East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

What good to clean the house when there was no one to see it? Only on the nights he went to the inn did he wash himself and put on clean clothes.

He remembered quite inaccurately the time before Adam went away as the happy time, and he wanted it to come again.

“It looks,” he wrote, “like somebody marked me like a cow. The damn thing gets darker. By the time you get home it will maybe be black. All I need is one going the other way and I would look like a Papist on Ash Wednesday. I don’t know why it bothers me. I got plenty other scars. It just seems like I was marked. And when I go into town, like to the inn, why, people are always looking at it. I can hear them talking about it when they don’t know I can hear. I don’t know why they’re so damn curious about it. It gets so I don’t feel like going in town at all.”

His impulse was to rush into a crowd for warmth, any crowd.

Adam remembered his father’s tone and how he looked. And he had plenty of time to remember, because he did rot in barracks. He remembered that Cyrus was lonely and alone—and knew it.

“I don’t know why I signed again. It was like somebody else doing it. Write soon and tell me how you are.”

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

“This time I’m coming home,” and that was the last Charles heard of him for over three years.

Such men are rare now, but in the nineties there were many of them, wandering men, lonely men, who wanted it that way.

They were all kinds of men—literate men and ignorant men, clean men and dirty men—but all of them had restlessness in common.

And by now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle.

His voice had grown soft, and he had merged many accents and dialects into his own speech, so that his speech did not seem foreign anywhere.

He traveled alone after that and made sure that he was shaven and clean.

The Negroes were poor enough to be kind, but they could not trust any white man no matter how poor, and the poor white men had a fear of strangers.

He removed expression from his face, light from his eyes, and silenced his speech.

Suddenly Adam thought of his stepmother—as unloved as the farm, adequate, clean in her way, but no more wife than the farm was a home.

“Isn’t that plain enough? I said it plain. There’s only one meaning to dishonest.”

It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

“I can’t understand why a girl like you—” he began, and fell right into the oldest conviction in the world—that the girl you are in love with can’t possibly be anything but true and honest.

If in all the years Mr. Edwards had heard about anyone like himself he would have laughed. For Mr. Edwards, as coldblooded a whoremaster as ever lived, had fallen hopelessly, miserably in love with Catherine Amesbury. He rented a sweet little brick house for her and then gave it to her. He bought her every imaginable luxury, overdecorated the house, kept it overwarm. The carpeting was too deep and the walls were crowded with heavy framed pictures.

She gave him an impression of restlessness, as though she might take flight at any moment.

In their sexual relations she convinced him that the result was not quite satisfactory to her, that if he were a better man he could release a flood of unbelievable reaction in her.

Mr. Edwards was essentially a simple man, but even a simple man has complexities which are dark and twisted. Catherine was clever, but even a clever woman misses some of the strange corridors in a man.

She spoke to him softly. “You fat slug,” she said. “What do you know about me? Do you think I can’t read every rotten thought you ever had?

Her voice came from so near that he jerked his head back. He heard richness in her voice. “Dear,” she said softly, “I didn’t know you would take it so. I’m sorry, Adam.”

“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?”

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

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

He said kindly, “What happened, Mr. Trask? Tell me what happened.”

Adam opened his eyes, and they were blank like a sleepwalker’s eyes. And his voice came out without rise or fall, without emphasis, and without any emotion. It was as though he pronounced perfectly words in a language he did not understand.

There were water rights, boundary disputes, astray arguments, domestic relations, paternity matters—all to be settled without force of arms.

First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously.

the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

The sects fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the others were bound for hell in a basket.

but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself.

Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic conversion against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had stood under the window of a whorehouse and listened to the low decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities of the two ministries.

Do you remember hearing that, old men?

Myths collect around her, and, oddly enough, not voluptuous myths.

When you came out of there you felt that something pretty stern and important had happened. It was no jump in the hay. The dark beautiful eyes of the Nigger stayed with you for days.

If any sexual thing happened to you at Faye’s you felt it was an accident but forgivable.

The doctor looked closely at him. “I think you’re telling the truth, Samuel. I’ll keep the money.”

“Samuel, do you think why you want to go? Is it your natural incurable nosiness? Is it your black inability to mind your own business?”

He slammed into the bedroom, and Liza smiled at the panels.

“What is there to understand? Just read it. There it is in black and white. Who wants you to understand it? If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He’d have given you to understand or He’d have set it down different.”

“Don’t agree with me all the time. It hints of insincerity. Speak up for yourself.”

“For the love of any holy thing you can remember, step back from me. I feel murder nudging my gizzard.”

You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.” Suddenly he plucked his hard thumbs out of his neighbor’s throat.

“And you have left them fatherless. Can’t you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don’t you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?”

“There wasn’t any fear in it,” Adam said. “It was more like a weariness.”