Adam asked, “How do you know I want to write a letter?”
“You’re going to try to write to your brother, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“It will be a hard thing to do after so long,” said Lee.
And it was hard. Adam nibbled and munched on the pen and his mouth made strained grimaces. Sentences were written and the page thrown away and another started. Adam scratched his head with the penholder. “Lee, if I wanted to take a trip east, would you stay with the twins until I get back?”
“It’s easier to go than to write,” said Lee. “Sure I’ll stay.”
“No. I’m going to write.”
“Why don’t you ask your brother to come out here?”
“Say, that’s a good idea, Lee. I didn’t think of it.”
“It also gives you a reason for writing, and that’s a good thing.”
The letter came fairly easily then, was corrected and copied fair. Adam read it slowly to himself before he put it in the envelope.
“Dear brother Charles,” it said. “You will be surprised to hear from me after so long. I have thought of writing many times, but you know how a man puts it off.
“I wonder how this letter finds you. I trust in good health. For all I know you may have five or even ten children by now. Ha! Ha! I have two sons and they are twins. Their mother is not here. Country life did not agree with her. She lives in a town nearby and I see her now and then.
“I have got a fine ranch, but I am ashamed to say I do not keep it up very well. Maybe I will do better from now on. I always did make good resolutions. But for a number of years I felt poorly. I am well now.
“How are you and how do you prosper? I would like to see you. Why don’t you come to visit here? It is a great country and you might even find a place where you would like to settle. No cold winters here. That makes a difference to ‘old men’ like us. Ha! Ha!
“Well, Charles, I hope you will think about it and let me know. The trip would do you good. I want to see you. I have much to tell you that I can’t write down.
“Well, Charles, write me a letter and tell me all the news of the old home. I suppose many things have happened. As you get older you hear mostly about people you knew that died. I guess that is the way of the world. Write quick and tell me if you will come to visit. Your brother Adam.”
He sat holding the letter in his hand and looking over it at his brother’s dark face and its scarred forehead. Adam could see the glinting heat in the brown eyes, and as he looked he saw the lips writhe back from the teeth and the blind destructive animal take charge. He shook his head to rid his memory of the vision, and he tried to rebuild the face smiling. He tried to remember the forehead before the scar, but he could not bring either into focus. He seized the pen and wrote below his signature, “P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother.”
Adam folded the letter and forced the creases sharp with his fingernails. He sealed the envelope flap with his fist. “Lee!” he called, “Oh, Lee!”
The Chinese looked in through the door.
“Lee, how long does it take a letter to go east—clear east?”
“I don’t know,” said Lee. “Two weeks maybe.”
Chapter 29
1
After his first letter to his brother in over ten years was mailed Adam became impatient for an answer. He forgot how much time had elapsed. Before the letter got as far as San Francisco he was asking aloud in Lee’s hearing, “I wonder why he doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s mad at me for not writing. But he didn’t write either. No—he didn’t know where to write. Maybe he’s moved away.”
Lee answered, “It’s only been gone a few days. Give it time.”
“I wonder whether he would really come out here?” Adam asked himself, and he wondered whether he wanted Charles. Now that the letter was gone, Adam was afraid Charles might accept. He was like a restless child whose fingers stray to every loose article. He interfered with the twins, asked them innumerable questions about school.
“Well, what did you learn today?”
“Nothing!”
“Oh, come! You must have learned something. Did you read?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you read?”
“That old one about the grasshopper and the ant.”
“Well, that’s interesting.”
“There’s one about an eagle carries a baby away.”
“Yes, I remember that one. I forget what happens.”
“We aren’t to it yet. We saw the pictures.”
The boys were disgusted. During one of Adam’s moments of fatherly bungling Cal borrowed his pocketknife, hoping he would forget to ask for it back. But the sap was beginning to run freely in the willows. The bark would slip easily from a twig. Adam got his knife back to teach the boys to make willow whistles, a thing Lee had taught them three years before. To make it worse, Adam had forgotten how to make the cut. He couldn’t get a peep out of his whistles.
At noon one day Will Hamilton came roaring and bumping up the road in a new Ford. The engine raced in its low gear, and the high top swayed like a storm-driven ship. The brass radiator and the Prestolite tank on the running board were blinding with brass polish.
Will pulled up the brake lever, turned the switch straight down, and sat back in the leather seat. The car backfired several times without ignition because it was overheated.
“Here she is!” Will called with a false enthusiasm. He hated Fords with a deadly hatred, but they were daily building his fortune.
Adam and Lee hung over the exposed insides of the car while Will Hamilton, puffing under the burden of his new fat, explained the workings of a mechanism he did not understand himself.
It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.
Will Hamilton explained the car and went back and explained it again. His customers were wide-eyed, interested as terriers, cooperative, and did not interrupt, but as he began for the third time Will saw that he was getting no place.
“Tell you what!” he said brightly. “You see, this isn’t my line. I wanted you to see her. and listen to her before I made delivery. Now, I’ll go back to town and tomorrow I’ll send out this car with an expert, and he’ll tell you more in a few minutes than I could in a week. But I just wanted you to see her.”
Will had forgotten some of his own instructions. He cranked for a while and then borrowed a buggy and a horse from Adam and drove to town, but he promised to have a mechanic out the next day.
2
There was no question of sending the twins to school the next day. They wouldn’t have gone. The Ford stood tall and aloof and dour under the oak tree where Will had stopped it. Its new owners circled it and touched it now and then, the way you touch a dangerous horse to soothe him.
Lee said, “I wonder whether I’ll ever get used to it.”
“Of course you will,” Adam said without conviction. “Why, you’ll be driving all over the county first thing you know.”
“I will try to understand it,” Lee said. “But drive it I will not.”
The boys made little dives in and out, to touch something and leap away. “What’s this do-hickey, Father?”
“Get your hands off that.”
“But what’s it for?”
“I don’t know, but don’t touch it. You don’t know what might happen.”
“Didn’t the man tell you?”
“I don’t remember what he said. Now you boys get away from it or I’ll have to send you to school. Do you hear me, Cal? Don’t open that.”