East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

As they walked back toward the house Cyrus turned left and entered the woodlot among the trees, and it was dusk. Suddenly Adam said, “You see that stump there, sir? I used to hide between the roots on the far side. After you punished me I used to hide there, and sometimes I went there just because I felt bad.” “Let’s go and see the place,” his father said. Adam led him to it, and Cyrus looked down at the nestlike hole between the roots. “I knew about it long ago,” he said. “Once when you were gone a long time I thought you must have such a place, and I found it because I felt the kind of a place you would need. See how the earth is tamped and the little grass is torn? And while you sat in there you stripped little pieces of bark to shreds. I knew it was the place when I came upon it.” Adam was staring at his father in wonder. “You never came here looking for me,” he said. “No,” Cyrus replied. “I wouldn’t do that. You can drive a human too far. I wouldn’t do that. Always you must leave a man one escape before death. Remember that! I knew, I guess, how hard I was pressing you. I didn’t want to push you over the edge.”

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dangerous animal.

He realized that he wanted this one for his own. “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.

She had not only made up her mind to marry Adam but she had so decided before he had asked her. She was afraid. She needed protection and money. Adam could give her both. And she could control him—she knew that. She did not want to be married, but for the time being it was a refuge. Only one thing bothered her. Adam had a warmth toward her which she did not understand since she had none toward him, nor had ever experienced it toward anyone.

“There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”

What made Kate so effective was the fact that she had either learned it or had been born with the knowledge. Kate never hurried. If a barrier arose, she waited until it had disappeared before continuing. She was capable of complete relaxation between the times for action. Also, she was mistress of a technique which is the basis of good wrestling—that of letting your opponent do the heavy work toward his own defeat, or of guiding his strength toward his weaknesses.

Adam said, “Get off my place. Go on—get off. You’re acting crazy. Get off. This is my place. I bought it.” “You bought your eyes and nose,” Samuel jeered. “You bought your uprightness. You bought your thumb on sideways. Listen to me, because I’m like to kill you after. You bought! You bought out of some sweet inheritance. Think now—do you deserve your children, man?” “Deserve them? They’re here—I guess. I don’t understand you.” Samuel wailed, “God save me, Liza! It’s not the way you think, Adam! Listen to me before my thumb finds the bad place at throat. The precious twins—untried, unnoticed, undirected—and I say it quiet with my hands down—undiscovered.”

And Samuel was snarling at him. “Tear away with your jelly fingers. You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them. You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.” Suddenly he plucked his hard thumbs out of his neighbor’s throat.

The fire went out of Samuel’s eyes and he said quietly, “Your sons have no names.” Adam replied, “Their mother left them motherless.” “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?”

“I’ve had lots of time for it. I want to ask you something. I can’t remember behind the last ugly thing. Was she very beautiful, Samuel?” “To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation.” Adam mused aloud, “I wonder who she was—what she was. I was content not to know.” “And now you want to?” Adam dropped his eyes. “It’s not curiosity. But I would like to know what kind of blood is in my boys. When they grow up—won’t I be looking for something in them?” “Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them.” “But their blood—” “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”

He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him.

And Will said out of his experience, “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

“You know how it is,” Samuel said. “When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he’s gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.”

Samuel said softly, “I wonder you do not feel a shame at leaving that land fallow.” “I had no reason to plant it,” Adam said. “We had that out before. You thought I would change. I have not changed.” “Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” “I don’t know.” “Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

Samuel glanced at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Set your teeth in it. How we do defend a wrongness! Shall I tell you what you do, so you will not think you invented it? When you go to bed and blow out the lamp— then she stands in the doorway with a little light behind her, and you can see her nightgown stir. And she comes sweetly to your bed, and you, hardly breathing, turn back the covers to receive her and move your head over on the pillow to make room for her head beside yours. You can smell the sweetness of her skin, and it smells like no other skin in the world—” “Stop it,” Adam shouted at him. “Goddam you, stop it! Stop nosing over my life! You’re like a coyote sniffing around a dead cow.” “The way I know,” Samuel said softly, “is that one came to me that selfsame way—night after month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I’ll never know that. I think she would maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.”

Samuel looked after them. “They seem older than eleven,” he said. “I seem to remember that at eleven my brood were howlers and screamers and runners in circles. These seem like grown men.” “Do they?” Adam asked. Lee said, “I think I see why that is. There is no woman in the house to put a value on babies. I don’t think men care much for babies, and so it was never an advantage to these boys to be babies. There was nothing to gain by it. I don’t know whether that is good or bad.”

“Why didn’t you want the boys to learn Chinese, Adam?” Adam thought for a moment. “It seems a time for honesty,” he said at last. “I guess it was plain jealousy. I gave it another name, but maybe I didn’t want them to be able so easily to go away from me in a direction I couldn’t follow.”

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”

And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’ ”

Aron said, “I’ll go wrap up the rabbit. I’ve got the box my pants came in.” He ran out of the old house. Cal watched him go. He was smiling. “What are you laughing at?” Abra asked. “Oh, nothing,” he said. Cal’s eyes stayed on her. She tried to stare him down. She was an expert at staring down, but Cal did not look away. At very first he had felt a shyness, but that was gone now, and the sense of triumph at destroying Abra’s control made him laugh. He knew she preferred his brother, but that was nothing new to him. Nearly everyone preferred Aron with his golden hair and the openness that allowed his affection to plunge like a puppy. Cal’s emotions hid deep in him and peered out, ready to retreat or attack. He was starting to punish Abra for liking his brother, and this was nothing new either. He had done it since he first discovered he could. And secret punishment had grown to be almost a creative thing with him.

Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.

Nevertheless, with good manners they said good-by in the presence of the heads of the family. I have often thought that perhaps formal good manners may be a cushion against heartbreak.

Lee said quietly, “So young to be so erudite.”

“Yes, it meant something.” Then he said, “Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?” “Maybe you’re right,” said Adam. “It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.” “And memory.” “Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us. What did you want to talk to me about?”

And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over. But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist—or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

“Now, you say you want to give back the money your father lost. Why?” Ordinarily Cal’s eyes were squinted and cautious, but now they were so wide that they seemed to look around and through Will. Cal was as close to his own soul as it is possible to get. “My father is good,” he said. “I want to make it up to him because I am not good.” “If you do that, wouldn’t you be good?” “No,” said Cal. “I think bad.” Will had never met anyone who spoke so nakedly. He was near to embarrassment because of the nakedness, and he knew how safe Cal was in his stripped honesty. “Only one more,” he said, “and I won’t mind if you don’t answer it. I don’t think I would answer it. Here it is. Suppose you should get this money and give it to your father—would it cross your mind that you were trying to buy his love?” “Yes, sir. It would. And it would be true.”

I guess we were like a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose in the first flurry and it hurts and we wished it was over.

Joe lavished every care on his love, and he perfected a lonely set of rules which might have gone like this: 1. Don’t believe nobody. The bastards are after you. 2. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t stick your neck out. 3. Keep your ears open. When they make a slip, grab on to it and wait. 4. Everybody’s a son of a bitch and whatever you do they got it coming. 5. Go at everything roundabout. 6. Don’t never trust no dame about nothing. 7. Put your faith in dough. Everybody wants it. Everybody will sell out for it.

“All great and precious things are lonely.” “What is the word again?” “Timshel—thou mayest.”

Cal’s mind careened in anger at himself and in pity for himself. And then a new voice came into it, saying coolly and with contempt, “If you’re being honest—why not say you are enjoying this beating you’re giving yourself? That would be the truth. Why not be just what you are and do just what you do?” Cal sat in shock from this thought. Enjoying?—of course. By whipping himself he protected himself against whipping by someone else.

Lee said testily, “Goddam it, whenever a person wants reassurance he tells a friend to think what he wants to be true. It’s like asking a waiter what’s good tonight. How the hell do I know?”

“You’re pretty full of yourself. You’re marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask—Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer.

“Maybe I deserve to be killed.” “Stop that!” Lee said coldly. “That can be the cheapest kind of self-indulgence. You stop that!”

Lee started to speak and choked and then what he wanted to say seemed good to say—to say carefully. He hovered over her. “You know, I haven’t wished for many things in my life,” he began. “I learned very early not to wish for things. Wishing just brought earned disappointment. ”

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?”

The smell of azaleas and the sleepy smell of sun working with chlorophyll filled the air.

Cal said, “Abra, I’ve killed my brother and my father is paralyzed because of me.” She took his arm and clung to it with both hands. Cal said, “Didn’t you hear me?” “I heard you.” “Abra, my mother was a whore.” “I know. You told me. My father is thief.” “I’ve got her blood, Abra. Don’t you understand?” “I’ve got his,” she said.

“Maybe you’ll come to know that every man in every generation is refired.

“I have to,” said Lee. “If it kills him I have to. I have the choice,” and he smiled sadly and quoted, “ ‘If there’s blame, it’s my blame.’ ” Lee’s shoulders straightened. He said sharply, “Your son is marked with guilt out of himself—out of himself—almost more than he can bear. Don’t crush him with rejection. Don’t crush him, Adam.”

“Timshel!”