East of Eden

“What did you do, Dessie?”

“Well, I had to tell him about the high price and that I had planned to be argued down. He didn’t seem to care either way.”

Tom said, “Let me beg you never to tell that story to Will. He’d have you locked up.”

“But the house wasn’t worth what I asked!”

“I repeat what I said about Will. What’s Adam want with your house?”

“He’s going to move there. Wants the twins to go to school in Salinas.”

“What’ll he do with his ranch?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

Tom said, “I wonder what would have happened if Father’d got hold of a ranch like that instead of Old Dry and Dusty.”

“It isn’t such a bad place.”

“Fine for everything except making a living.”

Dessie said earnestly, “Have you ever known any family that had more fun?”

“No, I don’t. But that was the family, not the land.”

“Tom, remember when you took Jenny and Belle Williams to the Peachtree dance on the sofa?”

“Mother never let me forget it. Say, wouldn’t it be good to ask Jenny and Belle down for a visit?”

“They’d come too,” Dessie said. “Let’s do it.”

When they turned off the county road she said, “Somehow I remember it differently.”

“Drier?”

“I guess that’s it. Tom, there’s so much grass.”

“I’m getting twenty head of stock to eat it.”

“You must be rich.”

“No, and the good year will break the price of beef. I wonder what Will would do. He’s a scarcity man. He told me. He said, ‘Always deal in scarcities.’ Will’s smart.”

The rutty road had not changed except that the ruts were deeper and the round stones stuck up higher.

Dessie said, “What’s the card on that mesquite bush?” She picked it off as they drove by, and it said, “Welcome Home.”

“Tom, you did it!”

“I did not. Someone’s been here.”

Every fifty yards there was another card sticking on a bush, or hanging from the branches of a madrone, or tacked to the trunk of a buckeye, and all of them said, “Welcome Home.” Dessie squealed with delight over each one.

They topped the rise above the little valley of the old Hamilton place and Tom pulled up to let her enjoy the view. On the hill across the valley, spelled out in whitewashed stones, were the huge words, “Welcome Home, Dessie.” She put her head against his lapel and laughed and cried at the same time.

Tom looked sternly ahead of him. “Now who could have done that?” he said. “A man can’t leave the place any more.”

In the dawn Dessie was awakened by the chill of pain that came to her at intervals. It was a rustle and a threat of pain; it scampered up from her side and across her abdomen, a nibbling pinch and then a little grab and then a hard catch and finally a fierce grip as though a huge hand had wrenched her. When that relaxed she felt a soreness like a bruise. It didn’t last very long, but while it went on the outside world was blotted out, and she seemed to be listening to the struggle in her body. When only the soreness remained she saw how the dawn had come silver to the windows. She smelled the good morning wind rippling the curtains, bringing in the odor of grass and roots and damp earth. After that sounds joined the parade of perception—sparrows haggling among themselves, a bawling cow monotonously beratine a punching hungry calf, a blue jay’s squawk of false excitement, the sharp warning of a cock quail on guard and the answering whisper of the hen quail somewhere near in the tall grass. The chickenyard boiled with excitement over an egg, and a big lady Rhode Island Red, who weighed four pounds, hypocritically protested the horror of being lustfully pinned to the ground by a scrawny wreck of a rooster she could have blasted with one blow of her wing.

The cooing of pigeons brought memory into the procession. Dessie remembered how her father had said, sitting at the head of the table, “I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and—do you know?—he said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘Ilike white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.”

And Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.”

“I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said.

And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!”

“Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”

And of course he got white pigeons and waited truculently for sadness and death until he’d proved his point. And here were the great-great-grand squabs cooing in the morning and rising to fly like a whirling white scarf around the wagon shed.

As Dessie remembered, she heard the words and the house around her grew peopled. Sadness and death, she thought, and death and sadness, and it wrenched in her stomach against the soreness. You just have to wait around long enough and it will come.

She heard the air whooshing into the big bellows in the forge and the practice tap for range of hammer on anvil. She heard Liza open the oven door and the thump of a kneaded loaf on the floury board. Then Joe wandered about, looking in unlikely places for his shoes, and at last found them where he had left them under the bed.

She heard Mollie’s sweet high voice in the kitchen, reading a morning text from the Bible, and Una’s full cold throaty correction.

And Tom had cut Mollie’s tongue with his pocketknife and died in his heart when he realized his courage.

“Oh, dear Tom,” she said, and her lips moved.

Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. His violence balanced his tenderness, and himself was a pitted battlefield of his own forces. He was confused now, but Dessie could hold his bit and point him, the way a handler points a thoroughbred at the barrier to show his breeding and his form.

Dessie lay part in pain and a part of her dangled still in sleep while the morning brightened against the window. She remembered that Mollie was going to lead the Grand March at the Fourth of July picnic with no less than Harry Forbes, State Senator. And Dessie had not finished putting the braid on Mollie’s dress. She struggled to get up. There was so much braid, and here she lay drowsing.