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.
Chapter 7
1
Adam spent his next five years doing the things an army uses to keep its men from going insane—endless polishing of metal and leather, parade and drill and escort, ceremony of bugle and flag, a ballet of business for men who aren’t doing anything. In 1886 the big packinghouse strike broke out in Chicago and Adam’s regiment entrained, but the strike was settled before they were needed. In 1888 the Seminóles, who had never signed a peace treaty, stirred restlessly, and the cavalry entrained again; but the Seminóles retired into their swamps and were quiet, and the dreamlike routine settled on the troops again.
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
Adam’s second five years were up before he knew it. It was late in 1890, and he was discharged with sergeant’s stripes in the Presidio in San Francisco. Letters between Charles and Adam had become great rarities, but Adam wrote his brother just before his discharge, “This time I’m coming home,” and that was the last Charles heard of him for over three years.
Adam waited out the winter, wandering up the river to Sacramento, ranging in the valley of the San Joaquín, and when the spring came Adam had no money. He rolled a blanket and started slowly eastward, sometimes walking and sometimes with groups of men on the rods under slow-moving freight cars. At night he jungled up with wandering men in the camping places on the fringes of towns. He learned to beg, not for money but for food. And before he knew it he was a bindlestiff himself.