Samuel Hamilton
Samuel Hamilton came from the north of Ireland, the son of small farmers who had lived on one landhold for many hundreds of years. He was remarkably well educated and well read, and he was connected to both very great and very small people. Why he left the stone house and green acres of his ancestors is not known for certain, but there was a whisper in the family that love drove him out, and not love of the wife he married. He arrived in the Salinas Valley full-blown and hearty, full of inventions and energy, about thirty years before the turn of the century, bringing with him his tiny Irish wife, Liza, a tight, hard little woman with a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down nearly everything pleasant to do.
Identity and Introduction
Samuel was a big man but delicate in a way, with very blue eyes that wandered outward a little when he was tired. In the dusty business of ranching he seemed always immaculate. His hands were clever: he was a good blacksmith, carpenter, and woodcarver, and he could improvise anything with bits of wood and metal. He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money. Other men who had the talent took Samuel's tricks and sold them and grew rich, but Samuel barely made wages all his life. He homesteaded marginal land in the barren hills east of what is now King City, taking a quarter-section for himself, one for his wife, and one for each child as they were born, until the family held eleven quarter-sections, or seventeen hundred and sixty acres. If the land had been any good the Hamiltons would have been rich, but the acres were harsh and dry, with no springs and a crust of topsoil so thin that the flinty bones stuck through. Even in reasonably good years there was so little feed that the cattle kept thin running about looking for enough to eat. From their barren hills the Hamiltons could look down to the west and see the richness of the bottom land and the greenness around the Salinas River.
Life and Work
Samuel built his house with his own hands, and a barn and a blacksmith shop. Finding he could not make a living on the bony soil without water, his clever hands built a well-boring rig, and he bored wells on the lands of luckier men. He invented and built a threshing machine and moved through the bottom farms in harvest time, threshing the grain his own farm would not raise. In his shop he sharpened plows, mended harrows, welded broken axles, and shod horses. Men from all over the district brought him tools to mend and to improve, and they loved to hear Samuel talk of the world and its thinking, of the poetry and philosophy that were going on outside the Salinas Valley. He had a rich deep voice, good both in song and in speech, and while he had no brogue there was a rise and a lilt and a cadence to his talk that made it sound sweet in the ears of the taciturn farmers from the valley bottom. They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens. Samuel should have been rich from his well rig and his threshing machine and his shop, but he had no gift for business. His customers, always pressed for money, promised payment after harvest, and then after Christmas, and then after—until at last they forgot it. Samuel had no gift for reminding them, and so the Hamiltons stayed poor.
Relationships and Influence
Samuel's friendship with Adam Trask became one of the novel's central relationships. He helped Adam name his twin sons, Caleb and Aaron, in a long afternoon of conversation that also involved Lee and ranged over the story of Cain and Abel. Samuel struck Adam in the dust to shake him out of his grief after Cathy's departure, and later, when Adam had sunk into a year-long stupor, Samuel returned to force him back to life. He told Adam the truth about Cathy's whereabouts in Salinas, a revelation he called a "medicine" that might either cure or kill. Samuel also formed a deep intellectual bond with Lee, the Chinese servant, who later said that when Samuel Hamilton died the world went out like a candle. Lee and Samuel discussed the Hebrew word timshel—"thou mayest"—which became the novel's central moral concept, giving a man the choice to triumph over sin. Samuel's own life was marked by a refusal to take the cold responsibility of greatness; he said he chose mediocrity, warmth, and companionship, though he watched his son Tom suffer over the same choice.
Change and Ending
Samuel's daughter Una died in bleak circumstances in the north, and her death struck him like a silent earthquake. His tissue, which had fought joyously against time, gave up. He became an old man. His children, seeing the change, conspired to send him and Liza on a visiting tour to their homes, a plan Samuel saw through but accepted. He made formal calls on all his neighbors, saving the Trask place for last. He told Adam he was going away and that he knew where he was going and was content. On the night he left, he spoke to Lee of his life as a kind of music, not always good but still having form and melody, and said that a single note only—unchanging sorrow—had been playing for a long time. Then he spoke of the word timshel and said it had taken him by the throat and shaken him, opening a path new and bright. He died soon after, and at his funeral Adam stood apart, unable to believe that Samuel was dead, preserving the man alive in his memory. Samuel Hamilton left behind a family of nine children, a legacy of laughter and learning, and a profound impact on everyone who knew him.
