“You shall give me a present when I go to town, señor. A present is not pay.” The smile was back again. Joseph poured out a cup of coffee for him.
“You’re a good friend, Juanito. Thank you.”
Juanito reached into the peak of his sombrero and drew out a letter. “Since I was coming, I brought you this, señor.”
Joseph took the letter and walked slowly away. He knew what it was. He had been expecting it for some time. And the land seemed to know what it was, too, for a bush bad fallen over the grass flats, the meadowlarks had gone away, and even the linnets in the oak tree had stopped their twittering. Joseph sat down on a lumber pile under the oak and slowly tore open the envelope. It was from Burton.
“Thomas and Benjy have asked me to write to you,” it said. “The thing we knew must happen has happened. Death shocks us even when we know it must come. Father passed to the Kingdom three days ago. We were all with him at the last, all except you. You should have waited.
“His mind was not clear at the last. He said some very peculiar things. He did not talk about you so much as he talked to you. He said he could live as long as he wanted, but be wished to see your new land. He was obsessed with this new land. Of course his mind was not clear. He said, ‘I don’t know whether Joseph can pick good land. I don’t know whether he’s competent. I’ll have to go out there and see.’ Then he talked a great deal about floating over the country, and he thought he was doing it. At last he seemed to go to sleep. Benjy and Thomas went out of the room then. Father was delirious. I really should shut up his words and never tell them, for he was not himself. He talked about the mating of animals. He said the whole earth was a—no, I can’t see any reason for saying it. I tried to get him to pray with me, but he was too nearly gone. It has troubled me that his last words were not Christian words. I haven’t told the other boys because his last words were to you, as though he talked to you.”
The letter continued with a detailed description of the funeral. It ended—“Thomas and Benjy think we could all move to the West if there’s still land to be taken. We shall want to hear from you before we make any move.”
Joseph dropped the letter on the ground and put his forehead down in his hands. His mind was inert and numb, but there was no sadness in him. He wondered why he was not sad. Burton would reproach him if he knew that a feeling of joy and of welcome was growing up in him. He heard the sounds come back to the land. The meadowlarks built little crystal towers of melody, a ground squirrel chattered shrilly, sitting upright in the doorway of his hole, the wind whispered a moment in the grass and then grew strong and beady, bringing the sharp odors of the grass and of the damp earth, and the great tree stirred to life under the wind. Joseph raised his head and looked at its old, wrinkled limbs. His eyes lighted with recognition and welcome, for his father’s strong and simple being, which had dwelt in his youth like a cloud of peace, had entered the tree.
Joseph raised his hand in greeting. He said very softly, “I’m glad you’ve come, sir. I didn’t know until now how lonely I’ve been for you.” The tree stirred slightly. “It is good land, you see,” Joseph went on softly. “You’ll like to be staying, sir.” He shook his head to clear out the last of the numbness, and he laughed at himself, partly in shame for the good thoughts, and partly in wonder at his sudden feeling of kinship with the tree. “I suppose being alone is doing it. Juanito will stop that, and I’ll have the boys come out to live. I am talking to myself already.” Suddenly he felt guilty of treason. He stood up, walked to the old tree and kissed its bark. Then he remembered that Juanito must be watching him, and he turned defiantly to face the boy. But Juanito was staring steadily at the ground. Joseph strode over to him. “You must have seen—” he began angrily.
Juanito continued to stare downward. “I did not see, señor.”
Joseph sat down beside him. “My father is dead, Juanito.”
“I am sorry, my friend.”
“But I want to talk about that, Juanito, because you are my friend. For myself I am not sorry, because my father is here.”
“The dead are always here, señor. They never go away.”
“No,” Joseph said earnestly. “it is more than that. My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it. Can you talk to me a little Juanito? You were born here. Since I have come, since the first day, I have known that this land is full of ghosts.” He paused uncertainly. “No, that isn’t right. Ghosts are weak shadows of reality. What lives here is more real than we are. We are like ghosts of its reality. What is it, Juanito? Has my brain gone weak from being two months alone?”
“The dead, they never go away,” Juanito repeated. Then he looked straight ahead with a light of great tragedy in his eyes. “I lied to you, señor. I am not Castilian. My mother was Indian and she taught me things.”
“What things?” Joseph demanded.
“Father Angelo would not like it. My mother said how the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has life from the mother and goes back into the mother. When I remember, señor, and when I know I believe these things, because I see them and hear them, then I know I am not Castilian nor caballero. I am Indio.”
“But I am not Indian, Juanito, and now I seem to see it.”
Juanito looked up gratefully and then dropped his eyes, and the two men stared at the ground. Joseph wondered why he did not try to escape from the power that was seizing upon him.
After a time Joseph raised his eyes to the oak and to the house-frame beside it. “In the end it doesn’t matter,” he said abruptly. “What I feel or think can kill no ghosts nor gods. We must work, Juanito. There’s the house to build over there, and here’s the ranch to put cattle on. We’ll go on working in spite of ghosts. Come,” he said hurriedly, “we haven’t time to think,” and they went quickly to work on the house.
That night he wrote a letter to his brothers:
“There’s land untaken next to mine. Each of you can have a hundred and sixty acres, and then we’ll have six hundred and forty acres all in one piece. The grass is deep and rich, and the soil wants only turning. No rocks, Thomas, to make your plough turn somersaults, no ledges sticking out. We’ll make a new community here if you’ll come.”
5
THE grass was summer brown, ready for cutting, when the brothers came with their families and settled on the land. Thomas was the oldest, forty-two, a thick strong man with golden hair and a long yellow mustache. His cheeks were round and red and his eyes a cold wintry blue between slitted lids. Thomas had a strong kinship with all kinds of animals. Often he sat on the edge of a manger while the horses ate their hay. The low moaning of a cow in labor could draw Thomas out of bed at any hour of the night to see that the calving was true, and to help if there were trouble. When Thomas walked through the fields, horses and cows raised their heads from the grass and sniffed the air and moved in toward him. He pulled dogs’ ears until they cried with the pain his strong slender fingers induced, and, when he stopped, they put their ears up to be pulled again. Thomas had always a collection of half-wild animals. Before he had been a month on the new land he had collected a raccoon, two half-grown coyote pups that slunk at his heels and snarled at everyone else, a box of ferrets and a red-tailed hawk, besides four mongrel dogs. He was not kind to animals; at least no kinder than they were to each other, but he must have acted with a consistency beasts could understand, for all creatures trusted him. When one of the dogs foolishly attacked the coon and lost an eye in the encounter, Thomas was unruffled. He scraped out the torn eye-ball with his pocket knife and pinched the dog’s feet to make it forget the torture in its head. Thomas liked animals and understood them, and he killed them with no more feeling than they had about killing each other. He was too much an animal himself to be sentimental. Thomas never lost a cow, for he seemed to know instinctively where a straying beef would stray. He rarely hunted, but when he did go out for game, he marched straight to the hiding place of his prey and killed it with the speed and precision of a lion.