East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

She tried to speak, and Kate said, "Shush! Save your strength. Save your strength."

  She went to the kitchen for a glass of warm milk and put it on the bedside table. She took two little bottles from her pocket and sucked a little from each one into the eye-dropper. "Open up, Mother. This is a new kind of medicine. Now be brave, dear. This will taste bad." She squeezed the fluid far back on Faye's tongue and held up her head so she could drink a little milk to take away the taste. "Now you rest and I'll be back in a little while."

  Kate slipped quietly out of the room. The kitchen was dark. She opened the outer door and crept out and moved back among the weeds. The ground was damp from the spring rains. At the back of the lot she dug a small hole with a pointed stick. She dropped in a number of small thin bottles and an eye-dropper. With the stick she crushed the glass to bits and scraped dirt over them. Rain was beginning to fall as Kate went back to the house.

  At first they had to tie Kate down to keep her from hurting herself. From violence she went into a gloomy stupor. It was a long time before she regained her health. And she forgot completely about the will. It was Trixie who finally remembered.

  Chapter 22

  1

  On the Trask place Adam drew into himself. The unfinished Sanchez house lay open to wind and rain, and the new floorboards buckled and warped with moisture. The laid-out vegetable gardens rioted with weeds.

  Adam seemed clothed in a viscosity that slowed his movements and held his thoughts down. He saw the world through gray water. Now and then his mind fought its way upward, and when the light broke in it brought him only a sickness of the mind, and he retired into the grayness again. He was aware of the twins because he heard them cry and laugh, but he felt only a thin distaste for them. To Adam they were symbols of his loss. His neighbors drove up into his little valley, and every one of them would have understood anger or sorrow--and so helped him. But they could do nothing with the cloud that hung over him. Adam did not resist them. He simply did not see them, and before long the neighbors stopped driving up the road under the oaks.

  For a time Lee tried to stimulate Adam to awareness, but Lee was a busy man. He cooked and washed, he bathed the twins and fed them. Through his hard and constant work he grew fond of the two little boys. He talked to them in Cantonese, and Chinese words were the first they recognized and tried to repeat.

  Samuel Hamilton went back twice to try to wedge Adam up and out of his shock. Then Liza stepped in.

  "I want you to stay away from there," she said. "You come back a changed man. Samuel, you don't change him. He changes you. I can see the look of him in your face."

  "Have you thought of the two little boys, Liza?" he asked.

  "I've thought of your own family," she said snappishly. "You lay a crepe on us for days after."

  "All right, Mother," he said, but it saddened him because Samuel could not mind his own business when there was pain in any man. It was no easy thing for him to abandon Adam to his desolation.

  Adam had paid him for his work, had even paid him for the windmill parts and did not want the windmills. Samuel sold the equipment and sent Adam the money. He had no answer.

  He became aware of an anger at Adam Trask. It seemed to Samuel that Adam might be pleasuring himself with sadness. But there was little leisure to brood. Joe was off to college--to that school Leland Stanford had built on his farm near Palo Alto. Tom worried his father, for Tom grew deeper and deeper into books. He did his work well enough, but Samuel felt that Tom had not joy enough.

  Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

  Samuel wrote to Joe, saying, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet."

  Liza was getting old. Samuel saw it in her face, and he could not feel old himself, white beard or no. But Liza was living backwards, and that's the proof.

  There was a time when she looked on his plans and prophecies as the crazy shoutings of a child. Now she felt that they were unseemly in a grown man. They three, Liza and Tom and Samuel, were alone on the ranch. Una was married to a stranger and gone away. Dessie had her dressmaking business in Salinas. Olive had married her young man, and Mollie was married and living, believe it or not, in an apartment in San Francisco. There was perfume, and a white bearskin rug in the bedroom in front of the fireplace, and Mollie smoked a gold-tipped cigarette--Violet Milo--with her coffee after dinner.

  One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.

  In King City, Dr. Tilson felt him over. The doctor grew more testy with his overworked years.

  "You sprained your back."

  "That I did," said Samuel.

  "And you drove all the way in to have me tell you that you sprained your back and charge you two dollars?"

  "Here's your two dollars."

  "And you want to know what to do about it?"

  "Sure I do."

  "Don't sprain it any more. Now take your money back. You're not a fool, Samuel, unless you're getting childish."

  "But it hurts."

  "Of course it hurts. How would you know it was strained if it didn't?"

  Samuel laughed. "You're good for me," he said. "You're more than two dollars good for me. Keep the money."

  The doctor looked closely at him. "I think you're telling the truth, Samuel. I'll keep the money."

  Samuel went in to see Will in his fine new store. He hardly knew his son, for Will was getting fat and prosperous and he wore a coat and vest and a gold ring on his little finger.

  "I've got a package made up for Mother," Will said. "Some little cans of things from France. Mushrooms and liver paste and sardines so little you can hardly see them."

  "She'll just send them to Joe," said Samuel.

  "Can't you make her eat them?"

  "No," said his father. "But she'll enjoy sending them to Joe."

  Lee came into the store and his eyes lighted up. "How do, Missy," he said.

  "Hello, Lee. How are the boys?"

  "Boys fine."

  Samuel said, "I'm going to have a glass of beer next door, Lee. Be glad to have you join me."

  Lee and Samuel sat at the little round table in the barroom and Samuel drew figures on the scrubbed wood with the moisture of his beer glass. "I've wanted to go to see you and Adam but I didn't think I could do any good."

  "Well, you can't do any harm. I thought he'd get over it. But he still walks around like a ghost."

  "It's over a year, isn't it?" Samuel asked.

  "Three months over."

  "Well, what do you think I can do?"

  "I don't know," said Lee. "Maybe you could shock him out of it. Nothing else has worked."

  "I'm not good at shocking. I'd probably end up by shocking myself. By the way, what did he name the twins?"

  "They don't have any names."

  "You're making a joke, Lee."

  "I am not making jokes."

  "What does he call them?"

  "He calls them 'they.' "

  "I mean when he speaks to them."

  "When he speaks to them he calls them 'you,' one or both."

  "This is nonsense," Samuel said angrily. "What kind of fool is the man?"

  "I've meant to come and tell you. He's a dead m
an unless you can wake him up."

  Samuel said, "I'll come. I'll bring a horse whip. No names! You're damn right I'll come Lee."

  "When?"

  "Tomorrow."

  "I'll kill a chicken," said Lee. "You'll like the twins, Mr. Hamilton. They're fine-looking boys. I won't tell Mr. Trask you're coming."

  2

  Shyly Samuel told his wife he wanted to visit the Trask place. He thought she would pile up strong walls of objection, and for one of the few times in his life he would disobey her wish no matter how strong her objection. It gave him a sad feeling in the stomach to think of disobeying his wife. He explained his purpose almost as though he were confessing. Liza put her hands on her hips during the telling and his heart sank. When he was finished she continued to look at him, he thought, coldly.

  Finally she said, "Samuel, do you think you can move this rock of a man?"

  "Why, I don't know, Mother." He had not expected this. "I don't know."

  "Do you think it is such an important matter that those babies have names right now?"

  "Well, it seemed so to me," he said lamely.

  "Samuel, do you think why you want to go? Is it your natural incurable nosiness? Is it your black inability to mind your own business?"

  "Now, Liza, I know my failings pretty well. I thought it might be more than that."

  "It had better be more than that," she said. "This man has not admitted that his sons live. He has cut them off mid-air."

  "That's the way it seems to me, Liza."

  "If he tells you to mind your own business--what then?"

  "Well, I don't know."

  Her jaw snapped shut and her teeth clicked. "If you do not get those boys named, there'll be no warm place in this house for you. Don't you dare come whining back, saying he wouldn't do it or he wouldn't listen. If you do I'll have to go myself."

  "I'll give him the back of my hand," Samuel said.

  "No, that you won't do. You fall short in savagery, Samuel. I know you. You'll give him sweet-sounding words and you'll come dragging back and try to make me forget you ever went."

  "I'll beat his brains out," Samuel shouted.

  He slammed into the bedroom, and Liza smiled at the panels.

  He came out soon in his black suit and his hard shiny shirt and collar. He stooped down to her while she tied his black string tie. His white beard was brushed to shining.

  "You'd best take a swab at your shoes with a blacking brush," she said.

  In the midst of painting the blacking on his worn shoes he looked sideways up at her. "Could I take the Bible along?" he asked. "There's no place for getting a good name like the Bible."

  "I don't much like it out of the house," she said uneasily. "And if you're late coming home, what'll I have for my reading? And the children's names are in it." She saw his face fall. She went into the bedroom and came back with a small Bible, worn and scuffed, its cover held on by brown paper and glue. "Take this one," she said.

  "But that's your mother's."

  "She wouldn't mind. And all the names but one in here have two dates."

  "I'll wrap it so it won't get hurt," said Samuel.

  Liza spoke sharply. "What my mother would mind is what I mind, and I'll tell you what I mind. You're never satisfied to let the Testament alone. You're forever picking at it and questioning it. You turn it over the way a 'coon turns over a wet rock, and it angers me."

  "I'm just trying to understand it, Mother."

  "What is there to understand? Just read it. There it is in black and white. Who wants you to understand it? If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He'd have given you to understand or He'd have set it down different."

  "But, Mother--"

  "Samuel," she said, "you're the most contentious man this world has ever seen."

  "Yes, Mother."

  "Don't agree with me all the time. It hints of insincerity. Speak up for yourself."

  She looked after his dark figure in the buggy as he drove away. "He's a sweet husband," she said aloud, "but contentious."

  And Samuel was thinking with wonder, Just when I think I know her she does a thing like that.

  3

  On the last half-mile, turning out of the Salinas Valley and driving up the unscraped road under the great oak trees, Samuel tried to plait a rage to take care of his embarrassment. He said heroic words to himself.

  Adam was more gaunt than Samuel remembered. His eyes were dull, as though he did not use them much for seeing. It took a little time for Adam to become aware that Samuel was standing before him. A grimace of displeasure drew down his mouth.

  Samuel said, "I feel small now--coming uninvited as I have."

  Adam said, "What do you want? Didn't I pay you?"

  "Pay?" Samuel asked. "Yes, you did. Yes, by God, you did. And I'll tell you that pay has been more than I've merited by the nature of it."

  "What? What are you trying to say?"

  Samuel's anger grew and put out leaves. "A man, his whole life, matches himself against pay. And how, if it's my whole life's work to find my worth, can you, sad man, write me down instant in a ledger?"

  Adam exclaimed, "I'll pay. I tell you I'll pay. How much? I'll pay."

  "You have, but not to me."

  "Why did you come then? Go away!"

  "You once invited me."

  "I don't invite you now."

  Samuel put his hands on his hips and leaned forward. "I'll tell you now, quiet. In a bitter night, a mustard night that was last night, a good thought came and the dark was sweetened when the day sat down. And this thought went from evening star to the late dipper on the edge of the first light--that our betters spoke of. So I invite myself."

  "You are not welcome."

  Samuel said, "I'm told that out of some singular glory your loins got twins."

  "What business is that of yours?"

  A kind of joy lighted Samuel's eyes at the rudeness. He saw Lee lurking inside the house and peeking out at him. "Don't, for the love of God, put violence on me. I'm a man hopes there'll be a picture of peace on my hatchments."

  "I don't understand you."

  "How could you? Adam Trask, a dog wolf with a pair of cubs, a scrubby rooster with sweet paternity for a fertilized egg! A dirty clod!"

  A darkness covered Adam's cheeks and for the first time his eyes seemed to see. Samuel joyously felt hot rage in his stomach. He cried, "Oh, my friend, retreat from me! Please, I beg of you!" The saliva dampened the corners of his mouth. "Please!" he cried. "For the love of any holy thing you can remember, step back from me. I feel murder nudging my gizzard."

  Adam said, "Get off my place. Go on--get off. You're acting crazy. Get off. This is my place. I bought it."

  "You bought your eyes and nose," Samuel jeered. "You bought your uprightness. You bought your thumb on sideways. Listen to me, because I'm like to kill you after. You bought! You bought out of some sweet inheritance. Think now--do you deserve your children, man?"

  "Deserve them? They're here--I guess. I don't understand you."

  Samuel wailed, "God save me, Liza! It's not the way you think, Adam! Listen to me before my thumb finds the bad place at your throat. The precious twins--untried, unnoticed, undirected--and I say it quiet with my hands down--undiscovered."

  "Get off," said Adam hoarsely. "Lee, bring a gun! This man is crazy. Lee!"

  Then Samuel's hands were on Adam's throat, pressing the throbbing up to his temples, swelling his eyes with blood. And Samuel was snarling at him. "Tear away with your jelly fingers. You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them. You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation." Suddenly he plucked his hard thumbs out of his neighbor's throat.

  Adam stood panting. He felt his throat where the blacksmith hands had been. "What is it you want of me?"

  "You have no love."

  "I had--enough to kill me."

  "No one ever had enough. The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much."

  "Stay
away from me. I can fight back. Don't think I can't defend myself."

  "You have two weapons, and they not named."

  "I'll fight you, old man. You are an old man."

  Samuel said, "I can't think in my mind of a dull man picking up a rock, who before evening would not put a name to it--like Peter. And you--for a year you've lived with your heart's draining and you've not even laid a number to the boys."

  Adam said, "What I do is my own business."

  Samuel struck him with a work-heavy fist, and Adam sprawled out in the dust. Samuel asked him to rise, and when Adam accepted struck him again, and this time Adam did not get up. He looked stonily at the menacing old man.

  The fire went out of Samuel's eyes and he said quietly, "Your sons have no names."

  Adam replied, "Their mother left them motherless."

  "And you have left them fatherless. Can't you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don't you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?"

  "I didn't do it," Adam said.

  "Have you undone it? Your boys have no names." He stooped down and put his arms around Adam's shoulders and helped him to his feet. "We'll give them names," he said. "We'll think long and find good names to clothe them." He whipped the dust from Adam's shirt with his hands.

  Adam wore a faraway yet intent look, as though he were listening to some wind-carried music, but his eyes were not dead as they had been. He said, "It's hard to imagine I'd thank a man for insults and for shaking me out like a rug. But I'm grateful. It's a hurty thanks, but it's thanks."

  Samuel smiled, crinkle-eyed. "Did it seem natural? Did I do it right?" he asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, in a way I promised my wife I'd do it. She didn't believe I would. I'm not a fighting man, you see. The last time I clobbered a human soul it was over a red-nosed girl and a Schoolbook in County Derry."

  Adam stared at Samuel, but in his mind he saw and felt his brother Charles, black and murderous, and that sight switched to Cathy and the quality of her eyes over the gun barrel. "There wasn't any fear in it," Adam said. "It was more like a weariness."

  "I guess I was not angry enough."

  "Samuel, I'll ask just once and then no more. Have you heard anything? Has there been any news of her--any news at all?"

  "I've heard nothing."

  "It's almost a relief," said Adam.

  "Do you have hatred?"