East of Eden

“You wouldn’t be going to Trask’s, would you?”

“That’s right. Did you hear anything about it?”

“Not to make any sense. I heard Mr. Trask shot himself in the shoulder with a forty-four and then fired everybody on the ranch. How do you go about shooting yourself in the shoulder with a forty-four, Horace?”

“I don’t know. Them Easterners are pretty clever. I thought I’d go up and find out. Didn’t his wife just have a baby?”

“Twins, I heard,” said Julius. “Maybe they shot him.”

“One hold the gun and the other pull the trigger? Hear anything else?”

“All mixed up, Horace. Want some company?”

“I’m not going to deputize you, Julius. Sheriff says the supervisors are raising hell about the payroll. Hornby out in the Alisal deputized his great aunt and kept her in posse three weeks just before Easter.”

“You’re fooling!”

“No, I’m not. And you get no star.”

“Hell, I don’t want to be a deputy. Just thought I’d ride along with you for company. I’m curious.”

“Me too. Glad to have you, Julius. I can always fling the oath around your neck if there’s any trouble. What do you say the new place is called?”

“Faye’s. Sacramento woman.”

“They do things pretty nice in Sacramento,” and Horace told how they did things in Sacramento as they rode along.

It was a nice day to be riding. As they turned into the Sanchez draw they were cursing the bad hunting in recent years. Three things are never any good—farming, fishing, and hunting—compared to other years, that is. Julius was saying, “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

A silence came on them as they rode in under the oaks, a silence they took from the place itself. There was no sound, no movement.

“I wonder if he finished fixing up the old house,” Horace said.

“Hell, no. Rabbit Holman was working on it, and he told me Trask called them all in and fired them. Told them not to come back.”

“They say Trask has got a pot of money.”

“I guess he’s well fixed, all right,” said Julius. “Sam Hamilton is sinking four wells—if he didn’t get fired too.”

“How is Mr. Hamilton? I ought to go up to see him.”

“He’s fine. Full of hell as ever.”

“I’ll have to go up and pay him a visit,” said Horace.

Lee came out on the stoop to meet them.

Horace said, “Hello, Ching Chong. Bossy man here?”

“He sick,” said Lee.

“I’d like to see him.”

“No see. He sick.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Horace. “Tell him Deputy Sheriff Quinn wants to see him.”

Lee disappeared, and in a moment he was back. “You come,” he said, “I take horsy.”

Adam lay in the four-poster bed where the twins had been born. He was propped high with pillows, and a mound of home-devised bandages covered his left breast and shoulder. The room reeked of Hall’s Cream Salve.

Horace said later to his wife, “And if you ever saw death still breathing, there it was.”

Adam’s cheeks hugged the bone and pulled the skin of his nose tight and slimy. His eyes seemed to bulge out of his head and to take up the whole upper part of his face, and they were shiny with sickness, intense and myopic. His bony right hand kneaded a fistful of coverlet.

Horace said, “Howdy, Mr. Trask. Heard you got hurt.” He paused, waiting for an answer. He went on, “Just thought I’d drop around and see how you were doing. How’d it happen?”

A look of transparent eagerness came over Adam’s face. He shifted slightly in the bed.

“If it hurts to talk you can whisper,” Horace added helpfully.

“Only when I breathe deep,” Adam said softly. “I was cleaning my gun and it went off.”

Horace glanced at Julius and then back. Adam saw the look and a little color of embarrassment rose in his cheeks.

“Happens all the time,” said Horace. “Got the gun around?”

“I think Lee put it away.”

Horace stepped to the door. “Hey there, Ching Chong, bring the pistol.”

In a moment Lee poked the gun butt-first through the door. Horace looked at it, swung the cylinder out, poked the cartridges out, and smelled the empty brass cylinder of the one empty shell. “There’s better shooting cleaning the damn things than pointing them. I’ll have to make a report to the county, Mr. Trask. I won’t take up much of your time. You were cleaning the barrel, maybe with a rod, and the gun went off and hit you in the shoulder?”

“That’s right, sir,” Adam said quickly.

“And cleaning it, you hadn’t swung out the cylinder?”

“That’s right.”

“And you were poking the rod in and out with the barrel pointed toward you with the hammer cocked?”

Adam’s breath rasped in a quick intake.

Horace went on, “And it must have blowed the rod right through you and took off your left hand too.” Horace’s pale sun-washed eyes never left Adam’s face. He said kindly, “What happened, Mr. Trask? Tell me what happened.”

“I tell you truly it was an accident, sir.”

“Now you wouldn’t have me write a report like I just said. The sheriff would think I was crazy. What happened?”

“Well, I’m not very used to guns. Maybe it wasn’t just like that, but I was cleaning it and it went off.”

There was a whistle in Horace’s nose. He had to breathe through his mouth to stop it. He moved slowly up from the foot of the bed, nearer to Adam’s head and staring eyes. “You came from the East not very long ago, didn’t you, Mr. Trask?”

“That’s right. Connecticut.”

“I guess people don’t use guns very much there any more.”

“Not much.”

“Little hunting?”

“Some.”

“So you’d be more used to a shotgun?”

“That’s right. But I never hunted much.”

“I guess you didn’t hardly use a pistol at all, so you didn’t know how to handle it.”

“That’s right,” Adam said eagerly. “Hardly anybody there has a pistol.”