The Red Pony Read online

  The first story, likewise, "The Gift," has an element of self-deconstructiveness, starting with its ironic title. The red pony colt is the kind of "gift" called "Greek," in that it comes hearing special conditions. Jody must earn his "gift" by attending to its training. Like many middle-class parents (as in Flicka ), Carl Tiflin hopes to use the experience as a step in an enforced process of teaching "responsibility." But it is Billy Buck who serves as the tutor when it comes to actually caring for the pony, and his tragic failure in that regard results in the emotional explosion with which the story ends--not only Jody's grief but Billy Buck's turning on the unseeing father, a multiple instance of unresolved anger. The title of the third story (the last in the original cycle), "The Promise," is again ironic. The terms of the second "gift" are such that Jody can take no pleasure in it, having required the death of Nellie, the gentle old mare: "He tried to be glad because of the colt, but the bloody face, and the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him." Here again it is Billy Buck who is the parental figure, carrying the guilt over his omissions that caused the death of the red pony into the bloody horror of delivering the second colt. Though the death of the mare is inevitable, the position of the colt in her womb being beyond human intervention, Billy turns it into an act of retaliation against Jody: "There's your colt, the way I promised," he says implying that the death of the mare was somehow the boy's fault, much as the name of the colt (given before it is born), Black Demon, carries with it a kind of foreboding or tragic necessity, linking it to the dark range of mountains much as the red pony was named for the Gabilans.

  Symbols of death and loss loom over these stories, but they do not point toward any cumulative pattern of resolution. The most explicit of the parables in this regard is the second, which, like the fourth and last, exists outside the "pony" sequence. The sight of the old Mexican riding an ancient horse off into "The Great Mountains" never to return is a powerful, even archetypal image, which fills Jody with "a nameless sorrow" but no real understanding of what he has witnessed. Death may be the dominant theme of these stories, but although we can read the signs and signals, Jody cannot, and he serves chiefly as a kind of symbol himself, of boyish innocence against which the cycles of birth and death are played. Again, the cumulative result is not progressive but promotes a kind of stasis, a symbolic map of contraries and correspondences: the two ranges of mountains, the two colts, the two old men, the two "fathers," an arrangement centered by the "round tub at the brush line" and the sad boy lying next to it "with his crossed arms and... nameless sorrow."

  Like many innocents in American fiction, Jody is something of a Christ figure, burdened with sorrows occasioned by other men. But in many telling ways, also, he is not a particularly sympathetic little boy--again in contrast to the youths in Yearling and Flicka. He is given to bullying Doubletree Mutt, the family dog, and pestering the cat in Tom Sawyer fashion--but without Tom's saving grace of mischievous humor. He revenges himself upon his nagging parents by killing a songbird against their specific proscriptions, and we can hardly be sympathetic toward his cold-blooded plans to kill a community of unsuspecting mice--whose chief crime seems to be their plumpness. Christ does not come to mind but rather Twain's Young Satan. This is clearly not Wordsworth's or even Rousseau's Natural Child but rather a kid by way of Calvin and Hobbes. Again, all of these gestures are integral to the power play that makes up the chief substance of the stories, ending with Jody's bearing a glass of lemonade to his grandfather, a tart sacrament of rebellion against his father. "He didn't care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion."

  The Red Pony is undoubtedly the most unconventional story about the adventures of a boy in rural America that can be found in our national canon, lacking as it does both a developmental sequence and a strong moral overlay of didacticism. I have been told that it has become a particular favorite among younger readers--teenagers, not children--perhaps for the same reasons I was drawn to Steinbeck's fiction during my own high-school years. Adolescents are attracted to stories that seem to present a realistic account of life--including death--nor are they made particularly uncomfortable by scenes of cruel, even unwarranted suffering. Neither Catcher in the Rye nor Lord of the Flies were taken up by young readers because of any positive moral at the end, and recent examples of fiction specifically written for adolescents likewise approach the balance of situational ethics, not the loaded situations of proscriptive, adult-legislated morality.

  If I have drawn extended comparisons between The RedPony and equivalent stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Mary O'Hara, it was not merely to emphasize differences. Both of these subsequent, very popular novels bear clear debts to Steinbeck, despite their contrasting emphases, and though more clearly written for adolescent readers, they also avoid the easy resolutions and faultless adult tutors of so much earlier literature aimed at that young audience. True, problems are introduced in those two novels in order to achieve resolutions, and the deaths and near deaths of pets are integrated to the social necessity of maturation. But both stories share Steinbeck's interest in psychological and familial realism, presenting parents and other adults who can be as misguided and self-interested as children. And both portray the rural scene as something less than the locus of a pastoral idyll, but rather as a place in the American landscape as prone to economic complications and deadly accident as the urban scene. These emphases, I would suggest, can be traced to Steinbeck's influence.

  Steinbeck, once again, was only forwarding, with his own revisions, the lessons of agrarian fiction found in the works of Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, and he was assisted in this regard by his fellow writers Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner as well. But in Steinbeck's The Red Pony we find a singular instance of the daily rounds of the farmer's life as it impinges on the felt need of a small boy to force some space for himself in the neighboring world. It is also, notably, a story in which anger in open and indirect manifestations is the chief emotion expressed, rage against the necessity of death that encircles all events. Such anger is classically an aspect of grieving, reminding us once again that Steinbeck wrote these stories in the shadow of his mother's mortality and the matched prospect of his father's decline. But if The Red Pony served as a channel for Steinbeck's grief, the parables the book contains testify also to the supremacy of craft over emotion, as well as signaling a move away from the stylistically luxuriant early prose toward the matter-of-fact manner, the perfect detachment of irony that characterizes his greatest work. They attest to the author's arrival at artistic maturity, one sign of which is his refusal to allow Jody an equivalent crossing-over.

  The Red Pony is not, as I stated in the beginning, a book for children, but it is preeminently a book about a child. Perhaps the present edition will lead readers to an unimpeded recognition of the true nature and enduring importance of a story cycle that was central not only to the author's emergence as a major American novelist but to the development of a distinctly midtwentieth-century genre, opening up as it did a whole new range of possibilities about the fictional presentation of a child's world. For whatever else this book may be, it is most assuredly a book about a boy, a caterpillar kid moreover, not a fragile adolescent butterfly, in whom we may easily recognize that embryonic barbarian who once stood in the way of our path from home.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

  Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

  Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963.

  French, Warren. John Steinbeck (second edition, revised). Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

  Hughes, R. S. Beyond the Red Pony: A Reader's Companion to Steinbeck's Complet
e Short Stories. Metuchen and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1987.

  Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958.

  Timmerman, John H. The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

  The Red Pony

  1

  The Gift

  At daybreak Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house. Billy stuck the brush and currycomb together and laid them on the rail, and went up to breakfast. His actions had been so deliberate and yet so wasteless of time that he came to the house while Mrs. Tiflin was still ringing the triangle. She nodded her gray head to him and withdrew into the kitchen. Billy Buck sat down on the steps, because he was a cow-hand, and it wouldn't be fitting that he should go first into the dining-room. He heard Mr. Tiflin in the house, stamping his feet into his boots.

  The high jangling note of the triangle put the boy Jody in motion. He was only a little boy, ten years old, with hair like dusty yellow grass and with shy polite gray eyes, and with a mouth that worked when he thought. The triangle picked him up out of sleep. It didn't occur to him to disobey the harsh note. He never had: no one he knew ever had. He brushed the tangled hair out of his eyes and skinned his nightgown off. In a moment he was dressed--blue chambray shirt and overalls. It was late in the summer, so of course there were no shoes to bother with. In the kitchen he waited until his mother got from in front of the sink and went back to the stove. Then he washed himself and brushed back his wet hair with his fingers. His mother turned sharply on him as he left the sink. Jody looked shyly away.

  "I've got to cut your hair before long," his mother said. "Breakfast's on the table. Go on in, so Billy can come."

  Jody sat at the long table which was covered with white oilcloth washed through to the fabric in some places. The fried eggs lay in rows on their platter. Jody took three eggs on his plate and followed with three thick slices of crisp bacon. He carefully scraped a spot of blood from one of the egg yolks.

  Billy Buck clumped in. "That won't hurt you," Billy explained. "That's only a sign the rooster leaves."

  Jody's tall stern father came in then and Jody knew from the noise on the floor that he was wearing boots, but he looked under the table anyway, to make sure. His father turned off the oil lamp over the table, for plenty of morning light now came through the windows.

  Jody did not ask where his father and Billy Buck were riding that day, but he wished he might go along. His father was a disciplinarian. Jody obeyed him in everything without questions of any kind. Now, Carl Tiflin sat down and reached for the egg platter.

  "Got the cows ready to go, Billy?" he asked.

  "In the lower corral," Billy said. "I could just as well take them in alone."

  "Sure you could. But a man needs company. Besides your throat gets pretty dry." Carl Tiflin was jovial this morning.

  Jody's mother put her head in the door. "What time do you think to be back, Carl?"

  "I can't tell. I've got to see some men in Salinas. Might be gone till dark."

  The eggs and coffee and big biscuits disappeared rapidly. Jody followed the two men out of the house. He watched them mount their horses and drive six old milk cows out of the corral and start over the hill toward Salinas. They were going to sell the old cows to the butcher.

  When they had disappeared over the crown of the ridge Jody walked up the hill in back of the house. The dogs trotted around the house corner hunching their shoulders and grinning horribly with pleasure. Jody patted their heads--Doubletree Mutt with the big thick tail and yellow eyes, and Smasher, the shepherd, who had killed a coyote and lost an ear doing it. Smasher's one good ear stood up higher than a collie's ear should. Billy Buck said that always happened. After the frenzied greeting the dogs lowered their noses to the ground in a businesslike way and went ahead, looking back now and then to make sure that the boy was coming. They walked up through the chicken yard and saw the quail eating with the chickens. Smasher chased the chickens a little to keep in practice in case there should ever be sheep to herd. Jody continued on through the large vegetable patch where the green corn was higher than his head. The cowpumpkins were green and small yet. He went on to the sagebrush line where the cold spring ran out of its pipe and fell into a round wooden tub. He leaned over and drank close to the green mossy wood where the water tasted best. Then he turned and looked back on the ranch, on the low, whitewashed house girded with red geraniums, and on the long bunkhouse by the cypress tree where Billy Buck lived alone. Jody could see the great black kettle under the cypress tree. That was where the pigs were scalded. The sun was coming over the ridge now, glaring on the whitewash of the houses and barns, making the wet grass blaze softly. Behind him, in the tall sagebrush, the birds were scampering on the ground, making a great noise among the dry leaves; the squirrels piped shrilly on the side-hills. Jody looked along at the farm buildings. He felt an uncertainty in the air, a feeling of change and of loss and of the gain of new and unfamiliar things. Over the hillside two big black buzzards sailed low to the ground and their shadows slipped smoothly and quickly ahead of them. Some animal had died in the vicinity. Jody knew it. It might be a cow or it might be the remains of a rabbit. The buzzards overlooked nothing. Jody hated them as all decent things hate them, but they could not be hurt because they made away with carrion.

  After a while the boy sauntered down the hill again. The dogs had long ago given him up and gone into the brush to do things in their own way. Back through the vegetable garden he went, and he paused for a moment to smash a green muskmelon with his heel, but he was not happy about it. It was a bad thing to do, he knew perfectly well. He kicked dirt over the ruined melon to conceal it.

  Back at the house his mother bent over his rough hands, inspecting his fingers and nails. It did little good to start him clean to school for too many things could happen on the way. She sighed over the black cracks on his fingers, and then gave him his books and his lunch and started him on the mile walk to school. She noticed that his mouth was working a good deal this morning.

  Jody started his journey. He filled his pockets with little pieces of white quartz that lay in the road, and every so often he took a shot at a bird or at some rabbit that had stayed sunning itself in the road too long. At the crossroads over the bridge he met two friends and the three of them walked to school together, making ridiculous strides and being rather silly. School had just opened two weeks before. There was still a spirit of revolt among the pupils.

  It was four o'clock in the afternoon when Jody topped the hill and looked down on the ranch again. He looked for the saddle horses, but the corral was empty. His father was not back yet. He went slowly, then, toward the afternoon chores. At the ranch house, he found his mother sitting on the porch, mending socks.

  "There's two doughnuts in the kitchen for you," she said. Jody slid to the kitchen, and returned with half of one of the doughnuts already eaten and his mouth full. His mother asked him what he had learned in school that day, but she didn't listen to his doughnut-muffled answer. She interrupted, "Jody, tonight see you fill the wood-box clear full. Last night you crossed the sticks and it wasn't only ab
out half full. Lay the sticks flat tonight. And Jody, some of the hens are hiding eggs, or else the dogs are eating them. Look about in the grass and see if you can find any nests."

  Jody, still eating, went out and did his chores. He saw the quail come down to eat with the chickens when he threw out the grain. For some reason his father was proud to have them come. He never allowed any shooting near the house for fear the quail might go away.

  When the wood-box was full, Jody took his twenty-two rifle up to the cold spring at the brush line. He drank again and then aimed the gun at all manner of things, at rocks, at birds on the wing, at the big black pig kettle under the cypress tree, but he didn't shoot for he had no cartridges and he wouldn't have until he was twelve. If his father had seen him aim the rifle in the direction of the house he would have put the cartridges off another year. Jody remembered this and did not point the rifle down the hill again. Two years was enough to wait for cartridges. Nearly all of his father's presents were given with reservations which hampered their value somewhat. It was good discipline.

  The supper waited until dark for his father to return. When at last he came in with Billy Buck, Jody could smell the delicious brandy on their breaths. Inwardly he rejoiced, for his father sometimes talked to him when he smelled of brandy, sometimes even told things he had done in the wild days when he was a boy.

  After supper, Jody sat by the fireplace and his shy polite eyes sought the room corners, and he waited for his father to tell what it was he contained, for Jody knew he had news of some sort. But he was disappointed. His father pointed a stern finger at him.

  "You'd better go to bed, Jody. I'm going to need you in the morning."