East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers.

It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.

The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer.

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot.

Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.

When my grandfather came into the valley the mustard was so tall that a man on horseback showed only his head above the yellow flowers.

The Salinas River sank under its sand.

But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley.

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish.

Then the Americans came—more greedy because there were more of them.

these to me are the most fascinating of all names because each name suggests a story that has been forgotten.

You can name anything San Lorenzo, but Shirt Tail Canyon or the Lame Moor is something quite different.

He was the son of small farmers, neither rich nor poor, who had lived on one landhold and in one stone house for many hundreds of years.

He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money.

His clever hands built a well-boring rig, and he bored wells on the lands of luckier men.

He had a rich deep voice, good both in song and in speech, and while he had no brogue there was a rise and a lilt and a cadence to his talk that made it sound sweet in the ears of the taciturn farmers from the valley bottom.

Samuel should have been rich from his well rig and his threshing machine and his shop, but he had no gift for business.

Samuel’s hands were so good and gentle that neighbors from twenty miles away would call on him to help with a birth. And he was equally good with mare, cow, or woman.

with pregnancy and the birth of children. The Hamiltons must have been either lucky or moral for the sections on gonorrhea and syphilis were never opened.

Samuel kept always a foreignness. Perhaps it was in the cadence of his speech, and this had the effect of making men, and women too, tell him things they would not tell to relatives or close friends. His slight strangeness set him apart and made him safe as a repository.

She felt that people having a good time were wide open to the devil. And this was a shame, for Samuel was a laughing man, but I guess Samuel was wide open to the devil. His wife protected him whenever she could.

She suffered bravely and uncomplainingly through life, convinced that that was the way her God wanted everyone to live. She felt that rewards came later.

They landed with no money, no equipment, no tools, no credit, and particularly with no knowledge of the new country and no technique for using it.

It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put their faith there and let the smaller securities take care of themselves.

because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back.

Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.

managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable.

Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks.

a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents.

Her god of communication became a god of vengeance—to her the most satisfactory deity she had devised so far—and, as it turned out, the last.

As the warm unconsciousness finally crept over her, she was thinking with some irritation of how her white lawn shroud would have mud down the front when they pulled her out in the morning. And it did.

The baby was drunk for two days and a half.

Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.

He knew not only the battles, movements, campaigns, but also the units involved, down to the regiments, their colonels, and where they originated. And from telling he became convinced that he had been there.

The death of Lincoln caught Cyrus in the pit of the stomach. Always he remembered how he felt when he first heard the news. And he could never mention it or hear of it without quick tears in his eyes.

He traveled from one end of the country to the other, attending conventions, meetings, and encampments. So much for his public life.

with sickness which resembled punishment. A stomach ache was treated with a purge so violent that it was a wonder anyone survived it.

He kept them hard with exercises, beating out the rhythm with a stick on his wooden leg.

When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong-willed and concentrated little man wearing a huge busby.

Charles was a natural athlete, with instinctive timing and coordination and the competitor’s will to win over others, which makes for success in the world.

His father, a one-legged natural force at first, installed justly to make little boys feel littler and stupid boys aware of their stupidity; and then—after god had crashed—he saw his father as the policeman laid on by birth, the officer who might be circumvented, or fooled, but never challenged.

but love, affection, empathy, were beyond conception.

And as a result of her fault she was not here. Adam thought sometimes that if he could only find out what sin it was she had committed, why, he would sin it too—and not be here.

Alice did not see him. She was darning socks and she was smiling.

And he ached toward her with a longing that was passionate and hot.

all of these were in his passion, and he did not know it because he did not know that such things existed, so how could he miss them?

He feared the day he would be taken and enlisted in the army. His father never let him forget that such a time would come. He spoke of it often. It was Adam who needed the army to make a man of him. Charles was pretty near a man already. And Charles was a man, and a dangerous man, even at fifteen, and when Adam was sixteen.