East of Eden

My little sister and I did our part with Mr. Fenchel, and it is one of those memories of shame that still makes me break into a sweat and tighten up around the throat. We were standing in our front yard on the lawn one evening and we saw him coming with little fat steps. His black homburg was brushed and squarely set on his head. I don’t remember that we discussed our plan but we must have, to have carried it out so well.

As he came near, my sister and I moved slowly across the street side by side. Mr. Fenchel looked up and saw us moving toward him. We stopped in the gutter as he came by.

He broke into a smile and said, “Gut efning, Chon. Gut efning, Mary.”

We stood stiffly side by side and we said in unison, “Hoch der Kaiser!”

I can see his face now, his startled innocent blue eyes. He tried to say something and then he began to cry. Didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t. He just stood there sobbing. And do you know?—Mary and I turned around and walked stiffly across the street and into our front yard. We felt horrible. I still do when I think of it.

We were too young to do a good job on Mr. Fenchel. That took strong men—about thirty of them. One Saturday night they collected in a bar and marched in a column of fours out Central Avenue, saying, “Hup! Hup!” in unison. They tore down Mr. Fenchel’s white picket fence and burned the front out of his house. No Kaiser-loving son of a bitch was going to get away with it with us. And then Salinas could hold up its head with San Jose.

Of course that made Watsonville get busy. They tarred and feathered a Pole they thought was a German. He had an accent.

We of Salinas did all of the things that are inevitably done in a war, and we thought the inevitable thoughts. We screamed over good rumors and died of panic at bad news. Everybody had a secret that he had to spread obliquely to keep its identity as a secret. Our pattern of life changed in the usual manner. Wages and prices went up. A whisper of shortage caused us to buy and store food. Nice quiet ladies clawed one another over a can of tomatoes.

It wasn’t all bad or cheap or hysterical. There was heroism too. Some men who could have avoided the army enlisted, and others objected to the war on moral or religious grounds and took the walk up Golgotha which normally comes with that. There were people who gave everything they had to the war because it was the last war and by winning it we would remove war like a thorn from the flesh of the world and there wouldn’t be any more such horrible nonsense.

There is no dignity in death in battle. Mostly that is a splashing about of human meat and fluid, and the result is filthy, but there is a great and almost sweet dignity in the sorrow, the helpless, the hopeless sorrow, that comes down over a family with the telegram. Nothing to say, nothing to do, and only one hope—I hope he didn’t suffer—and what a forlorn and last-choice hope that is. And it is true that there were some people who, when their sorrow was beginning to lose its savor, gently edged it toward pride and felt increasingly important because of their loss. Some of these even made a good thing of it after the war was over. That is only natural, just as it is natural for a man whose life function is the making of money to make money out of a war. No one blamed a man for that, but it was expected that he should invest a part of his loot in war bonds. We thought we invented all of it in Salinas, even the sorrow.

Chapter 47

1

In the Trask house next to Reynaud’s Bakery, Lee and Adam put up a map of the western front with lines of colored pins snaking down, and this gave them a feeling of participation. Then Mr. Kelly died and Adam Trask was appointed to take his place on the draft board. He was the logical man for the job. The ice plant did not take up much of his time, and he had a clear service record and an honorable discharge himself.

Adam Trask had seen a war—a little war of maneuver and butchery, but at least he had experienced the reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can. Adam didn’t remember his war very well. Certain sharp pictures stood out in his memory, a man’s face, the piled and burning bodies, the clang of saber scabbards at fast trot, the uneven, tearing sound of firing carbines, the thin cold voice of a bugle in the night. But Adam’s pictures were frozen. There was no motion or emotion in them—illustrations in the pages of a book, and not very well drawn.

Adam worked hard and honestly and sadly. He could not get over the feeling that the young men he passed to the army were under sentence of death. And because he knew he was weak, he grew more and more stern and painstaking and much less likely to accept an excuse or a borderline disability. He took the lists home with him, called on parents, in fact, did much more work than was expected of him. He felt like a hanging judge who hates the gallows.

Henry Stanton watched Adam grow more gaunt and more silent, and Henry was a man who liked fun—needed it. A sour-pussed associate could make him sick.

“Relax,” he told Adam. “You’re trying to carry the weight of the war. Now, look—it’s not your responsibility. You got put in here with a set of rules. Just follow the rules and relax. You aren’t running the war.”

Adam moved the slats of the blind so that the late afternoon sun would not shine in his eyes, and he gazed down at the harsh parallel lines the sun threw on his desk. “I know,” he said wearily. “Oh, I know that! But, Henry, it’s when there’s a choice, and it’s my own judgment of the merits, that’s when it gets me. I passed Judge Kendal’s boy and he was killed in training.”

“It’s not your business, Adam. Why don’t you take a few drinks at night? Go to a movie—sleep on it.” Henry put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and leaned back in his chair. “While we’re talking about it, Adam, it seems to me it don’t do a candidate a damn bit of good for you to worry. You pass boys I could be talked into letting off.”

“I know,” said Adam. “I wonder how long it will last?”

Henry inspected him shrewdly and took a pencil from his stuffed vest pocket and rubbed the eraser against his big white front teeth. “I see what you mean,” he said softly.

Adam looked at him, startled. “What do I mean?” he demanded.

“Now don’t get huffy. I never thought I was lucky before, just having girls.”

Adam traced one of the slat shadows on his desk with his forefinger. “Yes,” he said in a voice as soft as a sigh.

“It’s a long time before your boys will be called up.”

“Yes.” Adam’s finger entered a line of light and slid slowly back.