(Power by Joseph McFadden cont.)

Then he discovered dynamite; he saw it in a newsreel at the movies. A row of the sticks planted in the earth and set off in serried fashion blasted in a few seconds a straight ditch across the land. The same work would have taken years of digging with pick and shovel. With the possibilities of dynamite, he had the answer; this was the power he needed.

Mabel watched in fear and dismay as he began doing the work himself, crimping the nitroglycerine caps onto fuses and pushing them down drill holes in the brown waxy sticks. He bored slanting holes through the earth with great effort, down under the stumps, using a well auger. But stumps don't come easily out of the glue-grip of thick bottomland mud; one stick would not do it. It took as many as four set off at the same time.

The stumps disappeared one by one. He blew them all out of the fields, using hundreds of sticks of dynamite, and the land stood clean and uncluttered and he viewed it with great pride. She remained silent, waiting, wanting to believe he at last had triumphed, but in her wisdom she knew better. All of his ideas have their own built-in self-destruction.

The rains set in and the ground looked like a shell-torn battlefield, water standing in dozens of sunken stump hole puddles. Willard's stubborn hangdog look of determination returned as if he already knew but would not admit the stump project would end in failure, too, like all the others. But once he got an idea he launched into obsessive pursuit, never stopping to reason it through, nor to ask for advice, nor to think of anything but success. No amount of talking would bring him back to reality. She had stopped trying.

Willard Mills has other pursuits besides the dynamite. As bad or worse, he practices righteousness, the unclouded convictions of the uninformed. His ideas run in diverse veins, medicine and mechanical engineering to name only two. Like the time he decided the children needed worming, although they seemed perfectly well. Turpentine would do it. Willard administers stern discipline. Children obey him or else. So he forced each to take a dose, a spoonful of sugar soaked in turpentine, on which they gagged. When he started the second round of treatment, to be sure he had done it thoroughly, she called the family doctor to stop him -- Willard, turpentine destroys human kidneys, regardless of what it does to imaginary worms.

And in mechanics, his ideas run to greatness of high order, accomplishments the rest of the human race has missed down through the ages. He tried to invent a perpetual-motion machine without any knowledge of physics or higher mathematics, and spent a whole year of after-work afternoons building little metal frames mounted on little metal wheels and wide tracks to run them on. Disassembled old sewing machines and rusting metal contrivances still clutter her storage closet. He may get back to it yet. She could never understand what dreamy notion made him think he could give the world perpetual motion. She suspected he heard, in his own head, crowds cheering Willard Mills' genius: his inventions.

And the stump holes in the fields set on her memory like a sour smell. As soon as the sun popped out and the top of the ground dried, he went in triumphantly with the tractor and disc, in high gear, to drive straight up and down the fields this time, with no stumps to dodge. When he crossed the first hole, a back wheel plunged in and quickly dug itself axle deep. It took two days and all of his and the neighbor's mules to pull it out, with Willard down there straining and digging with a shovel in front of the back wheel to remove the vertical wall of mud, to give it an incline. The share croppers planted the crops, going around the holes with mules and plows. But Mabel was helpless, and saddened by the awful events in his earlier life. The tragedies of an earlier day had sentenced him to this endless and unproductive slavery and futility.

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