Free at last, and Lee asks

Adam rides home from Salinas expecting grief and finds instead "a hungry gaiety". He stops at Will Hamilton's new garage to order an automobile — the last man in the valley Will would have expected — and hears Will's version of the family: a father always off in the clouds, a mother who fried the chicken for a hundred mourners at her own husband's funeral. Driving home he notices the wildflowers and the red cows on the hillsides and finds himself chanting in time with the horse's feet: "I'm free. She's gone. She's out of me." He scrubs the rum out of his skin, puts on soft blue work clothes, and asks Lee for tea and ng-ka-py. He describes Kate as a creature he cannot believe exists, and says he can live with his boys now. Then Lee asks to be freed too: he has the money saved for the bookshop in San Francisco. Adam admits he wished for a moment that Lee were a slave so he could refuse, agrees, and asks only for time.

The chapter measures Samuel's death three ways: Will's, an inventory of a father who was never practical; Adam's, in which the man is more alive than before; and Lee's, which needs no words. Adam's release is written as physical detail — sage sap on the fingers, clean blue overalls — rather than declared. The first use he makes of it is to be asked for someone else's freedom.