The Long Valley by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online Page B

were his own again. “I’ll get out the car. You can put on your coat while I’m starting.”
    Elisa went into the house. She heard him drive to the gate and idle down his motor, and then she took a long time to put on her hat. She pulled it here and pressed it there. When Henry turned the motor off she slipped into her coat and went out.
    The little roadster bounced along on the dirt road by the river, raising the birds and driving the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow-line and dropped into the river-bed.
    Far ahead on the road Elisa saw a dark speck. She knew.
    She tried not to look as they passed it, but her eyes would not obey. She whispered to herself sadly, “He might have thrown them off the road. That wouldn’t have been much trouble, not very much. But he kept the pot,” she explained. “He had to keep the pot. That’s why he couldn’t get them off the road.”
    The roadster turned a bend and she saw the caravan ahead. She swung full around toward her husband so she could not see the little covered wagon and the mismatched team as the car passed them.
    In a moment it was over. The thing was done. She did not look back.
    She said loudly, to be heard above the motor, “It will be good, tonight, a good dinner.”
    “Now you’ve changed again,” Henry complained. He took one hand from the wheel and patted her knee. “I ought to take you in to dinner oftener. It would be good for both of us. We get so heavy out on the ranch.”
    “Henry,” she asked, “could we have wine at dinner?”
    “Sure we could. Say! That will be fine.”
    She was silent for a while; then she said, “Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each other very much?”
    “Sometimes a little, not often. Why?”
    “Well, I’ve read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I’ve read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood.”
    He looked around at her. “What’s the matter, Elisa? I didn’t know you read things like that.” He brought the car to a stop, then turned to the right over the Salinas River bridge.
    “Do any women ever go to the fights?” she asked.
    “Oh, sure, some. What’s the matter, Elisa? Do you want to go? I don’t think you’d like it, but I’ll take you if you really want to go.”
    She relaxed limply in the seat. “Oh, no. No. I don’t want to go. I’m sure I don’t.” Her face was turned away from him. “It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty.” She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly—like an old woman.

The White Quail

I
    The wall opposite the fireplace in the living room was a big dormer window stretching from the cushioned window seats almost to the ceiling—small diamond panes set in lead. From the window, preferably if you were sitting on the window seat, you could look across the garden and up the hill. There was a stretch of shady lawn under the garden oaks—around each oak there was a circle of carefully tended earth in which grew cinerarias, big ones with loads of flowers so heavy they bent the stems over, and ranging in color from scarlet to ultramarine. At the edge of the lawn, a line of fuchsias grew like little symbolic trees. In front of the fuchsias lay a shallow garden pool, the coping flush with the lawn for a very good reason.
    Right at the edge of the garden, the hill started up, wild with cascara bushes and poison oak, with dry grass and live oak, very wild. If you didn’t go around to the front of the house you couldn’t tell it was on the very edge of the town.
    Mary Teller, Mrs. Harry E. Teller, that is, knew the window and the garden were Right and she had a very good reason for knowing. Hadn’t she picked out the place where the house and the garden would be years ago? Hadn’t she seen the house and the garden a thousand times while the place was still a dry flat against the shoulder of a hill? For that matter, hadn’t she, during five