Chapter 28 — Teaching Companion

This chapter's big question

Lee's father would never let the story end safely at the lake, saying there is “more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.” Is a terrible truth really better for a young person to hear than a kind story?

The tension The lie comes to Adam so fast it frightens him, “so glibly to his tongue”, and Lee warns “It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything”; yet the same night Adam's letter to his brother hides Cathy in “Country life did not agree with her” and then adds, under his name, “P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what.”

Today's focus

How a father’s quick lie, a cook’s terrible family story and a hard letter to a brother all turn on what we owe others in the way of honesty.

The shape at a glance

The chapter has three sections. First, at supper on the night Adam comes back from Salinas, the twins Cal and Aron find that their father, who used to hear without listening, now asks them questions and laughs. They tell him about the rabbit they shot, Cal giving Aron the credit and Aron not quite taking it, and Aron says he wants to marry Abra. Lee brings out the household accounts. Cal says Abra told them to ask where their mother’s grave is, so they can take flowers. The lie comes to Adam so fast it frightens him: her grave is “clear across the country” where she came from. Cal adds that they sent her home on a train, and Lee nods and says Chinese people are sent home after death too. Adam changes the subject to Mr. Bacon’s idea of moving to Salinas, and Lee takes the boys to bed. Second, Lee hands Adam ten years of accounts, complete, and wishes aloud that Adam could tell the boys the truth. Adam says it would rob them of their good thoughts about their mother. Lee warns that a discovered lie might infect everything, and proposes a part truth. To persuade him, Lee tells the story of his own mother. His father, in debt, signed on to build the railroads; his young wife came secretly in the ship’s hold disguised as a man, and worked beside him in a mountain camp, pregnant, passed off as his nephew. They planned to escape to a high lake for the birth. Young Lee always begged his father to let the story end at the lake; his father refused, saying there is more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. A falling boulder broke the father’s leg, the mother went into early labor, and the men of the camp, learning she was a woman, attacked her. The father reached her and delivered the baby with his own hands as she died on the shale. Lee ends with the words his father always ended with: the whole camp became the baby’s mother. Third, Adam borrows Lee’s pen and, at Lee’s suggestion, writes inviting his brother Charles to visit. The letter is guarded and jokey, and says only that the boys’ mother did not like country life. Looking up, Adam sees Charles’s scarred, raging face from memory, cannot picture it smiling, and adds a postscript: he never hated Charles and always loved him because he was his brother. He seals it and asks how long a letter takes to go east. Two weeks, Lee guesses.

A way in

This chapter is mostly talk, and its center is a story told to argue a point. Read it yourself first, and read Lee’s story with the supper scene still in mind: it is told to a man who has lied to his sons that same evening. The twins’ mother, Cathy, shot Adam and left the family soon after the boys were born; the boys have been told she is dead. Not long before this night Adam went to Salinas and saw her, alive and living there under the name Kate; that is what lies behind the letter’s “She lives in a town nearby and I see her now and then.” Abra is a girl from Salinas who visited that day; Mr. Bacon is her father. Charles is Adam’s half-brother back East, who in the book’s early chapters beat Adam savagely. Sam Hamilton is Adam’s friend, recently dead. Some words need naming plainly: the queue is the long braid Chinese men wore in that era; Lee speaks of men brought in as “human cattle” and says the country “did not want them breeding”, which is his account of how the railroads treated Chinese laborers. The attack on Lee’s mother should be stated as plainly as the chapter states it, no more. Do not say whether Adam tells the boys the truth, whether Charles answers, whether the family moves, or what the boys know. Stop on “Two weeks maybe.”

Lesson plan

Retell The student tells the chapter back from the change the boys find in their father at supper to Lee’s “Two weeks maybe.” Look for the three sections in order: the supper and the lie; Lee’s warning and his mother’s story; the letter and its postscript. Look for the turns that carry the chapter: the arrows, the grave and the train, the box of accounts, “It might infect everything”, the ship, the camp, the plan for the lake, the father’s refusal and Adam’s “Get on with it”, the shale and the camp’s care, Charles’s face, and the P.S. Look for the attack told plainly and briefly, and for no claim about what Adam tells the boys later. Then ask which sentence the student would keep if they could keep only one, and why.

Imitate the author After copying, the student writes six sentences in the manner of the first passage, about a household that runs on something unspoken: a cleft sentence that begins It was … that; a sentence that turns on a dash into two parallel phrases, each built on two verbs that look alike and are not; a short sentence ending on a noun-of-a-noun metaphor; a sentence whose last item is set apart by a comma; a long sentence on not only … but also; and a sentence that ends on who really did a thing. Then five sentences in the manner of the second, about people getting ready for something in secret: a sentence with two actions on the same thing; a sentence that gives a reason with for; a short sentence with one exact sacrifice; a long sentence that strings its actions together with and; and a closing sentence of a few words that turns from what was done to what it means to the writer. Read both aloud beside Steinbeck’s and ask where the writer’s judgment shows without being stated.

Debate Take sides on the last written question. One side argues that a terrible truth is better for a young person than a kind story. It gathers “I’m glad he told me though. I wouldn’t like not to know”, “I wish I had known her”, the rice and the swaddling clothes, the father’s case against the storytellers at the city gate, “The whole camp became my mother”, Lee’s warning that the lie “might infect everything”, and the fright Adam feels at how glibly his own lie came. The other side argues that it is not always better. It gathers “That would rob them of the good thoughts about their mother”, “Of course it wasn’t the same”, young Lee’s begging for the lake, the father’s “old misery”, Lee’s “I wish I hadn’t started to tell you this”, and Adam’s own letter, which keeps its kind story about the boys’ mother. Each side must answer the other’s strongest piece. Neither may say whether Adam tells the boys, what Charles does, or whether the family moves.

Purpose Close on the chapter’s design. Steinbeck opens on a father who has never listened and now asks his sons for the truth about a rabbit; within minutes they ask him for the truth about their mother, and he lies. He then gives the longest stretch of the chapter to a story told as an argument, and has the teller stop, start again and finish at the window, so the reader feels how hard the truth is to finish. He ends with a letter whose plainest line is added below the signature, and with an echo of the lie’s own words, “clear east”. Ask what the chapter gains by placing Lee’s story between the lie and the letter, and why it ends on a guess about time rather than an answer. Name the habit the chapter practices: weighing a kind story against a hard truth, and asking what each one costs the person who hears it.

Three levels

Easier Read aloud the supper, from “This night, the first after Adam’s return from Salinas” to “Adam quickly changed the subject.”; Lee’s warning, from “I wish there were some way you could tell the boys the truth.” to “Well, I can’t force you.”; the start of Lee’s story, from “I’ll make it very short,” to “And Lee looked back in time.”; the end of Lee’s story, from “And then my father figured out a plan.” to “I can’t talk any more.”; and the letter, from “He sat holding the letter in his hand” to the last line. Talk through the five discussion questions, then answer the last written question aloud before writing it.

On level Talk through all five discussion questions in order, then write all three written questions as a thesis, the strongest objection and a revised thesis, each with lines from the chapter.

Harder Ask for one argued essay on the chapter as an argument about truth told to the young. Set Adam’s lie at supper, Lee’s nod, Lee’s years of passing off his own rules as Adam’s, Lee’s mother’s story and how it is told, and the letter with its postscript side by side, and weigh whether the chapter itself takes Lee’s father’s side. Meet the strongest objection: Lee says his case “wasn’t the same”, and the chapter ends with Adam still undecided, so perhaps it argues that the answer depends on the truth in question.

Discussion

1. At supper Cal says the arrow was his but Aron hit the rabbit, and Aron says maybe he hit it, but he isn’t sure. Adam tells them, “you both seem to handle the situation very well.” What is he praising them for?Inference

What it asks It asks the student to decide what Adam admires in the boys’ answers. This is the first night Adam “listened to them and asked questions, looked at them and saw them”, and “The change made them timid.” He asks who shot the rabbit, then presses: “Don’t you know your own arrows? We used to mark our arrows when I was a boy.” “This time Aron refused to answer and get into trouble.” Cal says, “Well, it was my arrow, all right, but we think it might have got in Aron’s quiver.” Then: “But I think it was Aron hit the rabbit.” Aron says, “I think maybe I hit it—but I’m not sure.” Adam answers, “Well, you both seem to handle the situation very well.” “The alarm went out of the faces of the boys. It did not seem to be a trap.” The student decides what Adam is praising. It feeds the hinge: the chapter opens with a father asking his sons for the plain truth and getting a careful half-answer, a few minutes before they ask him something and he gives them a lie. The card must not settle who shot the rabbit; the page leaves it open.

A strong answer A strong response names what Adam praises and grounds it. One reader says he praises their generosity: he expected a quarrel over the arrows, and Cal gave the credit away while Aron would not grab it. Another says he praises a graceful dodge: both boys hedge because they fear a trap, and a few minutes later, asked something harder, Adam does not hedge but lies. The best answers notice that the chapter’s first question is about telling the truth, and they do not decide who shot the rabbit.

2. When Cal says they sent their mother home on a train, Lee nods. He adds that Chinese people are sent home after they die, and Aron says, “You told us that before.” Lee asks, “Did I?” Later, alone with Adam, Lee wishes there were a way to tell the boys the truth. Why does he help with the story first?Character

What it asks It asks the student to explain why the man who argues for the truth helps the lie at the table. Cal asks where their mother’s grave is, “so we can take some flowers.” “Adam’s mind raced.” He says, “Your mother’s grave is clear across the country where she came from.” Cal asks, “How did she get there?” and answers himself: “We put her on a train and sent her home—didn’t we, Lee?” “Lee nodded.” He says, “It’s the same with us,” and, “Nearly all Chinese get sent home to China after they die.” Aron says, “You told us that before.” Lee asks, “Did I?” Alone with Adam, Lee says, “I wish there were some way you could tell the boys the truth.” The student decides why Lee goes along. It feeds the hinge: Lee’s case for the truth is made by a man who has just told the boys a kind story himself. The card must not say what the boys know, or that Cal asked to make trouble; when Adam asks, “Do they know anything?” Lee says, “I don’t know”.

A strong answer A strong response gives a reason and grounds it. One reader says Lee acts out of loyalty: he has spent years giving the boys a respect for their father, and he will not shame Adam at the table on the night the boys find him, so he argues in private. Another says Lee is already part of the story: Aron says Lee told them about Chinese burials before, so the boys’ version is older than tonight. The best answers notice that Lee’s warning comes from someone who knows how a kind story is kept up, and they claim nothing about what the boys know.

3. Lee’s father spoke Cantonese. But whenever he told the story of Lee’s mother, he spoke in “high and beautiful Mandarin.” Why would he tell the worst thing in his life in the most beautiful language he had?Tone

What it asks It asks the student to explain a teller’s choice of language. Lee says, “My first memory is of living in a little dark shack alone with my father in the middle of a potato field, and with it the memory of my father telling me the story of my mother. His language was Cantonese, but whenever he told the story he spoke in high and beautiful Mandarin.” He also says, “I can see my father’s face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain.” His father “had to stop and gain possession of himself, and when he continued he spoke sternly and he used hard sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them.” Early in the story Lee says, “I have often thought that perhaps formal good manners may be a cushion against heartbreak.” His father’s rule for the story: “There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.” The student decides why the father used his finest speech. It feeds the hinge: the father would not soften the facts, yet he chose to give them a beautiful form, and the student can weigh whether form softens what it carries.

A strong answer A strong response explains the choice and grounds it. One reader says the high speech honors the mother: the story is her only memorial, and the father gives it his finest words. Another says it lets him get through the telling, the way Lee says formal manners cushion heartbreak, though the “hard sharp words” show it spares him nothing. The best answers tie the choice to the father’s own phrase, “dreadful beauty”, and ask whether a beautiful form softens a hard truth or makes it bearable.

4. When Lee says a loving woman is “almost indestructible,” Adam makes a face. He says he can’t know from one experience. Later Lee says he wishes he had known his mother, and Adam says, “So do I.” What has Lee’s story done to Adam in between?Character

What it asks It asks the student to trace what the story does to the man hearing it. Adam asks, “How could your mother do a man’s work?” Lee answers that a strong woman may be stronger than a man, “particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.” “Adam made a wry grimace.” Lee says, “You’ll see one day, you’ll see.” Adam answers, “I didn’t mean to think badly,” and, “How could I know out of one experience? Go on.” Lee goes on: the hidden pregnancy, the camp, the nephew, the plan for the lake. He tells how his mother and father saved rice under their mats, how his father filed a hook and gave up smoking to save matches, how his mother sewed rags into swaddling clothes, and he ends, “I wish I had known her.” “So do I,” said Adam. A moment later Adam says, “I hope they got there.” The student decides what has changed in Adam between the grimace and “So do I.” It feeds the hinge: that evening Adam lied to keep his sons’ “good thoughts about their mother”, and now a dreadful true story gives him good thoughts about a woman he never met. The card must not say whether Adam tells the boys the truth, and must not say more about Adam’s “one experience” than the chapter does.

A strong answer A strong response traces a change and grounds it. One reader says the details won Adam over: he made a face at Lee’s claim about loving women, and after the rice, the hook, the matches and the rags he says, “So do I.” A true story told in small things did what a claim could not. Another says the story has pulled Adam in rather than changed his mind: his next words are “I hope they got there,” so he now wants the lake, the kind of ending he gave his own sons at supper. The best answers set the grimace beside “So do I,” notice what Lee tells in between, and say nothing about what Adam tells the boys.

5. At supper Adam tells his sons their mother’s grave is “clear across the country”. The chapter ends with him asking Lee how long a letter takes to go “clear east”. Why might Steinbeck end on that echo?Author's choice

What it asks It asks the student to judge what an echo does at the end of a chapter. At supper Adam says, “Your mother’s grave is clear across the country where she came from.” That night he writes to his brother Charles after many years. The letter says, “Their mother is not here. Country life did not agree with her. She lives in a town nearby and I see her now and then.” It says, “I have much to tell you that I can’t write down.” Under his name he adds, “P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother.” He seals the letter and calls Lee: “Lee, how long does it take a letter to go east—clear east?” Lee says, “I don’t know,” and, “Two weeks maybe.” The student decides why the chapter closes on those words. It feeds the hinge: the same distance holds Adam’s lie and his letter, and the student weighs whether the letter crosses it or carries the lie along. The card must not say whether Charles answers.

A strong answer A strong response explains what the echo does and grounds it. One reader says the letter crosses the distance the lie made, and carries something true across it, the postscript’s “I always loved you”. Another says the lie travels with it, since the same letter hides the boys’ mother behind a smoother half-truth. The best answers set the two uses of “clear” side by side, notice that the chapter ends on a guess, and say nothing about what Charles does.

Critical thinking

1. On the first night Adam really listens to his sons, he also lies to them about their mother. Lee warns that if they ever find out, “the true things would suffer.” If the boys learn the truth, will they doubt the father who listened to them that night?

What it asks It asks the student to test Lee’s warning against the night it is made. This is the first evening Adam “listened to them and asked questions, looked at them and saw them”, and the boys hear him laugh for the first time they can remember. Minutes later he tells them, “Your mother’s grave is clear across the country where she came from.” Alone with Adam, Lee warns, “It’s the lie I’m thinking of. It might infect everything. If they ever found out you’d lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They wouldn’t believe anything then.” Adam’s reason for the lie is that the truth “would rob them of the good thoughts about their mother.” The same evening Lee hands Adam ten years of accounts, every year with “a rubber band around it”: “I’ve been over it. It’s complete.” Later, Lee’s father ends his dreadful story on the men who did the harm: “Before you hate those men you must know this.” The student writes a thesis on whether a lie, once found out, would spoil the boys’ trust in the father they met that night, meets the strongest objection, and revises. It feeds the hinge: part of the case for a hard truth is what a kind story costs when it is caught. The card must not say whether the boys find out, what they know now, or whether Adam tells them; he says only, “I’ll have to think about that, Lee.”

A strong answer A strong response builds a thesis, meets the strongest objection, and revises. One thesis says the lie would reach back: the listening and the lie came minutes apart from the same new father, and, as with Lee’s complete accounts, one false entry sends you back over every page, so the true things would “suffer.” The strongest objection comes from Lee’s own story: his father would not let one dreadful act blot out the camp’s care, and the boys might weigh the lie against its reason, a father keeping their good thoughts about their mother. A good revision might hold that a lie found out would make the boys doubt what their father says but not what he did, the listening and the laugh, and that this is still a real loss, since a father who listens must also be believed. It says nothing about whether the boys ever find out.

2. Adam’s letter admits, “I always did make good resolutions.” Then he sees his brother’s scarred face in his mind and cannot make it smile. Under his name he writes, “I never hated you no matter what.” Does that P.S. belong with his good resolutions?

What it asks It asks the student to decide what kind of line the postscript is. Adam has not written “a word in years.” His letter is guarded: “Ha! Ha!” twice, “But for a number of years I felt poorly”, and “I have much to tell you that I can’t write down.” About the ranch it says, “I am ashamed to say I do not keep it up very well. Maybe I will do better from now on. I always did make good resolutions.” Then Adam looks over the page “at his brother’s dark face and its scarred forehead.” He sees “the lips writhe back from the teeth and the blind destructive animal take charge.” “He shook his head to rid his memory of the vision, and he tried to rebuild the face smiling. He tried to remember the forehead before the scar, but he could not bring either into focus.” “He seized the pen and wrote below his signature”: “P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother.” Then he forces the creases sharp and seals the flap “with his fist.” The student writes a thesis on whether the P.S. is one more of the resolutions Adam owns to making, meets the strongest objection, and revises. It feeds the hinge: a letter of evasions ends in one plain line, and the student weighs what makes that line true. The card must not say whether Charles answers, or whether Adam keeps to what he wrote.

A strong answer A strong response builds a thesis, meets the strongest objection, and revises. One thesis says the P.S. does not belong with the resolutions: they promise to do better later and have not held, while the P.S. speaks of the past, “never” and “always”, and is written with the worst memory of Charles in view, so “no matter what” names the harm instead of hiding it. Another says it is the best of them: Adam cannot make the memory kind, so he “seized” the pen and decided what he would hold to. The strongest objection to the first is that a man who cannot picture the forehead before the scar is in no position simply to report that he “never” hated; the line is chosen as much as remembered. The strongest objection to the second is that the P.S. promises nothing; it names a love Adam says was always there. A good revision might hold that the P.S. is a claim about the past that Adam chooses to stand by, and that this is why it comes after the guarded letter, below his name, with the memory in view.

3. Lee's father would never let the story end safely at the lake, saying there is “more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.” Is a terrible truth really better for a young person to hear than a kind story?

What it asks It asks the chapter’s whole question. Lee says, “My father told me about my mother when I was very little, and he didn’t spare me. He told me a number of times as I was growing. Of course it wasn’t the same, but it was pretty dreadful. I’m glad he told me though. I wouldn’t like not to know.” As a boy he begged, “Get to that lake”, and his father answered, “There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.” Lee tells the end plainly: his father “clawed me out” and his mother “died on the shale in the afternoon.” Then: “Before you hate those men you must know this.”, and, “The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty—a dreadful kind of beauty.” Against this stands Adam’s reason for his lie: the truth “would rob them of the good thoughts about their mother”, and “I couldn’t tell them the whole truth.” Lee himself says, “I wish I hadn’t started to tell you this”. That same evening Adam’s lie came “so glibly to his tongue” that it frightened him. The student writes a thesis on whether a terrible truth is better for a young person than a kind story, meets the strongest objection, and revises. The card must not say whether Adam tells the boys, what answer comes from Charles, or whether the family moves to Salinas, and must not describe the attack on Lee’s mother more fully than the chapter does.

A strong answer A strong response builds a thesis, meets the strongest objection, and revises. One thesis says the terrible truth is better: it gave Lee a mother to love and the camp’s care to be grateful for, and he says plainly that he is glad he knows. The strongest objection is Lee’s own “it wasn’t the same”: his truth gives a son someone to honor, and Adam fears his would take away the good thoughts the boys have. A good revision might hold that the truth is better when it is told with love and told whole, the way Lee’s father always ended with the camp’s care, and that Adam’s real problem may be not whether to tell but how.

Vocabulary definitions