She cried, “I’ll get it done, Mollie. It will be ready.”
She got up from her bed and threw her robe around her and walked barefooted through the house crowded with Hamiltons. In the hall they were gone to the bedrooms. In the bedrooms, with the beds neat-made, they were all in the kitchen, and in the kitchen—they dispersed and were gone. Sadness and death. The wave receded and left her in dry awakeness.
The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it—the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight and there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table when a book was moved.
The stove was warming, with orange light showing around the lids and the soft thunder of drafty flame leaping past the open damper. The kitchen clock flashed its pendulum behind its glass skirt, and it ticked like a little wooden hammer striking on an empty wooden box.
From outside came a whistle as wild and raucous as a reed and pitched high and strange. The whistling scattered a savage melody. Then Tom’s steps sounded on the porch, and he came in with an armload of oakwood so high he could not see over it. He cascaded the wood into the woodbox.
“You’re up,” he said. “That was to wake you if you were still sleeping.” His face was lighted with joy. “This is a morning light as down and no time to be slugging.”
“You sound like your father,” Dessie said, and she laughed with him.
His joy hardened to fierceness. “Yes,” he said loudly. “And we’ll have that time again, right here. I’ve been dragging myself in misery like a spine-broken snake. No wonder Will thought I was cracked. But now you’re back, and I’ll show you. I’ll breathe life into life again. Do you hear? This house is going to be alive.”
“I’m glad I came,” she said, and she thought in desolation how brittle he was now and how easy to shatter, and how she would have to protect him.
“You must have worked day and night to get the house so clean,” she said.
“Nothing,” said Tom. “A little twist with the fingers.”
“I know that twist, but it was with bucket and mop and on your knees—unless you’ve invented some way to do it by chicken power or the harnessed wind.”
“Invented—now that’s why I have no time. I’ve invented a little slot that lets a necktie slip around freely in a stiff collar.”
“You don’t wear stiff collars.”
“I did yesterday. That’s when I invented it. And chickens—I’m going to raise millions of them—little houses all over the ranch and a ring on the roof to dip them in a whitewash tank. And eggs will come through on a little conveyor belt—here! I’ll draw it.”
“I want to draw some breakfast,” Dessie said. “What’s the shape of a fried egg? How would you color the fat and lean of a strip of bacon?”
“You’ll have it,” he cried, and he opened the stove lid and assaulted the fire with the stove lifter until the hairs on his hand curled and charred. He pitched wood in and started his high whistling.
Dessie said, “You sound like some goat-foot with a wheat flute on a hill in Greece.”
“What do you think I am?” he shouted.
Dessie thought miserably, If his is real, why can’t my heart be light? Why can’t I climb out of my gray ragbag? I will, she screeched inside herself. If he can—I will.
She said, “Tom!”
“Yes.”
“I want a purple egg.”
Chapter 33
1
The green lasted on the hills far into June before the grass turned yellow. The heads of the wild oats were so heavy with seed that they hung over on their stalks. The little springs trickled on late in the summer. The range cattle staggered under their fat and their hides shone with health. It was a year when the people of the Salinas Valley forgot the dry years. Farmers bought more land than they could afford and figured their profits on the covers of their checkbooks.
Tom Hamilton labored like a giant, not only with his strong arms and rough hands but also with his heart and spirit. The anvil rang in the forge again. He painted the old house white and whitewashed the sheds. He went to King City and studied a flush toilet and then built one of craftily bent tin and carved wood. Because the water came so slowly from the spring, he put a redwood tank beside the house and pumped the water up to it with a handmade windmill so cleverly made that it turned in the slightest wind. And he made metal and wood models of two ideas to be sent to the patent office in the fall.
That was not all—he labored with humor and good spirits. Dessie had to rise very early to get in her hand at the housework before Tom had it all done. She watched his great red happiness, and it was not light as Samuel’s happiness was light. It did not rise out of his roots and come floating up. He was manufacturing happiness as cleverly as he knew how, molding it and shaping it.
Dessie, who had more friends than anyone in the whole valley, had no confidants. When her trouble had come upon her she had not talked about it. And the pains were a secret in herself.
When Tom found her rigid and tight from the grabbing pain and cried in alarm, “Dessie, what’s the matter?” she controlled her face and said, “A little crick, that’s all. Just a little crick. I’m all right now.” And in a moment they were laughing.
They laughed a great deal, as though to reassure themselves. Only when Dessie went to her bed did her loss fall on her, bleak and unendurable. And Tom lay in the dark of his room, puzzled as a child. He could hear his heart beating and rasping a little in its beat. His mind fell away from thought and clung for safety to little plans, designs, machines.
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.
It was startling to both of them when Dessie said one evening on the hill, “Tom, why don’t you get married?”
He looked quickly at her and away. He said, “Who’d have me?”
“Is that a joke or do you really mean it?”
“Who’d have me?” he said again. “Who’d want a thing like me?”
“It sounds to me as though you really mean it.” Then she violated their unstated code. “Have you been in love with someone?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“I wish I knew,” she said as though he had not answered.
Tom did not speak again as they walked down the hill. But on the porch he said suddenly, “You’re lonely here. You don’t want to stay.” He waited for a moment. “Answer me. Isn’t that true?”
“I want to stay here more than I want to stay anyplace else.” She asked, “Do you ever go to women?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Is it any good to you?”
“Not much.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
In silence they went back to the house. Tom lighted the lamp in the old living room. The horsehair sofa he had rebuilt raised its gooseneck against the wall, and the green carpet had tracks worn light between the doors.
Tom sat down by the round center table. Dessie sat on the sofa, and she could see that he was still embarrassed from his last admission. She thought, How pure he is, how unfit for a world that even she knew more about than he did. A dragon killer, he was, a rescuer of damsels, and his small sins seemed so great to him that he felt unfit and unseemly. She wished her father were here. Her father had felt greatness in Tom. Perhaps he would know now how to release it out of its darkness and let it fly free.
She took another tack to see whether she could raise some spark in him. “As long as we’re talking about ourselves, have you ever thought that our whole world is the valley and a few trips to San Francisco, and have you ever been farther south than San Luis Obispo? I never have.”
“Neither have I,” said Tom.
“Well, isn’t that silly?”
“Lots of people haven’t,” he said.
“But it’s not a law. We could go to Paris and to Rome or to Jerusalem. I would dearly love to see the Colosseum.”