“In fifty years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?”
“Samuel, please go out of my kitchen,” she said apprehensively.
He took the letter from his pocket and unfolded it. “It’s from Ollie,” he said. “She wants us to come and visit in Salinas. They’ve fixed over the upstairs rooms. She wants us to get to know the children. She’s got us tickets for the Chautauqua season. Billy Sunday’s going to wrestle with the Devil and Bryan is going to make his Cross of Gold speech. I’d like to hear that. It’s an old fool of a speech but they say he gives it in a way to break your heart.”
Liza rubbed her nose and floured it with her finger. “Is it very costly?” she asked anxiously.
“Costly? Ollie has bought the tickets. They’re a present.”
“We can’t go,” said Liza. “Who’d run the ranch?”
“Tom would—what running there is to do in the winter.”
“He’d be lonely.”
“George would maybe come out and stay a while to go quail hunting. See what’s in the letter, Liza.”
“What are those?”
“Two tickets to Salinas on the train. Ollie says she doesn’t want to give us a single escape.”
“You can just turn them in and send her back the money.”
“No, I can’t. Why, Liza—Mother—now don’t. Here—here’s a handkerchief.”
“That’s a dish towel,” said Liza.
“Sit here, Mother. There! I guess the shock of taking a rest kind of threw you. Here! I know it’s a dish towel. They say that Billy Sunday drives the Devil all over the stage.”
“That’s a blasphemy,” said Liza.
“But I’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? What did you say? Hold up your head. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I said yes,” said Liza.
Tom was making a drawing when Samuel came in to him. Tom looked at his father with veiled eyes, trying to read the effect of Olive’s letter.
Samuel looked at the drawing. “What is it?”
“I’m trying to work out a gate-opener so a man won’t have to get out of his rig. Here’s the pull-rod to open the latch.”
“What’s going to open it?”
“I figured a strong spring.”
Samuel studied the drawing. “Then what’s going to close it?”
“This bar here. It would slip to this spring with the tension the other way.”
“I see,” said Samuel. “It might work too, if the gate was truly hung. And it would only take twice as much time to make and keep up as twenty years of getting out of the rig and opening the gate.”
Tom protested, “Sometimes with a skittish horse—”
“I know,” said his father. “But the main reason is that it’s fun.”
Tom grinned. “Caught me,” he said.
“Tom, do you think you could look after the ranch if your mother and I took a little trip?”
“Why, sure,” said Tom. “Where do you plan to go?”
“Ollie wants us to stay with her for a while in Salinas.”
“Why, that would be fine,” said Tom. “Is Mother agreeable?”
“She is, always forgetting the expense.”
“That’s fine,” said Tom. “How long do you plan to be gone?”
Samuel’s jeweled, sardonic eyes dwelt on Tom’s face until Tom said, “What’s the matter, Father?”
“It’s the little tone, son—so little that I could barely hear it. But it was there. Tom, my son, if you have a secret with your brothers and sisters, I don’t mind. I think that’s good.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Tom.
“You may thank God you didn’t want to be an actor, Tom, because you would have been a very bad one. You worked it out at Thanksgiving, I guess, when you were all together. And it’s working smooth as butter. I see Will’s hand in this. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I wasn’t in favor of it,” said Tom.
“It doesn’t sound like you,” his father said. “You’d be for scattering the truth out in the sun for me to see. Don’t tell the others I know.” He turned away and then came back and put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth, my son. It’s not clever but it’s more permanent.”
“I’m glad you’re going.”
Samuel stood in the doorway of the forge and looked at the land. “They say a mother loves best an ugly child,” he said, and he shook his head sharply. “Tom, I’ll trade you honor for honor. You will please hold this in your dark secret place, nor tell any of your brothers and sisters—I know why I’m going—and, Tom, I know where I’m going, and I am content.”
Chapter 24
1
I have wondered why it is that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death than others. Una’s death cut the earth from under Samuel’s feet and opened his defended keep and let in old age. On the other hand Liza, who surely loved her family as deeply as did her husband, was not destroyed or warped. Her life continued evenly. She felt sorrow but she survived it.
I think perhaps Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all of its paradoxes and its reverses. She did not like death but she knew it existed, and when it came it did not surprise her.
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, hut he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
To Liza it was simply death—the thing promised and expected. She could go on and in her sorrow put a pot of beans in the oven, bake six pies, and plan to exactness how much food would be necessary properly to feed the funeral guests. And she could in her sorrow see that Samuel had a clean white shirt and that his black broadcloth was brushed and free of spots and his shoes blacked. Perhaps it takes these two kinds to make a good marriage, riveted with several kinds of strengths.
Once Samuel accepted, he could probably go farther than Liza, but the process of accepting tore him to pieces. Liza watched him closely after the decision to go to Salinas. She didn’t quite know what he was up to but, like a good and cautious mother, she knew he was up to something. She was a complete realist. Everything else being equal, she was glad to be going to visit her children. She was curious about them and their children. She had no love of places. A place was only a resting stage on the way to Heaven. She did not like work for itself, but she did it because it was there to be done. And she was tired. Increasingly it was more difficult to fight the aches and stiffnesses which tried to keep her in bed in the morning—not that they ever succeeded.