East of Eden by John Steinbeck Page A

shelter and cooking. It was a grim farm and a grim house, unloved and unloving. It was no home, no place to long for or to come back to. 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.
    His brother’s sobbing had stopped. Adam turned. Charles was looking blankly straight ahead. Adam said, “Tell me about Mother.”
    “She died. I wrote you.”
    “Tell me about her.”
    “I told you. She died. It’s so long ago. She wasn’t your mother.”
    The smile Adam had once caught on her face flashed up in his mind. Her face was projected in front of him.
    Charles’ voice came through the image and exploded it. “Will you tell me one thing—not quick—think before you tell me, and maybe don’t answer unless it’s true, your answer.”
    Charles moved his lips to form the question in advance. “Do you think it would be possible for our father to be—dishonest?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Isn’t that plain enough? I said it plain. There’s only one meaning to dishonest.”
    “I don’t know,” said Adam. “I don’t know. No one ever said it. Look what he got to be. Stayed overnight in the White House. The Vice-President came to his funeral. Does that sound like a dishonest man? Come on, Charles,” he begged, “tell me what you’ve been wanting to tell me from the minute I got here.”
    Charles wet his lips. The blood seemed to have gone out of him, and with it energy and all ferocity. His voice became a monotone. “Father made a will. Left everything equal to me and you.”
    Adam laughed. “Well, we can always live on the farm. I guess we won’t starve.”
    “It’s over a hundred thousand dollars,” the dull voice went on.
    “You’re crazy. More like a hundred dollars. Where would he get it?”
    “It’s no mistake. His salary with the G.A.R. was a hundred and thirty-five dollars a month. He paid his own room and board. He got five cents a mile and hotel expenses when he traveled.”
    “Maybe he had it all the time and we never knew.”
    “No, he didn’t have it all the time.”
    “Well, why don’t we write to the G.A.R. and ask? Someone there might know.”
    “I wouldn’t dare,” said Charles.
    “Now look! Don’t go off half-cocked. There’s such a thing as speculation. Lots of men struck it rich. He knew big men. Maybe he got in on a good thing. Think of the men who went to the gold rush in California and came back rich.”
    Charles’ face was desolate. His voice dropped so that Adam had to lean close to hear. It was as toneless as a report. “Our father went into the Union Army in June 1862. He had three months’ training here in this state. That makes it September. He marched south. October twelfth he was hit in the leg and sent to the hospital. He came home in January.”
    “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
    Charles’ words were thin and sallow. “He was not at Chancellorsville. He was not at Gettysburg or the Wilderness or Richmond or Appomattox.”
    “How do you know?”
    “His discharge. It came down with his other papers.”
    Adam sighed deeply. In his chest, like beating fists, was a surge of joy. He shook his head almost in disbelief.
    Charles said, “How did he get away with it? How in hell did he get away with it? Nobody ever questioned it. Did you? Did I? Did my mother? Nobody did. Not even in Washington.”
    Adam stood up. “What’s in the house to eat? I’m going to warm up something.”
    “I killed a chicken last night. I’ll fry it if you can wait.”
    “Anything quick?”
    “Some salt pork and plenty of eggs.”
    “I’ll have that,” said Adam.
    They left the question lying there, walked mentally around it, stepped over it. Their words ignored it but their minds never left it. They wanted to talk about it and could not. Charles fried salt pork, warmed up a skillet of beans, fried eggs.
    “I plowed the pasture,” he said. “Put it in rye.”
    “How did it