East of Eden Page 6

  Once when he was very ill Samuel asked, "Liza, couldn't I have a glass of whisky to ease me?"

  She set her little hard chin. "Would you go to the throne of God with liquor on your breath? You would not!" she said.

  Samuel rolled over on his side and went about his illness without ease.

  When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and her doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.

  Samuel and Liza Hamilton got all of their children raised and well toward adulthood before the turn of the century. It was a whole clot of Hamiltons growing up on the ranch to the east of King City. And they were American children and young men and women. Samuel never went back to Ireland and gradually he forgot it entirely. He was a busy man. He had no time for nostalgia. The Salinas Valley was the world. A trip to Salinas sixty miles to the north at the head of the valley was event enough for a year, and the incessant work on the ranch, the care and feeding and clothing of his bountiful family, took most of his time--but not all. His energy was large.

  His daughter Una had become a brooding student, tense and dark. He was proud of her wild, exploring mind. Olive was preparing to take county examinations after a stretch in the secondary school in Salinas. Olive was going to be a teacher, an honor like having a priest in the family in Ireland. Joe was to be sent to college because he was no damn good at anything else. Will was well along the way to accidental fortune. Tom bruised himself on the world and licked his cuts. Dessie was studying dressmaking, and Mollie, pretty Mollie, would obviously marry some well-to-do man.

  There was no question of inheritance. Although the hill ranch was large it was abysmally poor. Samuel sunk well after well and could not find water on his own land. That would have made the difference. Water would have made them comparatively rich. The one poor pipe of water pumped up from deep near the house was the only source; sometimes it got dangerously low, and twice it went dry. The cattle had to come from the far fringe of the ranch to drink and then go out again to feed.

  All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent, and successfully planted in the Salinas Valley, not poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. Samuel was well pleased with the fruit of his loins.

  Chapter 6

  1

  After Adam joined the army and Cyrus moved to Washington, Charles lived alone on the farm. He boasted about getting himself a wife, but he did not go about doing it by the usual process of meeting girls, taking them to dances, testing their virtues or otherwise, and finally slipping feebly into marriage. The truth of it was that Charles was abysmally timid of girls. And, like most shy men, he satisfied his normal needs in the anonymity of the prostitute. There is great safety for a shy man with a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal to her. Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which shrivels the guts of timid men.

  The arrangement was simple and reasonably secret. The owner of the inn kept three rooms on his top floor for transients, which he rented to girls for two-week periods. At the end of two weeks a new set of girls took their place. Mr. Hallam, the innkeeper, had no part in the arrangement. He could almost say with truth that he didn't know anything about it. He simply collected five times the normal rent for his three rooms. The girls were assigned, procured, moved, disciplined, and robbed by a whoremaster named Edwards, who lived in Boston. His girls moved in a slow circuit among the small towns, never staying anywhere more than two weeks. It was an extremely workable system. A girl was not in town long enough to cause remark either by citizen or town marshal. They stayed pretty much in the rooms and avoided public places. They were forbidden on pain of beating to drink or make noise or to fall in love with anyone. Meals were served in their rooms, and the clients were carefully screened. No drunken man was permitted to go up to them. Every six months each girl was given one month of vacation to get drunk and raise hell. On the job, let a girl be disobedient to the rules, and Mr. Edwards personally stripped her, gagged her, and horsewhipped her within an inch of her life. If she did it again she found herself in jail, charged with vagrancy and public prostitution.

  The two-week stands had another advantage. Many of the girls were diseased, and a girl had nearly always gone away by the time her gift had incubated in a client. There was no one for a man to get mad at. Mr. Hallam knew nothing about it, and Mr. Edwards never appeared publicly in his business capacity. He had a very good thing in his circuit.

  The girls were all pretty much alike--big, healthy, lazy, and dull. A man could hardly tell there had been a change. Charles Trask made it a habit to go to the inn at least once every two weeks, to creep up to the top floor, do his quick business, and return to the bar to get mildly drunk.

  The Trask house had never been gay, but lived in only by Charles it took on a gloomy, rustling decay. The lace curtains were gray, the floors, although swept, grew sticky and dank. The kitchen was lacquered--walls, windows, and ceiling--with grease from the frying pans.

  The constant scrubbing by the wives who had lived there and the biannual deep-seated scourging had kept the dirt down. Charles rarely did more than sweep. He gave up sheets on his bed and slept between blankets. 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.

  Charles developed a restlessness that got him out at dawn. He worked the farm mightily because he was lonely. Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep in the resulting torpor.

  His dark face took on the serious expressionlessness of a man who is nearly always alone. He missed his brother more than he missed his mother and father. He remembered quite inaccurately the time before Adam went away as the happy time, and he wanted it to come again.

  During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude. For this he took a powerful purge called Father George's Elixir of Life.

  One accident he did have in the third year of his aloneness. He was digging out rocks and sledding them to the stone wall. One large boulder was difficult to move. Charles pried at it with a long iron bar, and the rock bucked and rolled back again and again. Suddenly he lost his temper. The little smile came on his face, and he fought the stone as though it were a man, in silent fury. He drove his bar deep behind it and threw his whole weight back. The bar slipped and its upper end crashed against his forehead. For a few moments he lay unconscious in the field and then he rolled over and staggered, half-blinded, to the house. There was a long torn welt on his forehead from hairline to a point between his eyebrows. For a few weeks his head was bandaged over a draining infection, but that did not worry him. In that day pus was. thought to be benign, a proof that a wound was healing properly. When the wound did heal, it left a long and crinkled scar, and while most scar tissue is lighter than the surrounding skin, Charles' scar turned dark brown. Perhaps the bar had forced iron rust under the skin and made a kind of tattoo.

  The wound had not worried Charles, but the scar did. It looked like a long fingermark laid on his forehead. He inspected it often in the little mirror by the stove. He combed his hair down over his forehead to conceal as much of it as he could. He conceived a shame for his scar; he hated his scar. He became restless when anyone looked at it, and fury rose in him if any question was asked about it. In a letter to his brother he put down his feeling about it.

  "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."

  2

  Adam was discharged in 1885 and started to beat his way home. In appearance he had changed little. There was no military carriage about him. The cavalry didn't act that way. Indeed some units took pride in a sloppy posture.

  Adam felt that he was sleepwalking. It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it. In the morning he awakened on a split second and lay waiting for reveille. His calves missed the hug of leggings and his throat felt naked without its tight collar. He arrived in Chicago, and there, for no reason, rented a furnished room for a week, stayed in it for two days, went to Buffalo," changed his mind, and moved to Niagara Falls. He didn't want to go home and he put it off as long as possible. Home was not a pleasant place in his mind. The kind of feelings he had had there were dead in him, and he had a reluctance to bring them to life. He watched the falls by the hour. Their roar stupefied and hypnotized him.

  One evening he felt a crippling loneliness for the close men in barracks and tent. His impulse was to rush into a crowd for warmth, any crowd. The first crowded public place he could find was a little bar, thronged and smoky. He sighed with pleasure, almost nestled in the human clot the way a cat nestles into a woodpile. He ordered whisky and drank it and felt warm and good. He did not see or hear. He simply absorbed the contact.

  As it grew late and the men began to drift away, he became fearful of the time when he would have to go home. Soon he was alone with the bartender, who was rubbing and rubbing the mahogany of the bar and trying with his eyes and his manner to get Adam to go.

  "I'll have one more," Adam said.

  The bartender set the bottle out. Adam noticed him for the first time. He had a strawberry mark on his forehead.

  "I'm a stranger in these parts," said Adam.

  "That's what we mostly get at the falls," the bartender said.

  "I've been in the army. Cavalry."

  "Yeah!" the bartender said.

  Adam felt suddenly that he had to impress this man, had to get under his skin some way. "Fighting Indians," he said. "Had some great times."

  The man did not answer him.

  "My brother has a mark on his head."

  The bartender touched the strawberry mark with his fingers. "Birthmark," he said. "Gets bigger every year. Your brother got one?"

  "His came from a cut. He wrote me about it."

  "You notice this one of mine looks like a cat?"

  "Sure it does."

  "That's my nickname, Cat. Had it all my life. They say my old lady must of been scared by a cat when she was having me."

  "I'm on my way home. Been away a long time. Won't you have a drink?"

  "Thanks. Where you staying?"

  "Mrs. May's boarding house."

  "I know her. What they tell is she fills you up with soup so you can't eat much meat."

  "I guess there are tricks to every trade," said Adam.

  "I guess that's right. There's sure plenty in mine."

  "I bet that's true," said Adam.

  "But the one trick I need I haven't got. I wisht I knew that one."

  "What is it?"

  "How the hell to get you to go home and let me close up."

  Adam stared at him, stared at him and did not speak.

  "It's a joke," the bartender said uneasily.

  "I guess I'll go home in the morning," said Adam. "I mean my real home."

  "Good luck," the bartender said.

  Adam walked through the dark town, increasing his speed as though his loneliness sniffed along behind him. The sagging front steps of his boarding house creaked a warning as he climbed them. The hall was gloomed with the dot of yellow light from an oil lamp turned down so low that it jerked expiringly.

  The landlady stood in her open doorway and her nose made a shadow to the bottom of her chin. Her cold eyes followed Adam as do the eyes of a front-painted portrait, and she listened with her nose for the whisky that was in him.

  "Good night," said Adam.

  She did not answer him.

  At the top of the first flight he looked back. Her head was raised, and now her chin made a shadow on her throat and her eyes had no pupils.

  His room smelled of dust dampened and dried many times. He picked a match from his block and scratched it on the side of the block. He lighted the shank of candle in the japanned candlestick and regarded the bed--as spineless as a hammock and covered with a dirty patchwork quilt, the cotton batting spilling from the edges.

  The porch steps complained again, and Adam knew the woman would be standing in her doorway ready to spray inhospitality on the new arrival.

  Adam sat down in a straight chair and put his elbows on his knees and supported his chin in his hands. A roomer down the hall began a patient, continuing cough against the quiet night.

  And Adam knew he could not go home. He had heard old soldiers tell of doing what he was going to do.

  "I just couldn't stand it. Didn't have no place to go. Didn't know nobody. Wandered around and pretty soon I got in a panic like a kid, and first thing I knowed I'm begging the sergeant to let me back in--like he was doing me a favor."

  Back in Chicago, Adam reenlisted and asked to be assigned to his old regiment. On the train going west the men of his squadron seemed very dear and desirable.

  While he waited to change trains in Kansas City, he heard his name called and a message was shoved into his hand--orders to report to Washington to the office of the Secretary of War. Adam in his five years had absorbed rather than learned never to wonder about an order. To an enlisted man the high far gods in Washington were crazy, and if a soldier wanted to keep his sanity he thought about generals as little as possible.

  In due course Adam gave his name to a clerk and went to sit in an anteroom. His father found him there. It took Adam a moment to recognize Cyrus, and much longer to get used to him. Cyrus had become a great man. He dressed like a great man--black broadcloth coat and trousers, wide black hat, overcoat with a velvet collar, ebony cane which he made to seem a sword. And Cyrus conducted himself like a great man. His speech was slow and mellow, measured and unexcited, his gestures were wide, and new teeth gave him a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion.

  After Adam had realized that this was his father he was still puzzled. Suddenly he looked down--no wooden leg. The leg was straight, bent at the knee, and the foot was clad in a polished kid congress gaiter. When he moved there was a limp, but not a clumping wooden-legged limp.

  Cyrus saw the look. "Mechanical," he said, "Works on a hinge. Got a spring. Don't even limp when I set my mind to it. I'll show it to you when I take it off. Come along with me."

  Adam said, "I'm under orders, sir. I'm to report to Colonel Wells."

  "I know you are. I told Wells to issue the orders. Come along."

  Adam said uneasily, "If you don't mind, sir, I think I'd better report to Colonel Wells."

  His father reversed himself. "I was testing you," he said grandly. "I wanted to see whether the army has any discipline these days. Good boy. I knew it would be good for you. You're a man and a soldier, my boy."

  "I'm under orders, sir," said Adam. This man was a stranger to him. A faint distaste arose in Adam. Something was not true. And the speed with which doors opened straight to the Colonel, the obsequious respect of that officer, the words, "The Secretary will see you now, sir," did not remove Adam's feeling.

  "This is my son, a private soldier, Mr. Secretary--just as I was--a private soldier in the United States Army."

  "I was discharged a corporal, sir," said Adam. He hardly heard
the exchange of compliments. He was thinking, This is the Secretary of War. Can't he see that this isn't the way my father is? He's play-acting. What's happened to him? It's funny the Secretary can't see it.

  They walked to the small hotel where Cyrus lived, and on the way Cyrus pointed out the sights, the buildings, the spots of history, with the expansiveness of a lecturer. "I live in a hotel," he said. "I've thought of getting a house, but I'm on the move so much it wouldn't hardly pay. I'm all over the country most of the time."

  The hotel clerk couldn't see either. He bowed to Cyrus, called him "Senator," and indicated that he would give Adam a room if he had to throw someone out.

  "Send a bottle of whisky to my room, please."

  "I can send some chipped ice if you like."

  "Ice!" said Cyrus. "My son is a soldier." He rapped his leg with his stick and it gave forth a hollow sound. "I have been a soldier--a private soldier. What do we want ice for?"

  Adam was amazed at Cyrus's accommodations. He had not only a bedroom but a sitting room beside it, and the toilet was in a closet right in the bedroom.

  Cyrus sat down in a deep chair and sighed. He pulled up his trouser leg, and Adam saw the contraption of iron and leather and hard wood. Cyrus unlaced the leather sheath that held it on his stump and stood the travesty-on-flesh beside his chair. "It gets to pinching pretty bad," he said.

  With the leg off, his father became himself again, the self Adam remembered. He had experienced the beginning of contempt, but now the childhood fear and respect and animosity came back to him, so that he seemed a little boy testing his father's immediate mood to escape trouble.

  Cyrus made his preparations, drank his whisky, and loosened his collar. He faced Adam. "Well?"

  "Sir?"

  "Why did you reenlist?"

  "I--I don't know, sir. I just wanted to."

  "You don't like the army, Adam."

  "No, sir."