Lee’s voice said, “I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.” And Lee had worked patiently and slowly and he had succeeded in building Adam as the center, the foundation, the essence of truth.

Aron shook his head in the dark, shook it hard in disbelief. “If my father is a liar, Lee is a liar too.” He was lost. He had no one to ask. Cal was a liar, but Lee’s conviction had made Cal a clever liar. Aron felt that something had to die—his mother or his world.

His solution lay suddenly before him. Abra had not lied. She had told him only what she had heard, and her parents had only heard it too. He got to his feet and pushed his mother back into death and closed his mind against her.

He was late for supper. “I was with Abra,” he explained. After supper, when Adam sat in his new comfortable chair, reading the Salinas Index, he felt a stroking touch on his shoulder and looked up. “What is it, Aron?” he asked.

“Good night, Father,” Aron said.

Chapter 37

[1]

FEBRUARY IN SALINAS is likely to be damp and cold and full of miseries. The heaviest rains fall then, and if the river is going to rise, it rises then. February of 1915 was a year heavy with water.

The Trasks were well established in Salinas. Lee, once he had given up his brackish bookish dream, made a new kind of place for himself in the house beside Reynaud’s Bakery. On the ranch his possessions had never really been unpacked, for Lee had lived poised to go someplace else. Here, for the first time in his life, he built a home for himself, feathered with comfort and permanence.

The large bedroom nearest the street door fell to him. Lee dipped into his savings. He had never before spent a needless penny, since all money had been earmarked for his bookstore. But now he bought a little hard bed and a desk. He built bookshelves and unpacked his books, invested in a soft rug and tacked prints on the walls. He placed a deep and comfortable Morris chair under the best reading lamp he could find. And last he bought a typewriter and set about learning to use it.

Having broken out of his own Spartanism, he remade the Trask household, and Adam gave him no opposition. A gas stove came into the house and electric wires and a telephone. He spent Adam’s money remorselessly—new furniture, new carpets, a gas water-heater, and a large icebox. In a short time there was hardly a house in Salinas so well equipped. Lee defended himself to Adam, saying, “You have plenty of money. It would be a shame not to enjoy it.”

“I’m not complaining,” Adam protested. “Only I’d like to buy something too. What shall I buy?”