All night long I lay being conscious of him in the house. He never left, even for a moment. It was constant; it never dimmed.

18

At seven o’clock the next morning the telephone woke me up. It was Fay calling from wherever they were staying.

“We’ll buy your equity in the house,” she said. “Here’s what we can give you. One thousand dollars cash and the rest in the form of monthly payments of thirty-eight dollars. We sat up half the night discussing it.”

I said, “The only thing is that I want to stay here.”

“You can’t,” she said. “Did it occur to you that everything in that house belongs either to the girls or to me? And if we want to we can keep you from using the refrigerator or the sink—you can’t even use the towels in the bathroom. You can’t even eat off the dishes in the rack on the drainboard. My good god, you can’t even sit down in a chair—that bed you’re sleeping in doesn’t come with the house; that’s part of the personal property, and he only left you his share of the house. The sheets on the bed. The ashtrays!” She went on and on, working herself up. “And how are you going to eat? I’ll bet you think you’re going to walk into the kitchen and open up a few cans and packages of food. Do you think that food is yours? It isn’t. And if you eat one bite of it, I’ll sue you. I’ll take you to court and sue you!”

I hadn’t realized it. What she said was true. “There’s a lot in what you say,” I said. “I’ll have to get my own furniture.”

She said, “I think I’ll have the movers come up from Fairfax and move everything out of that house.”

“Okay,” I said, taken aback and having difficulty thinking.

“You idiot,” Fay said. “All you’ve got in this world is that empty box of a house—half that empty box of a house. And we can keep up our share of the payments with what we’re getting in from the factory.” She hung up, then.

I dressed and combed my hair, and then I went into the kitchen and stood wondering if I should fix myself breakfast or not. Suppose while I was eating it, Fay appeared with the sheriff or someone? Wouldn’t I, in a sense, be stealing the food?

Unable to decide, I at last gave up the idea of eating breakfast. Instead, I went outdoors and down to the chicken pen to throw grain to the banties.

How empty the duck pen was without the ducks. The trough remained, the porcelain sink that Charley had put down for them, and the drainage system that he had been working on. There was even a duck egg left over, half-buried in the weeds that the ducks had made into a nest. And, in the garbage can, half a sack of egg-gro. Almost fifty pounds of it.

I wandered on, to the stable that Charley had built for the horse. There was the saddle hanging up on the wall, and all the other equipment that had gone with the horse. Over three hundred dollars worth of stuff.

Returning to the house I seated myself on the floor, near the fireplace, and thought. I spent most of the morning deep in thought, and at last I came to the conclusion that what I had to do was find a way of bringing in enough money to make my monthly payments on the house, including what I had to pay on the taxes and insurance. Also, I needed to have enough money to buy food, because it was now clearly apparent that Fay and Nat would not give me any of theirs. I had had the half-formed notion that we could go back to something like the old system, with me doing baby sitting for them—although not the dirty work, the scrubbing part—and them supplying me with what would be an equitable amount of supplies such as food and the like. However, that was off.

After figuring I came to the conclusion that I would have to earn almost five hundred dollars a month in order to keep up my end of the house, and this did not include either unusual medical bills or house repairs. Anyhow, I could make the payments, eat, buy some clothes, etc., and acquire some second-hand furniture.

I therefore got out on the road and hitch hiked to Point Reyes Station. There, I started looking for a job.

The first place I tried was the garage on the corner. I told them that I wasn’t a mechanic, but that I had a scientific disposition and was good at analyzing and diagnosis. They told me they didn’t have any openings, so I went on across the street to the market. There was nothing there, either, even ajob such as opening crates and putting out the merchandise on the shelves. I next tried at the big hardware store. They said that the only person they could use was one who could drive. After that I tried at the post office for the job of postal clerk, but there they told me that a federal civil service exam was required. I tried the other garages and gas stations, the pharmacy, the coffee shop—at least there should have been a job of dish washer open—and the dress shop, even the little free library. No work was available at any place. I tried the feed store, the big building-supply yard, and finally the bank.

The man at the bank was very helpful. He recognized me as Fay’s brother, and we sat down at his desk and talked for a long time. I explained my situation, why I wanted work and how much I had to have. The man told me that it was next to impossible to find work at any of the retail businesses in the area because they all did such a limited operation. My best bet, he said, was either the dairy ranches out on the Point or down at Olema at the mill, or over at the gravel works on the Petaluma road, or the RCA station out on the lighthouse road. If I could drive, he said, I could probably get a job driving the school bus, but that was obviously out. In summer I could pick produce, but this was only April.

Of the various alternatives it seemed tome that ajob on one of the dairy farms would be the best, because of my love of animals. Thanking the man, I hitch hiked back onto the Inverness side of the bay and then, by means of several rides, managed to get out to some of the ranches. It took all day. The only job that was open was that of milker, and this reminded me of what Charley had said originally, that milking would be my best bet up here in the country.

Milking, however, although it sounded like interesting work, paid only a dollar-thirty an hour, and this would not be enough for me to meet my expenses. In addition, I would have to actually live on the various ranches, and this would defeat the whole purpose of the job. So milking was out. Toward evening, feeling discouraged and tired, I started hitch hiking back to town. Fortunately the people at one of the ranches were kind enough to give me a big lunch, otherwise I would have had nothing to eat all day. As it was, I got back to the house at nine-thirty in the evening, thoroughly depressed and tired, with no prospect of work.

I turned on the light in the living room, and, because the house was so cold, I lit a fire in the fireplace, even though I was conscious that the wood belonged to Fay and the children, not to me. Even the discarded newspapers which we always used to start fires did not belong to me, nor the milk cartons that we saved out of the garbage. Only the stuff in the study that I had carried with me from the Hambros’.

Thinking about it, I wondered if possibly anybody in the group might be able to help me find ajob that paid five hundred a month. I therefore took a chance and telephoned Mrs. Hambro. Although she was sympathetic she seemed to feel that there was no chance that I’d find ajob paying anything like that much; she pointed out that in a farm area wages were generally lower than in the city, and even for San Francisco, five hundred a month was a pretty high salary.

At ten, while I was seated before the fire, the phone rang. I answered it. Again it was Fay, calling from wherever they were staying.

“I came by during the day,” she said. “Where were you?”