John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" Chapters 10-16

Languid, heat-raddled ladies, small nucleuses about whom revolve a thousand accouterments: creams, ointments to grease themselves, coloring matter in phials--black, pink, red, white, green, silver--to change the color of hair, eyes, lips, nails,

When she spoke her voice had a beautiful low timbre, soft and modulated, and yet with ringing overtones.

The truculence left the fat man's face.

Al relapsed into an insulated silence.

I took a snooze this morning.

In a ditch, where a culvert went under the road, an old touring car was pulled off the highway and a little tent was pitched beside it, and smoke came out of a stove pipe through the tent.

When she spoke her voice had a beautiful low timbre, soft and modulated, and yet with ringing overtones.

He got it all roiled up, too.

Near Paden there was a shack beside the road and two gas pumps in front of it; and beside a fence, a water faucet and a hose.

It was told of him that once he went clear to Shawnee and hired three whores in one bed, and snorted and rutted on their unresponsive bodies for an hour.

The tent flaps opened and a wizened woman came out--a face wrinkled as a dried leaf and eyes that seemed to flame in her face, black eyes that seemed to look out of a well of horror.

He ate little, drank nothing, and was celibate.

Tom set the rod in a vise and carefully wrapped the wire around the piston rings, forcing them deep into their slots, and where the wire was twisted he hammered it flat; and then he turned the piston and tapped the wire all around until it cleared the piston wall.

Grampa was emerging from the bedroom, and as in the morning, he fumbled with the buttons of his fly.

Could a got a bigger, fancier car for the same money, but parts too hard to get, an' too dear.

In the late afternoon the truck came back, bumping and rattling through the dust, and there was a layer of dust in the bed, and the hood was covered with dust, and the headlights were obscured with a red flour.

"We're beholden to you," said Pa. "There's no beholden in a time of dying," said Wilson, and Sairy echoed him, "Never no beholden."

Grampa was still the titular head, but he no longer ruled.

Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining.

I'll splice the ends.

And again his eyes reached toward her voice and his lips writhed.

She took the cup and rinsed her mouth and spat and then drank the cupful of tepid water.

The firelight fell on the grouped people, showing their faces and their eyes, dwindling on their dark clothes.

His chin, bristly with sparse whiskers, rested on the back of one hand.

Casy picked the backs of his long knotty fingers.

A great pile of junk; fenders and truck sides, wheels and axles; over the whole lot a spirit of decay, of mold and rust; twisted iron, half-gutted engines, a mass of derelicts.

The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both.

Weddin' come due, or overdue, an' there's your preacher.

Only for a moment did the blood ooze out, and then it stopped.

Inside were letters, clippings, photographs, a pair of earrings, a little gold signet ring, and a watch chain braided of hair and tipped with gold swivels.

The three men on the seat were glum as they drove toward home over the dusty road.

Tom said, "Well, we got to tear the pan off an' get the rod out, an' we got to get a new part an' hone her an' shim her an' fit her.

Connie, her nineteen-yearold husband, who had married a plump, passionate hoyden, was still frightened and bewildered at the change in her; for there were no more cat fights in bed, biting and scratching with muffled giggles and final tears.

Pa was amazed at the revolt.

This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust.

Ma came in with wet hands, and her palms puckered and bloated from hot water and soap.

Her round soft face, which had been voluptuous and inviting a few months ago, had already put on the barrier of pregnancy, the selfsufficient smile, the knowing perfection-look; and her plump body--full soft breasts and stomach, hard hips and buttocks that had swung so freely and provocatively as to invite slapping and stroking--her whole body had become demure and serious.

A half-million people moving over the country; a million more, restive to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.

They watched his lax hands to see the fists form.

Noah from a box in the kitchen, brought out the bow-bladed butchering knife and whetted it on a worn little carborundum stone.

And she came scurrying through the flaps.

Ma came in with wet hands, and her palms puckered and bloated from hot water and soap.

And the revulsion spread to the rest.

HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road.

Al, bending over the wheel, kept shifting eyes from the road to the instrument panel, watching the ammeter needle, which jerked suspiciously, watching the oil gauge and the heat indicator.

He whistled shrilly, and one bouncing dog ran in, but only one.

The old eyes looked up at Ma in pain and bewilderment for a moment before the awareness receded again.

He throttled down his motor.

Slowly her relaxed face tightened, and the lines disappeared from the taut muscular face.

"An' I heard the other: 'Born outa too much joy'll be a doleful boy.'"

A long gash appeared on the back of his hand.

But Connie and Rose of Sharon were breathless and red with stifling laughter before they could stop.

The dog wandered, sniffing, past the truck, trotted to the puddle under the hose again and lapped at the muddy water.

"You do not see," she said, and she smiled her complacent smile and went into the house.

Pa sharpened two more sticks to hold the bodies open to the air, while Tom with the scrubber and Ma with a dull knife scraped the skins to take out the bristles.

She took a letter from an envelope and dropped the trinkets in the envelope.

The brakes squealed when they stopped, and the sound printed in Al's head--no lining left.

But Winfield was still a trifle of a snot-nose, a little of a brooder back of the barn, and an inveterate collector and smoker of snipes.

"This here's a nice one, just blowed full a religion: 'Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.'

The families were quiet and sleeping, and the field mice grew bold and scampered about among the mattresses.

Languid, heat-raddled ladies, small nucleuses about whom revolve a thousand accouterments: creams, ointments to grease themselves, coloring matter in phials--black, pink, red, white, green, silver--to change the color of hair, eyes, lips, nails, brows, lashes, lids.

Reassured, she said, "How'd you like to be goin' along in that?"

"Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name--" "Glory!" shouted Granma.

"Pigs up here," said Pa. "You can't spill a pig and scald yourself like you can hot water.

The old eyes looked up at Ma in pain and bewilderment for a moment before the awareness receded again.

Castle to Paden twenty-five miles and the sun passed the zenith and started down.

He answered with inflexible humility, "Won't you--can't you see your way to cut off ten cents' worth?"

But they looked at each other, and their mouth corners smiled rigidly with embarrassment.

She took the cup and rinsed her mouth and spat and then drank the cupful of tepid water.

The jack handle flicked hungrily back and forth in Ma's hand.

But when one of his appetites was sated, he was sad and ashamed and lonely again.

Casy found a stick on the ground and held down the tongue with it, and the uneven breath rattled in and out.

And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance.

This you may say of man--when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes.

The land rolled like great stationary ground swells.

He finished in the tone of a benediction, and Al reddened a little with pleasure.

You got to report a death, an' when you do that, they either take forty dollars for the undertaker or they take him for a pauper."

Boxes of clothes next, and kitchen utensils in a gunny sack; cutlery and dishes in their box.

He dug in the pouch with a forefinger, located a dime, and pinched in for it.

The motor droned along steadily and the sun receded down the sky in front of them.

At the house, Noah slipped his knife between tendon and bone of the hind legs; the pointed sticks held the legs apart, and the carcasses were hung from the two-by-four rafters that stuck out from the house.

Sometimes he looks up at the vivaciousness in Mae's voice, and then he scrapes the griddle with a spatula, scrapes the grease into an iron trough around the plate.

"I dunno," said Tom. "Pa'd crap a litter of lizards if we buy beers."

Ma chuckled lightly and scrounged the clothes in and out of the bucket.

The midday sun burned through the hole and threw a glaring spot on the floor.

Granma, giddy and vague, saying, "What's all this?

Bands of little boys came out from the towns to break the windows and to pick over the debris, looking for treasures.

And the dog, a blot of blood and tangled, burst intestines, kicked slowly in the road.

Languid, heat-raddled ladies, small nucleuses about whom revolve a thousand accouterments: creams, ointments to grease themselves, coloring matter in phials--black, pink, red, white, green, silver--to change the color of hair, eyes, lips, nails, brows, lashes, lids.

Granma, beside him on the seat, half slept, and whimpered in her sleep, opened her eyes to peer ahead, and then dozed again.

The outskirts were wide spread.

Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining.

They leaped like chipmunks over the front seat and onto the top of the load, and they burrowed back out of sight like chipmunks.

Noah and Uncle John and the preacher began to unload the truck.

And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.

The next wind pried into the hole where the shingle had been, lifted off three, and the next, a dozen.

But, hell, that costs in the Zephyr class an' it ain't got the sap.

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west.

Pa walked around the truck, looking at it, and then he squatted down in the dust and found a stick to draw with.

Even Pa, who was the leader, would hold a wrench and take orders from Al. They were all tired on the truck.

Why, with nobody to take care of you, you'd starve."

WHEN THE TRUCK had gone, loaded with implements, with heavy tools, with beds and springs, with every movable thing that might be sold, Tom hung around the place.