East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

  "No--they kept order the way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them--always the whip, the rope, and the rifle. I wish I hadn't started to tell you this--"

  "Why should you not tell me?" Adam asked.

  "I can see my father's face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain. Telling it, my father had to stop and gain possession of himself, and when he continued he spoke sternly and he used hard sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them.

  "These two managed to stay close together by claiming she was my father's nephew. The months went by and fortunately for them there was very little abdominal swelling, and she worked in pain and out of it. My father could only help her a little, apologizing, 'My nephew is young and his bones are brittle.' They had no plan. They did not know what to do.

  "And then my father figured out a plan. They would run into the high mountains to one of the higher meadows, and there beside a lake they would make a burrow for the birthing, and when my mother was safe and the baby born, my father would come back and take his punishment. And he would sign for an extra five years to pay for his delinquent nephew. Pitiful as their escape was, it was all they had, and it seemed a brightness. The plan had two requirements--the timing had to be right and a supply of food was necessary."

  Lee said, "My parents"--and he stopped, smiling over his use of the word, and it felt so good that he warmed it up--"my dear parents began to make their preparations. They saved a part of their daily rice and hid it under their sleeping mats. My father found a length of string and filed out a hook from a piece of wire, for there were trout to be caught in the mountain lakes. He stopped smoking to save the matches issued. And my mother collected every tattered scrap of cloth she could find and unraveled edges to make thread and sewed this ragbag together with a splinter to make swaddling clothes for me. I wish I had known her."

  "So do I," said Adam. "Did you ever tell this to Sam Hamilton?"

  "No Ididn't. I wish I had. He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like a personal triumph to him."

  "I hope they got there," said Adam.

  "I know. And when my father would tell me I would say to him, 'Get to that lake--get my mother there--don't let it happen again, not this time. Just once let's tell it: how you got to the lake and built a house of fir boughs.' And my father became very Chinese then. He said, There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.' "

  "Get on with it," Adam said irritably.

  Lee got up and went to the window, and he finished the story, looking out at the stars that winked and blew in the March wind.

  "A little boulder jumped down a hill and broke my father's leg. They set the leg and gave him cripples' work, straightening used nails with a hammer on a rock. And whether with worry or work--it doesn't matter--my mother went into early labor. And then the half-mad men knew and they went all mad. One hunger sharpened another hunger, and one crime blotted out the one before it, and the little crimes committed against those starving men flared into one gigantic maniac crime.

  "My father heard the shout 'Woman' and he knew. He tried to run and his leg rebroke under him and he crawled up the ragged slope to the roadbed where it was happening.

  "When he got there a kind of sorrow had come over the sky, and the Canton men were creeping away to hide and to forget that men can be like this. My father came to her on the pile of shale. She had not even eyes to see out of, but her mouth still moved and she gave him his instructions. My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails. She died on the shale in the afternoon."

  Adam was breathing hard. Lee continued in a singsong cadence, "Before you hate those men you must know this. My father always told it at the last: No child ever had such care as I. The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty--a dreadful kind of beauty. And now good night. I can't talk any more."

  3

  Adam restlessly opened drawers and looked up at the shelves and raised the lids of boxes in his house and at last he was forced to call Lee back and ask, "Where's the ink and the pen?"

  "You don't have any," said Lee. "You haven't written a word in years. I'll lend you mine if you want." He went to his room and brought back a squat bottle of ink and a stub pen and a pad of paper and an envelope and laid them on the table.

  Adam asked, "How do you know I want to write a letter?"

  "You're going to try to write to your brother, aren't you?"

  "That's right."

  "It will be a hard thing to do after so long," said Lee.

  And it was hard. Adam nibbled and munched on the pen and his mouth made strained grimaces. Sentences were written and the page thrown away and another started. Adam scratched his head with the penholder. "Lee, if I wanted to take a trip east, would you stay with the twins until I get back?"

  "It's easier to go than to write," said Lee. "Sure I'll stay."

  "No. I'm going to write."

  "Why don't you ask your brother to come out here?"

  "Say, that's a good idea, Lee. I didn't think of it."

  "It also gives you a reason for writing, and that's a good thing."

  The letter came fairly easily then, was corrected and copied fair. Adam read it slowly to himself before he put it in the envelope.

  "Dear brother Charles," it said. "You will be surprised to hear from me after so long. I have thought of writing many times, but you know how a man puts it off.

  "I wonder how this letter finds you. I trust in good health. For all I know you may have five or even ten children by now. Ha! Ha! I have two sons and they are twins. Their mother is not here. Country life did not agree with her. She lives in a town nearby and I see her now and then.

  "I have got a fine ranch, but I am ashamed to say I do not keep it up very well. Maybe I will do better from now on. I always did make good resolutions. But for a number of years I felt poorly. I am well now.

  "How are you and how do you prosper? I would like to see you. Why don't you come to visit here? It is a great country and you might even find a place where you would like to settle. No cold winters here. That makes a difference to 'old men' like us. Ha! Ha!

  "Well, Charles, I hope you will think about it and let me know. The trip would do you good. I want to see you. I have much to tell you that I can't write down.

  "Well, Charles, write me a letter and tell me all the news of the old home. I suppose many things have happened. As you get older you hear mostly about people you knew that died. I guess that is the way of the world. Write quick and tell me if you will come to visit. Your brother Adam."

  He sat holding the letter in his hand and looking over it at his brother's dark face and its scarred forehead. Adam could see the glinting heat in the brown eyes, and as he looked he saw the lips writhe back from the teeth and the blind destructive animal take charge. He shook his head to rid his memory of the vision, and he tried to rebuild the face smiling. He tried to remember the forehead before the scar, but he could not bring either into focus. He seized the pen and wrote below his signature, "P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother."

  Adam folded the letter and forced the creases sharp with his fingernails. He sealed the envelope flap with his fist. "Lee!" he called, "Oh, Lee!"

  The Chinese looked in through the door.

  "Lee, how long does it take a letter to go east--clear east?"

  "I don't know," said Lee. "Two weeks maybe."

  Chapter 29

  1

  After his first letter to his brother in over ten years was mailed Adam became impatient for an answer. He forgot how much time had elapsed. Before the letter got as far as San Francisco he was asking aloud in Lee's hearing, "I w
onder why he doesn't answer. Maybe he's mad at me for not writing. But he didn't write either. No--he didn't know where to write. Maybe he's moved away."

  Lee answered, "It's only been gone a few days. Give it time."

  "I wonder whether he would really come out here?" Adam asked himself, and he wondered whether he wanted Charles. Now that the letter was gone, Adam was afraid Charles might accept. He was like a restless child whose fingers stray to every loose article. He interfered with the twins, asked them innumerable questions about school.

  "Well, what did you learn today?"

  "Nothing!"

  "Oh, come! You must have learned something. Did you read?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "What did you read?"

  "That old one about the grasshopper and the ant."

  "Well, that's interesting."

  "There's one about an eagle carries a baby away."

  "Yes, I remember that one. I forget what happens."

  "We aren't to it yet. We saw the pictures."

  The boys were disgusted. During one of Adam's moments of fatherly bungling Cal borrowed his pocketknife, hoping he would forget to ask for it back. But the sap was beginning to run freely in the willows. The bark would slip easily from a twig. Adam got his knife back to teach the boys to make willow whistles, a thing Lee had taught them three years before. To make it worse, Adam had forgotten how to make the cut. He couldn't get a peep out of his whistles.

  At noon one day Will Hamilton came roaring and bumping up the road in a new Ford. The engine raced in its low gear, and the high top swayed like a storm-driven ship. The brass radiator and the Prestolite tank on the running board were blinding with brass polish.

  Will pulled up the brake lever, turned the switch straight down, and sat back in the leather seat. The car backfired several times without ignition because it was overheated.

  "Here she is!" Will called with a false enthusiasm. He hated Fords with a deadly hatred, but they were daily building his fortune.

  Adam and Lee hung over the exposed insides of the car while Will Hamilton, puffing under the burden of his new fat, explained the workings of a mechanism he did not understand himself.

  It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today's children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncrasies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell.

  Will Hamilton explained the car and went back and explained it again. His customers were wide-eyed, interested as terriers, cooperative, and did not interrupt, but as he began for the third time Will saw that he was getting no place.

  "Tell you what!" he said brightly. "You see, this isn't my line. I wanted you to see her. and listen to her before I made delivery. Now, I'll go back to town and tomorrow I'll send out this car with an expert, and he'll tell you more in a few minutes than I could in a week. But I just wanted you to see her."

  Will had forgotten some of his own instructions. He cranked for a while and then borrowed a buggy and a horse from Adam and drove to town, but he promised to have a mechanic out the next day.

  2

  There was no question of sending the twins to school the next day. They wouldn't have gone. The Ford stood tall and aloof and dour under the oak tree where Will had stopped it. Its new owners circled it and touched it now and then, the way you touch a dangerous horse to soothe him.

  Lee said, "I wonder whether I'll ever get used to it."

  "Of course you will," Adam said without conviction. "Why, you'll be driving all over the county first thing you know."

  "I will try to understand it," Lee said. "But drive it I will not."

  The boys made little dives in and out, to touch something and leap away. "What's this do-hickey, Father?"

  "Get your hands off that."

  "But what's it for?"

  "I don't know, but don't touch it. You don't know what might happen."

  "Didn't the man tell you?"

  "I don't remember what he said. Now you boys get away from it or I'll have to send you to school. Do you hear me, Cal? Don't open that."

  They had got up and were ready very early in the morning. By eleven o'clock hysterical nervousness had set in. The mechanic drove up in the buggy in time for the midday meal. He wore box-toed shoes and Duchess trousers and his wide square coat came almost to his knees. Beside him in the buggy was a satchel in which were his working clothes and tools. He was nineteen and chewed tobacco, and from his three months in automobile school he had gained a great though weary contempt for human beings. He spat and threw the lines at Lee.

  "Put this hayburner away," he said, "How do you tell which end is the front?" And he climbed down from the rig as an ambassador comes out of a state train. He sneered at the twins and turned coldly to Adam, "I hope I'm in time for dinner," he said.

  Lee and Adam stared at each other. They had forgotten about the noonday meal.

  In the house the godling grudgingly accepted cheese and bread and cold meat and pie and coffee and a piece of chocolate cake.

  "I'm used to a hot dinner," he said. "You better keep those kids away if you want any car left." After a leisurely meal and a short rest on the porch the mechanic took his satchel into Adam's bedroom. In a few minutes he emerged, dressed in striped overalls and a white cap which had "Ford" printed on the front of its crown.

  "Well," he said. "Done any studying?"

  "Studying?" Adam said.

  "Ain't you even read the litature in the book under the seat?"

  "I didn't know it was there," said Adam.

  "Oh, Lord," said the young man disgustedly. With a courageous gathering of his moral forces he moved with decision toward the car. "Might as well get started," he said. "God knows how long it's going to take if you ain't studied."

  Adam said, "Mr. Hamilton couldn't start it last night."

  "He always tries to start it on the magneto," said the sage. "All right! All right, come along. Know the principles of a internal combustion engine?"

  "No," said Adam.

  "Oh, Jesus Christ!" He lifted the tin flaps. "This-here is a internal combustion engine," he said.

  Lee said quietly, "So young to be so erudite."

  The boy swung around toward him, scowling. "What did you say?" he demanded, and he asked Adam, "What did the Chink say?"

  Lee spread his hands and smiled blandly. "Say velly smaht fella," he observed quietly. "Mebbe go college. Velly wise."

  "Just call me Joe!" the boy said for no reason at all, and he added, "College! What do them fellas know? Can they set a timer, huh? Can they file a point? College!" And he spat a brown disparaging comment on the ground. The twins regarded him with admiration, and Cal collected spit on the back of his tongue to practice.

  Adam said, "Lee was admiring your grasp of the subject."

  The truculence went out of the boy and a magnanimity took its place. "Just call me Joe," he said. "I ought to know it. Went to automobile school in Chicago. That's a real school--not like no college." And he said, "My old man says you take a good Chink, I mean a good one--why, he's about as good as anybody. They're honest."

  "But not the bad ones," said Lee.

  "Hell no! Not no highbinders nor nothing like that. But good Chinks."

  "I hope I may be included in that group?"

  "You look like a good Chink to me. Just call me Joe."

  Adam was puzzled at the conversation, but the twins weren't. Cal said experimentally to Aron, "Jus' call me
Joe," and Aron moved his lips, trying out, "Jus' call me Joe."

  The mechanic became professional again but his tone was kinder. An amused friendliness took the place of his former contempt. "This-here," he said, "is a internal combustion engine." They looked down at the ugly lump of iron with a certain awe.

  Now the boy went on so rapidly that the words ran together into a great song of the new era. "Operates through the explosion of gases in a enclosed space. Power of explosion is exerted on piston and through connecting rod and crankshaft through transmission thence to rear wheels. Got that?" They nodded blankly, afraid to stop the flow. "They's two kinds, two cycle and four cycle. This-here is four cycle. Got that?"

  Again they nodded. The twins, looking up into his face with adoration, nodded.

  "That's interesting," said Adam.

  Joe went on hurriedly, "Main difference of a Ford automobile from other kinds is its planetary transmission which operates on a rev-rev-a-lu-shun-ary principle." He pulled up for a moment, his face showing strain. And when his four listeners nodded again he cautioned them, "Don't get the idea you know it all. The planetary system is, don't forget, rev-a-lu-shun-ary. You better study up on it in the book. Now, if you got all that we'll go on to Operation of the Automobile." He said this in boldface type, capital letters. He was obviously glad to be done with the first part of his lecture, but he was no gladder than his listeners. The strain of concentration was beginning to tell on them, and it was not made any better by the fact that they had not understood one single word.

  "Come around here," said the boy. "Now you see that-there? That's the ignition key. When you turn that-there you're ready to go ahead. Now, you push this do-hickey to the left. That puts her on battery--see, where it says Bat. That means battery." They craned their necks into the car. The twins were standing on the running board.

  "No--wait. I got ahead of myself. First you got to retard the spark and advance the gas, else she'll kick your goddam arm off. This-here--see it?--this-here's the spark. You push it up--get it?--up. Clear up. And this-here's the gas--you push her down. Now I'm going to explain it and then I'm going to do it. I want you to pay attention. You kids get off the car. You're in my light. Get down, goddam it." The boys reluctantly climbed down from the running board; only their eyes looked over the door.