“I hated mine, too. He could have sent someone to Troezan to learn how I was, whether I was growing up strong and healthy. He never did. He didn’t even know he’d had a son until I showed up in Athens.”
“So if you hated him, why did you go?”
“Why will you?”
“I’m not, yet.”
“But you will. Just the way I did.”
Sam thought about this. “I guess I’m curious. I want to ask him why. I want to ask him lots of things.”
“Let me tell you, fathers don’t always give you good answers. In my experience, they sometimes tell you things, but it doesn’t satisfy. They tell you why, but it isn’t a why that matters, you know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Well, say you ask your father why he wasn’t there when you were born. And he says, he was off fighting a war with the Atticans or something. That’s the reason, but you still feel he should have been there.”
“You’re saying there aren’t any reasons good enough for some things.”
“Isn’t that the way you feel?”
Sam stared at the sky, wondering if it was the way he felt. He thought it was. There were no reasons good enough for some things. Certain things simply had to be. Fathers had to put their sons first. No war or cause was that important. Sons came first. If fathers didn’t do that, they failed, no matter what the reasons. He turned to explain this to the hero and found him gone.
It was all right. He’d explain it next time. He curled into the slight declivity he had been sitting in. The night was warm and windless; it was very quiet there; gradually he drowsed into sleep.
Two persons had followed Sam from the settlement, had hidden among the ribbon-willows, had listened to his conversation with whomever he had been talking to. They had seen him put on his belt and his helmet. They had seen him sit on a hillside. They had heard him talking to someone, maybe to himself. There had been nothing wild or crazy or violent going on. Just a man dressed up and talking to himself.
“How often does he do this?” asked Dern Blass, who had come to Settlement One that afternoon, disguised as a peddler, in response to certain rumors he had heard. “How often does he sit out here talking to himself?”
“He rambles every other night or so,” said Africa. “Sometimes he walks a long way. Sometimes he sits and talks like this.”
“But he’s all right in the daytime?”
“So far,” she said. So far he had been. “So far he’s done his job as well as anyone could do it.” Africa thought this was true. She could not think of any improvements she herself could make over Sam’s performance.
“Any idea what he meant by … there aren’t any reasons good enough for some things …’?”
Africa shook her head. She didn’t know what Sam had meant. She knew what she would have meant. The words were true. There weren’t any reasons good enough for some things.
• Jeopardy Wilm saw himself as a future Team Leader, like Saturday’s mom. Jep felt his Aunt Africa was the best, better than any of the uncles, though they were all right. Africa’s Team Five was recognized, even among the children, as being extremely well led.
Thus, when it came time to cut the wolf-cedar for the roof of the temple the children were restoring, Jeopardy went to the sisterhouse next door to China’s to consult his aunt about the proper system for doing things.
“Let’s say,” he told her over her work table, while Saturday and her sibs did homework at the other end of it, “let’s say I’ve got fifteen men.” Actually he had eight, but fifteen sounded better. Friday Wilm, who was eleven and knew very well how many workers Saturday had, looked up and winked at him, but Jep pretended not to notice. “I’ve got fifteen men, and the job I have to get done is to cut wolf-cedar logs and transport them and lift them up about twelve feet.”
His aunt stared at him, trying to show interest without curiosity, ashamed of herself for feeling impatient. She had been up half the night, watching Sam with Dern Blass, and she was tired and unusually fractious. If she could have, she would have postponed this little conference. What the hell were these kids up to now?
“What’s the total weight of the logs and what’s the distance you need to move them?” she asked, keeping her voice calm with an effort.
Jep had been prepared for these questions and came up with reasonable estimates as to total weight and distance. After a computation session, in which Saturday joined, Africa suggested the use of a dilapidated utility vehicle which, while it was no longer sufficiently reliable to be used regularly in the fields, could certainly carry larger loads than twelve- to fourteen-year-olds would find possible without mechanical help.
When Jep had gone, Saturday said into her book, “Mom, do you feel all right?” The other children looked up expectantly, wanting to hear the answer to this question.
“Not really,” Africa remarked with an apologetic look at all of them. “I think I must be coming down with something.”
“I thought maybe you didn’t feel good,” Saturday said, giving her mother a troubled look. “You almost sounded as though you didn’t like Jep, and I know you do.”
Africa started to say she didn’t like anybody much right now, but decided that would be misinterpreted. Instead she merely smiled apologetically and hoped whatever was wrong with her and everyone else would soon go away.
Jep got his eight-man crew into the wolf-cedar forest the following day. For several days they cut, trimmed, and stacked the slender trunks, trying to pick ones that were straight and uniform in size, being careful not to clear-cut any area of the forest, a deed which Jep’s mom would have regarded as only slightly less dishonorable than genocide. When enough wood had been assembled in
