To a God Unknown

by John Steinbeck

  "Well, Burton worries about it all the time. He's spoken to me about it over and over."

  "I was telling you," said Thomas, "I sat in the store in Nuestra Senora Saturday afternoon, and the riders from Chinita were there. They got to talking about the dry years from eighty to ninety. Did you know about them?"

  Joseph tied a new knot in the riata string on his saddle. "Yes," he said softly, "I've heard about them. Something was wrong. They won't ever come again."

  'Well, the riders were talking about it. They said the whole country dried up and the cattle died and the land turned to powder. They said they tried to move the cows to the interior but most of them died on the way. The rain came a few years before you got here." He pulled the coon's ears until the fierce little creature slashed at his hand with its sharp teeth.

  Joseph's eyes were troubled. He brushed his beard down with his hand and turned the ends under, as his father had done. "I heard about it, Tom. But it's all over now. Something was wrong, I tell you. It won't come again, ever. The hills are full of water."

  "How do you know it won't come again? The riders said it had been before. How can you say it won't ever come again?"

  Joseph set his mouth determinedly. "It can't come. The hill springs are all running. I won't--I can't see how it can come again."

  Juanito urged his horse abreast of them. "Don Joseph, I hear a cowbell over the rise."

  The three men swung their horses to the right and put them to a canter. The coon leaped to Thomas' shoulder and clung to his neck with its strong little arms. Over the rise they galloped. They came upon a little herd of red cows, and two young calves tottered among the cows. In a moment the calves were down. Juanito took a bottle of liniment from his pocket, and Thomas opened his broad-bladed knife. The shining knife snicked out the Wayne brand in the ears of both calves while they bawled hopelessly and their mothers stood by, bellowing with apprehension. Then Thomas knelt beside the bull calf. With two cuts he performed the castration and sloshed liniment on the wound. The cows snorted with fear when they smelled blood. Juanito untied the feet and the new steer scrambled up and hobbled lamely off to its mother. The men mounted and rode on.

  Joseph had picked up the pieces of ear. He looked at the little brown fragments for a moment and then thrust them into his pocket.

  Thomas watched the act. "Joseph," he said suddenly, "Why do you hang the hawks you kill in the oak tree beside your house?"

  "To warn off other hawks from the chickens, of course. Everybody does that."

  "But you know God-damned well it doesn't work, Joe. No hawk in the world will let the chance of a pullet go by just because his dead cousin is hanging up by the foot. Why, he'll eat his cousin if he can." He paused for a moment and then continued quietly, "You nail the ear notchings to the tree, too, Joseph."

  His brother turned angrily in his saddle. "I nail up the notchings so I'll know how many calves there are."

  Thomas looked puzzled. He lifted the coon to his shoulder again, where it sat and carefully licked the inside of his ear. "I almost know what you're doing, Joe. Sometimes it almost comes to me what you're getting at. Is it about the dry years, Joseph? Are you working already against them?"

  "If it isn't for the reason I told you, it's none of your damn business, is it?" Joseph said doggedly. His eyes were worried and his voice grew soft with perplexity. "Besides, I don't understand it myself. If I tell you about it, you won't tell Burton, will you? Burton worries about all of us."

  Thomas laughed. "Nobody tells Burton anything. He has always known everything."

  "Well," Joseph said, "I'll tell you about it. Our father gave me a blessing before I came out here, an old blessing, the kind it tells about in the Bible, I think. But in spite of that I don't think Burton would have liked it. I've always had a curious feeling about father. He was so completely calm. He wasn't much like other fathers, but he was a kind of a last resort, a thing you could tie to, that would never change. Did you feel like that?"

  Thomas nodded slowly, "Yes, I know."

  "Well, then I came out here and I still felt safe. Then I got a letter from Burton and for a second I was thrown out of the world, falling, with nothing to land on, ever. Then I read on, where father said he was coming out to see me after he was dead. The house wasn't built then, I was sitting on a lumber pile. I looked up--and I saw that tree--" Joseph fell silent and stared down at his horse's mane. After a moment he looked over at his brother, but Thomas avoided his eyes. "Well, that's all. Maybe you can figure it out. I just do the things I do, I don't know why except that it makes me happy to do them. After all," he said lamely, "a man has to have something to tie to, something he can trust to be there in the morning."

  Thomas caressed the coon with more gentleness than he usually bestowed on his animals, but still he did not look at Joseph. He said, "You remember once when I was a kid I broke my arm. I had it in a splint doubled up on my chest, and it hurt like Hell. Father came up to me and opened my hand, and he kissed the palm. That was all he did. It wasn't the kind of thing you'd expect of father, but it was all right because it was more like medicine than a kiss. I felt it run up my broken arm like cool water. It's funny how I remember that so well."

  Far ahead of them a cowbell clanged. Juanito trotted up. "In the pines, senor. I don't know why they'd be in the pines where there's no feed."

  They turned their horses up the ridge, which was crowned with the dark pines. The first trees stood deployed like outposts. Their trunks were as straight as masts, and the bark was purple in the shade. The ground under them, deep and spongy with brown needles, supported no grass. The grove was quiet except for a little whispering of the wind. Birds took no pleasure in the pines, and the brown carpet muffled the sound of walking creatures. The horsemen rode in among the trees, out of the yellow sunlight and into the purple gloom of the shade. As they went, the trees grew closer together, leaned for support and joined their tops to make one complete unbroken ceiling of needles. Among the trunks the undergrowth sprang up, brambles and blackberries, and the pale, light-hungry leaves of Guatras. The tangle grew thicker at every step until at last the horses stopped and refused to force their way farther into the thorn-armed barrier.

  Then Juanito turned his horse sharply to the left. "This way, senores. I remember a path this way."

  He led them to an old track, deep buried in needles but free of growth and wide enough for two to ride together. For a hundred yards they followed the path, and then suddenly Joseph and Thomas drew up and stared at the thing in front of them.

  They had come to an open glade, nearly circular, and as flat as a pool. The dark trees grew about it, straight as pillars and jealously close together. In the center of the clearing stood a rock as big as a house, mysterious and huge. It seemed to be shaped, cunningly and wisely, and yet there was no shape in the memory to match it. A short, heavy green moss covered the rock with soft pile. The edifice was something like an altar that had melted and run down over itself. In one side of the rock there was a small black cave fringed with five-fingered ferns, and from the cave a little stream flowed silently and crossed the glade and disappeared into the tangled brush that edged the clearing. Beside the stream a great black bull was lying, his front legs folded under him; a hornless bull with shining black ringlets on his forehead. When the three men entered the glade the bull had been chewing his cud and staring at the green rock. He turned his head and looked at the men with red-rimmed eyes. He snorted, scrambled to his feet, lowered his head at them, and then, turning, plunged into the undergrowth and broke a passage free. The men saw the lashing tail for a moment, and the long, black swinging scrotum, which hung nearly to the knees; and then he disappeared and they heard him crashing in the brush.

  It had all happened in a moment.

  Thomas cried, "That's not our bull. I never saw it before." And then he looked uneasily at Joseph. "I never saw this place before. I don't think I like it, I can't tell." His voice was babbling. He held the coon tightly under
his arm while it struggled and bit and tried to escape.

  Joseph's eyes were wide, looking at the glade as a whole. He saw no single thing in it. His chin was thrust out. He filled his chest to a painful tightness and strained the muscles of his arms and shoulders. He had dropped the bridle and crossed his hands on the saddlehorn.

  "Be still a moment, Tom," he said languidly. "There's something here. You are afraid of it, but I know it. Somewhere, perhaps in an old dream, I have seen this place, or perhaps felt the feeling of this place." He dropped his bands to his sides and whispered, trying the words, "This is holy--and this is old. This is ancient--and holy." The glade was silent. A buzzard swept across the circular sky, low over the treetops.

  Joseph turned slowly. "Juanito, you knew this place. You have been here."

  The light blue eyes of Juanito were wet with tears. "My mother brought me here, senor. My mother was Indian. I was a little boy, and my mother was going to have a baby. She came here and sat beside the rock. For a long time she sat, and then we went away again. She was Indian, senor. Sometimes I think the old ones come here still."

  "The old ones?" Joseph asked quickly, "what old ones?"

  "The old Indians, senor. I am sorry I brought you here. But when I was so close the Indian in me made me come, senor."

  Thomas cried nervously, "Let's get the Hell out of here! We've got to find the cows." And Joseph obediently turned his horse. But as they rode out of the silent glade and down the path he spoke soothingly to his brother.

  "Don't be afraid, Tom. There's something strong and sweet and good in there. There's something like food in there, and like cool water. We'll forget it now, Tom. Only maybe sometime when we have need, we'll go back again--and be fed."

  And the three men fell silent and listened for the cowbells.

  7

  IN MONTEREY there lived and worked a harness-maker and saddler named McGreggor, a furious philosopher, a Marxian for the sake of argument. Age had not softened his ferocious opinions, and he had left the gentle Utopia of Marx far behind. McGreggor had long deep wrinkles on his cheeks from constantly setting his jaw and pinching his mouth against the world. His eyes drooped with sullenness. He sued his neighbors for an infringement of his rights, and he was constantly discovering how inadequate was the law's cognizance of his rights. He tried to browbeat his daughter Elizabeth and failed as miserably as he had with her mother, for Elizabeth set her mouth and held her opinions out of reach of his arguments by never stating them. It infuriated the old man to think that he could not blast her prejudices with his own because he did not know what they were.

  Elizabeth was a pretty girl, and very determined. Her hair was fluffy, her nose small and her chin firm from setting it against her father. It was in her eyes that her beauty lay, grey eyes set extremely far apart and lashed so thickly that they seemed to guard remote and preternatural knowledge. She was a tall girl; not thin, but lean with strength and taut with quick and nervous energy. Her father pointed out her faults, or rather faults he thought she had.

  "You're like your mother," he said. "Your mind is closed. You have no single shred of reason. Everything you do is the way you feel about it. Take your mother, now, a highland woman and straight from home--her own father and mother believed in fairies, and when I put it up to her like a joke, she'd shoot her jaw and shut up her mouth like a window. And she'd say, 'There's things that won't stand reason, but are so, just the same.' I'll take a wager your mother filled you with fairies before she died."

  And he modeled her future for her. "There's a time coming," he said prophetically, "when women will earn their own bread. There's no reason why a woman can't learn a trade. Take you, for instance," he said. "There's a time coming, and not far off, either, when a girl like you will be making her wage and be damned to the first man that wants to marry her."

  McGreggor was shocked, nevertheless, when Elizabeth began studying for county examinations so she could be a teacher. McGreggor almost went soft. "You're too young, Elizabeth," he argued. "You're only seventeen. Give your bones a chance to get hard, at least." But Elizabeth smiled slightly in triumph and said nothing. In a house where the littlest statement automatically marshaled crushing forces of argument against itself, she had learned to be silent.

  The profession of school teaching was something more than child-instructing to a girl of spirit. When she turned seventeen she could take county examinations and go adventuring; it was a decent means of leaving her home, and her town where people knew her too well; a means of preserving the alert and shatterable dignity of a young girl. To the community where she was sent she was unknown and mysterious and desirable. She knew fractions and poetry; she could read a little French and throw a word of it into conversation. Sometimes she wore underclothes of lawn or even silk, as could be seen when her laundry was on the line. These things which might have been considered uppish in an ordinary person were admired and expected in the school teacher, for she was a person of social as well as educational importance, and she gave an intellectual and cultural tone to her district. The people among whom she went to live did not know her baby name. She assumed the title "Miss." The mantle of mystery and learning enveloped her, and she was seventeen. If, within six months, she did not marry the most eligible bachelor in the district, she must be ugly as a gorgon, for a school teacher could bring social elevation to a man. Her children were thought to be more intelligent than ordinary children. School teaching could be, if the teacher wished to make it so, a subtle and certain move toward matrimony.

  Elizabeth McGreggor was even more widely educated than most teachers. In addition to fractions and French she had read excerpts from Plato and Lucretius, knew several titles of Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Euripides, and had a classical background resting on Homer and Virgil. After she had passed the examinations she was assigned to the school at Nuestra Senora. The isolation of the place pleased Elizabeth. She wanted to think over all the things she knew, to arrange them in their places, and from their eventual arrangement to construct the new Elizabeth McGreggor. In the village of Our Lady she went to board with the Gonzales family.

  Word flew through the valley that the new teacher was young and very pretty, and thereafter, when Elizabeth went out, when she walked to school or hurried to the grocery, she met young men who, though idle, were intensely preoccupied with their watches, with the rolling of a cigarette or with some vague but vital spot in the distance. But occasionally there was one strange man among the loiterers who was preoccupied with Elizabeth; a tall man, black-bearded and with sharp blue eyes. This man bothered Elizabeth, for he stared at her when she passed, and his eyes pierced through her clothing.

  When Joseph heard about the new teacher he drew in upon her in lessening circles until at last he sat in the Gonzales parlor, a carpeted, respectable place, and he stared across at Elizabeth. It was a formal call. Elizabeth's soft hair was puffed on her head, but she was the teacher. Her face wore a formal expression, almost stern. Except that she smoothed down her skirt over her knees again and again, she might have been composed. At intervals she looked up into the searching eyes of Joseph and then looked away again.

  Joseph wore a black suit and new boots. His hair and beard were trimmed, and his nails were as clean as he could get them.

  "Do you like poetry?" Elizabeth asked, looking for a moment into the sharp, unmoving eyes.

  "Oh, yes--yes, I like it, what I have read of it."

  "Of course, Mr. Wayne, there are no modem poets like the Greeks, like Homer."

  Joseph's face became impatient. "I remember," he said, "of course I remember. A man went to an island and got changed into a pig."

  Elizabeth's mouth pinched at the corners. In an instant she was the teacher, remote and above the pupil. "That is the Odyssey," she said. "Homer is thought to have lived about nine hundred, B.C. He had a profound effect on all Greek literature."

  "Miss McGreggor," Joseph said earnestly, "there's a way to do this thing, but I don't know it. Some peopl
e seem to know by instinct, but I don't. Before I came I tried to think what I'd say to you, but I couldn't discover a way, because I've never done anything like this before. There's a time of fencing to go through and I don't know how to do it. Besides it all seems useless to me."

  Elizabeth was caught by his eyes now, and she was startled by his intensity of speech. "I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Wayne." She had been flung from her seat of learning, and the fall frightened her.

  "I know I'm doing it all wrong," he said. "I don't know any other way. You see, Miss McGreggor, I'm afraid I might get confused and embarrassed. I want you to be my wife, and you must know it. My brothers and I own six hundred and forty acres of land. Our blood is clean. I think I should be good to you if I could know what you want."

  He had dropped his eyes while he talked. Now he looked up and saw that she was flushing and looking very miserable. Joseph jumped to his feet. "I suppose I've done it wrong. Now I'm confused, but I got it out first. And now I'll go, Miss McGreggor. I'll come back after we've stopped being embarrassed." He hurried out without saying goodbye, leaped on his horse and galloped away into the night.

  There was a burn of shame and of exultance in his throat. When he came to the wooded river bottom he pulled up his horse, rose in his stirrups and shouted to ease the burn, and the echo blatted back at him. The night was very black and a high mist dulled the sharpness of the stars and muffled the night noises. His cry had blasted a thick silence and frightened him. For a moment he sat dumbly in his saddle and felt the swell and fall of his panting horse.

  "This night is too still," he said, "too unimpressed. I must do something." He felt that the time required a sign, an act to give it point. Somehow an act of his must identify him with the moment that was passing or it would slip away, taking no part of him with it. He whipped off his hat and flung it away into the dark. But this was not enough. He felt for his quirt where it hung from the saddlehorn, and plucking it off, lashed his own leg viciously to make a moment of pain. The horse plunged aside, away from the whistle of the blow, and then reared. Joseph threw his quirt away into the brush, controlled the horse with a powerful pressure of his knees, and when it was quieted, trotted the nervous animal toward the ranch. Joseph opened his mouth to let the cool air into his throat.