He had been a big man with a big voice. He had always worked hard, and he drank harder, and he was a difficult man to work for because of his temper. Lee was the only person I ever knew who could handle him. No matter what Lee did—and he did plenty—he could always bring the Major round to his side.
Lee had been expelled from college in his junior year for a wild week end in Galveston involving a stolen taxi and a girl from Postoffice Street. Lee always claimed he hadn’t stolen the taxi, that it was just that the driver had got even drunker than they were and had wandered off and left them. Anyway, the police had picked up Lee and the girl at dawn on Sunday morning going swimming in the nude out of the cab, which was seventy-five yards out from the beach in a heavy surf. They had driven it out until the motor stalled, at low tide. The Major had paid the damages and got the theft charges quashed and forgave Lee for it, but he never tried to send him back to school. Lee was a junior partner in the firm from then on, a partner whose duties consisted largely of driving a car as fast as it would go over rough country roads. Lee knew how to get along with him, and the Major was always a little proud of him, I think. He wore good clothes with an air, knew how to impress people, and knew a lot of good telephone numbers in a lot of places. The Major was a man who liked parties.
I don’t know yet why we couldn’t get along together. I had often wondered, during those years, if he didn’t subconsciously hate me because my coming into the world had killed my mother. She had died three days afterward, of complications following my birth. I had never really believed this, though, for he was far too smart a man to go in for any such crackpot morbidity. It was more likely that, as Mary had put it once, we both had too much of the same type of pigheaded stubbornness to live together. God knows, some of the whippings he had given me had been terrible to remember, and some of the provocations I had given him had been enough to try the patience of a saint.
A lot of things happened that year, the last one I was at home. Grandmother died in April, Lee came home in May, kicked out of college, and that same month the Major and I came to the parting. I graduated from high school the last of May and began packing to go out to the farm for the summer, as I had every year, and knowing that my grandfather would want me more than ever now that my grandmother was gone.
I will always remember the Major as he was that day. It isn’t a fair picture, because he wasn’t always that way, but it is one of those things that are ingrained in the memory and never come out. I didn’t look any better than he did that day, either, and I would like to forget it if I could, but I probably never will.
He met me in the living room as I was going out with my suitcase. He had been shaving and had come out of the bathroom in his gray tweed trousers with the suspenders dangling and shaving soap under one ear. His face was dark and I could see the nervous twitching of his right eyelid that always betrayed his anger.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.
“Out to the farm,” I said.
“Take that bag back upstairs and unpack it. You’re not going to any farm this summer.”
“Why not?”
“Because I say so. No son of mine is going to be a farm hand all his life. That’s finished.”
“He needs somebody out there.”
“He doesn’t need you. He’s got plenty of help, and if he needs any more he can hire ‘em, or I’ll hire ‘em for him.”
I was eighteen then and bigger than he was and I could feel our lifelong argument coming to a head. It was at this point that Lee always pretended to agree with him and turned on the charm and talked him out of it, but I never could do it. At about this time I usually got a whipping or a profane tongue-lashing for my rebellious attitude and the thing ended with my doing what I was told, but today I knew it was finished.
“I’m going out to the farm,” I said again.
“God damn you, are you defying me?”
Without answering, I turned and started to go.
“Stop where you are,” he roared, and stalked back to the bathroom and returned with the razor strap.
“You’ve laid that on me for the last time,” I said.
“We’ll see about that, young man,” he said, and swung it viciously. It hit me across the shoulders and hurt, and I caught it and pulled it out of his hand and threw it far down the hall behind me. He drew back as though to hit me with his right hand; his left hand had been amputated during the war.
“Don’t hit me,” I said. “I’ll slug you. You’ll need both hands if you ever hit me again.” It was something I would regret saying all the rest of my life, but I had said it and he stopped.
His voice wasn’t loud now. He sounded as if he would choke, and I could see his big chest rise as though he had to fight to breathe.
“Don’t come back. You’re finished here.”
“I’m not coming back,” I said. I picked up the bag and went on down the hall and out the front door. I saw him only once after that, for a little while one afternoon in July, at my grandfather’s funeral, but we didn’t speak.
I had been home once since then, two years ago, but it was while he was out of town.
When the rain slacked a little I went down to the barn and the mule lot and looked over the buildings and found them in good repair and then crossed the road to the tenant house. It hadn’t been used since my grandfather’s death, for the man who had been farming the place on the third-and-fourth had lived in the big house, and it had at one time been used for storing hay, but it hadn’t deteriorated too badly and could be put back in good condition with a few minor repairs and a half-dozen windowpanes that had been broken.
I was anxious to begin getting the place in shape again. It was mine now, and I intended to build it up to the way it had been when my grandfather was running it. I had always admired the way he had lived. I guess if someone had asked me, I couldn’t have explained why I wanted to go on being a farmer. There isn’t any money in it, and there certainly isn’t any prestige, as there is in being a doctor or a good lawyer or newspaper editor. But I liked the being outdoors all the time, and the hard physical activity, and the changing seasons, and the independence, and the knowledge—when I remembered my grandfather and the men like him—that I was in good company.
I moved out to the farm the second week in November. I had been pointing toward that ever since I had left New York after that last humiliating fight, and I was glad now to get away from the house in town. Lee was drinking more and more and it was hard to stay there and see what it was doing to Mary and what it was going to do to their marriage, to have to see it and still pretend it wasn’t happening.
They came out to see me often in December, sometimes bringing me a roast or something else that Mary or Rose had cooked, for they were convinced I would starve or poison myself with my own cooking. And in a way they were right, for that was the one feature about the arrangement I didn’t like. I hated the mess I made trying to cook, and I knew that later on, when the real farming began, I wouldn’t have time even to try to cook.
They came out every few days that first month, but after the first of the year their visits became less frequent and sometimes Mary would come alone, in a borrowed car. She never said what Lee was doing, or why he didn’t come with her, but I always knew. He wasn’t home. Sometimes he would be gone for a week at a time. He had made one halfhearted effort to go to work; he and another man had bought a filling station, but before they’d been operating a month there had been a party in the back room one night after closing and it had burned down. Somebody had left a cigarette lying around, I guess.