If nothing else, the event cemented in Samuel’s mind his desire to leave the farm forever, no matter what his father said. He wanted his life to mean something before he died, and he wasn’t going to accomplish that by staying on the Meller plot. That much was sure. No one made any comment about Samuel’s reappearance in the farm house an hour later than everyone else had returned. He was allowed to go up to his room with only cursory looks from his mother and father. His mother’s lips were pursed, but in the end she said nothing. Over the next few weeks, Samuel kept mostly to himself. He got all of his work done, but it was obvious to everyone that he was truly grieving for the first time in his life. Samuel imagined that he was plotting, planning his life after leaving the farm, but he wasn’t. Imagining the future is a denial of the painful present. It was his coping mechanism, and no one was willing to fault him for it.

In the early afternoons, his chores finished, Samuel would walk into the south wood, his pea shooter over his shoulder and a few biscuits in his pocket. He wandered mostly, shooting at squirrels and old glass bottles. Sometimes he’d follow the old train tracks for a mile or so, but never left the Meller property. The tracks kept going, seemingly endlessly, but surely they had to end too. Samuel imagined his life after the farm in a few ways. Being a war hero was obviously the best option. In war, death wasn’t meaningless. There was a special significance to those who had died in war for their country. Tom Meller had fought in the great war, and although he never talked about it, he always insisted on great reverence whenever it was brought up. Samuel misinterpreted his father badly in this instance. He was much too young to understand the special, almost incomprehensibly pointless nature of a death in war. To him, it still seemed the most meaningful type of death. It was a child’s view of the world, and a child’s imaginings of a better life, but that’s all Samuel was at this time. As he aged, his perception of the farm would change, and his views of the world would become more nuanced, but the stubborn, nagging feeling of the farm not being enough for him...well that would stay.

On one of these wandering afternoons, Samuel came back into the fields, tripped and fell straight on his face. It was not until he dusted himself off that he realized he hadn’t tripped on a tree root, but a man. There right at the tree line, propped up against a tree, pipe lit and smoking, was Eddard Morley. His legs were crossed and his thumb was placed in the middle of a book. His light eyes were fixed on Samuel with curiosity.

“Sorry to trip you up.”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You were walking mighty quick. Where you off to?”

“Just home. Been out walking.”

Eddard Morley nodded and took a puff from his pipe as if this needed to be thought over for a moment, as if Samuel had said something of great import instead of simply admitting to walking in the woods aimlessly. An ineffable force kept Samuel’s feet firmly in place, though the house was in sight. He needed to hear what Eddard was going to say.

“Took Howell’s death hard didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Thomas Howell. The man crushed by the tree the night of the storm. You know who I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Was your job to be on the lookout wasn’t it?”

“It was. I messed up.”

“Maybe so.”

Again, he took a puff from his pipe. As he inhaled deeply, he crossed his arms across his chest, his pipe coming out underneath the opposite armpit. He stared out over the fields. It was a quiet, early summer afternoon, the sunlight a substitution for sound.

“Well it ought to offer you some perspective I suppose.”

“Perspective? It made me realize I’m leaving this place if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m not sure it is. But you suit yourself.”

“I’m leaving. I hate it here,” Samuel said as if challenged. “ Nothing ever happens. I don’t want to die without ever having done anything, a stupid tree snuffing me out like that.”

“Foolish notion, that.”

“What do you know?” Samuel said angrily. “You don’t have a job or a home or anything. Why should anyone listen to you?”

“That’s fair, Samuel. All those things are true. I don’t have a family either. Does that prevent me from knowing yours is a pretty good one? Your father’s a good man, and this is a nice farm. It’d be a right shame to throw it away out of fear.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Like hell you aren’t. You’d run away from this place because you don’t want to be trapped here. Well I’ve got a secret for you: being trapped here ain’t half bad. You ought to be happy you’ve got the chance.”

With that, Samuel’s one-time idol pushed himself up and walked away into the fields and back to the old barn, leaving the young boy to reckon with his words as best he could. When the chance to meet him had finally come, Eddard Morley hadn’t been like what Samuel had imagined at all. In all his imaginings, Morley had told him about his epic life before the farm. He’d never talked about how great it was. In Samuel’s mind, Eddard should have been upset to find himself in such a situation. Look at all he had lost! It was he who was the fool, not Samuel.

The vagrants stayed on the Meller property for more than a year. After a number of negotiations, Tom Meller had managed to convince the railroad to take them on, the whole lot of them. They weren’t going to be paid a hell of a lot, but they were going to have jobs, which is more than could be said for masses of men across the country. It was a huge victory, and it was to be celebrated like one. In the time since the men had moved into the old barn, and Eddard Morley had crouched on the roof and patched the hole, the men had done a good deal more work on the old barn. It had new, permanent braces that weren’t unstripped trees, an entirely new roof, and a new coat of paint on the outside. The lofts had been entirely rebuilt, piece by piece, over the course of the year. A new summer was coming on, and Tom Meller was pleased to say that he would be hiring local boys to do summer work once more, and he could even offer them a place to lodge if their mothers saw fit. As a dual celebration, there was to be a massive party in the Meller’s old barn to send off the newly-minted railroad men, and to welcome another summer. The whole town was invited.

Samuel feigned indifference whenever his parents mentioned the party planning going on, rarely taking the time to look up from whatever book he was reading. He had taken to reading with a fever of recent, and particularly to the journals of Thoreau, reading them again and again with a sort of religious devotion.

“Trees are the closest thing I have to religion,” he said one day aloud at the dinner table.

Blynne Meller stood up and slapped her son across the face, leaving an angry red welt on his cheek.

“The Lord Jesus Christ ought to be first in your heart. I’ll hear no more of it.”

“No, ma’am,” he said quietly, not wanting his Thoreau to be taken away.

Samuel’s words were true though. His solemn, mourning walks in the woods after the death of the vagrant Howell had changed in character. While his walks had initially been plans of leaving, ways of ignoring the very concept of death, they had become communes with the south wood. What had begun aimlessly had turned into purposeful retreats from farm life. He learned from Thoreau the sanctity of the natural world, and how it provides a meaning for man. To be a steward of the natural world is his purpose, his religion, his mission. Whenever man might impose on that sacred duty, he ought to be opposed mightily, although nonviolently. Twelve year old Samuel began to privately refer to himself as a pacifist, and he even asked Del if there were any books he could get him about Buddhism.

“Sammy I’ve not ordered any like that before, and I don’t reckon your parents would like it much.”

“I’ll pay you extra,” Samuel said, pleading in his eyes.

“Why not another Thoreau journal? You’ve got what, Fall and Summer? Four seasons you know.”

“You really won’t, Del?”

“It’s not about the money. I’d need to hear it from your parents. I don’t mind ordering books for you, but this is something different.”

Samuel eventually dropped it, stopped asking Del to order him books that could directly be used to criticize him. Del had no problem ordering Whitman or Emerson or even Marx, because the shopkeeper didn’t have a clue who the men were, and he happily ordered them, thinking that the Meller’s had a real scholar on their hands. Samuel devoured the books, reading them over and over until their cheap bindings wore out and all that kept them together were his own folded hands. He read atop logs and with his back against trees. He read with his legs crossed in front of him on mossy ground near a creek, and he read sitting comfortably between old railroad slats. There was hardly a space large enough to contain him comfortably in the south wood where he had not imbibed of the sweet nectar of literature that appreciated nature as much as his young heart.