“I had—enough to kill me.”
“No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much.”
“Stay away from me. I can fight back. Don’t think I can’t defend myself.”
“You have two weapons, and they not named.”
“I’ll fight you, old man. You are an old man.”
Samuel said, “I can’t think in my mind of a dull man picking up a rock, who before evening would not put a name to it—like Peter. And you—for a year you’ve lived with your heart’s draining and you’ve not even laid a number to the boys.”
Adam said, “What I do is my own business.”
Samuel struck him with a work-heavy fist, and Adam sprawled out in the dust. Samuel asked him to rise, and when Adam accepted struck him again, and this time Adam did not get up. He looked stonily at the menacing old man.
The fire went out of Samuel’s eyes and he said quietly, “Your sons have no names.”
Adam replied, “Their mother left them motherless.”
“And you have left them fatherless. Can’t you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don’t you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?”
“I didn’t do it,” Adam said.
“Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.” He stooped down and put his arms around Adam’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. “We’ll give them names,” he said. “We’ll think long and find good names to clothe them.” He whipped the dust from Adam’s shirt with his hands.
Adam wore a faraway yet intent look, as though he were listening to some wind-carried music, but his eyes were not dead as they had been. He said, “It’s hard to imagine I’d thank a man for insults and for shaking me out like a rug. But I’m grateful. It’s a hurty thanks, but it’s thanks.”
Samuel smiled, crinkle-eyed. “Did it seem natural? Did I do it right?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in a way I promised my wife I’d do it. She didn’t believe I would. I’m not a fighting man, you see. The last time I clobbered a human soul it was over a red-nosed girl and a Schoolbook in County Derry.”
Adam stared at Samuel, but in his mind he saw and felt his brother Charles, black and murderous, and that sight switched to Cathy and the quality of her eyes over the gun barrel. “There wasn’t any fear in it,” Adam said. “It was more like a weariness.”
“I guess I was not angry enough.”
“Samuel, I’ll ask just once and then no more. Have you heard anything? Has there been any news of her—any news at all?”
“I’ve heard nothing.”
“It’s almost a relief,” said Adam.
“Do you have hatred?”
“No. No—only a kind of sinking in the heart. Maybe later I’ll sort it out to hatred. There was no interval from loveliness to horror, you see. I’m confused, confused.”
Samuel said, “One day we’ll sit and you’ll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now—why, you can’t find all the cards.”
From behind the shed there came the indignant shrieking of an outraged chicken and then a dull thump.
“There’s something at the hens,” said Adam.
A second shrieking started. “It’s Lee at the hens,” said Samuel. “You know, if chickens had government and church and history, they would take a distant and distasteful view of human joy. Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.”
Now the two men were silent, breaking it only with small false courtesies—meaningless inquiries about health and weather, with answers unlistened to. And this might have continued until they were angry at each other again if Lee had not interfered.
Lee brought out a table and two chairs and set the chairs facing each other. He made another trip for a pint of whisky and two glasses and set a glass on the table in front of each chair. Then he carried out the twins, one under each arm, and put them on the ground beside the table and gave each boy a stick for his hand to shake and make shadows with.
The boys sat solemnly and looked about, stared at Samuel’s beard and searched for Lee. The strange thing about them was their clothing, for the boys were dressed in the straight trousers and the frogged and braided jackets of the Chinese. One was in turquoise blue and the other in a faded rose pink, and the frogs and braid were black. On their heads sat round black silken hats, each with a bright red button on its flat top.
Samuel asked, “Where in the world did you get those clothes, Lee?”
“I didn’t get them,” Lee said testily. “I had them. The only other clothes they have I made myself, out of sail cloth. A boy should be well dressed on his naming day.”
“You’ve dropped the pidgin, Lee.”
“I hope for good. Of course I use it in King City.” He addressed a few short sung syllables to the boys on the ground, and they both smiled up at him and waved their sticks in the air. Lee said, “I’ll pour you a drink. It’s some that was here.”
“It’s some you bought yesterday in King City,” said Samuel.
Now that Samuel and Adam were seated together and the barriers were down, a curtain of shyness fell on Samuel. What he had beaten in with his fists he could not supplement easily. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on. His mind grinned inward at itself.
The two sat looking at the twin boys in their strange bright-colored clothes. Samuel thought, Sometimes your opponent can help you more than your friend. He lifted his eyes to Adam.
“It’s hard to start,” he said. “And it’s like a put-off letter that gathers difficulties to itself out of the minutes. Could you give me a hand?”
Adam looked up for a moment and then back at the boys on the ground. “There’s a crashing in my head,” he said. “Like sounds you hear under water. I’m having to dig myself out of a year.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me how it was and that will get us started.”
Adam tossed down his drink and poured another and rolled the glass at an angle in his hand. The amber whisky moved high on the side and the pungent fruit odor of its warming filled the air. “It’s hard to remember,” he said. “It was not agony but a dullness. But no—there were needles in it. You said I had not all the cards in the deck—and I was thinking of that. Maybe I’ll never have all the cards.”