East of Eden

“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.