The Grapes of Wrath: Chapters 9-15

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.

...her whole body had become demure and serious.

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

Connie Rivers lifted the high tail-gate out of the truck and got down and helped Rose of Sharon to the ground; and she accepted it nobly, smiling her wise, self-satisfied smile, mouth tipped at the corners a little fatuously.

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

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building had greater depth and more solidity than in the daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual—a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against.

Indeed his position was eminent, for Uncle John moved sideways, leaving space between Pa and himself for the preacher.

And the revulsion spread to the rest. “Whyn’t we go? Get sleep on the way.”

Pa said, “Al, go down, wake up Granma, Grampa. Tell ’em to come an’ eat. We’re goin’ before long.” And as Al sauntered toward the barn, “Muley, ya wanta squeeze in with us an’ go?

And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive.

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.

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

She brought the corner of the quilt over his head like a cowl and pulled it down over his face.

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

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.