BEFORE:

Despite the underlying occasion, dinner was a quiet, subdued affair.

Seated at opposite sides of a table crowded with food, Captain Abel Stoddard and Adam spoke sparingly. Mrs. Callahan tried her best to sustain a conversation, but her efforts were to little avail. Having spent the early evening hours pacing rather than resting, Adam was as careful with his words as he had been with his footsteps. Removing his boots, his footsteps had been light as he walked around the bedroom that had first belonged to his mother, then had been shared by his parents, and then had eventually become his own. Though he was born in the room, he would reach his sixteenth year before he would claim the space—or spend enough time in the house which contained it to form any real memories of the home or the people who inhabited it.

Mrs. Callahan had been in his grandfather's employ well before Adam's birth. She had married late and given birth to a baby boy that tragically would never live to see his first birthday. She buried both her husband and son mere weeks before Elizabeth would die. Losing one family she gained another, moving into Captain Stoddard's home, first to care for Elizabeth in her final months, and then to care for Ben's motherless infant son. She always had a specific fondness for Adam, looking after him as though he was her own. She would remain in the company of Ben and Adam during the first part of their travels west. It would be just after his son's first birthday that Ben would deem her presence more harmful than helpful.

Breaking ties with Ben, Mrs. Callahan returned east and to Captain Stoddard's home where she would remain, taking on whatever womanly duties were required around the house—or otherwise. Even now it was clear she loved the Captain, and he loved her—in his own craggy way. Adam had once loved her, too; it was yet another thing he wondered if the passing years had somehow changed. Or was it just his understanding of her that had changed? The wisdom of a man entering his forty-second year finally making the truth of the arrangement too glaring to be ignored. Mrs. Callahan was taking care of Captain Stoddard—in more ways than one.

Adam could not help thinking of Eddie and the lie they had told about their marriage. Was it his grandfather's influence that had destined him to love a woman in an untraditional way? Even as a teenager staying in Captain Stoddard's home, he had realized something about his grandfather's relationship with his so-called-housekeeper was scandalous and clandestine. Even back then, Mrs. Callahan's fondness for Adam had lingered; she softened the often too-jagged edges of the Captain's personality, treating Adam as though he was the son she had lost. When he had been much younger, enduring the first substantial span of time away from his father—or the first one he recalled, at least—Mrs. Callahan's warmth had been a great comfort to him.

But what was once comforting was no longer.

Tonight, Adam felt on display beneath her persistent stare and voracious eyes. He knew what she was thinking despite her never uttering the words. She was likening him to her own son. She was pretending that it was he who sat at the table with her, her son, her Adam. The baby who had died before he was given the opportunity for his life to truly begin. Maybe her enduring fondness for him was due to the fact that he and her deceased son shared a name; maybe it was because he had been motherless; maybe it was because Mrs. Callahan had cared for him so carefully and deeply when he was an infant, or maybe it was because of something else completely.

Whatever it was, her lingering, overwhelming love for him filled Adam with great unease. It had filled Pa with unease at one time, too, and that was why he had chosen to send the woman back to the Captain rather than allowing her to continue caring for his son when her help had still been so dearly needed. Pa had worried about the woman's fierce attachment to his baby; his trust in her had become finite, as she had begun to act strangely toward them both. Pushing Ben away, she clung to Adam a little too tightly. She began to say the strangest of things. Pa never reiterated them to Adam when his son had grown old enough to understand the seriousness of such things; he kept whatever had been said to himself. Even so, it was obvious how much the situation had unnerved him, and how his opinion of Mrs. Callahan had been permanently impacted. If Ben Cartwright had been nervous to send his teenage son to attend college under the Captain's temperamental watch, he was even more apprehensive to return his son to Mrs. Callahan's intensive care.

After dessert, Mrs. Callahan cleared the dishes and washed them in the kitchen. Adam and the Captain remained at opposite sides of the empty table. Neither of them spoke for the longest time. Mrs. Callahan came and went twice, once to procure the Captain his pipe and tobacco, and then again to bring the men a decanter of brandy. Placing it on the table in front of the Captain, she walked to the other side, leaned over and kissed Adam on the forehead. He wanted to pull away, forcing her to direct her attention elsewhere. But he did not. Without a word, she retired to the bedroom she had come to share with the Captain upstairs, leaving the men to their silence.

It no longer endured after she left.

Reaching for the decanter, the Captain poured his grandson a drink and pushed it across the table.

"I don't drink brandy," Adam said.

He doubted he could stomach the alcohol tonight, never mind the amount his grandfather had poured. Mrs. Callahan had left round snifters rather than stunted goblets, glassware that the Captain filled nearly to the rim.

"I mostly stay off the drink these days," Adam continued. "I thought you did too."

"When you reach my age, you realize there is little point in abstaining."

"From spirits?"

"From anything that can bring you pleasure."

"Or struggle and pain, apparently," Adam said flatly. Though aware of the Captain's past trials with drink, the statement was close to directly addressing it as he would come. There was little purpose in pointing out an old man's faults—especially when they could not be changed.

Captain Abel Stoddard may have had the willpower to forsake his demons when his daughter had been alive, but after her death, and in the years that passed between the time Ben took Adam out west and the day he sent him back east to college that certainly had not been the case.

Expelling a cloud of smoke from his lips, the Captain smiled around the end of his pipe. "Well, I'm sure at your age you must know a thing or two about struggle and pain." He nodded at the glass. "Drink up."

"I said I don't want it."

"Aye, I know, but tonight isn't about what you want."

"Then what's it about?"

"What you need. Tell me, lad, does she really not call out to ya?"

"Who?"

"The sea."

"Oh." Adam thought about the question. When he had been a young boy— his imagination fueled by tales from his father—he had believed a life at sea would be endlessly romantic and alluring. But now he knew the sea had been his father's adventure because with a badge pinned to his chest he had found his own. "No, I don't believe so."

Normally gruff and impenetrable, Stoddard was briefly visibly saddened by the response. Pursing his lips, he nodded, seemingly coming to a silent conclusion. "Your father certainly had his hopes," he said, "I suppose I had my hopes, too, that the sea would be in your blood. That whatever motivations you inherited from those who came before you would direct you to follow in the footsteps of the Stoddard line, rather than the Cartwright's. Cartwright," he repeated thoughtfully. "From what I understand, that is a surname that has come to mean a great deal in the place your father settled. Being a Cartwright means something around there, because your father made it mean something. He built what he had with nothing but hard work and a great deal of faith and hope. You think he did that because he had a dream more powerful than any fear or doubt. What you don't realize is that it was his fear and doubt that facilitated his choices; failing was never an option, at least not for him."

"He's a hard man. He wants what he wants, how and when he wants it."

"Consider yourself an expert on the nature of hard men, do you?"

The statement did not sound like a rebuke, but Adam knew it was. "Given my experiences, the kind of men I've crossed paths with and the others I've chased, let's just say I know a thing or two about the nature of rough men."

"You know nothing," Stoddard grunted. "About your father, at least. As a matter of fact, I'm not so sure you know anything about yourself. You show up on my doorstep in the afternoon, you don't volunteer any information outside of a star you have pinned to yourself, and you allow me to tell you what to do." He nodded at the unwanted glass of brandy Adam held in his hand. "Although, I wouldn't feel too much shame about that if I were you, after all, you are your father's son. If asked why at his age he allows a man of mine to influence his behavior, he would say it was because of his respect for me. I may be a precipitous, old sea barnacle, but he still sees value in the things I have to say, and so do you, because, whether you realize it or not, that is why you are here. Tell me, lad, if the sea does not call out to you, then what does?"

Adam knew he would always find mountain ranges and wide-open space more soothing than a boat on any water. It was the trail that reached out to him, promising nights under a blanket of stars and varying roads of endless possibility. In the way the Captain had once enjoyed finding a task that had fulfilled him so completely, Adam realized he had found his own. Being a seaman was once his grandfather's identity, his purpose; being a man of the law was his grandson's. To take away these roles, banning them from the very things they were born to do and denying them their sense of duty and responsibility, was to sentence them to a frustrating existence. The Captain never recovered from being so abruptly retired, having his ship and duties stripped from him because he was interpreted as too old to do what he loved.

Suddenly Adam was not thinking about his grandfather or the sea. He was thinking about himself, the life changes that were impending after he crossed Wallace Merrill's name off Weston's list, and his doubt about the sustainability of his life in San Francisco.

Examine your doubt, Ed Payson had urged. It's fate reaching out to you, telling you what to do and where to go.

Adam loved Eddie and his children with all his heart. Even so, he knew he would never love them as much as he loved the freedom and endless potential of the trail. The road would call out to him because it always had. Oh, he could remain in place for years at a time, but eventually a crippling sense of claustrophobia masquerading as restlessness would make itself known; he would become moody and distant, frustrated and discontent. He would not want to find fault with the people and the life surrounding him, but he would anyway. It had happened before and it would happen again. Whether he had been born with this sense of yearning or it had been instilled in him by his travels with his father during his formative years he did not know. He could not deny its existence any more than he could ignore the power it held over him.

"You and me," Adam said to his grandfather, "we're not built like other people, are we? We can have homes, families, people we love, and success outside of the things we were put on this earth to do, but take away our purpose and we don't have anything left, not really."

Lips curled around the end of his pipe, the Captain looked at him thoughtfully and nodded, a clear indication to continue.

"You love the sea and the sense of purpose it instilled within you. You were never the same after your post was taken from you. You tried to be happy, content with your life away from the sea, this house, the chandlery you and Pa established, the people fate presented you with after taking your daughter away, but none of it was enough, was it? You never have been truly happy, because your happiness is the vastness of those waters, the challenges it has yet to reveal to you. Men like you and me need a larger purpose, a challenge or they may as well shrivel up and die. That's something you and I share that my father does not. Oh, he wants and needs certain things, but it's stability, not adventure that his soul craves."

"You don't know how right you are about your father," the Captain said. "Although, I don't think you fully comprehend why your assessment of him is so apt."

"Why don't I?"

"Because you can't," the Captain said simply. "There is a great deal about your father's past you don't know. Even some details about your own that you remain unaware of simply because you were too young to truly recall them." He nodded at the glass of brandy his grandson held but had yet to drink from. "Drink it down, lad, not because I'm telling you to or even because you want to, but because the things I'm about to share with you aren't going to be easy for you to hear. The things I'm about to tell you, you won't want to know them. Even so, I am confident you will understand why it is important you do. That badge you wear with such pride, I suppose you believe you carved that path out on your own. That you're the first Cartwright to ever deem upholding the law as your calling. You are not. You see, there was a time when the surname Cartwright used to mean something around here, too."

Casting Adam an expectant look, the Captain withheld further details as he awaited his grandson's first drink.

A few moments passed before Adam's curiosity superseded his dislike of the offered alcohol. He took his first pull, the liquor sliding down his throat like lamp oil, mixing with his stomach acid to form a burning sensation that spread up his esophagus and mouth. He used to be able to stomach the spirit better than he currently did. His years away from his father's side had left him unaccustomed to its burn and taste. Not once since leaving his old life behind, had he ever reached for Ben Cartwright's drink of choice; he had his vices, but brandy was not one of them.

Nodding, the Captain opened his mouth, seemingly satisfied with his grandson's first pull. "If you come across a time in your life when you become a little too fond of the drink, I suppose you can blame me for that," he said. "But I accept no responsibility for the feelings that led you to pin a badge to yourself. Your mother is probably rolling around in her grave in fear for you, not to mention what your father would think about such a thing if he knew. What's the matter, lad, having grown too accustomed to the ease of the life provided to you by your father, you decided upon chasing struggle instead?"

Adam bristled at the implication of the statement and the sudden harshness of his grandfather's tone. "I'm not going to do this," he said. "If you want to talk, fine, but I'm not going to sit here and allow you to judge me for my actions and scold me like a child. My life is my own, Grandfather; I am quite old enough to make whatever decisions I please without having to suffer through a lecture."

"You sound like your father; he too reached an age where he was no longer willing to accept criticism of his actions or beliefs." Pressing the rim of his glass to his lips, the Captain took a deep drink. "Look at where it got him," he added eventually.

Staring at the glass the Captain still held in his hand, Adam was overcome by disappointment, disgust, and a memory too powerful and painful to be ignored. While Ben Cartwright had had his worries about sending his teenage son to live with his maternal grandfather, it was six months into his residency in Captain Abel Stoddard's home when Adam came to understand and appreciate his father's concern. Having been taken away from the sea, the Captain had taken to drinking instead. This was a known fact. What had been unknown, to young Adam, at least, was how belligerent, cruel, and downright frightening the Captain could become on the infrequent occasion he ingested one too many drinks. His recollection of the last time he himself had witnessed his grandfather captive to such a night, Adam did not like to think about, because of how it had eventually ended. Still, recalling how it had ended was the purpose of thinking about it in the first place.

The Captain had been a little too drunk and overwhelmingly cruel, and, at sixteen years old, Adam had grown so frustrated and fearful that he had cried like a child. It had been deeply scarring and scandalizing, and it still shamed him to think about it. If Adam were to count the occasions in life that had made him so violently emotional, they would be quantified with fewer fingers than found on one hand. It was a shame his grandfather had facilitated such an event; although it was not without purpose. The dawn of the next morning brought with it an exquisite sunrise, an apology, and a promise. The Captain had said he was sorry; he had vowed to never drink in front of Adam again.

"You're breaking the promise you made to me," Adam said as he looked between his grandfather and the older man's glass of brandy. "And you don't even care."

"And what about the promise you made to me? You seem to have broken that with little care."

"That's different."

"Why? Because you want it to be? A promise is a promise, lad, no matter how enormous or insignificant. After you graduated, you promised me that if anything bad were to happen between you and your father, that if you ever found yourself in an argument with him that you could not sort out on your own, you would come to me. Years ago, when you left your father's house under the circumstances that you did, you did not do that."

"Because it wouldn't have made a difference."

"And remaining missing all these years has? You're a grown man, lad, forty-two years on this very day. Do you really believe you're the only person your father has ever been a little too hard on, or the only one who has had to suffer through the things he had to say? Trust me, you aren't. He and I had plenty of bouts in our day."

"Not like the one we had," Adam said.

"So certain are you?" the Captain gruffly asked. "There have been times when your father gave me dressing downs I will never forget. During one he accused me of thievery, and another he accused me of being a drunkard."

"Those things are different from the ones he accused me of."

"How?"

"Because they were true."

"And the things your father accused you of were not?"

"Of course, they weren't."

"Were you not different after the injury to your back? Did you not struggle after your engagement ended? Were you not a little too short-sided and selfish when making your decisions?"

"You're twisting the truth to suit your own means."

"So, you did not take that little girl away from her father…"

"Will wasn't her father," Adam said.

"You did not use her discontent as a distraction from your own?"

"That was not the way that it was."

"And you did not leave your father's house and disappear into the night, never to be heard from or seen again for five years. Five years, lad," the Captain repeated, as though to accentuate the glaring seriousness of a truth he believed his grandson was choosing to ignore. "Whatever ways in which you believe your father wronged you, I think we've all paid more than enough for them by now."

Adam was acutely aware of how long it had been since he walked away from his father and brothers; he was fully knowledgeable of how long it had been since the last time he had written to his grandfather, and thanks to the direction of the current conversation he was reacquainted with why. Because of Ben Cartwright's influence, the Captain had already made up his mind about what had happened and why.

"This was a mistake," Adam said, silently cursing Ed Payson for leading him here, and himself for being foolish enough to listen to advice given in a dream. "I should not have come here."

"Then why did you?" the Captain asked.

Adam did not answer. He could not share what he was unsure of himself.

"You don't know," the Captain said, his voice softening as he took another sip of his drink. There was no malice, no hint of pride lurking behind the subtle statement; it was merely a truth the older man had gleaned. "That's alright," he added, his tone softening further, as though he understood his grandson's inner turmoil more than Adam ever could. "I think I do. So, why don't you forgive an old man for his past sins and current faults, be silent for a while and allow your grandfather to tell you a story?"

"A story about what?"

"Your father, and you." The Captain nodded at Adam's brandy glass. "You best drink that, lad. As I previously warned, these are not things that are going to be easy for you to hear."

Adam looked at the glass, thinking about the alcohol it contained. It was his father's favorite; this was a detail he had known from the moment it had been poured but only now did he fully understand its implication. The drink, like the conversation, was purposeful; it was supposed to instill within him a particular feeling. The spirit would overcome his senses, influencing his interpretation of whatever it was the Captain intended to say. Their previous conversation was meant to influence him, too, reacquainting him with his shame and guilt, the feeling that propelled him and the doubts he had harbored in the days which followed his final exit from the Cartwright family home.

And there had been so much doubt. Doubt about his decision to leave.

Doubt about his ability to love Eddie and Peggy. Doubt about who he was without his father. Even now, he still harbored doubt, something which Ed Payson had advised him to examine more closely than he was willing to, at this moment, at least.

Lifting the glass, Adam took a series of gulps, before placing it, emptied, on the table. He cast the Captain a questioning glance. "Tell me," he said. "Tell me everything you think I should know about the past that concerns my father and me."

TBC