The relative whose house had burned died of a heart attack shortly after. Paul was scheduled to go to an orphanage. But Ralph Finnegan, a cousin of Park’s, a Kentucky farmer, and his wife decided to adopt Paul. His fostermother gave him her maiden family name, Janus, as his middle name.
The revelation had shaken Paul terribly. It was after this that he began to suffer from a sense of loneliness. Or perhaps a sense of having been abandoned. Once he’d learned all the details he wanted to know about his true parents, he never spoke of them again. When he mentioned his parents to others, he spoke only of the man and woman who’d reared him.
Two years after Kickaha learned about his true parents, Mr. Finnegan fell ill with cancer and died in six months. That was grief enough, but three months after the burial, his mother had also fallen victim to the same disease. She took a longer time dying, and now Paul had no time to do anything except farm, attend school, and help take care of her. Finally, after much pain, she had died, the day before he was to graduate from high school.
Mingled with his grief was guilt. In some mysterious fashion, he thought, the shame they’d felt when he’d been arrested had caused the cancer. Considered rationally, the idea did not seem plausible. But guilt often had irrational origins. In fact, there were even times when he wondered if he hadn’t somehow been responsible for his real father’s having deserted his real mother and for her death.
His plans to go to college and major in zoology or in anthropology-he couldn’t make up his mind-had been deferred. The farm had been mortgaged to pay for the heavy medical expenses of his parents, and Paul had to work the farm and take a part-time job in Terre Haute as a car mechanic. Nevertheless, despite the long hours of work, the lack of money, he had some time to express his innate exuberance. He would drop in occasionally at Fisher’s Tavern, where some of the old gang still hung out. They’d go roaring off into the night on their motorcycles, their girls riding behind them, and finally end up in Indian Meadow, where there’d be a continuation of the beer blast and some fighting and lovemaking.
One of the girls wanted him to marry her, but he shied away from that. He wasn’t in love with her, and he couldn’t see himself spending the rest of his life with a woman with no intellectual interests whatever. Then she got pregnant, though fortunately not by him, and she departed to Chicago for a new life. Shortly thereafter, the gang began to drift apart.
He became alone and lonely again. But he liked to ride a horse wildly through the meadows or his chopper over the country roads. It was a good way to blow off steam.
Meantime, he had visits from an uncle who was a knifethrower, juggler, and circus acrobat. Paul learned much from him and became proficient at knife-throwing. When he felt gloomy he would go out into the backyard and practice throwing-knives at a target. He knew he was working off his depression, guilt, and resentment at the lot cast for him by the fates with this harmless form of mayhem.
Five years went by swiftly. Suddenly, he was twenty-three. The farm still wasn’t paid off. He couldn’t see himself as a farmer the rest of his life, so he sold the farm at a very small profit. But now it was evident that his hopes of entering college and becoming an anthropologist-he’d decided by then his choice of career-would once more have to be set aside. The United States would be getting into the war in a year or two.
Loving horses so much, he enlisted in the cavalry. To his surprise and chagrin, he soon found himself driving a tank instead. Then there was a three-months’ period in officers candidate training school. Though he wasn’t a college graduate, he’d taken an examination which qualified him to enter it. Pearl Harbor tilted the nation into the conflict, and eventually he was with the Eighth Army and in combat.