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By Root 399 0

was true. There was such a factory, founded by Castor Buntline, who was neither a veteran nor blind. Buntline perceived correctly that blind veterans would make very agreeable employees, that Buntline himself would gain a place in history as a humanitarian, and that no Northern patriot, for several years after the war, anyway, would use anything but a Buntline Union Beacon Broom. Thus was the great Buntline fortune begun. And, with broom profits, Castor Buntline and his spastic son Elihu went carpetbagging, became tobacco kings.

When the footsore, amiable General George Rosewater arrived at the broom factory, Castor Buntline wrote to Washington, confirmed that George was a general, hired George at a very good salary, made him foreman, and named the whisk-brooms the factory was making after him. The brand name entered ordinary speech for a little while. A "General Rosewater" was a whiskbroom.

And blind George was given a fourteen-year-old girl, an orphan named Faith Merrihue, who was to be his eyes and his messenger. When she was sixteen, George married her.

And George begat Abraham, who became a Congregationalist minister. Abraham went as a missionary to the Congo, where he met and married Lavinia Waters, the daughter of another missionary, an Illinois Baptist.

In the jungle, Abraham begat Merrihue. Lavinia died at Merrihue's birth. Little Merrihue was nursed on the milk of a Bantu.

And Abraham and little Merrihue returned to Rhode Island. Abraham accepted the call to the Congregationalist pulpit in the little fishing village of Pisquontuit. He bought a little house, and with that house came one hundred ten acres of scruffy, sandy woodlot. It was a triangular lot. The hypotenuse of the triangle lay on the shore of Pisquontuit Harbor.

Merrihue, the Parson's son, became a realtor, divided his father's land into lots. He married Cynthia Niles Rumfoord, a minor heiress, invested much of her money in pavement and streetlights and sewers. He made a fortune, lost it, and his wife's fortune, too, in the crash of 1929.

He blew his brains out.

But, before he did that, he wrote a family history and he begat poor Fred, the insurance man.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will probably kill themselves.

The syndrome was surely Fred's. And to it he added twitches, aversions and listlessnesses special to his own case. He had heard the shot that killed his father, had seen his father with a big piece of his head blown away, with the manuscript of the family history in his lap.

Fred had the manuscript, which he had never read, which he never wanted to read. It was on top of a jelly cupboard in the cellar of Fred's home. That was where he kept the rat poison, too.

Now poor Fred Rosewater was in the news store, continuing to talk to the carpenter and the two plumbers about brides. "Ned—" he said to the carpenter, "we've both done something for our brides, anyway." The carpenter was worth twenty thousand dollars dead, thanks to Fred. He could think of little else but suicide whenever premium time rolled around.

"And we can forget all about saving, too," said Fred. "That's all taken care of—automatically."

"Yup," said Ned.

There was a waterlogged silence. The two uninsured plumbers, gay and lecherous moments before, were lifeless now.

"With a simple stroke of the pen," Fred reminded the carpenter, "we've created sizable estates. That's the miracle of life insurance. That's the least we can do for our brides."

The plumbers slid off their stools. Fred was not dismayed to see them go. They would be taking their consciences with them wherever they went—and they would be coming back to the news store again and again.

And whenever they came back, there would be Fred.

"You know what my greatest satisfaction is in my profession?" Fred asked the carpenter.