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The sole exception to Plainview's remorseless utilitarianism in his "son," H.W. We first see the child as a baby boy around eight months old, sniffling, miserable, stuck in a ramshackle basket, the child of one of Plainview's workers whose wife has died in childbirth. (Or so we surmise.) The child's father is then felled in an accident, sinking into oily muck at the bottom of a well. Plainview adopts the child as his own. He tutors, nurtures, loves the boy, schooling him in the mysterious intricacies of risk-taking: is there oil or is there not on this land? He also uses the boy to good advantage given the resonance of the words, "I'm a family man. This is my son, H.W.," to which one must add the child's winsome wholesomeness as another possible attraction for those Plainview hopes to gull with his schemes. (Anderson draws an astonishing performance from newcomer Dillon Freasier.) When H.W. is around ten or eleven, he is deafened in an oil-derrick accident, leaving him unable to hear or to speak. (The score helps us to "hear" the horrors of the ruin of H.W.'s ears with a dissonant roaring after the accident, cuing us in on the condition of the child's hearing, or lack thereof.) Plainview is devastated. Over time, however, he grows impatient with H.W.: surely the child's muteness has become willful, surely he could speak if he really tried.
Because Plainview comes to interpret his son's inability to communicate through speech as opposition to his entreaties, he becomes shorter, more abrupt. But love the boy, he does. It is only after the child mysteriously (maliciously?) sets fire to the house, little more than a shack at that point, that Plainview sends H.W. away to a special school for the deaf, tricking him into believing his father is taking a trip with him. Plainview exits the train at the last moment, leaving H.W. to his factotum to deliver to the institution. As the train pulls away, we see Plainview doubled over in anguish. When the boy returns several years later in the company of a sign-language interpreter, Plainview runs to his son and embraces him, murmuring as he does so, "That does me good, that does me good."
In the interim, Plainview has been approached by Standard Oil executives, members of a cabal seeking monopoly who would buy Plainview out. One hapless member of this unattractive group attempts to persuade Plainview to sell by insisting that, if Plainview accepted the offer, he could spend more time with his son. Plainview's response is to promise the man he will sneak into his home one night and slit his throat. "Don't tell me how to raise my family," he shouts menacingly, as Day-Lewis uncannily channels the speech of the late, great John Huston, whose stentorian tones could lull and caress you and scare the bejesus out of you, too. (Day-Lewis' threats are more menacing than anything I have heard on film—save, perhaps, for Anthony Hopkins' dulcet murmurings to Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. "People will say we're in love, Clarisse," all velvet, drawn out, and deadly.)
A family motif haunts the film and Plainview himself. We join Plainview in our initial skepticism, followed by acceptance, of a man who presents himself as Plainview's half-brother. (Warning: spoiler material follows!) Plainview figures out that the Henry who has presented himself as his blood relative isn't such at all but, instead, a drifter who fell in with the half-brother, taking the real Henry's story as his own following Henry's death from tuberculosis. The imposter is a harmless soul looking for a place to lay his head and some decent, regular work. Plainview's vengeance at this deception is swift and horrifying to behold.
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