1890s

The 1890s mark a decisive, wandering interlude in Adam Trask's life, a decade of rootlessness that follows his second discharge from the army and precedes his eventual return to the Connecticut farm. It is the period in which Adam, having failed to go home after his service, becomes a bindlestiff, learning the tramp's life of movement, begging, and survival, and endures the brutalizing experience of a Florida road gang. This decade strips away his remaining innocence and forges a new, hardened self, one that will later be capable of both deep love and profound withdrawal.

The Bindlestiff's Education

After his discharge in late 1890, Adam did not return to his brother Charles. Instead, he waited out the winter wandering up the Sacramento River and ranging in the San Joaquin Valley. When spring came and his money was gone, he rolled a blanket and started slowly eastward, sometimes walking, sometimes riding the rods under slow-moving freight cars. At night he jungled up with other wandering men in camping places on the fringes of towns, and he learned to beg, not for money but for food. Before he knew it, he was a bindlestiff himself. Such men were rare later, but in the nineties there were many of them—lonely men who wanted it that way, some running from responsibilities, some feeling driven out of society by injustice. They worked a little, but not for long; they stole a little, but only food and occasionally needed garments from a wash line. They were all kinds of men—literate and ignorant, clean and dirty—but all of them had restlessness in common. They followed warmth and avoided great heat and great cold, tracking the spring eastward and fleeing the first frost west and south. Around the little fires where communal stew bubbled, Adam heard all manner of talk: the development of the I.W.W., philosophic discussions, metaphysics, esthetics, impersonal experience. His companions for the night might be a murderer, an unfrocked priest, a professor forced from his warm berth by a dull faculty, a lone driven man running from memory, a fallen archangel and a devil in training. Adam learned the technique of shaving with broken glass, of judging a house before knocking to ask for a handout, of avoiding or getting along with hostile police, and of evaluating a woman for her warmth of heart.

The Road and the Chain Gang

Adam took pleasure in the new life. When autumn touched the trees he had got as far as Omaha, and without question or reason he hurried west and south, fled through the mountains, and arrived with relief in Southern California. He wandered by the sea from the border north as far as San Luis Obispo, learning to pilfer the tide pools for abalones and eels and mussels and perch, to dig the sandbars for clams, and to trap a rabbit in the dunes with a noose of fishline. He lay in the sun-warmed sand, counting the waves. Spring urged him east again, but more slowly. Summer was cool in the mountains, and the mountain people were kind as lonesome people are kind. Adam took a job on a widow's outfit near Denver and shared her table and her bed humbly until the frost drove him south again. He followed the Rio Grande past Albuquerque and El Paso through the Big Bend, through Laredo to Brownsville. He learned Spanish words for food and pleasure, and he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself. By now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle. He was lean and sun-darkened, and he could withdraw his own personality until he made no stir of anger or jealousy. His voice had grown soft, and he had merged many accents and dialects into his own speech, so that his speech did not seem foreign anywhere. This was the great safety of the tramp, a protective veil. He rode the trains very infrequently, for there was a growing anger against tramps, based on the angry violence of the I.W.W. and aggravated by the fierce reprisals against them. Adam was picked up for vagrancy. The quick brutality of police and prisoners frightened him and drove him away from the gatherings of tramps. He traveled alone after that and made sure that he was shaven and clean. When spring came again he started north, feeling that his time of rest and peace was over. He aimed north toward Charles and the weakening memories of his childhood. Near Tallahassee he was picked up by sheriff's men, judged vagrant, and put on a road gang. His sentence was six months. He was released and instantly picked up again for a second six months. He learned how men can consider other men as beasts and that the easiest way to get along with such men was to be a beast. A clean face, an open face, an eye raised to meet an eye—these drew attention and attention drawn brought punishment. Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt. The savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dangerous animal. He drew a curtain around himself, removing expression from his face, light from his eyes, and silencing his speech. He reduced his personality to a minus, causing no stir, putting out no vibration, becoming as nearly invisible as it is possible to be. When the guards could not feel him, they were not afraid of him, and they gave him the jobs of cleaning the camps, of handing out the slops to the prisoners, of filling the water buckets.

Escape and Return

Adam waited until three days before his second release. Right after noon that day he filled the water buckets and went back to the little river for more. He filled his buckets with stones and sank them, then eased himself into the water and swam a long way downstream, rested and swam farther down. He kept moving in the water until at dusk he found a place under a bank with bushes for cover. He did not get out of the water. Late in the night he heard the hounds go by, covering both sides of the river. He had rubbed his hair hard with green leaves to cover human odor. He sat in the water with his nose and eyes clear. In the morning the hounds came back, disinterested, and the men were too tired to beat the banks properly. When they were gone Adam dug a piece of water-logged fried sowbelly out of his pocket and ate it. He had schooled himself against hurry. Most men were caught bolting. It took Adam five days to cross the short distance into Georgia. He took no chances, held back his impatience with an iron control. He was astonished at his ability. On the edge of Valdosta, Georgia, he lay hidden until long after midnight, entered the town like a shadow, crept to the rear of a cheap store, forced a window slowly so that the screws of the lock were pulled from the sun-rotted wood. He stole a pair of cheap trousers, a white shirt, black shoes, black hat, and an oilskin raincoat, and he tried on each article for fit. He forced himself to make sure nothing looked disturbed before he climbed out the window. He had taken nothing which was not heavily stocked. He had not even looked for the cash drawer. He lowered the window carefully and slipped from shadow to shadow in the moonlight. He lay hidden during the day and went in search of food at night—turnips, a few ears of corn from a crib, a few windfall apples—nothing that would be missed. He broke the newness of the shoes with rubbed sand and kneaded the raincoat to destroy its newness. It was three days before he got the rain he needed, or in his extreme caution felt he needed. The rain started late in the afternoon. Adam huddled under his oilskin, waiting for the dark to come, and when it did he walked through the dripping night into the town of Valdosta. He made his way to the station and peered through a rain-blurred window. The station agent, in green eyeshade and black alpaca worksleeves, leaned through the ticket window, talking to a friend. It was twenty minutes before the friend went away. Adam watched him off the platform. He took a deep breath to calm himself and went inside. He sent a telegram to Charles, asking for one hundred dollars, and the question Charles devised to verify his identity was, "What did you give Father on his birthday just before you went in the army?" The answer was, "A pup." Adam came walking out from the village, his shirt dirty and the stolen clothes wrinkled and soiled from having been slept in for a week. Charles met him, and Adam said, "Mostly wandering around all over," and when Charles asked, "Like a hobo?" Adam replied, "Like a hobo." The 1890s had ended, and Adam Trask had returned, a changed man.