He shook his head. “Why?”
Malcolm Maxill used some of the money from the bountiful crop of 1940 to buy the adjoining farm. He was indisputably a big man in Evarts County now. Three laborers worked the two farms; the house had been remodeled; a truck, two cars and a station wagon stood in the new garage beside all the shining machinery. The banker in Henryton listened deferentially when he spoke; Muriel’s husband asked his advice.
Nan saw how it chafed him to be tied to farming, beholden to Ash. When he left on the long trip to Los Angeles she knew he was trying to end his dependence, searching for a deal to put him in a business where his shrewdness, money, energy, not Ash’s gifts, would make the profit. Maxill wasn’t mean; if he sold the land she was sure he’d settle with Ash for enough so they could get a place of their own.
A freeway accident intervened: Malcolm Maxill was killed instantly. There was no will. The estate was divided amicably enough, Gladys and Muriel waiving practically all their share in return for Nan’s taking full responsibility for the three younger girls. Ash was quite content to leave arrangements—which he regarded with the detached interest an Anglican bishop might take in a voodoo mask—to her. He clearly didn’t grasp the importance of possessions and power.
He had to register for the draft but as a father in an essential occupation there was little danger of being called up; anyway he would never pass a medical examination with eight fingers. The war sent farm prices up and up; Gladys went to Washington to work for the government; Josey married a sailor home on leave.
Harvests continued bountiful, Nan noted with pleasure how other fanners came to Ash for advice and help. Since he couldn’t convey his knowledge to her despite partial communication in his own tongue there was no use trying with others. He never refused his aid; he simply limited it to visiting the poor growth, sick animal or doubtful field, talking platitudes’ from agricultural bulletins while his hands were busy. Afterward, so naturally that they were only amazed at the wisdom of the trite advice, the beasts recovered, the crop flourished, the sterile ground bore.
Her faint fear of little Ash’s hands becoming a handicap after all was dissipated. He could grasp, clutch, hold, manipulate, throw better than any other child of his age. (Some years later he became the best pitcher Evarts County had ever known; he had a facing curve no opposing batter ever caught onto.) Without precocity he talked early; he learned his father’s speech so well he eventually outdistanced Nan; she listened with maternal and wifely complacency as they hummed subtleties beyond her understanding.
Jessie, who took a commercial course, got a job as her brother-in-law’s secretary; Janet went East to study archaeology. After V-J Day, price-controls went off; the Maxills made more and more money. Ash stopped planting corn on the old farm. Part of the acreage he put into a new orchard, on the rest he sowed a hybrid grass of his own breeding which yielded a grain higher in protein than wheat. Young Ash was a joy; yet after seven years he remained an only child. “Why?” she asked.
“You want more children?”
“Naturally I do. Don’t you?”
“It’s still hard for me to understand your people’s obsession with security. Security of position, ancestry or posterity. How is it possible to differentiate so jealously between one child and another because of a biological relation or the lack of it?”
For the first time Nan felt him alien. “I want my children.”
But she had no more. The lack saddened without embittering her; she remembered how she had been bent on marrying Ash even with the chance of no children at all. And she had been right: without Ash the farm would have been worthless; her father a whining, querulous, churlish failure; she would have married the first boy who asked her after she tired of necking in cars, and would have had a husband as incapable of helping her grow and bloom as her father had been incapable with his barren acres. Even if she had known there would be no young Ash, she would still have chosen the same way.
It troubled her that Ash was unable to teach his son his farming skill. It destroyed a dream of Nan’s: Ash’s secret made him vulnerable; young Ash, with no secret to be extracted, could have worked his miracles for humanity without fear.
“Why can’t he learn? He understands you better than I ever will.”
“He may understand too much. He may have advanced beyond me. Remember, I’m a throwback, with faculties no longer needed by my people. Sports rarely breed true; he may be closer to them in some ways than I.”
“Then... then he should be able to do some of the marvelous things they can do.”
“I don’t think it works that way. There’s some kind of equation—not a mechanical leveling off, but compensatory gains and losses. I can’t teach him even the simple sort of telekinesis I can do. But he can heal flesh better than I.”
So a new dream supplanted the old: young Ash as a doctor, curing the diseases mankind suffered. But the boy, happy enough to exorcise warts from a playmate’s hands or mend a broken bone by running his fingers over the flesh outside, wanted no such future. The overriding interest of his life was machinery. At six he had rehabilitated an old bicycle each Maxill girl had used in turn until it was worn beyond repair. Beyond any repair except young Ash’s, that is. At eight he restored decrepit alarm clocks to service, at ten he could fix the tractor as well or better than the Henryton garage. Nan supposed she ought to be happy about a son who might be a great engineer or inventor; unfortunately she thought the world of freeways and nuclear weapons less desirable than the one she had known as a girl—Prohibition and Depression or not.
Could she be aging? She was just over forty; the fine lines on her face, the slight raising of the veins on her hands were far less noticeable than the same signs on girls—women— five or six years younger. Yet when she looked at Ash’s smooth cheeks, unchanged since the day Josey brought him in from the south pasture, she had a qualm of apprehension.
“How old are you?” she asked him. “How old are you really?”
“As old and as young as you are.”
“No,” she persisted. “That’s a figure of speech or a way of thinking. I want to know.”
“How can I put it in terms of earth years—of revolutions around this sun by this planet? It wouldn’t make sense even if I knew the mathematics involved and could translate one measurement into another. Look at it this way: wheat is old at six months, an oak is young at fifty years.”
“Are you immortal?”
“No more than you. I’ll die just as you will.”
“But you don’t grow any older.”
“I don’t get sick either. My body isn’t subject to weakness and decay the way my remote ancestors’ were. But I was born, therefore I must die.”
“You’ll still look young when I’m an old woman. Ash...”
Ah, she thought, it’s well enough for you to talk. What people say doesn’t bother you; you aren’t concerned with ridicule or malice. I’d call you inhuman if I didn’t love you. Every superhuman carries the suggestion of inhumanity with it. Yes, yes—we’re all selfish, mean, petty, grasping, cruel, nasty. Are we condemned for not seeing over our heads, for not being able to view ourselves with the judicial attachment of a million generations hence? I suppose we are. But it must be a self-condemnation, not am admonition, not even the example of a superior being.
She could not regret marrying Ash; she would not have changed anything. Except the one pitiful little resentment against aging while he didn’t. No acquired wisdom, no thoughtful contemplation could reconcile her to the idea, could prevent her shuddering at the imagined looks, questions, snickers at a woman of fifty, sixty, seventy, married to a boy apparently in his twenties. Suppose young Ash had inherited his father’s impervious constitution, as he seemed to have? She saw, despite the painful ludicrousness of it, her aged self peering from one to the other, unable to tell instantly which was the husband and which the son.