he thought. Sometimes the characteristics of genius pass not from father to son, as one might suppose, but take a leap in time and land in a grandchild; and stay there, and end there. Three hundred years of family go into the making of these two, and two hundred years of aftermath. Every family has them, though not always do both of them rise to the surface; usually only one—the first. Sometimes after one hundred years a small cluster of an old family will gather to talk over their heritage and anything else they have in common (which is usually very little), drinking lemonade and eating potato salad from picnic tables. Someone will bring a family album and they will see a picture of an ancient relative and his eyes will be wild and they’ll fit together all the information they can gather about him (which in most cases will be scarce); and finally later, much later, a young member of the family will be talking to his girlfriend about his family (as though selling them), and say, “That’s John T., we believe he was a genius.” And the girl will look down into his eyes, and from then on everyone will believe it. The other one, the second, will stay in the ground.
Glove knocked the loose snow from his shoes and went inside. He hung his coat in the off room and went upstairs, hearing his mother come to stand behind the door to her room. The voices from the men downstairs grew louder. He heard his father laugh, but there was shouting too. He tried to make it by. She opened the door.
“Glove.”
“Yes,” he said and stopped walking.
“Where you been?”
“Oh, the Wood kid came over for a birdcage. I went out to get it for him. And we talked.”
“I just wondered.” She smiled.
Glove felt the grip of the house on him. He began to walk away.
“Glove,” she said, “you got to keep the windows in your room closed . . . it ain’t healthy for that cold air to be in your room. I shut it for you.”
“O.K., Mom.” He stood there.
“Isn’t it a comfort . . . I mean how good Baron must be getting on . . . happy, I mean?” She was still standing behind the door, holding on to it with her left hand.
“A comfort.”
“You ain’t seen him, have you, Glove?”
“No, Mom. I haven’t, but I’m sure he’s fine.” Downstairs the shouting grew louder. “Those are real doctors up there.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “He must be so happy. He deserved to be happy . . . such a comfort.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Why . . . why don’t you ever”—she laughed and tossed a thread of hair away from her face—“call me Mother?”
“Mother! What do I call you?”
“Mom. Plain old Mom.”
“What’s the matter with that?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She laughed. “I just wondered, that’s all.”
More shouting from downstairs.
“I wonder why they’re . . .” Glove began.
“It’ll get worse,” Cell Easter said. “It’s for the good, though,” she added, and then smiled.
“What do you know about it?”
“I know. Before, I didn’t. But now I know . . . and it’ll get worse, but then it will be better.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I know.”
The angry, harsh voices exploded again downstairs, and the walls extracted the meaning of the words, leaving only the hard consonants to come up to the landing. To Glove it seemed as though the floor sagged under him.
“This house was poorly designed,” he said. “Your grandfather built it, Ansel Easter.”
Glove leaned against the hallway. How could it have been overlooked to tell him that? Why had he had to find out by himself, and put it together? Why did information never move through his family? Why, when in other families even the children knew the names of their parents’ parents’ friends, did his family seem to have come up out of the ground like a mushroom?
Suicide, he thought. It was the only explanation. A family suicide.
“Suicide,” said Glove.
“No,” his mother answered.
“Crazy. He was crazy, wasn’t he?” He was talking fast. “He was crazy. Of course. That’s why you think that—”
“He wasn’t crazy . . . not like Baron. He was misunderstood . . . by your father mostly . . . but he wasn’t crazy.”
“What happened? Something happened.” No, he thought then, I don’t want you to tell me.
Cell Easter and her son Glove went up another flight of stairs and into his room, because it was cooler there and the shouting downstairs could not reach them. She nudged him along with her hands. Glove’s gigantic radio, with its five aerials, switchboard, headphones, speakers, and interchangeable tuners, occupied a good one quarter of the room, spreading itself onto the table and connecting to three of the four chairs in the room, with the earphones draped over one post of the bed. With this radio he could hear men sending messages to each other in Alaska—lonely, isolated men who laughed to each other over their radio sets about trivial but grand things. Cell sat down in the only unconnected chair and told a story that she had ferreted out of her husband’s carefully protected history. One single green point of fierce light betrayed that Glove had it on; the glowing tubes of the transmitter were hidden.
“To begin with, the people here killed him. In the dark of the moon, at night, they came in this house to murder. They went through the house. They cut open his throat and kept him from screaming so that down on the second floor C and his brother Sam heard nothing; and it wasn’t until the next morning, when the blood came drip by drip onto the hallway from the boards above, that Sam went up and found him lying there, his head nearly off. Another slice had cloven his face. The blood stained the floor, but is covered now by a rug nailed down on top of it. I don’t tell this to make you sick, but to show what it must have been like for your father and Sam.”
“What people?” he asked. “Why would they do that? Things have reasons.”
“Because of hate . . . because of fear. Because evil will destroy goodness, will seek it out and destroy it, and Ansel Easter was a minister.”
“There were other preachers. There must have been—”
“No, not like the ministers we have now; they administer to the people. Your grandfather was a minister of God.
“In the beginning he was just a coal miner. He never went to a church school or learned how to compose sermons. But people would ask him to come up out of the mines and talk for them, organize their feelings and bring them out in the open. What I mean is that he never had any polish, the way the ministers are slick now and talk like funeral directors. Ansel Easter’s voice
