The Laughing Matter by William Saroyan

back.”
    Evan had looked after the old man as well as he’d been able to, getting in over the week ends, talking to him, eating the old-country food the old man cooked. But Dade was a long time getting back. One weekend when Evan came home he found the old man sick in bed.
    â€œWhy didn’t you phone?” he said.
    â€œAh,” the old man said. “It’s nothing.”
    It was pneumonia, though, and after six days Petrus Nazarenus died. Three months later Dade came home, and for the first time in his life Evan saw his brother weep.
    He saw Dade stand in the old man’s room and weep like a small boy.
    â€œMy dirty luck,” Evan heard his brother say.
    Years later, more than twenty years later, walking to the airplane with his brother, on his way back to Swan and Red and Eva, the younger brother said the words back to the older one.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Dade? What did I do? What did you do? What did the old man do? He comes to America, works hard, after three years sends for his wife and son. They come, another son is born, he thinks he’s going to have the family at last that he’s always wanted, a lot of boys, a lot of girls, all of them well, their mother well, their father well, but two years after his wife reaches America she’s dead, and he doesn’t want to look at another woman. He can’t. He becomes a sad old man in a silly little cigar store in Paterson, New Jersey, living for his sons.
You
know what’s happened to
you
, Dade. And here it is happening to me, too. What for, Dade? What’d he do wrong? What’d you do wrong? What’d I do?”
    He stopped, began again suddenly, speaking softly but swiftly.
    â€œYou know you want to see your kids, Dade. You know the only thing you live for is your kids. You know the only thing you think about is your kids. You know you’re here in San Francisco to get more money to send them. Is it right to live a life of pride and loneliness?”
    â€œIt is right,” the older brother said in their own language.
    â€œYou’re fifty now, man,” Evan said. “You’re not a swift kid racing around Paterson any more. What are you going to do? Are you finished, Dade? Are we all finished?”
    His brother only looked at him.
    â€œWhat am
I
supposed to do?” the younger brother said. “Be finished, too?”
    He stopped again, trying to think what to do, what to do next.
    â€œI can’t leave Red. I can’t leave Eva. I don’t
know
them. I don’t have the faintest idea who they are. What’d I do wrong, Dade? I went away to work for eight weeks, to get money for a car, so we could ride around a little. Two months, and she wrote every day. Yes,
every
day. And I wrote her. What’s the matter, Dade? What’s the matter with us?
    â€œListen,” he said suddenly. “I’m not going back. I can’t look at her any more. I’ll never be able to look at her again. There’s no use going back. All right, Red’s dead, Eva’s lost. All right. That’s how it is, and I can’t go back.”
    He began to walk swiftly, though.
    Dade watched him climb the steps and get aboard. He watched the plane turn on its wheels and roll slowly to the place for the take-off. When it was up and going, he went for a taxi.
    The book was
The Oxford Blake
, a small book with thin pages. Dade hadn’t finished reading it yet, but any time he wasn’t home the book was with him. He brought it out of his pocket now, in the taxi going back to San Francisco, opened it, and began to read.

Chapter 13
    Red was too busy to be frightened, but the thing
was
dangerous. It was a thing in which an enormous fire burned, in which a great deal of heat gathered. It was a thing on enormous wheels. It was too heavy to move, because movement is a light thing, but it
did
move, and he himself
started
it moving. Cody Bone put Red’s hand on the lever, helped him