Samuel had leaned his elbows on the table and his hands covered his eyes and his forehead. “I want to think,” he said. “Damn you, I want to think. I’ll want to take this off alone where I can pick it apart and see. Maybe you’ve tumbled a world for me. And I don’t know what I can build in my world’s place.”

Lee said softly, “Couldn’t a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn’t some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?”

“I don’t know, damn you. You’ve disturbed my pretty universe. You’ve taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone—let me think! Your damned bitch is having pups in my brain already. Oh, I wonder what my Tom will think of this! He’ll cradle it in the palm of his mind. He’ll turn it slow in his brain like a roast of pork before the fire. Adam, come out now. You’ve been long enough in whatever memory it was.”

Adam started. He sighed deeply. “Isn’t it too simple?” he asked. “I’m always afraid of simple things.”

“It isn’t simple at all,” said Lee. “It’s desperately complicated. But at the end there’s light.”

“There’s not going to be light long,” Samuel said. “We’ve sat and let the evening come. I drove over to help name the twins and they’re not named. We’ve swung ourselves on a pole. Lee, you better keep your complications out of the machinery of the set-up churches or there might be a Chinese with nails in his hands and feet. They like complications but they like their own. I’ll have to be driving home.”

Adam said desperately, “Name me some names.”

“From the Bible?”

“From anyplace.”

“Well, let’s see. Of all the people who started out of Egypt only two came to the Promised Land. Would you like them for a symbol?”

“Who?”

“Caleb and Joshua.”

“Joshua was a soldier—a general. I don’t like soldiering.”

“Well, Caleb was a captain.”

“But not a general. I kind of like Caleb—Caleb Trask.”

One of the twins woke up and without interval began to wail.

“You called his name,” said Samuel. “You don’t like Joshua, and Caleb’s named. He’s the smart one—the dark one. See, the other one is awake too. Well, Aaron I’ve always liked, but he didn’t make it to the Promised Land.”

The second boy almost joyfully began to cry.

“That’s good enough,” said Adam.

Suddenly Samuel laughed. “In two minutes,” he said, “and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.”

Lee took the boys up under his arms. “Have you got them straight?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Adam. “That one is Caleb and you are Aaron.”

Lee lugged the yelling twins toward the house in the dusk.

“Yesterday I couldn’t tell them apart,” said Adam. “Aaron and Caleb.”

“Thank the good Lord we had produce from our patient thought,” Samuel said. “Liza would have preferred Joshua. She loves the crashing walls of Jericho. But she likes Aaron too, so I guess it’s all right. I’ll go and hitch up my rig.”

Adam walked to the shed with him. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “There’s a weight off me.”

Samuel slipped the bit in Doxology’s reluctant mouth, set the brow band, and buckled the throatlatch. “Maybe you’ll now be thinking of the garden in the flat land,” he said. “I can see it there the way you planned it.”

Adam was long in answering. At last he said, “I think that kind of energy is gone out of me. I can’t feel the pull of it. I have money enough to live. I never wanted it for myself. I have no one to show a garden to.”

Samuel wheeled on him and his eyes were filled with tears. “Don’t think it will ever die,” he cried. “Don’t expect it. Are you better than other men? I tell you it won’t ever die until you do.” He stood panting for a moment and then he climbed into the rig and whipped Doxology and he drove away, his shoulders hunched, without saying good-by.

PART THREE

Chapter 23

1

The Hamiltons were strange, high-strung people, and some of them were tuned too high and they snapped. This happens often in the world.

Of all his daughters Una was Samuel’s greatest joy. Even as a little girl she hungered for learning as a child does for cookies in the late afternoon. Una and her father had a conspiracy about learning—secret books were borrowed and read and their secrets communicated privately.

Of all the children Una had the least humor. She met and married an intense dark man—a man whose fingers were stained with chemicals, mostly silver nitrate. He was one of those men who live in poverty so that their lines of questioning may continue. His question was about photography. He believed that the exterior world could be transferred to paper—not in the ghost shadings of black and white but in the colors the human eye perceives.

His name was Anderson and he had little gift for communication. Like most technicians, he had a terror and a contempt for speculation. The inductive leap was not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain. He had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings—and they got some bad falls that way.