And here interpolated—it’s so hard to remember how you die or when. An eyebrow raised or a whisper—they may be it; or a night mottled with splashed light until powder-driven lead finds your secret and lets out the fluid in you.

Now this is true, Tom Hamilton was dead and he had only to do a few decent things to make it final.

The sofa cricked in criticism, and Tom looked at it and at the smoking lamp to which the sofa referred. “Thank you,” Tom said to the sofa. “I hadn’t noticed it,” and he turned down the wick until the smoking stopped.

His mind dozed. Murder slapped him aware again. Now Red Tom, Gum Tom, was too tired to kill himself. That takes some doing, with maybe pain and maybe hell.

He remembered that his mother had a strong distaste for suicide, feeling that it combined three things of which she strongly disapproved—bad manners, cowardice, and sin. It was almost as bad as adultery or stealing—maybe just as bad. There must be a way to avoid Liza’s disapproval. She could make one suffer if she disapproved.

Samuel wouldn’t make it hard, but on the other hand you couldn’t avoid Samuel because he was in the air every place. Tom had to tell Samuel. He said, “My father, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. You overestimated me. You were wrong. I wish I could justify the love and the pride you squandered on me. Maybe you could figure a way out, but I can’t. I cannot live. I’ve killed Dessie and I want to sleep.”

And his mind spoke for his father absent, saying, “Why, I can understand how that would be. There are so many patterns to choose from in the arc from birth back to birth again. But let’s think how we can make it all right with Mother. Why are you so impatient, dear?”

“I can’t wait, that’s why,” Tom said. “I can’t wait any more.”

“Why, sure you can, my son, my darling. You’re grown great as I knew you would. Open the table drawer and then make use of that turnip you call your head.”

Tom opened the drawer and saw a tablet of Crane’s Linen Lawn and a package of envelopes to match and two gnawed and crippled pencils and in the dust corner at the back a few stamps. He laid out the tablet and sharpened the pencils with his pocketknife.

He wrote, “Dear Mother, I hope you keep yourself well. I am going to plan to spend more time with you. Olive asked me for Thanksgiving and you know I’ll be there. Our little Olive can cook a turkey nearly to match yours, but I know you will never believe that. I’ve had a stroke of good luck. Bought a horse for fifteen dollars—a gelding, and he looks like a blood-horse to me. I got him cheap because he has taken a dislike to mankind. His former owner spent more time on his own back than on the gelding’s. I must say he’s a pretty cute article. He’s thrown me twice but I’ll get him yet, and if I break him I’ll have one of the best horses in the whole county. And you can be sure I’ll break him if it takes all winter. I don’t know why I go on about him, only the man I bought him from said a funny thing. He said, ‘That horse is so mean he’d eat a man right off his back.’ Well, remember what Father used to say when we went rabbit hunting? ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ I’ll see you Thanksgiving. Your son Tom.”

He wondered whether it was good enough, but he was too tired to do it again. He added, “P.S. I notice that Polly has not reformed one bit. That parrot makes me blush.”

On another sheet he wrote, “Dear Will, No matter what you yourself may think—please help me now. For Mother’s sake—please. I was killed by a horse—thrown and kicked in the head—please! Your brother Tom.”

He stamped the letters and put them in his pocket and he asked Samuel, “Is that all right?”

In his bedroom he broke open a new box of shells and put one of them in the cylinder of his well-oiled Smith and Wesson .38 and he set the loaded chamber one space to the left of the firing pin.

His horse standing sleepily near the fence came to his whistle and stood drowsing while he saddled up.

It was three o’clock in the morning when he dropped the letters in the post office at King City and mounted and turned his horse south toward the unproductive hills of the old Hamilton place.

He was a gallant gentlemen.

PART FOUR

Chapter 34

A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

Herodotus, in the Persian War, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most-favored king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. “Who,” he asked, “is the luckiest person in the world?” He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solon told him of three lucky people in old times. And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say, “Do you not consider me lucky?”