“That there’s the one he hang himself on.”
“Why did he do it?” Clem had once asked.
“Softhearted,” Pop had answered in accusation. He had added details later. “The ole feller took a new rope he’d bought a couple days before to tie up a calf with. He hed some kinda crazy notion if good men could git into the gov’ment they could straighten things out. He didn’t want the sheriff’s job, though — wanted to give it up right away, but the party boss told him he had to keep it for the sake of the party, like. First thing ole man had to do was close the mortgage on that there farm, yander.” Pop Berger’s thick forefinger pointed next door. “He wuz softhearted, like I said. He said he’d ruther die. Nobody took him serious, like. Doggone if the old man didn’t mean it. Next day somebuddy found him hangin’ dead.”
Clem never answered. Pop Berger could not comprehend the only answer that he could have made. Of course his grandfather would rather die. It had been his way of escape from an intolerable duty. He thought a great deal about his grandfather, searching out about the barn, the house, the farm, the small signs of a conscientious, careful, good old man. The cow stalls, for example, were larger than most. There was room for a cow to lie full length in a stall. Pop fretted at the waste of room. There was a trough outside big enough for all the horses to drink at once. The water ran into it through an iron pipe from the well so that it was always fresh. In the house the step between kitchen and living room had been taken away and made into a gentle slope. His grandmother had gone blind in her old age, Pop told him.
Heir of the conscience of his fathers, Clem could not be hardened by the miseries of his present life. Instead he felt a constant soreness in his breast, an ache of remorse for sins of which he was not guilty. This discomfort he now tried to heal superficially by helping the children to get more food to eat. It was not easy, and after some struggle within himself he decided, remembering the dog’s dish, upon simple theft.
After the Aid woman had gone, not to return he knew for many months, even perhaps a year, he was angered to see how instantly the man and woman fell back into their careless cruelty. The meat was put away and the milk was watered. Yet he dared not complain. He, too, was now in the power of these two, and if they saw his courage they could prevent the escape he planned. His Chinese childhood had taught him never to be reckless even in anger, for anger is no weapon. Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control. Therefore he locked his anger behind his teeth and, having decided upon theft, he used a deep cunning. He stole food so cleverly that the man thought the woman had eaten some leftover, and she thought the man had taken it. Neither believed the other and they snarled at each other, while the blank faces of the children told nothing. It comforted Clem to know meanwhile that inside Tim’s slack stomach there was a piece of boiled beef or a slice of home-cured ham, and that Jen had a lump of butter on a piece of bread. He was just in giving out his booty, saving nothing for himself. At the table he had courage enough to eat more than the younger ones, and since he worked well and was seemingly obedient, Pop gave him more than he might have given. Milk Clem stole without heed. In the pasture, hidden behind the brow of a hill, the children learned to come to him between meals, and he took a tin can from under a rock and milked a can full from one cow and another, never too much from one. Each child had a can full at least twice a day of the pure milk, warm from the cow’s body. When they were strong enough, Clem told himself, they would run away together. It must be before the winter fell again.
When autumn came, he had supposed they would all go to school. Tim had told him that the law said they had to go to free school and even Pop had to obey the law. That would make it easy, Clem planned, for them to run away. They could be a day upon their way before night came and before Pop, finding that they did not come home, could report their escape.
But he had not counted on Pop’s cleverness. Pop said one day in the barn, “They ain’t no call for you to go to school, Clem. You’re too big.”
Clem looked up from the hay chopper. “I want to go to school.”
Pop chuckled. “Yeah? Ain’t nobody knows you’re even here.” Clem stared in silence, waiting. A frightful comprehension was stealing into his brain.
“See?” Pop said. He was picking his teeth after the noon meal and he leaned against a cow stall. “You jest come here, didn’t you? You don’t belong nowheres, as I see it. School board don’t even know you’re alive.”
“I could tell them,” Clem said in a tight voice.
“Just you try,” Pop said.
Clem did not answer. He went on chopping the hay while his mind worked fast. This was the final reason why he had to go at once. He would wait no longer. To grow up in ignorance and loneliness was more than he could do. He had dreamed vaguely of finding people to help him, school teachers whom he could tell of the misery of the children. Perhaps Pop had thought of that, too.
“We dassent tell the teacher anything,” Mamie had said once. “Pop says he’d kill us if we told, and he would, too.”
“Yeah, he would,” Tim agreed.
“Well, ain’t you goin’ to say nothin’?” Pop inquired now.
“No,” Clem said. “I’ve never been to school anyway.” He kept his face averted and Pop saw only his bent, subdued body working at the hay chopper, and he sauntered away.
But Clem, whose patience was the long endurance of those who have never known better, had suddenly reached the moment of decision. He would run away on Saturday when the man and woman went to the town to do their marketing. He must leave this desecrated house of his forefathers and he must take the children with him, for his own peace, for without him they would starve. Sooner or later they would sicken one by one, and then they would die because they were already half starved, their frail bodies struggling and scarcely able to live even when they were not ill. Where he would go he did not know, nor what he would do with them. Even though he found work, how could he earn enough to feed them?
He looked back on the days in Peking as sweetness he had not known enough to taste while it was in his mouth. He remembered the pleasantness of Mr. Fong’s shop, the coziness of the inner rooms where he had sat at the square table teaching Yusan. It had been a home rich in kindness and his eyelids smarted now when he thought of it. Of his own parents he would not think. He remembered them no more as they had been when they were living but only as he had seen them dead, and this memory he could not endure and he put it from him so far that it had become blankness. He could not remember even their faces. Mr. Fong’s he saw clearly, and Mrs. Fong’s face he saw always wreathed in smiles as it was when she brought in the cakes and meat rolls. He dreamed of that food.
Slowly, while his conscience burned, Clem made his plans. On Saturday, early, as soon as the man and woman had left the house, he would tell the children. He did not dare to prepare them earlier for they were too childish to be trusted. He would help them to gather their clothes together and tie them in bundles. They would take whatever food was left in the house.
Saturday morning dawned clear and cool. Hateful as his life was to him, Clem had fallen in love with the land. He woke early as usual, even before the heavy footsteps of the man shook the narrow stairs, and he put on his clothes and let himself out from the window upon the roof of a shed below and thence he dropped to the ground. At the stream he washed himself in a small pool below a shallow falls. The stream bed was of rock, slanted in layers so precise that when the falls rose after a rain, slabs came off like great Chinese tiles. He had taken a score or so of them and had laid them neatly at the bottom of the pool and when the sun shone through the water, as it did this morning, the stones shone in hues of wet amber and chestnut and gold.