The Long Valley (33 page)

“He takes a long time to dress,” said Mrs. Tiflin. “He combs his whiskers and rubs up his shoes and brushes his clothes.”

Carl scattered sugar on his mush. “A man that’s led a wagon train across the plains has got to be pretty careful how he dresses.”

Mrs. Tiflin turned on him. “Don’t do that, Carl! Please don’t!” There was more of threat than of request in her tone. And the threat irritated Carl.

“Well, how many times do I have to listen to the story of the iron plates, and the thirty-five horses? That time’s done. Why can’t he forget it, now it’s done?” He grew angrier while he talked, and his voice rose. “Why does he have to tell them over and over? He came across the plains. All right! Now it’s finished. Nobody wants to hear about it over and over.”

The door into the kitchen closed softly. The four at the table sat frozen. Carl laid his mush spoon on the table and touched his chin with his fingers.

Then the kitchen door opened and Grandfather walked in. His mouth smiled tightly and his eyes were squinted.

“Good morning,” he said, and he sat down and looked at his mush dish.

Carl could not leave it there. “Did—did you hear what I said?”

Grandfather jerked a little nod.

“I don’t know what got into me, sir. I didn’t mean it. I was just being funny.”

Jody glanced in shame at his mother, and he saw that she was looking at Carl, and that she wasn’t breathing. It was an awful thing that he was doing. He was tearing himself to pieces to talk like that. It was a terrible thing to him to retract a word, but to retract it in shame was infinitely worse.

Grandfather looked sidewise. “I’m trying to get right side up,” he said gently. “I’m not being mad. I don’t mind what you said, but it might be true, and I would mind that.”

“It isn’t true,” said Carl. “I’m not feeling well this morning. I’m sorry I said it.”

“Don’t be sorry, Carl. An old man doesn’t see things sometimes. Maybe you’re right. The crossing is finished. Maybe it should be forgotten, now it’s done.”

Carl got up from the table. “I’ve had enough to eat. I’m going to work. Take your time, Billy!” He walked quickly out of the dining-room. Billy gulped the rest of his food and followed soon after. But Jody could not leave his chair.

“Won’t you tell any more stories?” Jody asked.

“Why, sure I’ll tell them, but only when—I’m sure people want to hear them.”

“I like to hear them, sir.”

“Oh! Of course you do, but you’re a little boy. It was a job for men, but only little boys like to hear about it.”

Jody got up from his place. “I’ll wait outside for you, sir. I’ve got a good stick for those mice.”

He waited by the gate until the old man came out on the porch. “Let’s go down and kill the mice now,” Jody called.

“I think I’ll just sit in the sun, Jody. You go kill the mice.”

“You can use my stick if you like.”

“No, I’ll just sit here a while.”

Jody turned disconsolately away, and walked down toward the old haystack. He tried to whip up his enthusiasm with thoughts of the fat juicy mice. He beat the ground with his flail. The dogs coaxed and whined about him, but he could not go. Back at the house he could see Grandfather sitting on the porch, looking small and thin and black.

Jody gave up and went to sit on the steps at the old man’s feet.

“Back already? Did you kill the mice?”

“No, sir. I’ll kill them some other day.”

The morning flies buzzed close to the ground and the ants dashed about in front of the steps. The heavy smell of sage slipped down the hill. The porch boards grew warm in the sunshine.

Jody hardly knew when Grandfather started to talk. “I shouldn’t stay here, feeling the way I do.” He examined his strong old hands. “I feel as though the crossing wasn’t worth doing.” His eyes moved up the side-hill and stopped on a motionless hawk perched on a dead limb. “I tell those old stories, but they’re not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them.

“It wasn’t Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn’t been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head.

“Under the little bushes the shadows were black at white noonday. When we saw the mountains at last, we cried—all of us. But it wasn’t getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering.

“We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed.

“Then we came down to the sea, and it was done.” He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. “That’s what I should be telling instead of stories.”

When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him. “Maybe I could lead the people some day,” Jody said.

The old man smiled. “There’s no place to go. There’s the ocean to stop you. There’s a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.”

“In boats I might, sir.”

“No place to go, Jody. Every place is taken. But that’s not the worst—no, not the worst. Westering has died out of the people. Westering isn’t a hunger any more. It’s all done. Your father is right. It is finished.” He laced his fingers on his knee and looked at them.

Jody felt very sad. “If you’d like a glass of lemonade I could make it for you.”

Grandfather was about to refuse, and then he saw Jody’s face. “That would be nice,” he said. “Yes, it would be nice to drink a lemonade.”

Jody ran into the kitchen where his mother was wiping the last of the breakfast dishes. “Can I have a lemon to make a lemonade for Grandfather?”

His mother mimicked—“And another lemon to make a lemonade for you.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t want one.”

“Jody! You’re sick!” Then she stopped suddenly. “Take a lemon out of the cooler,” she said softly. “Here, I’ll reach the squeezer down to you.”

EXPLANATORY NOTES

“The Chrysanthemums”: First published in
Harper’s Magazine
175 (October 1937): 513-19

1:1
grey-flannel fog.
Steinbeck typically spelled
gray
with an e. Although
Harper’s
Americanized the spelling, Viking Penguin follows Steinbeck’s spelling here and in all the other short stories with the except ion of “The White Quail.”

8:22-23
Every pointed star
...
lovely.
Steinbeck’s holograph version reads: “Every pointed star gets driven up into you, into your body. It’s like that. Hot and sharp and all lovely.” The passage was censored in the
Harper’s
publication, with these sentences deleted entirely.

9:31
scary.
The word is misspelled as
scarey
in the earlier Viking Penguin text. It is spelled as
scary
in the manuscript and Harper’s texts.

 

“The White Quail”: First published in the
North American Review
239 (March 1935): 204-11

22:9
Florida Water.
A trademark name for an aromatic toilet water or perfume with an orange-flower scent.

 

“Flight”: First published in
The Long Valley
(1938)

“Flight” appears in the ledger notebook under the title “Man Hunt.”
A
later entry, titled “Addenda to Flight,” was incorporated into the final version of the story.

“Flight” was one of Steinbeck’s most extensively revised stories. Sections of the rejected portions of the first draft appear in John H. Timmerman,
The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories
(190-92).

31:3
dulces.
Spanish for “sweets,” or candy.

34:21
‘Qui ’st’l caballo.
Spanish for “Here’s the horse.”

 

“The Snake”: First published in the
Monterey Beacon
(June 22, 1935): 10-11, 14-15; published as “A Snake of One’s Own” in
Esquire
(February 1938): 31, 178-80

In his 1951 essay “About Ed Ricketts”—the prototype for Dr. Phillips—in The
Log from
the Sea of Cortez (Viking Press, 1951), Steinbeck recollects the actual event from which the short story “The Snake” developed:

 

Webster Street, in “Remembering John Steinbeck,”
San Jose Studies
1 (November 1975), offers a slightly different view of the incident from his eyewitness point of view:

 

Echoes of “The Snake” also appear in chapters 16 and 17 of
Sweet Thursday
(Viking Press, 1954).

 

 

“Breakfast”: First published in the
Pacific Weekly
5 (November 9, 1936): 300

The first-person narrative of this sketch, likely written in the summer of 1934, is often compared to the third-person accounting in chapter 22 of The Grapes
of Wrath.

 

“The Raid”: First published in
North American Review
238 (October 1934): 299-305

75:10—12
Can’t you see?
...
what you’re doing.
Compare Root’s words with Jim Casy’s in chapter 26 of
The Grapes of Wrath:
“You fellas don’t know what you’re doing!” The response to Root is “Kill the red rats!” To Casy, it is “Shut up, you red son-of-a-bitch.”

76:23-24
Forgive them
...
what they’re doing
. Cf. Luke 23:34: “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

76:26
Religion is the opium of the people.
From Karl Marx (1818-1883), in his introduction to
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right
(1844).

 

“The Harness”: First published in
Atlantic Monthly
161 (June 1938): 741-49

 

“The Harness” was written in the ledger notebook under the working title “The Fool.” The geographical setting for the story—“across the Salinas River, next to the foothills”—is similar to that of “The Chrysanthemums,” wherein Henry Allen intends to plant sweet peas.

81:8
sodium amytal.
Amytal is a pharmaceutical name for amobarbital, a sedative.

 

 

“The Vigilante”: First published as “The Lonesome Vigilante” in
Esquire
6 (October 1936): 35, 186A-186B.

“The Vigilante” is based upon a historic event, the lynchings in San Jose, California, on November 16,1933, of John Maurice Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond. The historical circumstances of the case are related in
The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories,

The story first appears in the ledger notebook under the title “Case History.” Steinbeck wrote a synopsis of the plot for the story:

 

The “phalanx” is Steinbeck’s term for a certain mob psychology, a theory he had been speculating about for several years. “Case History,” although lengthy (4,500 words), never really got going as a story, falling prey instead to Steinbeck’s social theory.

Apparently Steinbeck was well aware of this, for he set “Case History” aside, wrote “The White Quail,” “Johnny Bear,” and two other short pieces, before writing “The Vigilante.”

 

 

“Johnny Bear”: First published as “The Ears of Johnny Bear” in
Esquire
8 (September 1937): 35, 195—200

Steinbeck alternately titled the story “Johnny Bear” and “The Sisters.” The subplot of dredging a swamp, the occupation of the first-person narrator, is rooted in Steinbeck’s own brief experience of working as a dredger near Castroville, his model for Loma in the story.

Steinbeck’s native Salinas, however, shares some similarities with Loma, if not in size then in a certain ambience. In his essay “Always Something to Do in Salinas”—published in
Holiday
17 (June 1955): 58—59, 152, 153, 156—Steinbeck observes that Salinas grew up on tule swamps. He writes: “Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful but Salinas was not and we knew it” (p. 58). The swamps, Steinbeck reflects, gave the town an atmosphere of darkness: “I wonder whether all towns have the blackness—the feeling of violence just below the surface.... It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open—a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Tule Swamps” (p. 59).