East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

  "What was it?"

  "I'll have to tell you. They were killing a bad man."

  "Was it the golden man?"

  "Yes, it was. And you must put no sorrow on him. He had to be killed. Not once but many times he did dreadful things--things only a fiend could think of. It's not his hanging sorrows me but that they make a holiday of it that should be done secretly, in the dark."

  "I saw the golden man. He looked right down at me."

  "For that even more I thank God he's gone."

  "What did he do?"

  "I'll never tell you nightmare things."

  "He had the strangest eyes, the golden man. They put me in mind of a goat's eyes."

  "Drink your sweety-milk and you shall have a stick with ribbons and a long whistle like silver."

  "And the shiny box with a picture into it?"

  "That also, so you drink up your sweety-milk and beg no more."

  There it was, mined out of the dusty past.

  Doxology was climbing the last rise before the hollow of the home ranch and the big feet stumbled over stones in the roadway.

  It was the eyes, of course, Samuel thought. Only twice in my life have I seen eyes like that--not like human eyes. And he thought, It's the night and the moon. Now what connection under heaven can there be between the golden man hanged so long ago and the sweet little bearing mother? Liza's right. My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day. Let me dig this nonsense out, else I'll be searching that poor child for evil. This is how we can get trapped. Now think hard and then lose it. Some accident of eye shape and eye color, it is. But no, that's not it. It's a look and has no reference to shape or color. Well, why is a look evil then? Maybe such a look may have been sometime on a holy face. Now, stop this romancing and never let it trouble again--ever. He shivered. I'll have to set up a goose fence around my grave, he thought.

  And Samuel Hamilton resolved to help greatly with the Salinas Valley Eden, to make a secret guilt-payment for his ugly thoughts.

  2

  Liza Hamilton, her apple cheeks flaming red, moved like a caged leopard in front of the stove when Samuel came into the kitchen in the morning. The oakwood fire roared up past an open damper to heat the oven for the bread, which lay white and rising in the pans. Liza had been up before dawn. She always was. It was just as sinful to her to lie abed after light as it was to be abroad after dark. There was no possible virtue in either. Only one person in the world could with impunity and without crime lie between her crisp ironed sheets after dawn, after sunup, even to the far reaches of midmorning, and that was her youngest and last born, Joe. Only Tom and Joe lived on the ranch now. And Tom, big and red, already cultivating a fine flowing mustache, sat at the kitchen table with his sleeves rolled down as he had been mannered. Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanos formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.

  Samuel came in from the yard where he had been washing himself. His face and beard gleamed with water, and he turned down the sleeves of his blue shirt as he entered the kitchen. Rolled-up sleeves at the table were not acceptable to Mrs. Hamilton. They indicated either an ignorance or a flouting of the niceties.

  "I'm late, Mother," Samuel said.

  She did not look around at him. Her spatula moved like a striking snake and the hot cakes settled their white sides hissing on the soapstone. "What time was it you came home?" she asked.

  "Oh, it was late--late. Must have been near eleven. I didn't look, fearing to waken you."

  "I did not waken," Liza said grimly. "And maybe you can find it healthy to rove all night, but the Lord God will do what He sees fit about that." It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject. She turned and reached and a plate of crisp hot cakes lay between Tom's hands. "How does the Sanchez place look?" she asked.

  Samuel went to his wife, leaned down from his height, and kissed her round red cheek. "Good morning, Mother. Give me your blessing."

  "Bless you," said Liza automatically.

  Samuel sat down at the table and said, "Bless you, Tom. Well, Mr. Trask is making great changes. He's fitting up the old house to live in."

  Liza turned sharply from the stove. "The one where the cows and pigs have slept the years?"

  "Oh, he's ripped out the floors and window casings. All new and new painted."

  "He'll never get the smell of pigs out," Liza said firmly. "There's a pungency left by a pig that nothing can wash out or cover up."

  "Well, I went inside and looked around, Mother, and I could smell nothing except paint."

  "When the paint dries you'll smell pig," she said.

  "He's got a garden laid out with spring water running through it, and he's set a place apart for flowers, roses and the like, and some of the bushes are coming clear from Boston."

  "I don't see how the Lord God puts up with such waste," she said grimly. "Not that I don't like a rose myself."

  "He said he'd try to root some cuttings for me," Samuel said.

  Tom finished his hot cakes and stirred his coffee. "What kind of a man is he, Father?"

  "Well, I think he's a fine man--has a good tongue and a fair mind. He's given to dreaming--"

  "Hear now the pot blackguarding the kettle," Liza interrupted.

  "I know, Mother, I know. But have you ever thought that my dreaming takes the place of something I haven't? Mr. Trask has practical dreams and the sweet dollars to make them solid. He wants to make a garden of his land, and he will do it too."

  "What's his wife like?" Liza asked.

  "Well, she's very young and very pretty. She's quiet, hardly speaks, but then she's having her first baby soon."

  "I know that," Liza said. "What was her name before?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, where did she come from?"

  "I don't know."

  She put his plate of hot cakes in front of him and poured coffee in his cup and refilled Tom's cup. "What did you learn then? How does she dress?"

  "Why, very nice, pretty--a blue dress and a little coat, pink but tight about the waist."

  "You've an eye for that. Would you say they were made clothes or store bought?"

  "Oh, I think store bought."

  "You would not know," Liza said firmly. "You thought the traveling suit Dessie made to go to San Jose was store bought."

  "Dessie's the clever love," said Samuel. "A needle sings in her hands."

  Tom said, "Dessie's thinking of opening a dressmaking shop in Salinas."

  "She told me," Samuel said. "She'd make a great success of it."

  "Salinas?" Liza put her hands on her hips. "Dessie didn't tell me."

  "I'm afraid we've done bad service to our dearie," Samuel said. "Here she wanted to save it for a real tin-plate surprise to her mother and we've leaked it like wheat from a mouse-hole sack."

  "She might have told me," said Liza. "I don't like surprises. Well, go on--what was she doing?"

  "Who?"

  "Why, Mrs. Trask of course."

  "Doing? Why, sitting, sitting in a chair under an oak tree. Her time's not far."

  "Her hands, Samuel, her hands--what was she doing with her hands?"

  Samuel searched his memory. "Nothing I guess. I remember--she had little hands and she held them clasped in her lap."

  Liza sniffed. "Not sewing, not mending, not knitting?"

  "No, Mother."

  "I don't know that it's a good idea for you to go over there. Riches and idleness, devil's tools, and you've not a very sturdy resistance."

  Samuel raised his head and laughed with pleasure. Sometimes his wife delighted him but he could never tell her how. "It's only the riches I'll be going there for, Liza. I meant to tell you after breakfast so you could sit down to hear. He wants me to bore four or five wells for him, and
maybe put windmills and storage tanks."

  "Is it all talk? Is it a windmill turned by water? Will he pay you or will you come back excusing as usual? 'He'll pay when his crop comes in,' " she mimicked, " 'He'll pay when his rich uncle dies.' It's my experience, Samuel, and should be yours, that if they don't pay presently they never pay at all. We could buy a valley farm with your promises."

  "Adam Trask will pay," said Samuel. "He's well fixed. His father left him a fortune. It's a whole winter of work, Mother. We'll lay something by and we'll have a Christmas to scrape the stars. He'll pay fifty cents a foot, and the windmills, Mother. I can make everything but the casings right here. I'll need the boys to help. I want to take Tom and Joe."

  "Joe can't go," she said. "You know he's delicate."

  "I thought I might scrape off some of his delicacy. He can starve on delicacy."

  "Joe can't go," she said finally. "And who is to run the ranch while you and Tom are gone?"

  "I thought I'd ask George to come back. He doesn't like a clerk's job even if it is in King City."

  "Like it he may not, but he can take a measure of discomfort for eight dollars a week."

  "Mother," Samuel cried, "here's our chance to scratch our name in the First National Bank! Don't throw the weight of your tongue in the path of fortune. Please, Mother!"

  She grumbled to herself all morning over her work while Tom and Samuel went over the boring equipment, sharpened bits, drew sketches of windmills new in design, and measured for timbers and redwood water tanks. In the midmorning Joe came out to join them, and he became so fascinated that he asked Samuel to let him go.

  Samuel said, "Offhand I'd say I'm against it, Joe. Your mother needs you here."

  "But I want to go, Father. And don't forget, next year I'll be going, to college in Palo Alto. And that's going away, isn't it? Please let me go. I'll work hard."

  "I'm sure you would if you could come. But I'm against it. And when you talk to your mother about it, I'll thank you to let it slip that I'm against it. You might even throw in that I refused you."

  Joe grinned, and Tom laughed aloud.

  "Will you let her persuade you?" Tom asked.

  Samuel scowled at his sons. "I'm a hard-opinioned man," he said. "Once I've set my mind, oxen can't stir me. I've looked at it from all angles and my word is--Joe can't go. You wouldn't want to make a liar of my word, would you?"

  "I'll go in and talk to her now," said Joe.

  "Now, son, take it easy," Samuel called after him. "Use your head. Let her do most of it. Meanwhile I'll set my stubborn up."

  Two days later the big wagon pulled away, loaded with timbers and tackle. Tom drove four hordes, and beside him Samuel and Joe sat swinging their feet.

  Chapter 17

  1

  When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it. If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can't know whether she escaped. Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language. Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable. It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.

  I've built the image in my mind of Cathy, sitting quietly waiting for her pregnancy to be over, living on a farm she did not like, with a man she did not love.

  She sat in her chair under the oak tree, her hands clasped each to each in love and shelter. She grew very big--abnormally big, even at a time when women gloried in big babies and counted extra pounds with pride. She was misshapen; her belly, tight and heavy and distended, made it impossible for her to stand without supporting herself with her hands. But the great lump was local. Shoulders, neck, arms, hands, face, were unaffected, slender and girlish. Her breasts did not grow and her nipples did not darken. There was no quickening of milk glands, no physical planning to feed the newborn. When she sat behind a table you could not see that she was pregnant at all.

  In that day there was no measuring of pelvic arch, no testing of blood, no building with calcium. A woman gave a tooth for a child. It was the law. And a woman was likely to have strange tastes, some said for filth, and it was set down to the Eve nature still under sentence for original sin.

  Cathy's odd appetite was simple compared to some. The carpenters, repairing the old house, complained that they could not keep the lumps of chalk with which they coated their chalk lines. Again and again the scored hunks disappeared. Cathy stole them and broke them in little pieces. She carried the chips in her apron pocket, and when no one was about she crushed the soft lime between her teeth. She spoke very little. Her eyes were remote. It was as though she had gone away, leaving a breathing doll to conceal her absence.

  Activity surged around her. Adam went happily about building and planning his Eden. Samuel and his boys brought in a well at forty feet and put down the newfangled expensive metal casing, for Adam wanted the best.

  The Hamiltons moved their rig and started another hole. They slept in a tent beside the work and cooked over a campfire. But there was always one or another of them riding home for a tool or with a message.

  Adam fluttered like a bewildered bee confused by too many flowers. He sat by Cathy and chatted about the pieplant roots just come in. He sketched for her the new fan blade Samuel had invented for the windmill. It had a variable pitch and was an unheard-of thing. He rode out to the well rig and slowed the work with his interest. And naturally, as he discussed wells with Cathy, his talk was all of birth and child care at the well head. It was a good time for Adam, the best time. He was the king of his wide and spacious life. And summer passed into a hot and fragrant autumn.

  2

  The Hamiltons at the well rig had finished their lunch of Liza's bread and rat cheese and venomous coffee cooked in a can over the fire. Joe's eyes were heavy and he was considering how he could get away into the brush to sleep for a while.

  Samuel knelt in the sandy soil, looking at the torn and broken edges of his bit. Just before they had stopped for lunch the drill had found something thirty feet down that had mangled the steel as though it were lead. Samuel scraped the edge of the blade with his pocketknife and inspected the scrapings in the palm of his hand His eyes shone with a childlike excitement. He held out his hand and poured the scrapings into Tom's hand.

  "Take a look at it, son. What do you think it is?"

  Joe wandered over from his place in front of the tent. Tom studied the fragments in his hand. "Whatever it is, it's hard," he said. "Couldn't be a diamond that big. Looks like metal. Do you think we've bored into a buried locomotive?"

  His father laughed. "Thirty feet down," he said admiringly.

  "It looks like tool steel," said Tom. "We haven't got anything that can touch it." Then he saw the faraway joyous look on his father's face and a shiver of shared delight came to him. The Hamilton children loved it when their father's mind went free. Then the world was peopled with wonders.

  Samuel said, "Metal, you say. You think, steel. Tom, I'm going to make a guess and then I'm going to get an assay. Now hear my guess--and remember it. I think we'll find nickel in it, and silver maybe, and carbon and manganese. How I would like to dig it up! It's in sea sand. That's what we've been getting."

  Tom said, "Say, what do you think it is with--nickel and silver--"

  "It must have been long thousand centuries ago," Samuel said, and his sons knew he was seeing it. "Maybe it was all water here--an inland sea with the seabirds circling and crying. And it would have been a pretty thing if it happened at night. There would come a line of light and then a pencil of white light and then a tree of blinding light drawn in a long arc from heaven. Then there'd be a great water spout and a big mushroom of steam. And your ears would be staggered by the sound because the soaring cry of its coming would
be on you at the same time the water exploded. And then it would be black night again, because of the blinding light. And gradually you'd see the killed fish coming up, showing silver in the starlight, and the crying birds would come to eat them. It's a lonely, lovely thing to think about, isn't it?"

  He made them see it as he always did.

  Tom said softly, "You think it's a meteorite, don't you?"

  "That I do. and we can prove it by assay."

  Joe said eagerly, "Let's dig it up."

  "You dig it, Joe, while we bore for water."

  Tom said seriously, "If the assay showed enough nickel and silver, wouldn't it pay to mine it?"

  "You're my own son," said Samuel. "We don't know whether it's big as a house or little as a hat."

  "But we could probe down and see."

  "That we could if we did it secretly and hid our thinking under a pot."

  "Why, what do you mean?"

  "Now, Tom, have you no kindness toward your mother? We give her enough trouble, son. She's told me plain that if I spend any more money patenting things, she'll give us trouble to remember. Have pity on her! Can't you see her shame when they ask her what we're doing? She's a truthful woman, your mother. She'd have to say, 'They're at digging up a star.' " He laughed happily. "She'd never live it down. And she'd make us smart. No pies for three months."

  Tom said, "We can't get through it. We'll have to move to another place."

  "I'll put some blasting powder down," said his father, "and if that doesn't crack it aside we'll start a new hole." He stood up. "I'll have to go home for powder and to sharpen the drill. Why don't you boys ride along with me and we'll give Mother a surprise so that she'll cook the whole night and complain. That way she'll dissemble her pleasure."

  Joe said, "Somebody's coming, coming fast." And indeed they could see a horseman riding toward them at full gallop, but a curious horseman who flopped about on his mount like a tied chicken. When he came a little closer they saw that it was Lee, his elbows waving like wings, his queue lashing about like a snake. It was surprising that he stayed on at all and still drove the horse at full tilt. He pulled up, breathing heavily. "Missy Adam say come! Missy Cathy bad--come quick. Missy yell, scream."

  Samuel said, "Hold on, Lee. When did it start?"

  "Mebbe bleakfus time."