Gods Men (12 page)

So though the sailors were so evil, they were good, too. On the first day ashore in San Francisco they went together to a shop and bought Clem a suit of clothes. It was too big for him, but he rolled up the pants and sleeves. They bought him two clean shirts and a red tie, a hat and a pair of shoes and three pairs of socks and a pasteboard suitcase. Then they took him to the railroad station and bought him a ticket to Pittsburgh on the day coach. There was not quite enough money, for they would not let him spend the ten dollars they had given him, and one of them had pawned a gold thumb ring he had bought in Singapore. They clapped him on the back, embraced him, and gave him good advice.

“Don't talk with nobody, you hear, Clem?”

“Specially no women.”

“Aw, he's too runty for women.”

“You'd be surprised if you knew women like I do. Don't talk to 'em, Clem!”

“Don't play no cards, Clem!”

“Send us a postcard once in a while, Clem, will ya?”

The train pulled out and he stood waving his new hat as they receded until he could see them no more. So he was alone again, riding in a train across his own country. He had a seat to himself, opposite a red-faced man in a gray suit who slept most of the time and grinned at him vaguely when he woke. “Don't speak to nobody on the train,” the sailors had told him. “Shore fellows will take your money away from you.” He kept quiet and his wallet was in his breast pocket where he could feel it against his ribs every time he took a deep breath. When he needed money to spend on food he went into the men's room and there alone he took out a dollar at a time, keeping his change in his hip pocket against the back of the seat.

Hour after hour, in every hour of daylight, he stared from the window, seeing a country he could not comprehend. It seemed empty and without people. Where were all the people? The mountains were higher than he could have imagined, the deserts wider and more desolate, their emptiness terrifying. To his amazement, many times at the stations he saw white men doing coolie work, and in the few fields between mountains and on the fringe of deserts he saw men and women more ragged, more poor, though white, than any he had seen in China. Where was the land of milk and honey his father used to call home?

One night while he slept upright in his seat, they rolled into green plains. When he woke at dawn it was to another country. Green fields and broad roads, big barns and compact clean farmhouses charmed his eyes. This was Pennsylvania, surely!

Long before Clem had begun his voyage William had reached America. The white English ship docked at Vancouver, and Mrs. Lane, brisk and experienced, bullied the courteous Canadian customs officers and found the best seats on the train that carried them across Canada to Montreal, where they changed for New York.

It was a smooth journey, and William enjoyed it with quiet dignity. He kept aloof from his mother and sisters, staying most of the time in the observation car where behind a magazine he listened to men's talk. There was no difficulty in Montreal, and in New York his mother took them at once to the Murray Hill, where he had a room to himself because he was a boy. It was high ceilinged, and the tall windows had red velvet curtains held back by loops of brass. The luxury of the room and its bath pleased him. This then was America. It was better than he had feared.

They ate in a dining room where fountains played and canaries sang, and he enjoyed this, too.

“I believe in the best,” his mother said. “Besides, Papa and Mama always stayed here when we came to town.”

His mother kept him with her in New York for a week while she smoothed his path toward college, but Henrietta and Ruth she sent to her parents at Old Harbor. She did not take him at once to the office of the Mission Board. Instead she toured the best stores, asking to see young men's clothing. When she found something she liked she made William try it on. She bought nothing, however, merely making notes of garments and prices.

With these in a small notebook in her handbag she went on the morning of the fourth day to the Board offices and there was received with a deference which was balm to William's pride.

“Ah, Mrs. Lane,” a rosy faced white-haired executive said, “we've been expecting you. We had a cablegram from Dr. Lane. What can we do for you?”

“I have a good deal of shopping to do for my son's entrance into Harvard,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice and look were equally firm.

The plump elderly executive, a retired minister himself, looked doubtful. “We have special arrangements with medium-priced stores to give us a ten percent discount.”

Mrs. Lane interrupted without interest in the medium-priced stores. “I want to see the treasurer immediately.”

“Certainly, Mrs. Lane—this way, please,” the white-haired man said.

“You stay here, William,” Mrs. Lane commanded.

While William waited, his mother had a long interview with the mission treasurer which left him looking dazed and certainly left him silent. William had stayed in the reading room because his mother wanted, she said, to be alone with the finances. He had sauntered about, reading pamphlets impatiently. They were religious and full of hopeful accounts of the hospitals and schools and orphanages and churches with which he was entirely surfeited. He wanted to get away from everything he had known. When he entered college in the autumn he would not tell anyone who his father was or that he came from China.

“There now,” Mrs. Lane said when she emerged from the inner office. “I have everything all arranged. You'll be able to get along nicely.” She held her long skirts in one hand and over her shoulder she said to the little mission treasurer, “Thank you, Mr. Emmons, you've been very helpful.”

Mr. Emmons broke his silence. “You do understand, don't you, Mrs. Lane, that I haven't made any promises? I mean—I'll have to take up these rather unusual requests with the Board—evening clothes, for example—”

“I'm sure they'll see that my son deserves some special consideration, after all we've been through,” Mrs. Lane said in her clear sharp voice. “Come, William, we can get the noon train after all.”

He had followed her, holding himself very straight and not speaking to the shabby little treasurer.

When they reached his grandfather's house at Old Harbor, he was pleased to see it was a large one. It was old-fashioned and needed paint, but it stood in large, somewhat neglected grounds.

“Papa doesn't keep things up the way he used to, I see,” his mother said. They had taken a hack at the station and now got down. She handed him her purse. “Pay the man his dollar, William,” she told him.

“Grass needs cutting,” she went on. “I suppose Papa can't afford a gardener all the time, now he's retired.”

The hack drove away, and William looked at the suitcases the man had set down in the path. “We'd better take what we can,” his mother said with some embarrassment. “I don't know how many servants Papa has now. We used to have a houseman and three maids.”

She picked up two suitcases, and much against his will he took the other and followed her to the house. The door stood open and when they entered they were met by Henrietta and Ruth, dripping in bathing suits, and by a carelessly dressed old gentleman whom he recognized, though with extreme discomfort, as his grandfather.

Mrs. Lane swooped down upon him. “Well, Papa, here I am again!”

“You've grown a little older,” he said, looking at his tall daughter.

Mr. Vandervent was no longer imposing. He was a potbellied, mild-looking man, and he seemed timid before his tall grandson.

“How do, William,” he said, putting out a round little hand.

William clasped it coldly. “I'm very well, sir,” he replied correctly. “I hope you are, too.”

“So so,” Mr. Vandervent said. “The sea don't really agree with me, but your grandma likes it.”

“What we've been through—” Mrs. Lane began.

She was interrupted by a loud scream. A tall fat woman burst through a swinging door, an apron tied about her waist.

“Helen, my goodness!”

It was her mother. They embraced and kissed. “I was just stirring up one of my chocolate cakes, thinking that William would probably—we only have two maids now, Helen—why, William, this isn't you, never! Isn't he the image of your father, Robert? Your great-grandfather was a real handsome man, William.”

Henrietta had disappeared and through the window William saw her walking along the shore. Ruth was standing on one foot and then another.

“William!” she now whispered. “Do get in your bathing suit. The ocean is wonderful.”

It gave him an excuse and he seized it.

“May I, Mother?”

“Go on,” his grandmother said heartily. “You'll have time before supper.”

Supper! The word chilled his spine. He had heard it among the commoner missionaries, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Primitive Baptists, the Pentecostal people. At the English school the evening meal was always called dinner and since at his own home it had been so, too, it had not occurred to him that it could be anything else here.

He mounted the stairs with laggard steps and was arrested by his mother's voice. “Here, William, since you're going up, you might as well take some of the suitcases.”

He stopped, not trusting his ears, and looked at his mother. She laughed, but he discerned embarrassment in the steel gray eyes she kept averted from his. “You may as well realize that you are in America, son,” she told him. “You'll have to do a lot of waiting on yourself here.”

He stood still for one instant; then with a passionate energy he turned and ran downstairs and loaded himself with the bags and staggered upstairs again. Once he glanced over the balustrade to see if they were looking at him, but nobody was. His mother was talking about the siege, and they had forgotten him.

No one had told Clem to telegraph to his grandfather, and he would have been reluctant to spend the money. When he got off at last at Centerville, there was no one to meet him, but he had expected no one. Carrying his suitcase, he approached a fat man who was staring at the train and scratching his head.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Charles Miller lives?” Clem inquired.

The man had started a yawn and stopped it midway. “Never heard of him.”

“He lives on a farm,” Clem said.

“Your best bet would be that way,” the man said nodding toward the south.

“Thank you,” Clem said.

The man looked surprised but said nothing and Clem began walking. His days on the sea had made his feet tender although they had once been horny from long walking on rough Chinese roads. But his muscles still were strong. The heat here was nothing to that in China, and the air was sweet with some wild fragrance. He did not see anyone after he left the small railroad town, and this was strange. Were there no people here? It occurred to him that it was nearly noon, and they might be having a meal. Even so, where were the villages? As far as he could see there was no village in sight. The fields rolled away in high green waves against a sky of solid blue. They were planted with corn, he saw with surprise. Did the people here eat only corn?

After another hour he was tired and hungry and he wished that he had stopped to buy some food. Five miles had seemed nothing in his excitement. He sat down beside a small stream and drank and rested, and while he sat there a wagon came by, pulled by two horses as high as camels. A man drove them, seated on a bench in the wagon. “Hi, there, feller,” he called down. “Wanta ride?”

Clem was cautious. Why should a stranger offer him a ride? Might not the fellow be a bandit? “No, thank you,” he replied.

The man drew the wagon to a stop. “You look like a stranger.”

Clem did not reply. The barber on the ship had clipped his hair close to get rid of the dyed hair, and he was conscious of his baldness.

“Where you goin'?” the man asked.

“To Mr. Charles Miller's farm,” Clem replied.

The man stared at him, his jaw hanging. He was a dirty fellow, clad in a sweat-soaked shirt and blue cotton trousers. Through the unbuttoned front of his shirt Clem saw a chest woolly with repulsively red hair.

“Old Charley Miller is dead,” the man said.

The sunlight glittering upon the landscape took on the sharpness of dagger points, springing from the edges of leaves, the tips of grass, the points of fence rails. Clem's eyes blurred and weakness laid hold upon his knees.

“When did he die?” His mouth was full of dust.

“Coupla years ago.” The man prepared for the story. He spat thick brown spittle into the road and pushed back his torn straw hat.

“Fact is, the old man hung himself in his own barn. Disappointed, that's what. He'd been tryin' for ten years to get a job with the Republicans, and when they got in that year they give him the sheriff's job. He had to put somebody off a farm the very first day—mortgage couldn't be met. He was too softhearted to do it—he was awful soft-hearted, old Charley was. He just hung himself the night before—yeah.”

The man shook his head and sighed. “Wouldn't hurt a flea, Charley wouldn't. Couldn't kill a fly. Lived all alone. He had a son somewheres, but he never come home.”

“His son was my father.” The words escaped Clem like a cry.

The man stared, brown saliva drooling down his chin. “You don't, say!”

Clem nodded. “He's dead, too. That's why I came to find my grandfather. But if I haven't anybody—I guess—I guess I don't know what to do.”

The man was kind enough. “You get up here along of me, sonny, and I'll take you to your grandpop's farm, anyway. There's folks livin' there. Maybe they'll lend a hand.”

For lack of any directing thought Clem obeyed. He lifted his suitcase and gave it to the man and then stepping upon the axle he crawled into the seat. There in the hot sunshine he sat, his suitcase between his knees, and in silence the man drove two miles and put him down before an unpainted gate set in a decaying picket fence lost in high weeds. The wagon went away and Clem stared at a small solid stone house.