Genus Americanus

The American Revolution was different from the French Revolution and the later Russian Revolution in that the revolting American colonists did not want a new kind of government; they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves. If they had been a united and cohesive polity, they might well have wanted a king -- but their own king. Americans did not come by a theory of government by the common man all at once; that growth was gradual and is still going on. We want a common candidate but an uncommon office holder.

What Americans did discover earlier than most of the rest of the world was that ability had nothing to do with birth. Of course we have to some extent overdone this, as we often do; a national leader was required to be of log-cabin background, even if he had to invent the lowliness of his own ancestry and upbringing. But here again our paradoxical tendency took charge: we had learned to distrust inherited position, property, and money, but we quickly proceeded to admire the same things if self-acquired. When we revolted against the old country and set up our own stalls, we were careful to eliminate the hated symbols of aristocracy -- titles, honors, inherited prerequisites. But since every man wants admiration and perhaps some envy, we had only possessions to admire and envy. The rich in America of the middle period may have been cursed and disparaged, but they had chosen the one way to be noticed.

The aristocrats our ancestors remembered and loathed invariably kept their positions and paid their expenses through land-holding. The greater the aristocrat, the larger the land-holding. It was natural that our early settlers tried to emulate the people they detested and perhaps envied. In open, untenanted America, apart from royal colonial grants some men did accumulate enormous pieces of land through seizure, purchase, or chicanery. Because of the debilitating effect of some crops such as cotton, large areas were required to make the land show profit. Later, with the development of farm machinery it became possible for very few men to farm very large tracts. The only difficulty lay in increasing taxes, the cost of machinery and fertilizer, and that new thing in the world -- overproduction: too much food, with the resulting drop in prices, came to haunt large farmers. The need to borrow and the advantages of corporate organizations made the huge farms into factories, owned mostly by banks or stock companies. Great holdings owned by one man or family became fewer, so that where once there were many estates as large as provinces, at the present there are very few; and the ones that do survive are almost museum pieces.

The world dearly loves the figure of the American capitalist: the hated robber baron, Mr. Moneybags, slopping up champagne fermented from the blood of the workers; feared and revered Uncle Sam in striped coat and a great dollar-sign belly, a crude, almost bestial figure. The curtain countries, Iron and Bamboo, particularly love this figure. Sometimes the "capitalist" carries bombs or tanks and doubles as a warmonger, the soulless maker and seller of destruction. Any inspired protest against America is bound to have this figure in effigy. In the course of the pageant he is either burned or hanged. Unfortunately he doesn't exist any more and we miss him. The great robbers, fat, free-spending, vicious, top-hatted, and glittering with precious stones -- the Diamond Jim Bradys, Lucky Baldwins, Leland Standfords, with their pretty women, fast horses, and baronial mansions -- were rich and proud of it, and they gloried in showing the world how rich they were. In the latter part of the last century these vital, boisterous figures were at once our curse and our ornament -- and then something happened, and they disappeared. The railroad barons, the iron and copper barons became giants, were hated, were admired -- and disappeared.

The giants of money were usually the sons of poor men who clawed and grappled their way to great fortune, driven by memory of poverty and hardship. Quite naturally, they protected their children from the experience which had been the driving force, and since there was no government approval or backing of individual families, the second generation of great wealth as a rule went to pieces in weakness, self-indulgence, and stupidity. A few families have continued in power through money, but they are rare. Most of the descendants who have remained rich are protected by trust funds and safeguards, which amount to about the same thing as entailment did in the old country and are designed to keep the grubby little hands of the sons out of the pot of the fathers. A goodly number of our earlier self-made millionaires even entertained dynastic notions. From the banks of the Hudson River to Nob Hill in San Francisco we can still see their efforts -- castellated fortress-like seats, sometimes of shingle, with arrow-slits, sally ports, barbicans -- which, far from holding off enemies from without, could not even defend against creeping decay from within. When the flame of the founder was gone, only a wreathy smolder remained, and, without the stern defense of the trust fund, went out altogether.

Today there are probably more and much richer men than ever before; but far from boasting of their wealth they live almost like fugitives, secret and shy. No doubt the income tax and the ways of circumventing it have made them timid. We know about our tycoons only when they are giving something away, and their gifts and foundations are usually a means of keeping their money out of the hands of the tax collector.

Today, instead of the old, highly visible capitalist we have the corporation -- one of the strangest organisms in the present world. It may manufacture goods for sale, operate mines, manipulate money, bore oil wells and crack the products into useable components, produce steel, copper, nickel, or tungsten, operate farms, or it may purchase the products of other corporations and distribute them; but its purpose is always to make money.

The corporation, to exist at all, must be efficient, must produce its product or perform its function for a minimum of cost and a maximum of profit. Since the most costly ingredient of any business operation is labor, the early corporations tried to keep labor costs at a minimum. They settled in areas where labor, because of its competition with itself, was cheap. When working men began to organize, to pit group action the employing agent, the corporations fought tooth and nail against the growing organization of labor. Every expedient was used to overcome or bypass organized labor -- hiring of the hopeless and the ignorant, lockouts of labor unions, even armed defense and retaliation -- a kind of civil war within the business structure.

We can all remember the warfare: company thugs against union goons; the riots, the murders, the wreckage; and particularly the loud and piercing charges, on the one hand that labor was treasonable to business, and on the other that fat, cold-hearted capitalism was exploiting the working man and requiring enforced poverty for its purposes.

Shares in the early corporations were held by few investors, and those usually in upper financial brackets. The shareholders were against socialism certainly -- but they were much more against no dividends. The warfare against organized labor was costly, as all wars are; and furthermore, the workers willing to accept the wages and conditions required were so ignorant, inept, and inefficient that production costs went up and profits went down. Also, as Americans generally acquired more money they bought shares in the more efficient corporations, so that the whole nature of the ownership changed and broadened. Gradually, the fat cartoon figure of Capitalism with the dollar sign on its distended vest ceased to be accurate. Shareholders became increasingly a cross-section of lively Americans. And it was early discovered that eleven men each with a hundred shares could outvote one man with a thousand. The shareholders ask one simple question: Is the corporation making money, or isn't it?

With all its power in the economy, its influence through the economy on states, governments, and nations, the great corporation has remained almost morbidly sensitive to criticism. A few letters critical of a product or a policy can and often do cause a nervous and fearful meeting of the board of directors and a sharp self-examination. Bad publicity, as every corporation head knows, can cause a fall-off in sales which automatically stirs up a hornets' nest among the stockholders. Therefore these giants spend great sums on public relations.

In America we have developed the Corporation Man. His life, his family, his future -- as well as his loyalty -- lie with his corporation. His training, his social life, the kind of car he drives, the clothes he and his wife wear, the neighborhood he lives in, and the kind and cost of his house and furniture, are all dictated by his corporate status. His position in the pyramid of management is exactly defined by the size of his salary and bonuses. The pressures toward conformity are subtle but inexorable, for his position and his hopes for promotion to a higher status are keyed to performance of duties, activities, and even attitudes which make the corporation successful. In the areas of management, sales, and public relations, the position of the corporation man is secure only from one stockholders' meeting to the next; a successful revolt there may sweep out whole cadres of earnest men and replace them with others.

By reason of the simplicity of its end -- making money -- the corporation is much more efficient than any existing government. As my friend Ed Ricketts put it, "If General Motors or Du Pont should form an army, no national army could last against it for a moment." To a fairly large extent a public army's purpose is just to stay in existence at all. We have found in the past, on entering into conflict, that the public professional army is not very well prepared. A great corporation on the other hand, if its purpose were to win a war, would devote its total energy to that end with maximum speed and efficiency and a minimum of waste. "What public army," Ed Ricketts said, "could stand against such versatility and singleness of purpose?"

An oil company may extend into transportation, or a food processing firm invest its profits in magazines, but there is one thing that the corporation cannot do. When it enters fields of individual creativeness it not only fails but it shrivels the creator. It cannot order the writing of good books and plays, the painting of great pictures, the composing of exquisite music. Where it has entered such fields, it has succeeded only in adulterating the product and eventually destroying the producer. In the production of food, clothing, and shelter, minor entertainment, and the gadgetry of comfort the corporation has not only fulfilled our needs but sometimes created them. Only in our yearning towards greatness is it helpless.

While our rich men were growing richer and we were all living high on the hog in the nineteenth century -- all equal, all common, democratic, mostly Protestant, materialistic and down-to-earth -- there must have been a profound yearning for the flamboyance, the trappings, the ritual, the fancy titles and postures and litanies we had denied and cast out. There was, and we did something about it. We created unofficial orders, kingdoms, robes, and regalia and complicated forms of procedure and secret recognitions among the elect. The meeting hall over the firehouse in the grubby little town would be transformed -- one night into Solomon's temple, the next to a select and benign witches' coven, the next to the chapel of the order of knighthood complete with regalia, shining swords, and ostrich feathers. For one night a week we became noble. I remember well seeing Louis Schneider, the good butcher of Salinas -- a round and red-faced man, in a bloody apron most of the time -- wearing a golden crown, an imitation ermine robe, holding the symbols of power in his hands and speaking ritual phrases I am sure he didn't understand and would have laughed at if he had. His box-toed shoes peeped from under the gold and purple of his robe, but nothing could change his yellow waterfall mustache or his wrinkled and much-reddened neck. It was glorious. At every parade the noble knights marched, a little shy and very unmilitary, but with their plumes fluttering and silver-plated swords reflecting the light.

It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don't have to. Every holiday draws millions of marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march, clad in any imaginable outlandish costume, carrying heavy banners with them too. Everything from Saint Patrick's Day to the Grandmothers of America, Inc., draws milling marchers; but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they will wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers. Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed. He lives for the day when he can get out of uniform, and once out spends a large part of his future life at reunions, conventions, marching his heart out while his uniform gets tighter, and his collar and waistband torture him. Then the war he loathed becomes the great time of his life, and he can conscientiously bore his wife and children to death with it.

Along with the veterans' organizations, Americans have developed scores of orders, lodges and encampments, courts -- some simple insurance organizations, some burial agreements, some charitable associations, but all, all noble. Anyone who has lived long enough will remember some of these as an enrichment of his youth. Elks, Masons, Knight Templars, Woodmen of the World, Redmen, Eagles, Eastern Star, Foresters, Concatenated Order of Whowho, International -- the World Almanac lists hundreds of such societies and associations, military and religious, philosophic, scholarly, charitable, mystic, political, and some just plain nuts. All were and perhaps still are aristocratic and mostly secret and therefore exclusive. They seemed to fulfill a need for grandeur against a background of commonness, for aristocracy in the midst of democracy. And the ritual perhaps satisfied the nostalgia of the Protestant for the fulsome litany and ritual of the denounced Catholic Church. A great many orders had rules against admitting any Catholic. And then the Catholics formed their own orders, their own knighthoods and clubs, and that kind of ruined the whole thing.

We are a very strange people; we love organizations, and hate them. I remember something that happened in Salinas at a time when the Hearst papers were whipping up anger against the Japanese, and when, in our schools -- I guess I was about twelve or thirteen years old -- at least thirty per cent of the pupils were Japanese. Some of them were my good friends, but, stimulated by the ferocity of the Hearst campaign, we formed a little club for espionage against the Japanese. We had secret signs and secret message places and codes. We prowled about Japanese gardeners' farms, peered in their windows, and found that they went to bed very early -- and got up very early, too. But we were content to snoop, and we were happy. Then a terrible thing happened. Takasi Yatkumi, who was one of our dearest friends, asked to join. We were horrified; it tore the whole structure of racial dislike down to the roots. We explained to Takasi that his action was not cricket; that he was the enemy; that he couldn't join an anti-Japanese organization. He thought about it awhile and said that if we would let him in he would help us to spy on his mother and father. And because he was our friend we had to take him in, but it ruined the fine, ferocious quality of our organization, just as the Catholic lodges in a way broke down the ferocity of the Protestant groups.

The desire and will to spy on , to denounce, to threaten, and to punish, while not an American tendency, nevertheless inflames a goodly number of Americans. The ones I have inspected at closer range are people just past middle age, both men and women, who feel that life has cheated them or passed them by; the feeling may have something to do with the climacteric. They seem to believe that the blame for their own unhappiness lies in the nature of the society in which they live. The sexually dissatisfied are appalled at the immorality of youth. Those who have failed or not succeeded in business become convinced that a great wrongness directs our economy. Feelings of social inadequacy emerge in hatred of society.

All such sickness of the soul must find a target to shoot at -- and the targets are available in the happy, the successful, the efficient, and the recognized. The attacker usually finds himself a high moral or religious purpose. He is not attacking something; he is defending something. Beautiful women, if publicized, must be whores, and attractive men lechers or deviates. The quality or direction of the attack diagnoses the failure or the sickness of the attacker. Politicians and statesmen are prime targets; and, above everyone else, our Presidents are sitting ducks. The letters of threat and denunciation sent to the White House are, in many cases, hysterical with hatred and jealousy. No President has escaped this deluge of rebuke, from Washington to Johnson. It is my firm belief that President Kennedy was murdered not for what he was but for what his murderer wasn't; a man with a beautiful and loving wife, a high position, and the respect and admiration of his countrymen could not be forgiven by a man who had failed in everything he had undertaken -- his marriage, his politics, and his aching desire to be accepted and admired.

Writers do not draw quite as much fire as those whose personal lives are publicized, but in my time I have received some ferocious letters accusing me of sins of both commission and omission. I think my favorite was one which, after several pages of furious and vengeful attack, ended with the beautiful threat: "You will never get out of this world alive!"

To guard us against taste, judgment and self-reliance in our critical attitudes -- particularly towards the arts -- the American species has produced a sport which may be unique in the world today. We have identified her and named her "Mom." She seems to be related to the arachnids. She resembles Latrodectus mactans, and also the Salticidae and the Lycosidae, in their mating habits. The males of those species often dance for hours before the females will submit to mating, although sometimes, as with Pisauridae, the female will accept from her mate a present such as a fly wrapped in silk. After mating, of course, she eats her spouse. Our counterpart Mama Americana, sometimes known as the "Haywire Mother," breathes fire and cries havoc while setting herself to defend her children from the withering effects of literature. She turns up to exorcise the pale and ghostly books from our haunted house of culture. Her victims, in effect, are not books but children.

The odd thing is that this March hare mother need never have had children nor have read a book -- indeed often has done neither. The object of her violence may be a little vague; sometimes morals are involved, sometimes politics, sometimes a confusion of both. It is her conviction that normal children, preoccupied as they are with normal and exciting thoughts and experiments with their own sexual potential, will learn to do what they are already doing by reading certain books. Again, a berserk mother gets into a belligerent panic in the belief that children, exposed to the turgid political litany of the last century, will become inflamed with uncontrollable revolutionary ecstasy approximating orgasm. It does not occur to this mother that the children are successfully resisting reading of any kind, and that she herself has never been able to read two paragraphs of Marx or Engels or Lenin even if she has heard of them. It is her conviction that the poison may even be fiendishly concealed in novels.

The field of action of this curious woman is the library of the public school, and her immediate victims are the teachers, the school board, and sometimes county or state officials, who are nervous of criticism of any kind. This noble creature infiltrates the school and demands that certain books be removed from the library shelves. Her action brings reaction. Defenders of the denounced books arise, newspapers are drawn in, stories are written, pictures taken. In many cases it develops that no one -- supervisor, principal, teacher, student, or the Iron Mother herself -- has ever read the books in question. The result is that school officials are forced to the dreary duty of reading the offending volumes and some of the children even dip into them briefly, just to be naughty. I don't suppose these Saint Georgias are very destructive. When, as happens pretty often, one or more of my books is purged from the shelves of a school or library, the immediate effect is an increased sale in that community, but perhaps for the wrong reason. Once a number of years ago when a town wanted to make a burnt offering of an offending book of mine, they found to their horror that there was no copy to be had. It was necessary to order ten copies for the auto de fé, and that was more books than they had bought in that town for years.

America has its fair share of screwballs -- we took the term from the kind of pitch in baseball which twists and turns in the air so that the batter can't figure out how it will come over the plate, and it is a very apt description. While some of our screwballs are charming, original, and theatrical, others are malign and vicious, and a few are downright dangerous. Of our people, the most timid and subject to passion are those -- some old, some idle through retirement -- who live on fixed incomes from investments. There are many thousands of these, and they are usually to be found where a bad climate does not further their anxieties. Southern California and Florida attract them in great numbers. They gather in tightly knit groups and share their fears with one another. Any fluctuations in the cost of living, changes in the tax laws, or international situations which cause variations in stock prices or in the real-estate market affect their immediate income, with the result that they live in a state of constant apprehension. This makes them fair game for the man or group with dictatorial desires.

Such leaders are surely screwballs, but they are wise in the uses of timidity. They have only to bring charges, no matter how ridiculous or improbable, of plots to disturb the delicate balance of the fixed and unearned income in order to arouse fear, which is the mother of ferocity. The poor, idle people sitting in the sun are drawn together in positions of furious defense. The leaders who feed and abet their anxieties are able to hit them with dues and contributions while adding new fuel to their fears. The stalking horror is "Communism," with its thread of confiscation of private wealth, and "Socialism," which implies that they might be forced to share their wealth with less fortunate citizens. Once they have been frightened into organization for self-defense, the Messiah who has planted the fear is able to use it for his own ends. He has only to bring some cruel, stupid, and untrue charge against an official, and particularly against any reform movement, to set these cohorts in noisy motion and to draw from them large amounts of money which, devoted to publications and radio and television programs, keep these poor people further off balance; and as Joseph McCarthy proved, the more ridiculous the charge, the less possibility there is of defense.

What is the purpose of such leaders or stimulators or catalysts? Probably a simple desire for power. But their stated purpose is invariably patriotic -- they promise to preserve the nation by techniques which will inevitably destroy it. They may even have convinced themselves of the virtue of their mission; and yet, over all such activities there is the smell that caused Doctor Johnson to say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Even more cynical are the screwball organizations which teach hatred and revenge to the ignorant and fearful people, using race or religion as the enemy. One of the oldest, most primitive and surviving of human groupings, after the family, is the totem; and the rules of the totem have never changed, from the beginning, when the animal totems branded and scarred their initiates, to the most recent activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The totem has certain rules, almost natural laws. It must be secret, exclusive, mysterious, cruel, afraid, dangerous, and monstrously ignorant. The mask, whether it be animal, skin, or sheet, is invariably present. The initiate must take a new name, thereby magically becoming a new, brave, shining person as opposed to the frightened, confused thing he knows himself to be. Spectacular, half-understood symbols must be used; and invariably torture and human sacrifice are appealed to as stimulants to release fear into ferocity. The steps never change; it is true there is less of it than there once was, but it still exists as a memory of our savage past and as an instrument on which the witch doctor, the wizard, or the Kleagle can play for his own profit.

Such are some of the ugly and evil aspects of American screwballery; but we also have pleasant, benign, and interesting screwballs who contribute to our gaiety. Of such was the gentle Emperor Norton, who lived in San Francisco and called himself "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico." Of such is the man who runs for the Presidency on a vegetarian ticket, and of such was One Eye Connelly the gate crasher, and Leaping Lena Levinsky the lady prizefight promoter; of such was Canvasback Cohen, the prizefighter who was maintained by the Marx brothers because he lost all contests.

We have poets in flowing robes, inventors of new religions, people who spend their lives warning us and painting on fences that the end of the world is at hand. Such screwballs are very valuable to us and we would be a duller nation without them, as our economy and our means of production gently shove us nearer and nearer to a dull and single norm.

One kind of eccentrics are the show-offs, who by outlandish costume or unusual gesture or speech spend their time drawing attention to themselves -- some foolishly and some with a terrible mock dignity. But, one must be sure, in observing such people, whether it is a true eccentricity or simply a matter of advertising. A number of years ago when I was working on a New York newspaper the police picked up a pretty young girl walking naked on Park Avenue, leading a fawn with a collar and leash. She was brought into the precinct station, booked, and then brought before a magistrate, who said that he found it eccentric but he wondered if she might not be opening in some show someplace; and it turned out that she was.

In addition to the show-offs there are the hiders -- those who secrete themselves from society. I was twelve or thirteen years old when I became deeply involved with my first real eccentric. There are verities beyond question when one is thirteen -- a haunted house is a haunted house and there is no sense or purpose in questioning it. There is good luck and bad luck, and the penalty for inspection of these is bad luck. Then there are misers, and misers hoard gold. We had a miser; I shall call him Mr. Kirk. Kirk and his wife and daughter lived in a little, old, dark house in a five-acre orchard not far from the center of Salinas. Of course it had once been in the country, until the town crept out and surrounded it. The Kirk place was much too valuable as town lots to be left as a grove of apples and pears and plums, and even those trees so old that they were long past good bearing. The Kirks had been a decent, well-to-do farm family for generations, and it occurred to me only much later why Mr. Kirk was known as a miser. He couldn't be tempted, or bribed, or threatened into selling his valuable acres, to root out his trees, take his profit, and build a white house with a wrought-iron fence and a grave-plot-sized lawn. He hoarded his five acres; and he was peculiar.

Kirk dressed in a blue shirt and overalls like all farm people, but he left his orchard only once a week. On Saturday he came to a little feed store my father owned and bought ten cents' worth of middlings -- about five pounds, I suppose. Middlings were simply ground wheat with the chaff left in; it would be called whole wheat now, but then it was sold for chicken and pig feed. His weekly purchase was remarkable because the Kirks had neither chickens nor pigs. Mrs. Kirk and the daughter were rarely seen. They never left the orchard, but we could peer through the black cypress hedge which surrounded the orchard and see two gaunt, gray women, so much alike that you couldn't tell which was mother and which was daughter. As far as anyone ever knew, the ten cents' worth of middlings was all Mr. Kirk ever bought. First the daughter faded and sickened and died, and soon after, Mrs. Kirk went the same way. The coroner said they had starved to death, we would call it malnutrition now -- but there was no evidence of violence. People did mind their own business then. But I do know that after they died, Mr. Kirk bought five cents' worth of middlings a week.

Having a genuine miser of our own had a great impact on me and on the three other little boys I ran with. The dark and gloomy orchard and the little unpainted house, mossy with dampness, drew us. I remember being out at night a good deal and I can't for the life of me remember how I got out or back into my own house again. The four of us chicken-necked kids hid in the black shadow of the cypress hedge and looked at the lighted window glowing among the trees, and eventually, by boasting and daring one another, we overcame our cowardice and moved quietly into the orchard and crept with held breaths toward the uncurtained window. Mr. Kirk's face and his right hand and forearm seemed to hang in the air, yellow-lighted by the butterfly flame of a kerosene barn lantern. He was writing feverishly in a big old ledger with red leather corners, his face twisted and contorted with concentration. Now and then his upper teeth clamped on his lower lip. Suddenly he looked up, I presume in thought, but in our timid state we thought he looked right into our peering faces. All of us jumped back, but one boy's foot slipped and fetched a heavy kick on the wall of the house.

Mr. Kirk leaped to his feet, and we froze in the darkness. He did not look at the window; he addressed a presence to his left so that his profile stood against the lantern. Through the closed window we could hear his voice; he cried out on Satan, on the Devil, on Beelzebub. He argued, pleaded, threatened, and after a few moments collapsed into his chair by the table and put his head down on his arms while we trembled in fear and ecstasy. Nothing there is in nature as thoughtlessly cruel as a small boy, unless it be a small girl. As we hid in the deep shadows, our terror abated and we felt that our entertainer had let us down. Then one of us, and I don't know which of us it was, crept back to the house and struck the wall three great, portentous raps. Instantly Mr. Kirk was on his feet again, fighting his brave and hopeless combat against Satan, while we glowed with excitement and a sense of power. Again he collapsed, and again we roused him, until finally he fell to the floor and did not get up. Now I am horrified at our wantonness, but I cannot remember that we felt any pity whatever.

In the ensuing weeks we ranged the darkness of the orchard every night, so that our parents wondered at our sluggishness in the daytime and put it down to what is called "growing pains." Since Mr. Kirk was a known miser, we began to dig about the roots of the fruit trees, searching for his golden hoard, while, to keep him busy, one of us would crouch under his window and with measured knockings employ him at his job against Satan.

We found no gold, but we were making a horrid mask of paper mounted on a stick to stimulate our victim to new heights of despair, when Mr. Kirk disappeared. No light glowed in his window, and a strange, sweet sickliness hung over the night orchard. Two weeks later we heard that Mr. Kirk had not gone away. He had died in his house, probably helped on by us, and he was in very bad shape when the sheriff and the coroner took him out and splashed the house with creosote.

We could hardly wait for the darkness to fall; we invaded through a window, our pockets full of candles. Every cranny we inspected for his gold; we dug up the earthen floor of his cellar, knocked on walls, searching for hidden hiding places, and we found nothing but his big ledgers. I took one away and read it: gibberish; words and word sounds repeated, "read, reed, wrote, rotten, Robert," or "sea, sky, sin, sister, soon." I know now that these were symptoms of his sickness.

In the end we were fortunate, but it wasn't long before we knew it to be good fortune. We found no gold, but when Kirk's distant cousins took over their inheritance and prepared to sell off the orchard for building lots, they found a canvas bag wedged in a U-pipe of the sink trap, and in the bag were gold pieces -- over five thousand dollars' worth. If we had found them, we would have tried to spend them and -- well, it's better we were unlucky.

This was our eccentric; every town must have one or more -- strange, hidden, frightened, half-mad people are always with us. Only when they hurt someone or die do we discover them.

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