“I don’t think he’d do it,” said Will. “He’s stubborn as a mule and proud as a horse. He’s got a pride like brass.”
Olive’s husband, Ernest, said, “Well, there’d be no harm in asking him. We would like to have him—or both of them—with us.”
Then they were silent again, for the idea of not having the ranch, the dry, stony desert of heartbreaking hillside and unprofitable hollow, was shocking to them.
Will Hamilton from instinct and training in business had become a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women. He said, “If we ask him to close up shop it will be like asking him to close his life, and he won’t do it.”
“You’re right, Will,” George agreed. “He would think it was like quitting. He’d feel it was a cowardice. No, he will never sell out, and if he did I don’t think he would live a week.”
Will said, “There’s another way. Maybe he could come for a visit. Tom can run the ranch. It’s time Father and Mother saw something of the world. All kinds of things are happening. It would freshen him, and then he could come back and go to work again. And after a while maybe he wouldn’t have to. He says himself that thing about time doing the job dynamite can’t touch.”
Dessie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I wonder if you really think he’s that stupid,” she said.
And Will said out of his experience, “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. We can try it anyway. What do you all think?”
There was a nodding of heads in the kitchen, and only Tom sat rocklike and brooding.
“Tom, wouldn’t you be willing to take over the ranch?” George asked.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Tom. “It’s no trouble to run the ranch because the ranch doesn’t run—never has.”
“Then why don’t you agree?”
“I’d find a reluctance to insult my father,” Tom said. “He’d know.”
“But where’s the harm in suggesting it?”
Tom rubbed his ears until he forced the blood out of them and for a moment they were white. “I don’t forbid you,” he said. “But I can’t do it.”
George said, “We could write it in a letter—a kind of invitation, full of jokes. And when he got tired of one of us, why, he could go to another. There’s years of visiting among the lot of us.” And that was how they left it.
3
Tom brought Olive’s letter from King City, and because he knew what it contained he waited until he caught Samuel alone before he gave it to him. Samuel was working in the forge and his hands were black. He took the envelope by a tiny corner and put it on the anvil, and then he scrubbed his hands in the half-barrel of black water into which he plunged hot iron. He slit the letter open with the point of a horseshoe nail and went into the sunlight to read it. Tom had the wheels off the buckboard and was buttering the axles with yellow axle grease. He watched his father from the corners of his eyes.
Samuel finished the letter and folded it and put it back in its envelope. He sat down on the bench in front of the shop and stared into space. Then he opened the letter and read it again and folded it again and put it in his blue shirt pocket. Then Tom saw him stand up and walk slowly up the eastern hill, kicking at the flints on the ground.
There had been a little rain and a fuzz of miserly grass had started up. Halfway up the hill Samuel squatted down and took up a handful of the harsh gravelly earth in his palm and spread it with his forefinger, flint and sandstone and bits of shining mica and a frail rootlet and a veined stone. He let it slip from his hand and brushed his palms. He picked a spear of grass and set it between his teeth and stared up the hill to the sky. A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain.
Samuel stood up and sauntered down the hill. He looked into the tool shed and patted the four-by-four supports. He paused near Tom and spun one of the free-running wheels of the buckboard, and he inspected Tom as though he saw him for the first time. “Why, you’re a grown-up man,” he said.
“Didn’t you know?”
“I guess I did—I guess I did,” said Samuel and sauntered on. There was the sardonic look on his face his family knew so well—the joke on himself that made him laugh inwardly. He walked by the sad little garden and all around the house—not a new house any more. Even the last added lean-to bedrooms were old and weathered and the putty around the windowpanes had shrunk away from the glass. At the porch he turned and surveyed the whole home cup of the ranch before he went inside.
Liza was rolling out pie crust on the floury board. She was so expert with the rolling pin that the dough seemed alive. It flattened out and then pulled back a little from tension in itself. Liza lifted the pale sheet of it and laid it over one of the pie tins and trimmed the edges with a knife. The prepared berries lay deep in red juice in a bowl.
Samuel sat down in a kitchen chair and crossed his legs and looked at her. His eyes were smiling.
“Can’t you find something to do this time of day?” she asked.
“Oh, I guess I could, Mother, if I wanted to.”
“Well, don’t sit there and make me nervous. The paper’s in the other room if you’re feeling day-lazy.”
“I’ve read it,” said Samuel.
“All of it?”
“All I want to.”
“Samuel, what’s the matter with you? You’re up to something. I can see it in your face. Now tell it, and let me get on with my pies.”
He swung his leg and smiled at her. “Such a little bit of a wife,” he said. “Three of her is hardly a bite.”
“Samuel, now you stop this. I don’t mind a joke in the evening sometimes, but it’s not eleven o’clock. Now you go along.”
Samuel said, “Liza, do you know the meaning of the English word ‘vacation’?”
“Now don’t you make jokes in the morning.”
“Do you, Liza?”
“Of course I do. Don’t play me for a fool.”
“What does it mean?”
“Going away for a rest to the sea and the beach. Now, Samuel, get out with your fooling.”
“I wonder how you know the word.”
“Will you tell me what you’re after? Why shouldn’t I know?”
“Did you ever have one, Liza?”
“Why, I—” She stopped.