To a God Unknown

by John Steinbeck

  "It isn't dead," Joseph protested. "The rain will come next winter, and in the spring the grass will be up and the river will be flowing. You'll see, Tom. There was some kind of accident that made this. Next spring the ground will be full of water again."

  Thomas jeered: "And you'll get another wife, and there won't ever be another drought."

  "It might be so," Joseph said gently.

  "Then come with us to the San Joaquin and help us with the cows."

  Joseph saw lights of a ship passing far out on the ocean, and he watched the lights and held up his finger to see how fast they moved. "I can't go away," he said. "This is my land. I don't know why it's mine, what makes it mine, but I cannot leave it. In the spring when the grass is up you'll see. Don't you remember how the grass was green all over the hills, even in the cracks of the rocks, and how the mustard was yellow? The redwing blackbirds built nests in the mustard stems."

  "I remember it," Thomas said truculently, "and I remember how it was this morning, burned to a cinder and picked clean. Sure, and I remember the circle of dead cows. I can't get out too quickly. It's a treacherous place." He turned on his side. "We'll go back tomorrow if you say, so. I hope you won't stay on the damn place."

  "I'll have to stay," Joseph said. "If I went with you, I'd be wanting to start back every moment to see if the rain had fallen yet, or if there was any water in the river. I might as well not go away."

  23

  THEY awakened to a world swaddled in grey fog. The house and the sheds were dark shadows in the mist, and from below the cliff the surf sounded muffled and hollow. Their blankets were damp. The moisture clung in fine drops to their faces and hair. Joseph found the old man sitting beside a smoldering fire in his hut, and he said, "We must start back as soon as we can find our horses."

  The old man seemed sad at their going. "I hoped you would stay a little while. I've told you my knowledge. I thought you might give me yours."

  Joseph laughed bitterly. "I have none to give. My knowledge has failed. How can we find our horses in the mist?"

  "Oh, I'll get them for you." He went to the door and whistled shrilly, and in a moment the silver bell began to ring. The burros came trotting in, and the two horses after them.

  Joseph and Thomas saddled their horses and tied the blankets on them, and then Joseph turned to say goodbye to the old man, but he had disappeared into the mist, and he didn't answer when Joseph called.

  "He's crazy," Thomas said. "Come on, let's go." They turned the horses into the trail and let them have their heads, for the fog was too thick for a man to find his way. They came to the crease where the violent growth and the redwoods were. Every leaf dripped moisture, and the shreds of the mist clung to the tree trunks like tattered flags. The men were half way to the pass before the fog began to thin and break and whirl about like a legion of ghosts caught by the daylight. At last the trail climbed above the mist level and, looking back, Joseph and Thomas saw the tumbling sea of fog extending to the horizon; covering from sight the sea and the mountain slopes. And in a little they reached the pass and looked over at their own dry dead valley, burning under the vicious sun, smoking with heat waves. They paused in the pass and looked back at the green growth in the canyon they had come from, and at the grey sea of fog.

  "I hate to leave it," Thomas said. "If there were only feed for the cattle I would move over."

  Joseph looked back only for a moment, and then he started ahead over the pass. "It isn't ours, Thomas," he said. "It's like a beautiful woman, and she isn't ours." He urged his horse over the hot broken rock. "The old man knew a secret, Tom. He told me some straight clean things."

  "He was crazy," Thomas insisted. "In any other place he would be locked up. What did he have all of those caged creatures for?"

  Joseph though of explaining. He tried to think how he would begin. "Oh, he--keeps them to eat," he said. "It isn't easy to shoot game, and so he traps the things and keeps them until he needs them."

  "But that's all right," Thomas said more easily. "I thought there was something else. If that's all it is, I don't mind. His craziness hasn't to do with the animals and birds then."

  "Not at all," said Joseph.

  "If I'd known that, I wouldn't have walked away. I was afraid there was some ceremony."

  "You are afraid of every kind of ritual, Thomas. Do you know why?" Joseph slowed his horse so that Thomas could come closer.

  "No, I don't know why," Thomas admitted slowly, "it seems a trap, a kind of little trap."

  "Perhaps it is," Joseph said. "I hadn't thought of it." When they had got down the slope to the river source with its dry and brittle moss and its black ferns, they drew up under a bay tree. "Let's go over the ridge and drive in any cattle we can see," Thomas said. They left the river and followed the shoulder of the ridge, and the dust clouded up and clung about them. Suddenly Thomas pulled up his horse and pointed down the slope. "There, look there." Fifteen or twenty little piles of picked bones lay on the sidehill, and grey coyotes were slinking away toward the brush, and vultures roosted on the ribs and pulled off the last strips of flesh.

  Thomas' face was pinched. "That's what I saw before. That's why I hate the country. I'll never come back," he cried. "Come on, I want to get to the ranch. I want to start away tomorrow if I can." He swung his horse down the hill and spurred it to a trot, and he fled from the acre of bones.

  Joseph kept him in sight, but he did not try to follow him. Joseph's heart was filled with sorrow and with defeat. "Something has failed," he thought. "I was appointed to care for the land, and I have failed" He was disappointed in himself and in the land. But he said, "I won't leave it. I'll stay here with it. Maybe it isn't dead." He thought of the rock in the pines, and excitement arose in him. "I wonder if the little stream is gone. If that still flows, the land is not dead. I'll go to see, pretty soon." He rode over the ridge top in time to see Thomas gallop up to the houses. The fences were down around the last stacks of bay, and the voracious cattle were eating holes in it. As Joseph came close, he saw how lean they were, and poor, and how their hips stuck out. He rode to where Thomas ta1ked with the rider Manuel.

  "How many?" he demanded.

  "Four hundred and sixteen," Manuel said. "Over a hundred gone."

  "Over a hundred!" Thomas walked quickly away. Joseph, looking after him, saw him go into the barn. He turned back to the rider.

  "Will these others make it to the San Joaquin, Manuel?" Manuel shrugged slightly. "We go slow. Maybe we find a little grass. Maybe we get some over there. But we lose some cows, too. Your brother hates to lose the cows. He likes the cows."

  "Let them eat all the hay," Joseph ordered. "When the hay is gone, we will start."

  "The hay will be gone tomorrow," Manuel said.

  They were loading the wagons in the yard, mattresses and chicken coops and cooking utensils, piled high and carefully. Romas came in with another rider to help with the herds. Rama would drive a buckboard, Thomas, a Studebaker wagon with grain for the horses and two barrels of water. There were folded tents on the wagons, supplies of food, three live pigs and a couple of geese. They were taking everything to last until winter.

  In the evening Joseph sat on his porch, watching the last of the preparation, and Rama left her work and came to him and sat on the step. "Why do you stay?" she asked.

  "Someone must take care of the ranch, Rama."

  "But what remains to be taken care of? Thomas is right, Joseph; there's nothing left."

  His eyes sought the ridge where the dark pines were. "There's something left, Rama. I'll stay with the ranch." She sighed deeply. "I suppose you want me to take the baby."

  "Yes. I wouldn't know how to care for it."

  "You know it won't be a very good life for him in a tent."

  "Don't you want to take him, Rama?" he asked.

  "Yes, I want him. I want him for my own."

  Joseph turned away and looked up at the pine forest again. The last of the sun was sinking over the Puerto
Suelo. Joseph thought of the old man and of his sacrifice. "Why do you want the child?" he asked softly.

  "Because he is part of you."

  "Do you love me, Rama? Is that it?"

  Her breath caught harshly in her throat. "No," she cried, "I am very near to hating you."

  "Then take the child," he said quickly "This child is yours. I swear it now. He is yours forever. I have no more claim on him." And he looked quickly back to the pine ridge, as though for an answer.

  "How can I be sure?" Rama fretted. "When I have made my mind over so the baby is my own, when he has come to think of me as his mother, how can I be sure you will not come and take him away?"

  He smiled at her, and the calm he knew came upon him. He pointed to the dead and naked tree beside the porch. "Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it."

  He stopped and stroked his beard and turned the ends under, as his father had done. His eyes drooped with pain and tightened with resistance to the pain. "Look on the ridge where the pines are, Rama," he said. "There's a circle in the grove, and a great rock in the circle. The rock killed Elizabeth. And on the hill over there are the graves of Benjy arid Elizabeth." She stared at him uncomprehendingly. "The land is struck," he went on. "The land is not dead, but it is sinking under a force too strong for it. And I am staying to protect the land."

  "What does all this mean to me?" she asked. "To me or to the child?"

  "Why," he said, "I don't know. It might help, to give the child to you. It seems to me a thing that might help the land."

  She brushed her hair back nervously, smoothed it beside the part. "Do you mean you're sacrificing the child? Is that it, Joseph?"

  "I don't know what name to give it," he said. "I am trying to help the land, and so there's no danger that I shall take the child again."

  She stood up then, and backed away from him slowly. "Goodbye to you, Joseph," she said. "I am going in the morning, and I am glad, for I shall always be afraid of you now. I shall always be afraid." Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. "Poor lonely man!" She hurried away toward her house, but Joseph smiled gravely up at the pine grove.

  "Now we are one," he thought, "and now we are alone; we will be working together." A wind blew down from the hills and raised a choking cloud of dust into the air. The cattle munched at the hay all night.

  The wagons set out well before daylight. For two hours the lanterns moved about. Rama got breakfast for the children and saw them to their high secure seat on top of the load. She put the baby in its basket on the floor of the wagon, in front of her. At last they were ready, and the horses hitched in. Rama climbed to her seat, and Thomas stood beside her. Joseph strode up. They stood in the dark, and all three unconsciously sniffed the air. The children were very quiet. Rama put her foot out on the brake. Thomas sighed deeply. "I'll write you how we get through," he said.

  "I'll be waiting to hear," Joseph replied.

  "Well, we may as well get started."

  "You'll stop in the hot part of the day?"

  "If we can find a tree to stop under. Well, goodbye," Thomas said. "It's a long trip." One of the horses bowed its neck against the checkrein and stamped.

  "Goodbye, Thomas. Goodbye, Rama."

  "I'll have Thomas write you how the baby is," Rama said. Still Thomas stood waiting. But suddenly he turned and walked away without another word. His brake whispered for a moment, and the axles creaked under the load. Rama started her horses and the teams moved off. Martha, on top of the load, cried bitterly because no one could see her waving a handkerchief. The other children had gone to sleep, but Martha awakened them. "We're going to a bad place," she said quietly, "but I'm glad we're going because this place will bum up in a week or two."

  Joseph could hear the creaking wheels after the teams disappeared. He strolled to the house that had been Juanito's, where the drovers were finishing their coffee and fried meat. As the first dawn appeared, they emptied their cups and rose heavily to their feet. Romas walked out to the corral with Joseph.

  "Take them slowly," Joseph said.

  "Sure, I will. It's a good bunch of riders, Mr. Wayne. I know all of them."

  The men were wearily saddling their horses. A pack of six long-haired ranch dogs got up out of the dust and walked tiredly out to go to work, serious dogs. The red dawn broke. The dogs lined out. Then the corral gate swung open and the herd started, three dogs on each side to keep them in the road, and the riders fanned out behind. With the first steps the dust billowed into the air. The riders raised their handkerchiefs and tied them over the bridges of their noses. In a hundred yards the herd had almost disappeared in the dust cloud. Then the sun started up and turned the cloud to red. Joseph stood by the corral and watched the line of dust that crawled like a worm over the land, spreading in the rear like a yellow mist.

  The thick cloud moved over the hill at last, but the dust hung in the air for hours.

  Joseph felt the weariness of the long journey. The heat of the early sun burned him and the dust stung his nose. For a long time he did not move away from his place, but stood and watched the dust-laden air where the herd had passed. He was filled with sorrow. "The cattle are gone for good," he thought. "Most of them were born here, and now they're gone." He thought how they had been fresh-coated calves, sleek and shiny with the licking of their mothers; how they had flattened little beds in the grass at night. He remembered the mournful bellowing of the cows when the calves got lost, and now there were no cows left. He turned away at last to the dead houses, the dead barn and the great dead tree. It was quieter than anything should be. The barn door swung open on its hinges. Rama's house was open, too. He could see the chairs inside, and the polished stove. He picked up a piece of loose baling wire from the ground, rolled it up and hung it on the fence. He walked into the barn, empty of hay. Hard black clods were on the floor, on the packed straw. Only one horse was left. Joseph walked down the long line of empty stalls, and his mind made history of his memories. "This is the stall where Thomas sat when the loft was full of hay." He looked up and tried to imagine how it had been. The air was laced with flashing yellow streaks of sun. The three barn-owls sat, faces inward, in their dark corners under the eaves. Joseph walked to the feed-room and brought an extra measure of rolled barley and poured it in the horse's barley box, and he carried out another measure and scattered it on the ground outside the door. He sauntered slowly across the yard.

  It would be about now that Rama came out with a basket of washed clothes and hung them on the lines, red aprons and jeans, pale blue with so much soaking, and the little blue frocks and red knitted petticoats of the girls. And it would be about now that the horses were turned out of the barn to stretch their necks over the watering trough and to snort bubbles into the water. Joseph had never felt the need for work as he did now. He went through all the houses and locked the doors and windows and nailed up the doors of the sheds. In Rama's house he picked up a damp drying cloth from the floor and hung it over the back of a chair. Rama was a neat woman; the bureau drawers were closed and the floor was swept, the broom and dustpan stood in their corner, and the turkey wing had been used on the stove that morning. Joseph lifted the stove lid and saw the last coals darkening. When he locked the door of Rama's house he felt a guilt such as one feels when the lid of a coffin is closed for the last time, and the body is deserted and left alone.

  He went back to his own house, spread up his bed, and carried in wood for the night's cooking. He swept his house and polished the stove and wound the clock. And everything was done before noon. When he had finished everything, he went to sit on the front porch. The sun beat down on the yard and glittered on bits of broken glass. The air was still and hot, but a few birds hopped about, picking up the grain Joseph had scattered. And, led on by the news that the ranch was deserted, a squirrel trotted fearlessly across the yard, and a brown weasel ran at him and missed, and the two rolled about in the dust. A horned to
ad came out of the dust and waddled to the bottom step of the porch, and settled to catch flies. Joseph heard his horse stamping the floor, and he felt friendly toward the horse for making a sound. He was rendered stupid by the quiet. Time had slowed down and every thought waddled as slowly through his brain as the horned toad had when he came out of the fine dust. Joseph looked up at the dry, white hills and squinted his eyes against their reflection of the glaring sun. His eyes followed the water scars up the hill to the dry springs and over the unfleshed mountains. And, as always, his eyes came at last to the pine grove on the ridge. For a long time he stared at it, and then he stood up and walked down the steps. And he walked toward the pine grove--walked slowly up on the gentle slope. Once, from the foothills, he looked back on the dry houses, huddled together under the sun. His shirt turned dark with perspiration. His own little dust cloud followed him, and he walked on and on toward the black trees.

  At last he came to the gulch where the grove stream flowed. There was a trickle of water in it, and the green grass grew on the edges. A little watercress still floated on the water. Joseph dug a hole in the bed under the tiny stream, and when the water had cleared, he knelt and drank from it, and he felt the cool water on his face. Then he walked on, and the stream grew a little wider and the streak of green grass broadened. Where it ran close under the bank of the gully, a few ferns grew in the black and mossy earth, out of reach of the sun. Some of the desolation left Joseph then. "I knew it would still be here," he said. "It couldn't fail. Not from that place." He took off his hat and walked quickly on. He entered the glade bareheaded and stood looking at the rock.

  The thick moss was turning yellow and brittle, and the ferns around the cave had wilted. The stream still stole out of the hole in the rock, but it was not a quarter as large as it had been. Joseph walked to the rock apprehensively and pulled out some of the moss. It was not dead. He dug a hole in the stream bed, a deep hole, and when it was full he took up water in his hat and threw it over the rock and saw it go sucking into the dying moss. The hole filled slowly. It took a great many hatfuls of water to dampen the moss, and the moss drank thirstily, and showed no sign that it had been dampened. He threw water on the scars where Elizabeth's feet had slipped. He said, "Tomorrow I'll bring a bucket and a shovel. Then it will be easier." As he worked, he knew the rock no longer as a thing separated from him. He had no more feeling of affection for it than he had for his own body. He protected it against death as he would have saved his own life.