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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1985 by John Hersey

  Map Copyright © 1985 by David Lindroth

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1985, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080849

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  a

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  ROSCOE MONROE HERSEY, SENIOR

  MY THOUGHTS ARE FIXED ON MY SAGE PARENT.

  THEY SAY THE GOOD LIVE LONG.

  THEN WHY WAS HE NOT SPARED?

  from “On the Death of His Father” by Wei Wen-ti (A.D. 188-227)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  BOOK ONE

  THE IMPULSE

  BOOK TWO

  USE GRAVITY!

  BOOK THREE

  THE TEST

  BOOK FOUR

  GOD-INTOXICATED

  BOOK FIVE

  VAST FORCES

  BOOK SIX

  A LIFEWORK

  BOOK SEVEN

  CAVERN OF DISAPPOINTMENT

  BOOK EIGHT

  ENTERING THE CENTURY

  BOOK NINE

  THE KNOTS UNDONE

  BOOK TEN

  TIME TO LEAVE

  NOTES

  INDEX OF CHINESE NAMES

  BOOK ONE

  THE IMPULSE

  FIRE IN THE EYE

  DAVID TREADUP was born in the incorporated village of Salt Branch, New York, on July 7, 1878, at 4:36 p.m., or 5:17 p.m., or 5:23 p.m.

  Discrepancies of this sort, and of deeper kinds, too, matters of linkage of body and soul, were to plague the entire future of this infant. One birthtime is written in a wobbling script on the flyleaf of the Treadup family Bible. The second appears in a ledger kept by Prudence Chin, the assisting midwife. The third is on David’s birth certificate, attested to by Pastor Philip Bokase of the Salt Branch Methodist Church, who was hastily called in at the delivery because of the alarming weakness of the mother toward the end of her labor. The inconsistencies evidently arose because no one noticed, in the confusion of an anxious delivery, just what time it was when the newborn David first cried out to greet life. The pull of what John Wesley had called “assurance”—the confidence that with enough faith, alertness, and willpower anyone could attain the Kingdom of Heaven—must have been such that each independently felt the need to summon up for God’s notice of this small event a speculative minute of the day. It speaks to the profound reserve of these people that they never pooled their guesses.

  There is no doubt that the delivery was a dangerous one. In her ledger the midwife, Mrs. Chin, after recording the fee of one dollar and fifty cents for her ministrations, entered in a column headed “Particulars” a laconic note, “A fierce fight.” David Treadup wrote in his journal in China, when his mother died six decades later at a great distance from him, “I almost murdered her by the mere act of arrival in this world.” Hannah Treadup was a tiny, light-boned woman, and everyone agreed that David weighed at birth a monstrous twelve pounds and two ounces. Further entries in the family Bible show David to have been the fifth and last of Brownson and Hannah Treadup’s children, girl boy boy girl boy; perhaps, but for this “fierce fight,” there might have been several other births.

  As for the baptism, David, wearing a long, lace-trimmed dress that had been handed down through his mother’s family for just this single use, was at six weeks touched with water on his forehead and admitted to the religion that would one day make a foreign legionnaire of him.

  * * *

  —

  HE WENT home from his baptism crying and did not stop. It was as if the holy water had scalded him. On and on, all day after day, for weeks, he made a wild, discontented noise. As a student at Syracuse, writing self-consciously in his diary about his own startlingly loud voice in elocution class, David reported having been told that his father, hearing his crying in those weeks, had said he sounded “like Pastor Bokase singing ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me.’ ” Hannah grew frightened. Prudence Chin was called in. She weighed David on her balance; he had lost four pounds. She said it was clear: The baby was starving. Hannah, battered by the delivery, had come up nearly dry and had been too worn and depressed even to realize it.

  There followed an anxious period, because Prue Chin said that she had neither served at, nor heard of, any other births in the village for nearly a year: a freakish drought of dragon seed in Blaine County. Finally news came of a sturdy nursing mother in Turcott, twelve miles from the Treadup farm. She was the wife of a blacksmith there, a fat and somewhat slovenly but warmhearted woman, people said; she was willing to suckle the Treadup child, but in exchange for her milk she wanted what the Treadups did not have: cash. Brownson Treadup went to Pastor Bokase, and the preacher arranged for some women of the church to “adopt” the baby, at least to the extent of raising money for the wet nurse. David was taken to Turcott and lived there, in a tight and dark little house, for eight months.

  He was soon well; his gigantic little frame became fully fleshed out.

  David Treadup believed in later years that he had a distinct and clear memory of being nursed by the Turcott woman. A memory from infancy? He insisted on it. It had come to him one night when he was in college, he claimed, as a kind of sudden bright picture; and it never left him after that. He described it in the manuscript he called “Search,” which he wrote many years later—in 1943—in a period when he felt a need to settle his mind about his past.

  I see a window’s rectangle of light. All around me is a massive welcome of flesh. I can make no distinction between shoulder, arm, breast, though I always know where the dear bud is. The mass is warm. I am in a bath of love. My hands mold the source. I have the most exq
uisite sense of comfort and well-being.

  When he was about seven, long before this “memory” had come to him, David was told by Will, the third child and second Treadup son, of his having been sent away to be nursed. Will put it in a triumphant older brother’s way: “You don’t belong to us.” David, who never kept in anything that caused him anger, went straight to his mother, told her what Will had said, and asked if it was true that he had been shipped away to be fed. Her answer was not completely forthcoming: “Of course you belong to us.” By the time he was twelve, David had been confided more about the “milker” by his complacent siblings, and he kept asking his mother who she was. His mother would never tell him the woman’s name. He could never even find out whether his mother had visited him in Turcott.

  When, at eighteen, David went away to board at the Enderbury Institute, in Turcott, he began keeping a Line-a-Day diary, and one finds frequent notations: “Looked for the woman.” And once: “Looked for the other mother.” What clues could he have followed?

  * * *

  —

  THE REAL MOTHER, Hannah Bledsoe Treadup, was a nimble little rabbit of a woman who did her share of heavy work on the Treadup farm; yet she also rigidly reserved certain hours for stillness—for reading, both to herself and in a murmur to her children. She kept apart an existence in books. “Words,” David wrote after she died, “were her amethysts, beryls, chalcedonies, and diamonds.” She evidently had a need to give these stones their settings, and she wrote everything down; David’s lifelong recording mania must have come from hers.

  Serenity, poise, and sweetness changed guard in her with sudden sallies of a sharp tongue, fleeting looks of having been grossly cheated, and frowns implying that a Bledsoe had been intended for something more edifying than sterilizing the cream separator or hacking at a lump of suet for the obligatory mince pie of a winter Sunday. In a strong light one could see a tiny glint of hysteria in the sharp pupils of her dark brown eyes. These impressions come from David, who once wrote in his journal that his mother pulled at the kitchen pump as if she had Lucifer by the tail.

  She came from old New England stock, and as she stirred things up in the western New York State village where fate had landed her, she made the bite of that heritage felt. “Resistance to something,” Henry Adams was to write, “was the law of New England nature…. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts of extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one’s self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement.” So with Hannah Treadup. She was, in her terms, though, a loving mother (save for chariness with the material gift of warm life at the breast), and such emanations of hatred as David caught from her were very weak. Indeed, all through life he shed on those around him an intermittent radiance of unsentimental love, which in his huge adult frame often grew very hot.

  Hannah Treadup was cursed with a hopeless gentility: hopeless because it was never connected with money. She was pathetically proud of some odd pieces of majolica ware, which she always kept behind glass in a sideboard for fear that use might bring breakage in a family of such turbulent energies as hers had.

  * * *

  —

  SHE PUT David down on paper. “He is a headstrong tyke,” she wrote in his Baby Book on his first birthday. Later: “He is much sunnier than the others. He passes off hardships.” Then this:

  He will not be denied. Brownie whittled him a tiny little pig—too small. He chewed at it. I took it away. He howled for three days, as if with those old hunger pains. I could not hurt him so, and gave it back, and he was sweet. My land! He swallowed it whole. Now he missed it but did not take on the way he had. I was most anxious. He grew cranky. The second day he took a fever. Brownie did not want to trouble Dr. Fosco all the way from the village. I blamed Brownie severely, but he said a baby’s guts are like a goat’s, he would pass the little bung. On the third day he did. After I tidied him that baby gave me the same look he had given me when I returned the toy to him. Dearly sweet, but also something of Mama, you are too easy a mark.

  Another time: “So big for his age! He has begun to walk. He is like a huge sailor on a pitching deck.” “He closes his eyes when I read to him, but I know he is not asleep.” “When the others tease him he neither sulks nor laughs. Sometimes I am afraid he will be hard.” “In his bath he cares only for the little boat Brownie carved out for him. I think he can say boat.” “Fire, fire, fire in David’s eye. God have mercy on the poor boy.” “A tinkerer. Fits things together. Potlid to pot. Hat to head. Brownson sits for his evening think and behind him comes David with the hat.” “His voice is as big as the rest of him. It seems to alarm even himself. He says bird. He says turtle.” “He watches the clock. He listens to the ticking.” “The other day Brownie took David to see the train come in. Now when the locomotive whistles before the hump, David jumps up and down and that look I fear comes in his eyes.” “I am teaching him to pray, Jesus friend of little children. He takes the boat to bed with him at night.” “O my big boy do not rush so at life.”

  * * *

  —

  THE INFANT’S father, Brownson Treadup, was big, wily, resourceful, loud, restless, expansive—and disorganized. He was descended from early trappers in this region near Lake Ontario, and though the frontier had long since swept on westward, he still manifested traits of the huntsman. He hated confinement, and he was triply restrained: by his rundown farm; by the hot eye of his bantam wife; and by his religion, which, though he never quite understood it, was always somehow overhead, day and night—a heaven up there disturbingly unsettled by clouds of doubt.

  The farm had belonged to Hannah’s father, Stephen Bledsoe, who had had seven daughters and no sons. On marrying Hannah, Brownson Treadup had moved into the Bledsoe farmstead, and when the old man died, Hannah and Brownson inherited the place. Hannah held over him heavy reminders of this delayed dowry, his whole worth. He was always poor. In need, he sold off a third of the original land. He had forever to trot here and trot there to stay one half pace ahead of Winthrop Jall, the mortgage officer of the Salt Branch National Bank—often mentioned in family correspondence.

  Thus there were storms and alarms in the Treadup household, but there were also decent measures of civility, aspiration, and thought. At table, David later noted, his father talked not only of the prices corn and oats would fetch, but also of the new rolling stock of the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad; of the unusual tumbler and fantail pigeons raised by the character down in the village whom people called Irondequoit Pete; of Uncle Don Treadup, the rich spender of the family, who one year bought a hotel, another year a traveling circus; of Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett and even Charles Darwin, with his message—no matter how rude to the Book of Genesis—of hope for the planet, if it was indeed true that all God’s creatures could adapt.

  The Treadup farm was two miles north of Salt Branch village, on the Clearport road. It comprised fifty-three acres, about half of which were in ill-kept woodlots; there were some five acres of worthless swampland in its back reaches, near stretches of the lower Branch. Brownson Treadup grew feed corn, wheat, oats, barley, and hay; kept a herd of milch cows, usually numbering twelve, and a pen for four or five pigs; had an ox and three horses for draft; tended a kitchen garden; and raised chickens and, in some years, turkeys.

  There were never enough hands. As soon as they could toddle, the children were assigned chores, and by the time they were about ten they were drawn into heavy labor of the farm. David’s father worked desperately hard, and David’s later testimony was that he never heard a word of complaint to a member of the family from his father, never a curseword, never an angry speech to his mother; he reserved his bluster for the livestock and for men in the village.

  But Brownson was a hopeless planner. As a missionary, his son David came to be known as almost ferociously meticulous in laying out e
very undertaking—outlines, lists, schedules to the split minute, gear lined up in neat bundles; this exactness may have been a response to his father’s maddening sloppiness. Day after day on the farm brought a critical, yet somehow familiar, surprise. Brownson was always having to send for an emergency hired hand, usually a boy from the village who would not need to be paid much. Once, mown hay lay mildewing in the meadows because Brownson, having three times forgotten to pay his mortgage installments (how easy for debts to drop out of mind!), had to spend two days in the village arguing with Winthrop Jall.

  For the children, their father’s disorganized ways were deeply confusing. Impressed by his stoic example, by his working to bleak exhaustion for their sakes, they arose each morning docile and willing to do whatever chores they must. But they never knew what to do. Instead of rotating regular assignments, Brownson told each child where to dash off to, and what to do, each morning, as he noticed, as if for the first time in his life, what various jobs needed doing to get the day under way.

  From this perhaps unlikely parentage—from a father stamped with a loud and blustering but finally indecisive masculinity, a mother of gentle intellect edged with ferocity and dissatisfaction—stemmed not only the great persistence, the ragelike energy, and the occasional narrow follies of the grown David Treadup, but also his immense reserves of courage, hope, humor, and free-floating love.

  * * *

  —

  “I LIKE crowds,” David wrote many years later in China. “I am a school fish.”

  The small house on the Salt Branch farm contained a preparatory turmoil of children and animals. From the time when David could sleep in a bed, all five children shared one bedroom. They clattered up and down the narrow stairs; they whooped and shrieked in the echoing rooms till their mother put her hands over her ears. There were two dogs, four to seven cats, a series of canaries, off-and-on turtles, and two squirrels for a time which ran and ran forever in squeaky circular wire treadmills, like little Ferris wheels, which the father built within their cage. Here was the Treadup brood when David was, as his mother wrote, “Terrible Mr. Two”: Sarah, the oldest, was eight; Paul was seven; Will, five; Grace, four; and then the Terrible Two, already nearly as tall as Will. Besides the seven Treadups in the house, there were often boarders for the sake of a few dollars; hired hands who slept in a shed but ate with the family; visiting relatives who stayed longer than invited; vagrants whom Hannah’s charity could not deny; drummers and canvassers and schoolmarms and Pastor Bokase—eaters all. No wonder the Treadups were poor.