East of Eden

“Why don’t you wait downstairs?” he suggested.

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. I’ll call you pretty soon.”

Adam patted Cathy’s shoulder, and she smiled up at him.

Dr. Tilson closed the door behind him and came back to the bed. His face was red with anger. “Why did you do it?”

Cathy’s mouth was a thin tight line.

“Does your husband know you are pregnant?”

Her head moved slowly from side to side.

“What did you do it with?”

She stared up at him.

He looked around the room. He stepped to the bureau and picked up a knitting needle. He shook it in her face. “The old offender—the old criminal,” he said. “You’re a fool. You’ve nearly killed yourself and you haven’t lost your baby. I suppose you took things too, poisoned yourself, inserted camphor, kerosene, red pepper. My God! Some of the things you women do!”

Her eyes were as cold as glass.

He pulled a chair up beside her bed. “Why don’t you want to have the baby?” he asked softly. “You’ve got a good husband. Don’t you love him? Don’t you intend to speak to me at all? Tell me, damn it! Don’t turn mulish.”

Her lips did not move and her eyes did not flicker.

“My dear,” he said, “can’t you see? You must not destroy life. That’s the one thing gets me crazy. God knows I lose patients because I don’t know enough. But I try—I always try. And then I see a deliberate killing.” He talked rapidly on. He dreaded the sick silence between his sentences. This woman puzzled him. There was something inhuman about her. “Have you met Mrs. Laurel? She’s wasting and crying for a baby. Everything she has or can get she would give to have a baby, and you—you try to stab yours with a knitting needle. All right,” he cried, “you won’t speak—you don’t have to. But I’m going to tell you. The baby is safe. Your aim was bad. And I’m telling you this—you’re going to have that baby. Do you know what the law in this state has to say about abortion? You don’t have to answer, but you listen to me! If this happens again, if you lose this baby and I have any reason to suspect monkey business, I will charge you, I will testify against you, and I will see you punished. Now I hope you have sense enough to believe me, because I mean it.”

Cathy moistened her lips with a little pointed tongue. The cold went out of her eyes and a weak sadness took its place. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But you don’t understand.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?” His anger disappeared like mist. “Tell me, my dear.”

“It’s hard to tell. Adam is so good, so strong. I am—well, I’m tainted. Epilepsy.”

“Not you!”

“No, but my grandfather and my father—and my brother.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “I couldn’t bring that to my husband.”

“Poor child,” he said. “My poor child. You can’t be certain. It’s more than probable that your baby will be fine and healthy. Will you promise me not to try any more tricks?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. I won’t tell your husband what you did. Now lie back and let me see if the bleeding’s stopped.”

In a few minutes he closed his satchel and put the knitting needle in his pocket. “I’ll look in tomorrow morning,” he said.

Adam swarmed on him as he came down the narrow stairs into the lobby. Dr. Tilson warded off a flurry of “How is she? Is she all right? What caused it? Can I go up?”

“Whoa, hold up—hold up.” And he used his trick, his standard joke. “Your wife is sick.”

“Doctor—”

“She has the only good sickness there is—”

“Doctor—”

“Your wife is going to have a baby.” He brushed past Adam and left him staring. Three men sitting around the stove grinned at him. One of them observed dryly, “If it was me now—why, I’d invite a few, maybe three, friends to have a drink.” His hint was wasted. Adam bolted clumsily up the narrow stairs.

Adam’s attention narrowed to the Bordoni ranch a few miles south of King City, almost equidistant, in fact, between San Lucas and King City.

The Bordonis had nine hundred acres left of a grant of ten thousand acres which had come to Mrs. Bordoni’s great-grandfather from the Spanish crown. The Bordonis were Swiss, but Mrs. Bordoni was the daughter and heiress of a Spanish family that had settled in the Salinas Valley in very early times. And as happened with most of the old families, the land slipped away. Some was lost in gambling, some chipped off for taxes, and some acres torn off like coupons to buy luxuries—a horse, a diamond, or a pretty woman. The nine hundred remaining acres were the core of the original Sanchez grant, and the best of it too. They straddled the river and tucked into the foothills on both sides, for at this point the valley narrows and then opens out again. The original Sanchez house was still usable. Built of adobe, it stood in a tiny opening in the foothills, a miniature valley fed by a precious ever-running spring of sweet water. That of course was why the first Sanchez had built his seat there. Huge live oaks shaded the valley, and the earth had a richness and a greenness foreign to this part of the country. The walls of the low house were four feet thick, and the round pole rafters were tied on with rawhide ropes which had been put on wet. The hide shrank and pulled joist and rafter tight together, and the leather ropes became hard as iron and nearly imperishable. There is only one drawback to this building method. Rats will gnaw at the hide if they are let.

The old house seemed to have grown out of the earth, and it was lovely. Bordoni used it for a cow barn. He was a Swiss, an immigrant, with his national passion for cleanliness. He distrusted the thick mud walls and built a frame house some distance away, and his cows put their heads out the deep recessed windows of the old Sanchez house.

The Bordonis were childless, and when the wife died in ripe years a lonely longing for his Alpine past fell on her husband. He wanted to sell the ranch and go home. Adam Trask refused to buy in a hurry, and Bordoni was asking a big price and using the selling method of pretending not to care whether he sold or not. Bordoni knew Adam was going to buy his land long before Adam knew it.

Where Adam settled he intended to stay and to have his unborn children stay. He was afraid he might buy one place and then see another he liked better, and all the time the Sanchez place was drawing him. With the advent of Cathy, his life extended long and pleasantly ahead of him. But he went through all the motions of carefulness. He drove and rode and walked over every foot of the land. He put a post-hole auger down through the subsoil to test and feel and smell the under earth. He inquired about the small wild plants of field and riverside and hill. In damp places he knelt down and examined the game tracks in the mud, mountain lion and deer, coyote and wild cat, skunk and raccoon, weasel and rabbit, all overlaid with the pattern of quail tracks. He threaded among willows and sycamores and wild blackberry vines in the riverbed, patted the trunks of live oak and scrub oak, madrone, laurel, toyon.