“You’re up,” he said. “That was to wake you if you were still sleeping.” His face was lighted with joy. “This is a morning light as down and no time to be slugging.”

“You sound like your father,” Dessie said, and she laughed with him.

His joy hardened to fierceness. “Yes,” he said loudly. “And we’ll have that time again, right here. I’ve been dragging myself in misery like a spine-broken snake. No wonder Will thought I was cracked. But now you’re back, and I’ll show you. I’ll breathe life into life again. Do you hear? This house is going to be alive.”

“I’m glad I came,” she said, and she thought in desolation how brittle he was now and how easy to shatter, and how she would have to protect him.

“You must have worked day and night to get the house so clean,” she said.

“Nothing,” said Tom. “A little twist with the fingers.”

“I know that twist, but it was with bucket and mop and on your knees—unless you’ve invented some way to do it by chicken power or the harnessed wind.”

“Invented—now that’s why I have no time. I’ve invented a little slot that lets a necktie slip around freely in a stiff collar.”

“You don’t wear stiff collars.”

“I did yesterday. That’s when I invented it. And chickens—I’m going to raise millions of them—little houses all over the ranch and a ring on the roof to dip them in a whitewash tank. And eggs will come through on a little conveyor belt—here! I’ll draw it.”

“I want to draw some breakfast,” Dessie said. “What’s the shape of a fried egg? How would you color the fat and lean of a strip of bacon?”

“You’ll have it,” he cried, and he opened the stove lid and assaulted the fire with the stove lifter until the hairs on his hand curled and charred. He pitched wood in and started his high whistling.

Dessie said, “You sound like some goat-foot with a wheat flute on a hill in Greece.”

“What do you think I am?” he shouted.

Dessie thought miserably, If his is real, why can’t my heart be light? Why can’t I climb out of my gray ragbag? I will, she screeched inside herself. If he can—I will.

She said, “Tom!”

“Yes.”

“I want a purple egg.”

Chapter 33

[1]

THE GREEN LASTED on the hills far into June before the grass turned yellow. The heads of the wild oats were so heavy with seed that they hung over on their stalks. The little springs trickled on late in the summer. The range cattle staggered under their fat and their hides shone with health. It was a year when the people of the Salinas Valley forgot the dry years. Farmers bought more land than they could afford and figured their profits on the covers of their checkbooks.

Tom Hamilton labored like a giant, not only with his strong arms and rough hands but also with his heart and spirit. The anvil rang in the forge again. He painted the old house white and whitewashed the sheds. He went to King City and studied a flush toilet and then built one of craftily bent tin and carved wood. Because the water came so slowly from the spring, he put a redwood tank beside the house and pumped the water up to it with a handmade windmill so cleverly made that it turned in the slightest wind. And he made metal and wood models of two ideas to be sent to the patent office in the fall.