“Did you?”
“Yes—but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Samuel walked silently in the sandy wheel rut of the road. His mind turned sluggishly in the pattern of Adam and almost wearily took up a thought he had hoped was finished. He said at last, “You have never let her go.”
“I guess not. But I’ve let the shooting go. I don’t think about it any more.”
“I can’t tell you how to live your life,” Samuel said, “although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining—small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
Adam’s face was bent down, and his jawbone jutted below his temples from clenching.
Samuel glanced at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Set your teeth in it. How we do defend a wrongness! Shall I tell you what you do, so you will not think you invented it? When you go to bed and blow out the lamp—then she stands in the doorway with a little light behind her, and you can see her nightgown stir. And she comes sweetly to your bed, and you, hardly breathing, turn back the covers to receive her and move your head over on the pillow to make room for her head beside yours. You can smell the sweetness of her skin, and it smells like no other skin in the world—”
“Stop it,” Adam shouted at him. “Goddam you, stop it! Stop nosing over my life! You’re like a coyote sniffing around a dead cow.”
“The way I know,” Samuel said softly, “is that one came to me that selfsame way—night after month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I’ll never know that. I think she would maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.”
Adam’s hands were clenched and the blood was driven out of his white knuckles. “You make me doubt myself,” he said fiercely. “You always have. I’m afraid of you. What should I do, Samuel? Tell me! I don’t know how you saw the thing so clear. What should I do?”
“I know the ‘shoulds,’ although I never do them, Adam. I always know the ‘shoulds.’ You should try to find a new Cathy. You should let the new Cathy kill the dream Cathy—let the two of them fight it out. And you, sitting by, should marry your mind to the winner. That’s the second-best should. The best would be to search out and find some fresh new loveliness to cancel out the old.”
“I’m afraid to try,” said Adam.
“That’s what you’ve said. And now I’m going to put a selfishness on you. I’m going away, Adam. I came to say good-by.”
“What do you mean?”
“My daughter Olive has asked Liza and me to visit with her in Salinas, and we’re going—day after tomorrow.”
“Well, you’ll be back.”
Samuel went on, “After we’ve visited with Olive for maybe a month or two, there will come a letter from George. And his feelings will be hurt if we don’t visit him in Paso Robles. And after that Mollie will want us in San Francisco, and then Will, and maybe even Joe in the East, if we should live so long.”
“Well, won’t you like that? You’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard enough on that dust heap of yours.”
“I love that dust heap,” Samuel said. “I love it the way a bitch loves her runty pup. I love every flint, the plow-breaking outcroppings, the thin and barren top-soil, the waterless heart of her. Somewhere in my dust heap there’s a richness.”
“You deserve a rest.”
“There, you’ve said it again,” said Samuel. “That’s what Ihad to accept,” and I have accepted. When you say I deserve a rest, you are saying that my life is over.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That’s what I have accepted.”
Adam said excitedly, “You can’t do that. Why, if you accept that you won’t live!”
“I know,” said Samuel.
“But you can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I’m a nosy old man, Adam. And the sad thing to me is that I’m losing my nosiness. That’s maybe how I know it’s time to visit my children. I’m having to pretend to be nosy a good deal of the time.”
“I’d rather you worked your guts out on your dust heap.”
Samuel smiled at him. “What a nice thing to hear! And I thank you. It’s a good thing to be loved, even late.”
Suddenly Adam turned in front of him so that Samuel had to stop. “I know what you’ve done for me,” Adam said. “I can’t return anything. But I can ask you for one more thing. If I asked you, would you do me one more kindness, and maybe save my life?”
“I would if I could.”
Adam swung out his hand and made an arc over the west. “That land out there—would you help me to make the garden we talked of, the windmills and the wells and the flats of alfalfa? We could raise flower-seeds. There’s money in that. Think what it would be like, acres of sweet peas and gold squares of calendulas. Maybe ten acres of roses for the gardens of the West. Think how they would smell on the west wind!”
“You’re going to make me cry,” Samuel said, “and that would be an unseemly thing in an old man.” And indeed his eyes were wet. “I thank you, Adam,” he said. “The sweetness of your offer is a good smell on the west wind.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“No, I will not do it. But I’ll see it in my mind when I’m in Salinas, listening to William Jennings Bryan. And maybe I’ll get to believe it happened.”
“But I want to do it.”
“Go and see my Tom. He’ll help you. He’d plant the world with roses, poor man, if he could.”
“You know what you’re doing, Samuel?”