into the house and electric wires and a telephone. He spent Adam’s money remorselessly—new furniture, new carpets, a gas water-heater, and a large icebox. In a short time there was hardly a house in Salinas so well equipped. Lee defended himself to Adam, saying, “You have plenty of money. It would be a shame not to enjoy it.”
“I’m not complaining,” Adam protested. “Only I’d like to buy something too. What shall I buy?”
“Why don’t you go to Logan’s music store and listen to one of the new phonographs?”
“I think I’ll do that,” said Adam. And he bought a Victor victrola, a tall Gothic instrument, and he went regularly to see what new records had come in.
The growing century was shucking Adam out of his shell. He subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly and the National Geographic. He joined the Masons and seriously considered the Elks. The new icebox fascinated him. He bought a textbook on refrigeration and began to study it.
The truth was that Adam needed work. He came out of his long sleep needing to do something.
“I think I’ll go into business,” he said to Lee.
“You don’t need to. You have enough to live on.”
“But I’d like to be doing something.”
“That’s different,” said Lee. “Know what you want to do? I don’t think you’d be very good at business.”
“Why not?”
“Just a thought,” said Lee.
“Say, Lee, I want you to read an article. It says they’ve dug up a mastodon in Siberia. Been in the ice thousands of years. And the meat’s still good.”
Lee smiled at him. “You’ve got a bug in your bonnet somewhere,” he said. “What have you got in all of those little cups in the icebox?”
“Different things.”
“Is that the business? Some of the cups smell bad.”
“It’s an idea,” Adam said. “I can’t seem to stay away from it. I just can’t seem to get over the idea that you can keep things if you get them cold enough.”
“Let’s not have any mastodon meat in our icebox,” said Lee.
If Adam had conceived thousands of ideas, the way Sam Hamilton had, they might all have drifted away, but he had only the one. The frozen mastodon stayed in his mind. His little cups of fruit, of pudding, of bits of meat, both cooked and raw, continued in the icebox. He bought every available book on bacteria and began sending for magazines that printed articles of a mildly scientific nature. And as is usually true of a man of one idea, he became obsessed.
Salinas had a small ice company, not large but enough to supply the few houses with iceboxes and to service the ice-cream parlors. The horse-drawn ice wagon went its route every day.
Adam began to visit the ice plant, and pretty soon he was taking his little cups to the freezing chambers. He wished with all his heart that Sam Hamilton were alive to discuss cold with him. Sam would have covered the field very quickly, he thought.
Adam was walking back from the ice plant one rainy afternoon, thinking about Sam Hamilton, when he saw Will Hamilton go into the Abbot House Bar. He followed him and leaned against the bar beside him. “Why don’t you come up and have some supper with us?”