The Red Pony, Chrysanthemums and Flight (Cliffs Notes)

John Steinbeck’s

The Red Pony by John G . Irons

The Red Pony 1

Editor: Gary Carey, M.A., University of Colorado Consulting Editor: James L. Roberts, Ph.D., Department of English, University of Nebraska CliffsNotes™ The Red Pony Published by: Hungry Minds, Inc. 909 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022 www.hungryminds.com (Hungry Minds Web site) www.cliffsnotes.com (CliffsNotes Web site) Copyright© 1978 Hungry Minds, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book, including interior design, cover design, and icons, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-8220-1135-2 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Distributed in the United States by Hungry Minds, Inc. Distributed by CDG Books Canada Inc. for Canada; by Transworld Publishers Limited in the United Kingdom; by IDG Norge Books for Norway; by IDG Sweden Books for Sweden; by IDG Books Australia Publishing Corporation Pty. Ltd. for Australia and New Zealand; by TransQuest Publishers Pte Ltd. for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong; by Gotop Information Inc. for Taiwan; by ICG Muse, Inc. for Japan; by Norma Comunicaciones S.A. for Columbia; by Intersoft for South Africa; by Eyrolles for France; by International Thomson Publishing for Germany, Austria and Switzerland; by Distribuidora Cuspide for Argentina; by LR International for Brazil; by Galileo Libros for Chile; by Ediciones ZETA S.C.R. Ltda. for Peru; by WS Computer Publishing Corporation, Inc., for the Philippines; by Contemporanea de Ediciones for Venezuela; by Express Computer Distributors for the Caribbean and West Indies; by Micronesia Media Distributor, Inc. for Micronesia; by Grupo Editorial Norma S.A. for Guatemala; by Chips Computadoras S.A. de C.V. for Mexico; by Editorial Norma de Panama S.A. for Panama; by American Bookshops for Finland. Authorized Sales Agent: Anthony Rudkin Associates for the Middle East and North Africa. For general information on Hungry Minds’ products and services please contact our Customer Care department; within the U.S. at 800-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993 or fax 317-572-4002. For sales inquiries and resellers information, including discounts, premium and bulk quantity sales and foreign language translations please contact our Customer Care department at 800-434-3422, fax 317-572-4002 or write to Hungry Minds, Inc., Attn: Customer Care department, 10475 Crosspoint Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46256. For information on licensing foreign or domestic rights, please contact our Sub-Rights Customer Care department at 650-653-7098. For information on using Hungry Minds’ products and services in the classroom or for ordering examination copies, please contact our Educational Sales department at 800-434-2086 or fax 317-572-4005. Please contact our Public Relations department at 212-884-5163 for press review copies or 212-884-5000 for author interviews and other publicity information or fax 212-884-5400. For authorization to photocopy items for corporate, personal, or educational use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, or fax 978-750-4470. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR HAVE USED THEIR BEST EFFORTS IN PREPARING THIS BOOK. THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES WHICH EXTEND BEYOND THE DESCRIPTIONS CONTAINED IN THIS PARAGRAPH. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES REPRESENTATIVES OR WRITTEN SALES MATERIALS. THE ACCURACY AND COMPLETENESS OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HEREIN AND THE OPINIONS STATED HEREIN ARE NOT GUARANTEED OR WARRANTED TO PRODUCE ANY PARTICULAR RESULTS, AND THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFIT OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR OTHER DAMAGES. FULFILLMENT OF EACH COUPON OFFER IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OFFEROR. Trademarks: Cliffs, CliffsNotes, the CliffsNotes logo, CliffsAP, CliffsComplete, CliffsTestPrep, CliffsQuickReview, CliffsNote-a-Day and all related logos and trade dress are registered trademarks or trademarks of Hungry Minds, Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hungry Minds, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

The Red Pony 2

CONTENTS Life and Background The Red Pony “The Gift” “The Great Mountains” “The Promise” “The Leader of the People” The Chrysanthemums Flight Review Questions Selected Bibliography

The Red Pony 3

LIFE AND BACKGROUND John Steinbeck was the type of author who liked to know his material firsthand. He was not content to narrate a story that had no basis in fact. Thus many of his works take place in California and deal with subjects that he thoroughly understood. One of the finest attributes of The Red Pony is the feeling that the author knew his material and his characters in great depth. The scenes in this novel, such as the episode when a mare must be killed in order to save her colt, are narrated with the skill of a person who has witnessed such an act. Steinbeck’s father settled in California shortly after the American Civil War. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. His mother was a schoolteacher in the public school system in Salinas. Steinbeck grew up in this beautiful, fertile California valley where he found the materials for most of his novels. His imagination was kindled by writing at a very early age partly because his mother, the schoolteacher, read to him from the famous literature of the world. During his formative years, he played various sports in high school, worked at many different jobs, and wandered around the countryside observing the phenomena of nature. He entered Stanford University in 1920, and even though he remained until 1925, he never graduated. While in college, he attempted some creative writing that was submitted to magazines and was rejected. Not caring to complete the requirements for a degree and hoping to earn a living as an author, he left Stanford permanently in 1925 to live in New York. While he continued his writing and while he continually received rejection slips, he worked briefly for the New York American newspaper and as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden before returning to California. His first novel, Cup of Gold, appeared in 1929, two months before the unprecedented and horrific stock market crash and only sold some fifteen hundred copies. In two respects, 1930 was a notable year for Steinbeck: He married Carol Henning and the newlyweds settled in staid Pacific Grove, which he often satirized. There, Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, whose friendship strongly influenced Steinbeck’s work. Ricketts, the owner of a biological supply laboratory on Monterey’s Cannery Row, became the hero of “The Snake,” Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday, as well as a collaborator in writing The Sea of Cortez. The Red Pony 4

During the era of “The Hungry Thirties”an era of Depression, bread lines, and bloody, labor-management conflicts Steinbeck knew a definitive cross-section of society and shared the problems and stresses of the times. His father, like many men, miraculously helped the family to survive the Depression with a small house and twenty-five dollars a month. Steinbeck continued his writing and received four hundred dollars for the first of his California novels, The Pastures of Heaven (1932). In 1933, To a God Unknown, a complicated, unsuccessful allegory, failed to repay the publisher’s two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar advance. Both publishers declared bankruptcy. That same year North American Review bought the first two parts of The Red Pony, and some short stories, including “Murder,” which was selected as an 0. Henry Prize story for 1934 and brought Steinbeck his first national recognition. Tortilla Flat (1935) was an immediate and popular success and won him the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for the year’s best novel by a Californian, even though critics missed the point of the droll humor about the unemployed drifters of Monterey. Steinbeck received three or four thousand dollars for the Hollywood film rights, which had a heartening effect upon a man accustomed to earning thirty-five dollars a week. During 1935, he tried writing in Mexico, but returned to Los Gatos, California. In Dubious Battle (1936) dealt with a labor strike and aroused the critics’ fury as Steinbeck had predicted. With a demand for his controversial work, he placed short stories in Esquire and Harper’s and wrote a series of articles for the San Francisco News concerning life in California’s migrant labor camps, material that he partly utilized later for The Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men (1937), a popular and a critical success, was selected by the Book-of-the- Month Club, and shortly afterward, Steinbeck was selected as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Year. After touring England, Ireland, Russia, and Sweden, he published a play version of the book with the famous playwright, George Kaufman. Steinbeck became a celebrity when the play enjoyed a long run, and he won the New York Drama Critics Circle’s award on the first ballot. Unsurprisingly, however, the night that Of Mice and Men opened on Broadway, Steinbeck was living in a migrant camp. In The Red Pony 5

preparation for writing his novels, Steinbeck would often live, work, and be with the people about whom he was to write. Thus, in preparation for writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Oklahoma, joined some migrants and rode with them to California. In California, he stayed with the migrants, living with them in “Hoovervilles,” joining them in their search for work and attempting as nearly as possible to come to terms with their essential characteristics. Leaving them, he made several trips to various camps to observe firsthand the living and working conditions of migrants. He wrote some short pieces in which he described the plight of these people and he pleaded for a more tolerant approach in dealing with them. These articles, however, were not very effective. It was only when he molded his new experiences into a novel that positive effects were achieved. The appearance of The Grapes of Wrath was the major publishing event of 1939. Publishers Weekly listed the novel as the best seller of 1939 and the eighth ranking book of 1940. It was estimated that over half a million copies of the original printing were sold. In addition to several American editions, there have been numerous foreign editions and translations. The novel was later made into an important social-protest film. Also in 1940, Steinbeck was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and won the Pulitzer Prize for the best novel of the year, as well as the American Booksellers’ Award. In 1939 and 1940, Steinbeck set off with Ed Ricketts for expeditions to the Gulf of California, later documented in The Sea of Cortez. He also went to Mexico to film The Forgotten Village, a semi-documentary about introducing medicine into a suspicious community. During 1942, his wife sued for divorce and that same year the Army Air Force requested a promotional book, Bombs Away, to popularize its flight training program and to allay parental fears about flying. Steinbeck gave the royalties to the Air Forces Aid Society. Steinbeck’s World War 11 works include the play-novella, The Moon Is Down, for which he was decorated by the King of Norway in recognition of the book’s contribution to the liberation effort. His film scenario, Lifeboat, is sometimes thought to be his most significant war writing. His human-interest articles, written while he was a special war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune from June to December, 1943, appeared as a The Red Pony 6

collection, Once There Was a War, in 1958, and it seems that Steinbeck had considered a novel about the war, but in The Wide World of John Steinbeck, Peter Lisca comments that Steinbeck was “too disheartened by what he had seen of the war to prolong the experience in any way and he decided not to publish it.” After the war, Steinbeck devoted himself to novels (East of Eden, for example), travels, film scripts, and editorials. In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the highest honor a writer can receive. He died December 20, 1968.

The Red Pony 7

THE RED PONY Critical Commentaries I. “The Gift” Steinbeck’s short novel, The Red Pony, is a classic tale of a young boy’s coming of age and his initiation into manhood. It consists of four short stories dealing with the Tiflin family and with Jody Tiflin, in particular. In “The Gift,” when we first meet Jody, he is ten years old, not even an adolescent; during this story and the remaining three stories, Steinbeck will focus on Jody’s gradual maturation. As a typical ten-year-old, Jody is like most farm boys. In general, he obeys his parents, but as we see, he forgets to do his chores, teases wild birds, and even smashes an occasional muskmelon because of his restlessness. Already he is feeling the need to be a manto be responsible for something that is his. This spark of independence, however, is not accepted lightly by Jody’s parents. Farm life is hard, and it demands discipline. Yet Jody’s parents are willing to test their young son and fulfill his dream of owning a horse of his own. In fact, the horse, Gabilan, will test them alltheir patience with one another, their understanding of Jody’s protectiveness, indulgence, and love for Gabilan, and their own insights into themselves when Gabilan dies. In these stories, Steinbeck’s theme is, foremost, the discipline which is necessary in order to cope with lifeand with death. Because “The Gift” deals with the dawn of a young boy’s manhood, note the fitting parallel as the story itself opens at daybreak. The central character in the opening scene, however, is not Jody Tiflin, nor his parents. It is Billy Buck, the cow-hand who helps Mr. Tiffin take care of his farm and tend the animals. He is a weathered, middle-aged man who has been with the Tiflins for a long time; it would seem to most people that he is almost part of the family, yet he remains separate and apart. This is due to no animosity between the Tiflins and Billy Buck; this is simply the natural order of things. Billy Buck is a cow-hand, hired by Mr. Tiflin, his boss. This is part of the strict discipline of the Tiflin family and is a discipline that has endured so long that it has become habitual. For instance, Billy Buck does not resent waiting to go into the house for breakfast until Carl Tiflin has come into the dining room. His waiting is as automatic as his rising at dawn, surveying the weather, then methodically and The Red Pony 8

carefully currying and brushing the horses. Steinbeck describes Billy Buck’s actions as “wasteless of time,” underscoring a code that is shared by ranchers and cow-hands alike. Carl Tiflin is characterized by Steinbeck as being tall and stern; twice during this story, Steinbeck describes Carl’s act of turning off the oil lamp. Carl regulates the light, God-like; in addition, Jody’s father isn’t often jovial. His humor is rarely expressed. The morning that he and Billy Buck saddle up and ride away to bring back Gabilan is an exception. Carl is pleased that he feels that his son is mature enough to have his own horse to feed it, care for it, and tame it. Jody, he senses, is ready for man-sized responsibility. The passing of responsibility from father to son is a major step; until now, Jody’s chores have been, for the most part, feeding the chickens and filling the wood-box. At first, Carl Tiflin seems to be a cold authoritarian father, but Steinbeck softens him and gives him human dimensions. He helps us to see that Carl Tiflin has plowed and farmed, defied the caprices of bad weather and poor crops, and has survived. He has realized that only the fittest survive and that survival depends, in large part, on strict self-discipline. He is a man who lives close to the soil; he observes the laws of nature, sees its checks and balances concerning life and death, and he models his own life accordingly. At the same time, Carl Tiflin has his own kind of warmth; for example, note how Steinbeck describes Carl’s feeding the quail, wild birds which are capable of foraging on their own. And Steinbeck adds, “… for some reason [he] was proud to have them come. He never allowed any shooting near the house for fear the quail might go away.” Despite the fact that Carl Tiflin is Jody’s natural father and it is he who gives Gabilan to Jody, it is the cow-hand Billy Buck who is largely Jody’s surrogate father in “The Gift.” It is from Billy Buck that Jody learns how to take care of Gabilan and it is to Billy Buck that Jody turns when Gabilan is coughing and near death. Billy Buck, as a cow-hand, does not have Carl Tiflin’s authority, but because he is an expert cow-hand, he shares a special kind of kinship with Jody because of the West’s caste system. Billy Buck owns no land, no horse of his own except a scrub one, and has no real home except that of the Tiflin’s bunkhouse. Thus he is able to be more relaxed when he is with Jody than Carl is with his own son. Billy Buck can joke and comment to Jody about “little things” that bother Jody. As an example, early in the story, Jody objects to a spot of blood being on one of his breakfast eggs. Carl The Red Pony 9

Tiflin has not sat down yet, so does not and would not comment on Jody’s scraping off the spot of blood; trivial conversations are not exchanged between father and son. But Billy Buck, however, waiting for Mr. Tiflin, notices what Jody does and feels free to comment, “That won’t hurt you ... that’s only a sign the rooster leaves.” This is the common-sense kind of discipline that Billy Buck offers to Jody throughout the entirety of The Red Pony. Billy Buck will be a kind of older brother, or uncle, to Jody; he will be a sort of father-confessor, but one with a strong streak of discipline, much akin to Jody’s own father. Although the morning begins much like any other morning, Jody is quick to perceive that this morning is different. His father’s joking about Billy Buck’s drinking is the first clue, then Carl’s generalizing about not knowing when he and Billy will be back is unusual in Carl’s usually regimented schedule. Ostensibly, Carl and Billy are going to sell some old cows to a butcher, but because this story will deal with a young boy’s confronting the death of his first pony, you should note that already Steinbeck is inserting death imagery, in its natural contextalmost casuallyinto the story. Recall Billy Buck’s comment that the blood spot on one of Jody’s eggs was “only a sign the rooster leaves.” Steinbeck’s motif of the death-life-death-life cycle has already begun: the fertilized egg has become food for the Tiflin family. And, probably, if the eggs had become full-grown chickens, they would have been eaten by either the Tiflins or by townspeople, just as the old cows are being herded off to the butcher. Death is a part of living, yet even adults tend to recoil about accepting death’s inevitability. To the young, death often seems to be something that happens only to something or someone else. Its fierceness and unjustness are not real until someone or something valuable is death’s victim. The death of Gabilan will be an epiphanous moment for Jody in The Red Pony; living on a farm he is aware of death, certainly, but Steinbeck deals with many kinds of imagery throughout his story in order to show us that Gabilan’s death is not merely an ordinary death. Be aware, for instance, that after the old cows disappear over the hill toward the butcher that Jody notices his two dogs, one of which has lost an ear in a battle with a coyote, the remaining ear stands higher, as a result. The imagery is utilitarian; it colors the narration and provides for us an explanation that came to Jody from Billy Buck. Steinbeck is emphasizing Billy Buck’s role of a sage old man, the stand-in father who answers the many questions The Red Pony 10

that would irritate and be of little consequence to Carl Tiflin. Steinbeck then steers young Jody Tiflin up a hill, where the boy can look back on the ranch. The story has just begun, and the main characters have been introduced and characterized. The action has commenced; now Steinbeck is giving us a sense of cinematic perspective on the Tiflin farm itself. He describes the color of the whitewashed house, the red geraniums, and the cypress tree that looms above the great black kettle where the Tiflin pigs are scalded. More death imagery follows closely as Jody observes two big black buzzards sailing low to the ground. Although he feels “an uncertainty in the air,” the buzzards do not seem to Jody to be a part of it. He knows the necessity of the buzzards’ finding carrion and disposing of the remains of dead cows or rabbits. It is here that Steinbeck includes a phrase that might be overlooked unless one was alerted to it. At the story’s climax, Jody will battle a strong and determined buzzard for the corpse of Gabilan, and already early in the story we are alerted to the fact that Jody knows, almost by instinct because he learned it many years ago, that buzzards “could not be hurt because they made away with carrion.” He knows this to be a truth, but at this time it carries no emotional quality. It is merely another part of Carl’s code of discipline and Billy Buck’s common sense; it is as natural as responding to his mother’s clanging of the breakfast triangle. As Jody starts off the story on his journey to manhood, he also starts off toward school, and Steinbeck is keen to remind us that this is an ordinary boy. He is still very young and so he fills his pockets with little rocks so that he can take a shot at a bird or a rabbit; he is not very interested in schoolbooks and he has the sense of late summer revolt that the rest of the schoolboys have. Later, when he returns home, his mother will have to remind him, as she probably has done numerous times, how to pile the wood in the wood-box and how to try and find out where the chickens are hiding their eggs. His chores finished, Jody enjoys his favorite pastimepretending that his twenty-two rifle is loaded; he aims the gun at all sorts of things, but knows that he won’t be able to really shoot the gun and buy cartridges for it until he is twelve years old. His father has decreed it; it is good discipline to wait. Jody’s wait for his father and Billy Buck is celebrated inwardly as the two men enter the Tiflin house. Jody smells The Red Pony 11

brandy on their breaths; for him, that means that his father may be mellowed somewhat and that perhaps he will talk to him, like Billy Buck does. He is disappointed, though, and puzzled when he hears the two men laughing after he has been sent to bed. He hears hoot-owls hunting mice down by the barn and, just before turning in, he recalls that he asked his father if they were going to butcher a pig in the morning. Jody’s earlier sensing “an uncertainty in the air” was valid; the following morning at breakfast, Billy Buck does not look at Jody and that his father speaks to his son crossly. Something has happened, Jody is sure, after his father commands him to “come with us after breakfast.” His father, however, is feigning, as he often does, an imitation of strength and authority. When Jody is finally shown the new red pony, Carl Tiflin is still curt, giving commands and threatening to sell the pony instantly if Jody does not curry and feed him properly. The tension is broken among the men and the boy only when the red pony gingerly nips Jody’s fingers. Carl Tiflin leaves his son with Billy Buck then, and although Billy Buck tries to be as cool and professional about the gift of the pony as Carl was, he soon drops the pose, and he and Jody exchange the thrill of examining and touching the awkward new pony. Billy, Steinbeck tells us, knows how Jody feels and he enjoys sharing the excitement. He points out, though, that the saddle which Carl bought along with the pony isn’t practical for farming, but to Jody both the saddle and the new pony are priceless. Jody becomes a rarity among his six school friends: he has his own horse. Before, Jody had been an ordinary schoolboy to them. Now even he feels different. We enjoy watching him tell his friends what Billy Buck has told him about training the horse and the uselessness of the show-saddle; we condone the excessive pride he has in his horse and are pleased with his eagerness to exaggerate its specialness. His adulation for Gabilan grows throughout the afternoon as he curries him again and again; so enthralled with the pony is he that he does not hear his mother enter the barn and remind him that his usual daily chores have not been done and must not be neglected. She is gentle with Jody, proud too of her son’s pride in his horse. After Jody has realized that Gabilan is really his horse and that he must be responsible for Gabilan, Steinbeck re-emphasizes the change that has taken place within Jody. No longer is he bound to The Red Pony 12

the rote discipline of, say, the breakfast triangle. He has replaced the iron discipline of his childhood for a new sense of self-discipline. He is no longer wholly dependent on the triangle to awaken him. His love for Gabilan and his pride in possessing Gabilan have begun to transform him towards a new maturity. But Jody, as often as he tries, seldom manages to reach the horse barn before Billy Buck does. The old cow-hand is usually already there and it is with the help of Billy Buck’s vast knowledge about horses that Jody learns practical tactics about caring for and disciplining a horse. It is Billy Buck, not Jody’s father, who is the key figure in initiating Jody into this new world of responsibility. Billy teaches the young ten-year-old such practical things as reassuring the colt by lifting his legs and patting his hooves. Jody’s father gives him the colt and tells him that he must be responsible for it, but it is Billy who tells Jody how to care for Gabilan. And Jody knows that he can trust Billy Buck’s advice, for although Billy is just a cow-hand and his own horse is only a “stringy cayuse,” the horse nearly always has won first prize at the stock trials and Billy himself is an expert in roping and steer wrestling. Thus, Billy Buck becomes almost a God-figure for the young boy, a never-ending source of comfort and knowledge, something which will prove to be a disappointment for Jody and painful for Billy Buck when Gabilan dies. Yet Steinbeck will show us that Gabilan’s death is necessary for Jody to achieve a new plateau of self-realization and maturity. By coping with Gabilan’s magical metamorphosis of an ordinary farm life into a new world of wonder and mystery and then being savagely severed from that world, Gabilan becomes one tool of many tools that Jody will use and fashion on his journey to adulthood. As Jody begins to train Gabilan, we notice certain parallels within them. Gabilan, for instance, races, then quivers, “pretending to be frightened.” Jody, arising early and going toward the barn, pretends how he would react if Gabilan were gone or if rats had gnawed into the red saddle. Likewise, early in the story, Jody, when he was thirsty, leaned over the wooden tub near the spring and drank close to the green mossy wood where the water tasted best. He drinks, as it turns out, like Gabilan. He does not cup his hands; he has learned “how best to drink,” for when Gabilan walks to the water-trough, he buries “his nose in the water up to the nostrils. Jody was proud then, for he knew that was the way to judge a horse.” And note, too, while reading this The Red Pony 13

story that Jody’s hair is described as “tangled and long” (“I’ve got to cut your hair before long,” his mother says); the red pony’s coat is, first off, described as “long and tangled.” Steinbeck is purposely aligning the young boy and the colt. Both are learning disciplines. Both must learn to bridle their wild impulsive natures without either of their spirits being broken. Billy Buck, in fact, says that Gabilan must be broken right or “he wouldn’t mind because he wanted it.” This, in a sense, is what Jody is also teaching himself. It is difficult, at times, for young Jody and for the colt to adjust to the new reality, and Jody’s father cautions his son that Gabilan’s tricks are annoying: “a trick horse is kind of an actorno dignity, no character of his own.” Jody too must learn not to be an actor or a dreamer. This is difficult. Owning Gabilan, teaching Gabilan, caring for Gabilan-all these things were fantasies that Jody dreamed of. We understand his riding the saddle on a sawhorse, riding “beyond the room.” We understand how “he carried his rifle across the pommel. He saw the field go flying by, and he heard the beat of the galloping hoofs.” Jody hopes now only that it won’t rain, “for rain would spot the red saddle,” but one can’t keep things untouched and pristine. All things must be exposed to life and the elements and, perhaps by chance, be battered. So it is with Gabilan. He must be taught not to be afraid; he must be taught halter-breaking, have long halter workouts, learn to stop, start, trot, gallop, adjust to the saddle, and then adjust to the bridle. We are forewarned and prepared for sorrow in this story due in part to the dramatic change in the weather. Although Jody has been promised that he can ride Gabilan on Thanksgiving Day, winter comes fast to the valley. Rain threatens, clouds hang low, and then the rains begin. Jody becomes over-protective of Gabilan. The horse is coddled as soon as the rain sets in. This is unnatural. Gabilan should have gotten used to the rain and learned to adjust to itjust as he learned to eventually adjust to the bridle. When he is soaked suddenly, then for a long time, he succumbs. Perhaps he would have died anyway, for individual strengths and weaknesses vary, but Jody was wrong to coddle him. Gabilan is slowly eased into a macabre, terribly unnatural situation. Death itself would have been easy and quick, but Jody and Billy Buck try to defy the natural course of matters. They steam the horse, lance a pus pocket, and finally are forced to make an incision into Gabilan’s windpipe, despite the horrible The Red Pony 14

knowledge that if the horse survives, he will have a metal button in his neck to breathe through. Gabilan attempts to break away and force death upon himself outside the barn but is led back inside. Finally, however, he is able to escape the boy and the hired hand who are prolonging his agony; he goes to the high brush country, a place Jody has led him to, one that is so overgrown that no trace of farmhouse or man is evident. It is here that he dies and he is able to do so peacefullyas an animal, outside, away from man’s interference. When Jody discovers Gabilan, he becomes defiant. We draw back and watch this young boy who has had his first confrontation with the reality of death. Life and death have occurred according to the laws of nature and cannot be influenced by man’s love or desires. We respond sympathetically to a young boy who is facing a great loss for the first time and who is discovering that neither his parents nor a close friend can prevent what has happened. In addition to the death of the red pony, Jody also learns that his absolute trust in Billy Buck is unwarranted; however much a man might know about the nature of horses, he cannot, finally, control nature itself. Critics who suggest that Steinbeck lulls the reader into a false position by the tender and beautiful opening of the story, often fail to take into consideration the careful preparation for Gabilan’s death through symbols and images which do indeed prepare us for the final, torturing reversal. In fact, the sorrow and cruelty we witness is made more poignant by Steinbeck’s contrast between the rural simplicity and the knowledge of death and nature that Jody must assimilate into his life. All of Jody’s experiences in “The Gift” have served to prepare him for an eventual balanced acceptance of life and death. In training the pony, he realized the inevitable which must be inflicted upon the pony in order to train him properly. Realistically, Jody knew that the pony was going to die: “When Jody saw how dry and dead the hair looked, he knew at last that there was no hope for the pony.” But however prepared Jody was for the horse’s death, he still knew that he had to assert some resistance to it. This is expressed in his encounter with the buzzards as Jody takes a piece of quartz and violently kills one of them. His gory attack on the buzzards at the end of the story indicates his irrational, emotional rejection of the destructive aspects of nature, but it is only Billy Buck who understands Jody’s gestures of futility; only he understands that Jody’s The Red Pony 15

violence against the buzzards is as illogical as was Jody’s love for Gabilan. II. “The Great Mountains” The story takes place six or seven months after Jody’s horse, Gabilan, has died; it is now midsummer. Unlike “The Gift,” in “The Great Mountains,” the focus here will be not on a lingering, agonizing death of something which is deeply loved; instead, it will concern the approaching death of a very old man, a stranger, who suddenly appears at the Tiflin ranch. And, when the story is finished, Jody will be profoundly shaken by the old man’s presence and his disappearance. Jody is listless and bored as the story begins. School is out, he has no close friends who live nearby to play with, he has no brothers and sisters, and his parents and Billy Buck are busy. His boredom will, thus, at first, tempt him to be violent and he will try to banish his restlessness with physical activity. Steinbeck starkly describes Jody’s careless, yet deliberate, cruelty as the young boy willfully destroys several small swallows’ nests, and his deliberately baiting a rat trap with stale cheese, knowing full well that his good-natured dog Doubletree Mutt will sniff out the trap before a rat has a chance to nibble at the cheese. We assume that Jody has a history of tormenting the dog, for Mrs. Tiflin knows immediately when she hears a yelp what her son has done. But Jody feels especially defiant today and tries, although without luck, to hit Mutt with a rock. Thoroughly defeated, he decides to kill a bird with his slingshot and, here, notice that Steinbeck tells us that the boy has never before been successful. This time, however, Jody is determined that he will kill and “for the first time that afternoon, he was intent.” And he does kill his first thrush, but he does not feel triumphant afterward. There is only a small pain in his stomach as he, ritual-like, cuts off the bird’s head, disembowels it, cuts off its wings, and then throws it into the brush. Steinbeck carefully orchestrates the violence that Jody creates because of his boredom as a vivid contrast to what will be born out of his boredom immediately following the violence. After detailing for us the dirty linings of the ruined swallows’ nests, the blood on Mutt’s nose, and Jody’s cutting the thrush into pieces, Steinbeck shows us a calmer version of Jody, one who goes immediately to the spring-pipe to refresh his thirst, to cleanse his thoughts, and also to cleanse blood from his hands. Afterwards, lying on the grass and closing one eye, Jodyas Steinbeck puts it“destroys perspective.” He allows himself to The Red Pony 16

absorb the hypnotic, persuasive mystery of the summer afternoon and the clouds overhead, “stroking them,” pushing them gently forward, and helping them to clear the mountain rims. He sees the great mountains to the west of the Tiflin ranch piling up, becoming ever darker and more savage within their core and having, at their crest, one jagged ridge. They have always been curious, secret mountains to Jody. He has talked to his father about them but to Carl Tiflin they are just mountains rocks, cliffs, and greasewoodnothing else. To Jody’s mother, they are just there, worthy of no more than a casual joke. When Jody once asked Billy Buck about the great mountains, Billy Buck did not share the young boy’s interest in lost, ancient cities still hidden there. The cow-hand doubts Jody’s fantasies and, like Jody’s mother, dismisses the boy’s questions humorously. But the fact that his father and his mother and Billy Buck view the mountains in a dull, prosaic manner creates within Jody a sense of his being like the mountainsas being different. He feels different because he perceives instinctively that there is a secret meaning to be found in these omnipresent, harsh mountainsthese mountains which are so vastly different from the gentle, jolly Gabilan mountains to the east of the ranch. There exists a duality, then, between the great mountains and the Gabilans, just as there exists a duality within the great mountains themselves. In the latter, they are both “dear” to Jody and also “terrible” to him. At dawn, the peaks of the great mountains are pink; in the evenings, they become dark, “purple-like with despair.” Their mystery is antithetical to the Gabilans. Despite “Gabilan” meaning, ironically, “hawk,” people live and have lived in the mountains and they have fought battles there. Between these two opposing ranges of mountains, in a foothill cup, lies the Tiflin ranch, “sunny and safe.” Particularly today, it seems to Jody that it is pastorally safe as he sees light streaming from the clean white house, the warm brown barn, and as he gazes on the languid, grazing cows. Even the dark cypress tree seems “usual and safe.” This, however, is only Steinbeck’s prelude to something unforeseen which breaks the “safe” spell of certainty that pervades the Tiflin clan. There will be no violence as there was in “The Gift”; now only a presence, unexplained, will cause the Tiflins concern and leave Jody a changed boy. The Red Pony 17

The presence will be that of an old Mexican man, a peasant type who says that he has come home to the mountains to die. The appearance of this stranger affects Jody greatly. The appearance of any stranger is unusual, but there seems to be a special mystery surrounding this old man’s sudden appearance and his explanation of why he has come to the Tiflin ranch. In addition, the isolation of the farm, the tedium of life there, and Jody’s recent musing about the great mountains make this a momentous event. Literarily, the old man is a universal type of figure who can be found in all of world literature; he is the wandering Jew of legends, the symbol of Old Father Death, and also the eternal wanderer. Jody’s immediate reaction is confusion, embarrassment, excitement, and helplessness in the face of an actual mystery. Before, he had only been toying and dreaming of the mysterious; now the mystery is immediate and present before him. There is a sense of unreality to the old man’s chant-like phrases; his words are flat and blunt: “I am Gitano and I have come back.” He is returning, ritual-like, to the place of his birth and that of his father. Fittingly, he points toward the west, long a symbol of death’s domain. When Billy Buck and Carl Tiflin arrive to view the old Mexican, the paisano is resting, and you should note Steinbeck’s description of the old man: “his whole body had sagged into a timeless repose.” The old man’s body and soul are readying themselves for a time without time. As readers, we have seldom seen anyone on the Tiflin ranch in “timeless repose.” Carl is always at work; time is valuable for him. Billy Buck is always busy; in “The Gift,” when he lays down the horse brush and the currycomb before he goes up to breakfast, Steinbeck says that his action was deliberate and “wasteless of time.” Mrs. Tiflin is continually described as preparing meals, cleaning food, or washing dishes; even the dogs are described as often lowering their noses to the ground in a “businesslike way.” As for Jody, either his body or his mind is always in motion. We have seen that boredom never eases him into “timeless repose.” Boredom causes him to kill, and to dream, but even in dreaming, his hands and arms “push” the clouds forward and his imagination enlarges as he tries to comprehend and encompass the mystery of the great mountains. Now, into the midst of this time-oriented cluster of people has come a stranger, someone who no longer measures time. Living, for him, is not nearly as important now as is his The Red Pony 18

preparing for dying. One often does not know what to do with strangers, especially old strangersthe women collecting at the door for various charities or the pamphlet-carrying evangelistsfor we have, besides embarrassment, a guilt if we do not aid them in a small way before sending them away. This awe in the presence of a stranger is archetypal; even the Greeks recognized the perplexity of the emotions when dealing with such a situation. Their solution was simple, however: just in case the stranger might be a god in disguise, be courteous, feed him and bed him, and then send him on his way. Carl Tiflin, however, has no illusions about the old man’s being a god. On the contrary, at the Tiflin ranch, Carl is the god, as it were. He makes the rules and wields the rod. Now, in the presence of his wife, son, and cow-hand, he must reveal a weakness that he does not like displayed to his family or to himself. He stated emphatically “we can’t have him,” but the old Mexican’s stoic statements eroded even Carl’s demand that “you won’t stay.” Then Carl’s arguments slowly crumbled as he tried to reason with the old man. Steinbeck tells us that Carl didn’t like to be cruel, but that he felt he must. He is attempting to preserve the status quo of his day-to-day living. Food is raised and eaten and sold for the sake of the Tiflinsand this includes no strange beggar. But, face-to-face with the pathetic, enigmatic man, Carl retreats from his position of absolute authoritarianism. Food and a bed for the nightthen the old man must go. The basic plot of the story is a universal type of situation. For example, the American poet Robert Frost wrote a very popular poem called “The Death of the Hired Man,” centered around a man who has come home to die on a farm very close to where he has blood relations; in Frost’s poem, the farmer is harsh about feeding a useless old man, while the wife is much more sympathetic. In Steinbeck’s story, old Gitano has also come home to die. Gitano’s desire to return to be near the mountains, to become again a part of the land where he was born, to re-emerge with nature at his death, and to find acceptance before his death creates within the reader an instant sympathy for the old paisano. Carl Tiflin’s inability to accept the old man, then, becomes the symbolic plight of many old people whom society casts off. If possible, Carl would perhaps keep the paisano, but he knows that the ranch will not support another person, and his realism cannot justify keeping a person who has relatives in the nearby town. He is particularly incapable of understanding the mystical The Red Pony 19

reasons why a person would return to the place of his birth in order to die there. Thus, to disguise his harshness and confusion, he tries to make jokes about the old man and the old horse, Easter. He eventually does the very thing he feared most: He “was afraid he might relent and let the old man stay.” He does and thus the suspense begins. We are prepared for Jody’s passionate eagerness to ask Gitano about the big mountains; only moments before, Jody was enthralled by the deep mystery pervading them and now here is Gitano, almost an emblem of the mountains himself because he is old and full of awesomeness. Gitano’s memories of going beyond the foothills of the great mountains are sparse; only once when he was a boy did he go into the mountains; he remembers littleonly that it was “quiet” and “nice” there, and his small soft smile indicates to Jody that there is truth in what he says. This is what Jody has wanted to hear. The old Tiflin horse Easter appears while Gitano and Jody are watching the stock come in from the fields and Steinbeck remarks that Carl Tiflin is again brutal to Gitano. Steinbeck repeats for us Carl’s suppressed anger: “He hates his brutality toward old Gitano, and so he became brutal again.” Jody’s own earlier brutality is somewhat akin to that of his father’s. He doesn’t like being brutal, but he continues to be brutal. But whereas Jody’s brutality was purposeless, his father deliberately tries to hurt Gitano. Jody is very aware of his father’s purpose, as is Billy Buck, who tries, with humor, to soothe the tone of the conversation. Perhaps it is old Easter, however, since he was the first horse that Carl Tiflin ever owned, who reminds Carl of his own mortality, and who is most responsible for Carl’s rashness. Certainly it is clear that old Easter reminds Gitano of his mortality, for the old paisano mutters that he does in fact like the horse, “but he’s no damn good.” The two of them have outlived their usefulnessas will Carl Tiflin, someday. During the Tiflins’ strained suppertime conversation, Steinbeck dwells on Carl’s continuing struggle to try and be firm with Gitano. Without Steinbeck’s stating why Carl finds it absolutely impossible to dismiss the old man immediately, we sense long ago that Carl erected barriers around his sensitive nature, barriers which have now become deeply rooted in order to cope with the hardships of farming, raising his family, and The Red Pony 20

maintaining the silent mystique of the taciturn stereotype of western manliness. This symbolic “last supper” between Gitano and Carl Tiflin is our fullest view of Mr. Tiflin’s tortured emotions. Even when Gitano is almost forced to eat, “the situation [did] not stop worrying Carl Tiflin.” He uses logic with the old man, but Gitano is defiant; he has come herehometo die. Carl then tries to repeat his joking harassment, reminding his wife about the goad he delivered to Gitano earlier about ham and eggs growing on the side-hills for old Gitano and old Easter. (The old horse’s name, it should be noted, suggests the concepts again of birth and death, Easter being the Christian celebration of the death and rebirth of Christ.) And even after Gitano has left and gone to the bunkhouse, Carl is restless and defensive about his treatment of the old man. After supper, Jody again tries to fathom the kinship between Gitano and the great mountains because of a nagging “something” within each of them that he cannot understand, “some unknown thing.” As he earlier felt himself irresistibly drawn to the mountains, he now feels this power drawing him toward the bunkhouse. When he emerges from the dark, “secret night” and enters the bunkhouse, he surprises Gitano before the old paisano can hide the lean, thin, gold handled rapier lying in his lap. Jody has never seen such an object before and Gitano is resentful and angry that the young boy has interfered with what is sacred to him. In this scene, Gitano is silent and at first reluctant to speak about the rapier, but after assenting to do so, he allows Jody a view of the rapier as a religious elder might allow a neophyte to witness a sacred object. He tells Jody little about the rapier, except that his father gave it to him and he doesn’t know why he keeps it, but that he does, then blows out the lamp almost before Jody has closed the bunkhouse door. This scene is central to Jody’s fuller comprehension of the nature of Gitano’s actions at the end of the story. Part of the pathos and emotional impact lie in Jody’s decision that no one must know about the rapier. He senses that there is a mystery that he may never unravel concerning the old man and the rapier and the great mountains, but he must tell no one; “it would destroy some fragile structure of truth.” He has witnessed a different sense of life than that which exists around him; he has sensed the possibilities of different ways of responding, of existing, and of The Red Pony 21

loving. When Gitano leaves next morning, we sense that we have seen the last of this Don Quixote figure. He has taken an old horse, described as having yellow teeth, flat sharp hoofs and its ribs and hipbones jutting out under its skin. Likewise, Gitano was described as a lean man, his skin so shrunk that it defined bone, not flesh, and his skin as dark as dried beef. But his posture is also often referred to: always straight. Even Jody notices that Gitano’s body was “as straight as that of a young man.” It is “only in his movements and by the scuffling of his heels could it be seen that he was old.” Although Steinbeck does not state outright that Carl Tiflin feels relief at Gitano’s disappearance, it is so. His eagerness to joke with Jess Taylor releases the tension that has confused him for years about the fate of old Easter and, currently, how he would have to deal with old Gitano’s demand that he die with the Tiflin family. As the story ends, only weand Jodyknow something of an answer to Carl Tiflin’s last question, directed to Jess, but more to himself, really: “I wonder what he wants back there.” Jody does not know what it is that Gitano searches for within the depths of the great mountains, but he has experienced the feeling of wanting to go there himself and only heand weknow that Gitano took with him the rapier that was handed down to him by his father, a remnant of the past, a past that will soon claim him and the old horse. The nameless sorrow which he feels is a sorrow we feel too because we have seen an old man whom no one cares about confronting death bravely and courageously without friends or food, with only an old horse whom no one wants. They will enter an unknown land as unknown as eternity itself, but a land that old Gitano remembers as being quiet and nice. The grief and sorrow that Steinbeck mentions come from Jody’s perception and recognition of some mystical conjunction of the death of old Gitano, old Easter, the great mountains, and the rapier. He cannot share his feelings with his prosaic father, nor can he understand their profundity. What he has discovered is the wonder and value in knowing that “something was there, something very wonderful because it wasn’t known...” III. “The Promise” The third section of The Red Pony opens with images of spring The Red Pony 22

and the promise of new life. The afternoon is “green and gold with spring.” The plants are tall and the feed is smooth and thick. The odor of the new spring causes the horses to gallop and the lambs and even the old sheep to jump in the air. But Steinbeck’s theme of the cycle of life, followed by death, is closely woven into these lighthearted introductory paragraphs. Jody is coming home from school alone, but accompanying him is a “phantom army with great flags and swords, silent but deadly.” Jody’s imagination and the impatient spring air transform him into a warrior and a hunter. He imagines himself hiding and hunting wild animals, as he silently collects his bounty of three horny-toads, four little lizards, a blue snake, sixteen grasshoppers and a brown newt and puts them in his tin lunch pail. At home, his imagination is fired with the discovery of a mailorder catalogue in the mailbox, but the promise of indulging in the thick “wish book” evaporates when Mrs. Tiflin tells him that his father wants to talk to him. She also chides him about having a guilty conscience when Jody asks if he’s done anything wrong, but she fails to remember what Jody knows well: his father is a taciturn man, seldom talking to his son unless he is disciplining or correcting him. It is with a feeling of uneasiness that Jody approaches his father and Billy Buck, the two of them talking slowly alongside the lower pasture fence. In “The Gift,” when Carl Tiflin first spoke to his son about Gabilan, he used a “stern” tone. This time, Carl wants to discuss the possibility of Jody’s having another horse, but, first, he must extract a promise from Jody to work for the horse before he will promise to give his son another pony. It is important to note in this scene that giving Jody another pony was not Carl’s idea; it was Billy Buck’s. While Carl discusses the promised pony with his son, he says that Billy has said that Jody took good care of the red pony, that Billy has said that Jody has “a good patient hand with horses,” and that Billy has said that the best way for Jody to be a good hand with horses is to raise a colt himself. In fact, Billy interrupts Mr. Tiflin to say that “It’s the only good way.” Billy has two motives for wanting Jody to have another chance to raise a colt. Billy’s credibility has become tarnished; at one time, he seemed infallible to Jody. He was once respected by the boy without question, but since Gabilan’s death, he has noticed a change within Jody. The boy has become more independent and more skeptical regarding Billy; the cow-hand hopes to regain Jody’s respect once again and, more important, he wants Jody to The Red Pony 23

have another chance to raise a horse of his own. It is important to Billy that Jody learn more than disappointment and defeat in ranching. He alone knows how deeply Jody loved Gabilan and how angered and frustrated the boy was by the horse’s seemingly senseless death. Despite Billy’s common sense expertise, he is a romanticist; he believes that the two of them, himself and Jody, can recapture their old sense of kinship. In contrast, Jody’s father is a realist, quite businesslike; breeding the mare, Nellie, will cost the Tiflins five dollars. The fee will have to be earned by Jody. He will have to do extra work for the family throughout the summer. Terms must be agreed upon between the two of them, and Jody must further promise to do no complaining during the summer about the extra work or about taking special care of Nellie until she foals her colt. Jody is mesmerized; Steinbeck describes his leaving his father and Billy by saying that he “slid away.” Jody’s imagination has ballooned once more; earlier in the story he was merely hunting bears and tigers on his way home from school; now the possibility of owning another colt, a horse of his own has been promised. And he senses that his father, although stating the terms of the promise, is not responsible for his new happiness. He knows that it was Billy Buck who convinced Mr. Tiflin to allow Jody to have one more chance to raise a horse, and he wants to touch Billy as he leaves the two men, but if he did so he would break an unspoken code; he would show a weakness, a softness, and a favoritism if he did so. He lives in a man’s world and has learned what softness and coddling can cause; long ago Carl Tiflin implanted the seeds of stern behavior within his son. Jody has accepted the challenge of earning his colt and so he slides away and begins his evening chores with new seriousness, silently and alone. A renewed sense of striving envelopes Jody; no longer does he simply toss out grain for the chickens; he spreads it far and wide for them. He promises himself that he will not absently catch bugs and reptiles and stuff them into his lunch pail merely to annoy his mother and to break the monotony of the endless days on the ranch. He vows that he will become more of a doer than a dreamer. And he will be patienteven though Billy Buck tells him that it will be nearly a year before the colt is born. He is determined to waitand warrantthe new colt. Steinbeck vividly describes Jody’s sitting out with Nellie as The Red Pony 24

the two leave to have her bred. Carl Tiflin soberly folds a five-dollar bill in a piece of newspaper and pins it inside Jody’s overalls. Then Billy cautions Jody about Nellie’s nervous temperament. But both men allow Jody to set out alone with the mare. There is to be no coddling of the boy. And Steinbeck even slips in an aside of humor as he tells us that because the sun was so warm on Jody’s back he was “forced to take a serious stiff-legged hop now and then in spite of his maturity.” His maturity, of course, is yet to be measured, but Jody does feel a new sense of maturity and certainty. Meanwhile, Steinbeck returns to the pastoral images of the introductory paragraphs of this section, focusing on the meadowlarks singing, the vivid red and black coloring of the blackbirds and, at the same time, blending this pastoral sense with his ever-present sense of foreboding, noting the “restrained grieving” of the wild doves. The bucolic, dual-toned atmosphere preceding Jody’s arrival at the Taylor ranch is a quiet contrast to the wild and violent copulation of Nellie and Sundog. We are as unprepared for it as Jodie is. The stallion’s spirit cannot be contained, nor can Nellie. She bares her teeth, defiant of Jody, while Sundog splinters the corral logs to reach the mare. Jess Taylor suggests that Jody go up to the house during the breeding, but Jody refuses to leave and sits behind Jess on the rancher’s horse. He will witness this creation of new life. Earlier in this section, the narrator’s description of the toad with his “thorny crown” and “spiked halo” echoed the Christian story of death and resurrection, reinforcing the process of rebirth in nature which has lain dormant for many months. Now lusty new life is being created in the animal world before young Jody as he sees Sundog breaking out of the barn and charging down the hill, “his stiff, erected nostrils ... as red as flame.” New evidence of other new life appears throughout this entire section, and later the oneness of all things is again made clear when Steinbeck parallels changes in the animal, plant, and human world. As the colt develops in Nellie’s womb, the wild oats in the field are ripening. “Every head bent sharply under its load of grain,” he says. Earlier, during copulation, the “wild oat heads were just clearing their scabbards.” And now too Jody is maturing: “His shoulders swayed a little with maturity and importance.” He no longer trusts Billy Buck as infallible, but, on the other hand, he would like to. He would like to believe in some absolute that he could extract a promise from; for that reason, he repeatedly begs Billynot Carl not to let “anything happen to the The Red Pony 25

colt.” Jody remains faithful to the promise he gave his father. He drives the farm rake, leads the horse that pulls the tackle, and learns to milk and even is given a cow to care for. These new chores are no burden, however, for Jody marvels at the new life within Nellie and waits as she grows empress-like, her lips beginning to curl in a perpetual smile. And yet, doubt lingers within the young boy; three months have passed and still Nellie shows no sign of increasing girth. Billy notices this nervous expectancy and it is he, not Carl, who suggests one day that he and Jody go together and have a look at the mare. Billy still feels a sense of guilt because of the death of the red pony and he wants to reassure Jody that Nellie is, indeed, carrying a new colt. While Jody watches, Billy inspects the mare’s eyes, feels her lower lips, and fingers her black, leathery teats. He assures Jody that his colt is within the mare, but that it will be five more months before it will be visible to them that Nellie is carrying a colt, and that it will be probably January before she gives birth to the colt. When Jody sighs, Billy does not coddle the boy with any more excessive reassurances concerning the colt; on the contrary, he tells Jody that even after the colt is born that Jody must wait another two years before he can ride the colt. The mere thought of riding the colt, yet unborn, causes Jody to cry out, “Then I’ll be grown up” a despair that Billy wisely counters by humoring him with the notion that, yes, he will be an old man by then. Billy Buck further cautions Jody not to yearn for a stallion. If Jody hopes to keep the colt, his father would insist on gelding him. Stallions, he tells Jody, can never be trusted. Jody, of course, has seen recent evidence of this when he took Nellie to the Taylor ranch to be bred to Sundog. But so eager is he to have a stallion that he has already forgotten; he wants to know innumerable whyswhy he can’t have a stallion and also how horses are actually born. The birth of a calf, we assume, he has witnessed, but never has he seen a colt born. And when Billy begins to explain the process, Steinbeck again inserts a note of foreboding. Billy begins with a positive statement, then remembering his former mistake concerning his absoluteness about Gabilan, he grows more realistic with Jody, telling him that mares often need more help while giving birth than cows do. Then he pauses as he says, “If it’s wrong, you have to–.” Then he explains in detail what must be done if a colt is not in the correct position to be delivered. He realizes that perhaps he has said too much and The Red Pony 26

assures Jody that Nellie has thrown good colts in the past and promises Jody again that he will be sure that the boy will be present when the colt is born, but he refuses to promise Jody anything more. He cannot promise that all will go well. He knows that he has lost a lot of prestige he once held with the boy and he is sad. He walks away from Jody, for, as Steinbeck says, “his feelings were hurt.” Steinbeck follows this scene with two paragraphs dealing with the water-tub, the black cypress tree, and the black caldron beneath it. He deals here with the dual imagery of death and life, emphasizing that any vision of life must be subject to death and that a rational man must subject himself ultimately to irrational nature. In “The Gift,” Jody climbed the hill to “where the cold spring ran out of its pipe and fell into a round wooden tub. He leaned over and drank close to the green mossy wood “where the water tasted best.” It is here, from the spring of life, that he looked at “the great black kettle under the cypress tree.” It is from the spring that he pointed his gun (as yet, without bullets) to imaginarily shoot at rocks, at birds, and at the black kettle. Sometimes Jody let the red pony drink from the spring, and when the pony became sick, Jody took a drink from the spring, and the cold made him shiver. It is from here that he saw the two blackbirds dive at the hawk. It is from here that he realized that “the dark cypress tree” had become “a frame for things that were happening.” In “The Great Mountains,” it was at this spring that he chose to lie down to think of Gitano and the mysterious mountains that filled him with longing and sorrow. Steinbeck says clearly and emphatically that “the water-tub and the black cypress were opposites and enemies.” Pig killing frightens Jody, as do the western mountains; the death images are again beginning to accumulate in the narrative, just as is the fear of “something going wrong” beginning to grow within Jody. When he turns and walks back toward the house, he thinks of Nellie and his colt and finds, suddenly, that he is “under the black cypress, under the very single tree where the pigs were hung.” He goes to the spring to counteract any bad influence of the cypress. There he dreams of the colt’s being a powerful animal, a horse who can be conquered by only Jody, a horse named Black Demon. With Black Demon, he will help the sheriff rid the countryside of outlaws; at rodeos, he and Jody will be an unbeaten pair at roping and tying. The two will merge into one glorious individual. All these dreams he hopes to entrust to the cooling, The Red Pony 27

trilling water of the spring. But the little stream of water “whines” into the mossy tub. Whining is a sorrowful sound and, even at the spring, Jody finds himself in the presence of death and mystery. Nellie’s unborn colt seems to exist only in Jody’s imagination as the summer passes and the autumn burns chilly. It is only when Jody’s mother, without warning, urges Jody to watch her mix boiling water into a bucketfull of dry midlings that the colt’s birth seems truly eminent. His first thoughts, although excited happy ones, contain an element of doubt about Nellie’s health, but his mother reassures him that the mare is fine, but from now on, Jody will need to spend extra time with her and that she will need better care. At the barn, he is also reassured by Billy Buck, who also tells him again that Jody’s father wants the boy to witness the birthing of the colt from the beginning. Jody’s exuberance is infectious. Billy’s imagination is rampant; laughing, he conjures up tales about himself being raised on mare’s milk and being half-horse himself. The two share a warm, close togetherness, and Billy boasts that he’ll “see that you get a good colt. You’ll have the best horse in the country.” This is a promise said lightly, one that Billy will fulfill, however, after a long and bloody struggle with his conscience and with the mare. Christmas comes and goes and Jody senses no special excitement because of the seasonall of his anticipation focuses on the birth of the colt, as does Billy Buck’s. Billy even teases Jody with the idea that Nellie might have twins, as he guides the boy’s hand over the mare’s swollen abdomen. All of this dreaming, however, is dampened by two weeks of steady rain early in January. In an unusual moment of sympathy for the worried boy, Carl Tiflin tells his son that he has truly done a good job taking care of Nellie. For hours, Jody’s pride in himself and belief in Nellie and her colt is revived. But after two weeks linger on and the mare has still not given birth, there are signs that this will not be an easy birth. The night that Jody slips out to comfort Nellie, the images of the thick black night, the cypress tree, and the mist encompass him. And when he begs Billy to promise that he “won’t let anything happen,” Billy growls at him to stop worrying. This time he refuses to promise that the mare or its colt will survive; he uses a tone of voice with Jody that the boy has never heard before and The Red Pony 28

the old cow-hand realizes this and quickly, against his intuition, reassures Jody that he told him that he’d get him “a good colt” and that he will. Promises, however, are not enough for Jody any longer. Billy was wrong before. And when his father confronts him on returning to the house, Jody blames Billy for the red pony’s death. Carl will hear none of his son’s accusations about the hired hand. “If Billy can’t save a horse,” he lectures to his son, “it can’t be saved.” As Jody waits for the colt, the seasons offer little resistance to one another; the hills lose their straw color and blacken and new grass starts before Christmas. The transition from autumn to winter to new spring occurs in an orderly and easy way, the old foliage giving way to the new seedlings without any pain or struggle. This, however, is not always the case with animals or humans. Parturition is often accompanied with anxiety, pain, and sorrow, but usually the mother survives to nurse and care for her offspring. Here, this is not the case. Jody is close to Nellie as she writhes in spasms, trying to force the colt from within her, and Billy is quick to tell Jody that “it’s wrong,” meaning that the colt is turned the wrong way in the womb. The old cow-hand knows what must be doneand done quicklyand orders Billy to turn his head away while he smashes Nellie’s head with a hammer and uses his big pocketknife to rip open her belly and drag out the colt which he promised Jody. Thus the story ends with the terrible burden of Jody’s realization that he has unconsciously forced Billy to kill the magnificent mare in order to keep his word to the young boy. The emphasis of this story lies, therefore, in the interrelation ships between two human beings, not merely in Jody’s exposure to birth and life and death. Here, we witness Jody’s growing awareness of other people. Of course, the framework of the pervading plot lies in the birth of the colt and the death of the mare, but Steinbeck utilizes these as vehicles by which he makes a subtle but strong statement about human relationships. When Billy Buck was forced to kill the mare in order to save the colt that he promised Jody, Jody at last realized his own selfishness: “He tried to be glad because of the colt, but the bloody face, and the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him.” Billy Buck’s silent suffering and Jody’s guilt are far more important in this section of The Red Pony in The Red Pony 29

recording Jody’s growing maturity than either the death of Nellie or the birth of the new colt. The self-centeredness of a boy is giving way to an awareness of the needs of other people. IV. “The Leader of the People” The first edition of The Red Pony (1938) contained only the first three stories. The final story was originally published later under the title “The Grandfather.” When The Red Pony was reissued in 1945, Steinbeck included this story under the title of “The Leader of the People” as the last story of the volume. The inclusion of this story in the 1945 edition shows Steinbeck’s intention to round out and to complete a thematic structure for this work. This final story is interrelated with the first three stories by a symbolic confrontation with death. In the first three stories, we witnessed a type of physical deaththe deaths of the red pony, of old Gitano, and of Nellie the mareand in the final story we not only witness the death of “westering” and of the past, but also the emotional death of the grandfather who realizes that his life is over and also that he is unable to communicate what his life has meant in terms of the settling of the west. The final story is also subtly connected with the preceding story because at the end of “The Promise,” Jody had heard his first swearword and, for the first time in the entire Red Pony, he practices his new swearword now when he refers to the “damn mice” and then “looked over his shoulder to see whether Billy Buck had noticed the mature profanity.” More important, “The Leader of the People” fits neatly as a thematic affinity with “The Great Mountains.” Whereas stories one and three have a similar unity in that each deals with a boy’s relationship with a horse, stories two and four have a direct thematic unity, as well as distinctive narrative connections. As in the opening story of this volume, we encounter Billy Buck. He is at work again. The Tiflin ranch is always a place of activity, as we have seen. There is a reference to his raking the last of the old year’s haystack and, especially on a farm, one is constantly reminded of harvesting, renewing, and readying for yet another season. And, as in the other three stories of The Red Pony, this story opens quietly: The cattle are calm and disinterested and the air is quiet, so quiet in fact that it can be heard only high above the Tiflin ranch, cupped between the Great Ones and the Gabilans. The Red Pony 30

Despite the fact that we have seen Jody endure and mature during the agonizing death of his first pony Gabilan, the bloody death of Nellie and the birth of Black Demon and also the mystical appearance and disappearance of old Gitano, Steinbeck still refers to Jody as “the little boy, Jody . . .” as he begins this story. And the epithet is deserved. Steinbeck is far too fine an author to take us through a series of “growing up” exercises in the short story and then end his quartet of tales with a young man almost full-grown in his maturity with one last challenge to master. Jody scuffs his shoes, defying old admonitions to save good shoe leather, then picks up a stone and startles some white pigeons who are being pestered by a sly cat. He is bored and defiant again, as in the earlier story, “The Promise,” and he looks for some animal or something to relieve his boredom; even mice will do. And, as in “The Great Mountains,” there is also the anticipation and the arrival of an older personGitano in the first story and now the grandfather in this story. Both stories deal with youth and old age and the rapport that is established between a young person (Jody) and an older person. In both stories, the father’s personality is emphasized and his failure to understand the older person emphasizes the young boy’s ability to both understand and to empathize with the older person. After establishing in the first part of the story a sense of the boredom and tedium of ranch life, Jody plans for a full-scale war on the mice: He makes plans to kill all of the mice which have grown “sleek, arrogant” and “smug in their security” for eight months now. The mice hunt will later be denigrated when Grandfather compares it to the crossing of the Great Plains. The only thing delaying the mouse war is Carl Tiflin. Billy is strong to caution Jody not to begin hunting the mice until Carl has given him his permission. Like ourselves, Jody needs no reminder: “Carl Tiflin insisted upon giving permission for anything that was done on the ranch, whether it was important or not.” For lack of anything better to do on a lazy March afternoon, Doubletree Mutt is busy trying to rout a squirrel from a hole and, while waiting for his father, Jody is idly watching. It is the dog that alerts Jody to the distant figure on horseback, moving down the road toward the house. Carl Tiflin carries a letter, and after Steinbeck has established the tedium of activity on the farm for a The Red Pony 31

young boy, the rest of the story is built around the impending visit of Jody’s grandfather, Carl Tiflin’s father-in-law, to the farm. In those days, to a young boy any visit would have been something to be greatly anticipated, but the visit of his grandfather is a special event because it was he who led a vast group of pioneers across the prairie, through Indian country, into this valley. But as much as Jody looks forward to the visit, his father dreads the visit because the grandfather, he knows, will continue to tell the same stories over and over again, using the same words, the same pauses, the same phrases, and the same tedium. Mrs. Tiflin, however, recognizes that the wagon train trip across the prairie was the single most momentous thing in her father’s life. And for a change, she isn’t “looking up from a pan of beans,” “pouring boiling water,” “working at the stove,” or sending blankets to old Gitano. For the first time in this novel, she visibly disapproves of her husband’s attitude. She halts what we have seen to be dutiful acquiescence and “her face darkened angrily.” Even when Carl looks away from her, she demands to know the reason for his resentment of her father. At last Mrs. Tiflin has taken on new color as a character and aroused our interest in what has largely been a male-oriented piece of western fiction. Even Jody is aware of the change within his mother. At one point in the altercation, he is as excitedly explosive as one of his dogs after a rabbit when he hears that Grandfather will be soon telling stories about Indians, but Carl dismisses his son with a verbal ousting. Later, outside the house, the young boy hears his mother become logical and compassionate without yielding to whining or complaining. She had a vague sense of why old Gitano felt the need to “come home”; now she feels it even more clearly in her own father’s desire to rejoin his blood kin and relive his youth and his last days with them. There is nothing else. The old man forged ahead years ago; he was stopped only by an ocean -otherwise, he’d still be pioneering new frontiers. Carl is stubborn and so it is Jody who goes to meet his grandfather. His joy is so expectant that he does his chores thoroughly and quickly and whistles for the dogs. As in so many of Steinbeck’s stories, the emotional impact of this story comes from the pathos created by the position that the grandfather finds himself in, a position similar to that of old Gitanobut whereas Gitano was quiet and mysterious, Grandfather is ready to share his legacy of folklore. Thus various The Red Pony 32

attitudes toward him are all early established in this story. Jody, as with all young boys, is fascinated by stories of the old westthe wagon trains, the Indians, the fighting, the crossing of the plains, and the men and women who lived and died during those days. Billy Buck, whose own father lived in those exciting days of the past and who was known to Grandfather, is a respectful listener. Mrs. Tiflin, being the daughter of the man who was a leader of the people, is very tolerant and defensive about her father’s stories. Only Carl seems to be bored and angered with hearing the same stories time and time again. And again, Carl is not being deliberately cruel. It is, instead, his view that the great crossing is completed: it is over and the west is conquered and the new task before man is the settling of the new frontier. Carl is a man who fashioned the west from a frontier into a settled place for civilization. But, now, he must renounce his aims for a time and return to another time; now the emphasis is upon the grandfather and his relationship to the past and also his influence upon Jody. When Jody wants his grandfather to join in the upcoming mouse hunt, Grandfather asks, “Have the people of this generation come down to hunting mice? They aren’t very strong, the new people, but I hardly thought mice would be game for them.” The mice have replaced the Indians, but so have ranches replaced the wild untamed prairies. And the grandfather who cannot participate in a mouse hunt can also find no more frontiers to conquer. At the end of the story, he has to try and evaluate his position and his relationship to the past. To him, the mere idea of westering was important, and had the prairie continued farther, he would still be westering; but with the ocean facing him, it all had to stop, and civilization had to begin. Thus the grandfather no longer fits into today’s society, a society which puts little or no emphasis on the westering of the past. The dilemma of the grandfather is thus not that there is no more land to conquerno more westering to be donebut that somehow he cannot discover how to communicate the spirit of westering: the feelings, desires, and motives that brought a group of people together to form a strong single unit to cross the endless prairies. The grandfather knows that what he did had to be done and he is proud that he was a leader, but he also knows that if he had not done so and had he not been the leader, there would have been others to fill his place. His confusion, therefore, stems primarily from his inability to communicate his feelings to the The Red Pony 33

younger generation. The climax of the story comes when the grandfather inadvertently overhears Carl Tiflin say in irritation: “Why does he have to tell the stories over and over? He came across the plains. All right! Now it’s finished. Nobody wants to hear about it over and over.” The old grandfather is not visibly hurt by the reality of Carl’s statements, but goes to the porch to try and sort out the place that westering had had in his life and in the settling of the west. Even though the grandfather thinks that he isn’t telling the stories correctly, yet he does manage to communicate with Jody. In this final story of Steinbeck’s quartet, Jody approaches perhaps his finest moment of maturity as he puts aside his own desires and, instead, devotes his energies to his grandfather. After hearing his grandfather’s long story, Jody asks for a lemon to make his grandfather a lemonade. Jody’s mother automatically assumes that he is doing it only so that he can also have a lemonade and sarcastically says, “and another lemon to make a lemonade for you.” When he refuses for himself, she at first assumes that he is sick, then realizes, as does the reader, that Jody has reached a state of selfless maturity which will allow him to feel deep compassion for another human being. Thus, in each of the stories“The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,” “The Promise,” and “The Leader of the People”Steinbeck shows us unique ways in which young Jody undergoes certain experiences and, as a result, comes closer to a realization of true manhood. In addition, each of these stories has carried as its theme the conflict between the old and the new. This story, in particular, began with Billy Buck’s raking together what was left of the old hay stack to make room for the new and focused on the mice (“smug, sleek, arrogant”) Grandfather’s concept of many twentieth-century men. To Grandfather, men today have grown soft and lost the pioneering spirit which required strength and courage. Grandfather says: “They aren’t very strong, the new people . . . Me carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs.” His generation was persistent and indefatigable, like the ants. Furthermore, Grandfather tells Jody that he served as head of this “one great crawling beast.” Like the crawling beast, the frontiersmen hungered for land and excitement and courageously frolicked with death and danger as they lumbered across the west. The Red Pony 34

Now there is no longer any demand for the group who welds people together in order to enhance their chances for survival. The narrator metaphorically underscores the demise of the old hero, for as Grandfather speaks, the narrator tells us “his eyes moved up the side-hill and stopped on a motionless hawk perched on a dead limb.” Relating Grandfather with this immobile bird on a dead branch suggests the end of the frontier spirit. But this does not necessarily mean that modern man has become totally lax and debilitated. Grandfather, so caught up imaginatively with his own glorious past, fails to realize the strengths of the present age. Life with nature still demands hard work and the emotional and mental stamina necessary to cope with uncertainty and failure, so much a part of farm life. Gabilan, the show pony, was beautiful and lovable, but he could not endure the hardships of the rugged ranch life. Black Demon promises to survive in this kind of environment because he possesses the vital spirit of nature itself; his conception was strong and vigorous and he was faced with the death of his mother at birth, a loss to which he has to adjust with his own determination and physical stamina. Yet he will most likely grow up to be a pet horsegentle, playful, and consideratea domesticated rather than a wild animal. If this assumption is correct, Black Demon resembles the leader of the new generation, Jody Tiflin. Jody too displays a sympathetic and magnanimous attitude toward his grandfather that the other members of the family do not do. And in so doing he breaks down the barriers between the generations. Jody gives up his mice hunt to visit with Grandfather, and Grandfather in return doffs his old feeling of superiority. He agrees to drink a lemonade, an act which symbolizes his communion with the present age. Thus the old and the new orders abandon their differences and merge into one endless stream of time just as the old haystack makes way for the new one.

The Red Pony 35

The Chrysanthemums In this story, we encounter a woman who has led a systematic, slumbering farm existence until she unexpectedly encounters an unusual peddler. She is then transformed briefly into a vivacious young girl before she realizes that her fantasies and the stranger are both cruelly fraudulent. Meanwhile her husband is largely unaware of the deeply disturbing metamorphosis his wife has undergone as he sits beside her at the end of the story, steering their little roadster into town to share a rare night out together. The story opens peacefully. It is a time of quiet, Steinbeck says, but the tranquility of this mood contains an ambivalent oppressiveness and anticipation. Elisa Allen is alone, tending her garden. Not only is she alone but the farm itself, even the Salinas Valley, seems to be isolated. High dark fog rises all around the valley walls, its flannel-like texture shutting this small world off and isolating it so that we are forced to peer closely into it for small signs of life. There is no sun in the valley, and the cold December sky seems to have dropped like a lid onto the top of the valley. The earth is colored unnaturally dark, like metal; the fields hold no crops, only stiff stubble, and there is only thick scrub along the riverbanks. In Steinbeck’s descriptive setting of the valley and the land, he suggests a sense of barrenness and, at the same time, a hope that the earth might once again become pregnant with life, but the optimism is only a mild hope because today’s fog is proof that the skies will not promise rain because “fog and rain do not go together.” The people and the land must be patient, doing small idle tasks during this time of quiet and of waiting. For example, there is little farm work now to be done on the Allen farm. The hay has been cut and stored and the orchards have been plowed up, their thirsty furrows awaiting rain. The only activity on the Allen farm is the quick decisive snipping being done by a small figure bending low over the dead stalks of last year’s chrysanthemums. Elisa Allen’s hands move eagerly, almost too eagerly and too powerfully for the small chrysanthemum stems. At work is a woman who seems trapped beneath her heavy work clothes. She lives alone with her farmer husband, she has no children, and has transplanted her energies into creating substitutes for her lack of The Red Pony 36

children raising immense chrysanthemums. Except for the smudge of dirt on her cheek, which she left there when brushing a cloud of hair out of her eyes, she is as solid as her farm. If some women refer to themselves as housewives, she might be considered a farm wife, as sturdy as her “hard-swept little house.” When Steinbeck notes the accidental smudge on Elisa’s face, he suggests that her face is usually clean, perhaps as clean as her house with its “hard-polished windows.” Her heavy garments protect her body from the weatherfrom rain if it comes and from dirt and garden soil in the same way that they also protect her from the world beyond this valley. She glances briefly at the strangers standing by the tractor shed who are talking with her husband. Earlier in the story, she had looked across the yard and watched them for a moment. The visual contact with the strangers kindled a spark of interest and curiosity within her. The appearance of a stranger is usually a moment of anxiety and anticipation for one who lives in a rural settingand it is especially significant here that she “sees” the strangers. She does not “hear” them for instance; nor is the basic conflict in this story initiated by perhaps her “feeling” in the air a raindrop or by Steinbeck’s having her nibble and taste one of the green sprouts of chrysanthemums as she studies the strangers. Recall that when describing Elisa, Steinbeck focused on her dumpy, armor-like clothes, but said that her features were hidden beneath a man’s black hat. We could not see her eyes; it was Steinbeck who had to tell us that “her eyes were clear as water.” They, of all her senses, seem to have retained the freshness of a young woman’s vision, just as her gardening actions belie her stolid, obtuse appearance. Her energy has been largely squandered by years of acquiescing to farm chores, yet it remains still alive as she flashes her knife across the dead chrysanthemums, then removes a glove and thrusts a hand into the “forest of new green chrysanthemums that were growing around the old roots.” Steinbeck’s symbols here are lush with both sterility and fecundity. Since this story will focus on a woman’s new awareness of herself, we are being prepared for Elisa’s responding to a man in a way that she has not done for a long timeif ever. Already she is unconsciously readying to open herself to new possibilities as she touches the tender new chrysanthemum sprouts. She spreads the leaves, examining the clean virgin growth. They are as immaculate as the moments that await her. She looks closer, as Steinbeck comments that she discovers no The Red Pony 37

sowbugs or snails or cutworms among the old straw-stubble roots. She has been “terrior-like” in protecting her flowering chrysanthemums as she has been with her own life. Soon a stranger will offer her a world of spontaneity and gladness and she will accept the novelty of his allure and be as responsive to him as the new chrysanthemums are to be planted and begin new life. Elisa’s garden, evocative of Eden if one elides the sounds of Elisa and Allen, will be invaded by a large, dark stranger offering to repair and sharpen whatever of Elisa’s has become dulledand if one extends the metaphor to Elisa herselfhe offers to sharpen a life that has become prosaic, tedious, and spiritless. The profoundness of Elisa’s trance-like state is so full that her husband’s approach startles her when he speaks to her beyond the wire fence. His words are sufficient to return her to her former repose. It is as though he had interrupted her while she was naked, for her back stiffens and she pulls on her gardening glove again. A sternness and pride reassert themselves within her. She is a good gardenerone of the bestso unique that her husband Henry calls her ability to grow remarkable flowers a “gift.” He wishes that she would garden in his orchard and touch his apples with her magic instead of being content to dabble with flowers. She considers it for a moment and is convinced that if she chose, she would be effective with Henry’s orchard because her mother also had this gift. Whatever her mother stuck into the ground, she could make it grow. Elisa has that same giftbut she has confined it to working with flowers. And what flowers she has created! They are monstrous in proportion and symbolic of their having sapped her life and infused themselves with her vitality. No one else’s flowers can equal her chrysanthemums, flowers that are curiously unflower-like: brittle colored and largely impervious to wind and drought. Within the next few minutes, Elisa will be offered two proposals. Henry’s offer to her will be to celebrate his sale of some steers and, with the profits, they will go into town, buy a dinner at a restaurant, and see a movie. How ironic that her simple farmer-husband would offer her as a treat a meal and a movie. Movies themselves are worlds of make-believe that one substitutes for escape and, doubly ironic, is the fact that the movie will be paid for with the money that Henry receives for selling a herd of steers. Elisa’s response to Henry is similar to previous actions: rote-like. “Good,” she repeats three times and checks with Henry to make sure they will not attend the fights tonight. Fights The Red Pony 38

frighten her. Within the shelter of her husband and her prescribed farm rituals, venturing no farther than town and an occasional movie, Elisa is safe and so returns to her chrysanthemums again. Elisa’s other proposal comes from the stranger. First, she hears a squeak of wheels and a plod of hoofs. Metaphorically, the sounds are unpleasant and diabolical. The wagon carrying the stranger is twice described as curious; and it is drawn by both a horse and a burro, an unlikely team. Following behind the back wheels of the wagon is a rangy dog, a mongrel that parallels the grotesqueness of the “crawling” schooner-topped wagon and its mismatched team of work animals. Emblazoned on the canvas of the wagon’s sides are advertisements that are clumsily and crookedly painted. The man driving the wagon offers to mend pots and pans, knives, scissors and also lawnmowers. This last word has been painted as two words (lawn and mores) and connotes metaphorically that the driver can deal also with “mores”standards of behavior. This is emphatically proclaimed because on the second line of the advertisement is painted the “triumphantly definitive” word “Fixed” in black paint, further underscored by drips of sharp paint points below each letter. The wagon is a strange apparition, most unlike the Allen farm vehicles. It is crazy and loose-jointed and its crooked old wheels skirl and squeak, then stop before the house. The horse and burro pause, drooping “like unwatered flowers.” They are as dry and weary as their owner, who is already eyeing the woman before him. The Allen’s farm dogs dash out toward the invading vehicle, protective of their mistress and their territory, and the dog belonging to the man on the wagon seat retreats. Elisa notices its raised hackles and bared teeth. The dog’s owner warns Elisa that the mongrel is a bad animal, especially in a fight “when he gets started” and Elisa laughs. The man echoes her laughter but their laughter is not alike. Elisa’s is motivated by nervousness and fear and the man’s by his mocking powerfulness. Like Elisa he is not old, and once he ceases laughing, his eyes become dark and brooding. Removing his battered hat, the man explains that he is “off my general road.” Elisa discourages him from attempting to try and ford across the river to the Los Angeles highway because of the deep sand but the stranger is insistent, and Elisa realizes that the man, his team, and his dog are creatures of determination “once The Red Pony 39

they get started,” a phrase of his that she jokes with him about. There is a coyness to the couple’s conversation as he tells her that he lives by no set schedule nor is he in a hurry. Like Elisa’s cyclical life, he goes from Seattle to San Diego but he is not bound by the seasons; he travels only when it is nice weather. Elisa echoes his word “nice,” saying that his life sounds like a “nice” way to live, but her use of the word “nice” indicates a yearning to be free, for his life does consist of freedom. He is as confident as he leans over the fence and inquires if Elisa has anything to be mended or sharpened as she is quick to resist his offer (“terrior-quick” Steinbeck referred to her as being earlier) and she is certainly as defensive as were the farm dogs at the stranger’s approach. The stranger continues to question her, willing to hammer closed the holes in her pots and sharpen her scissors, but she resists. The imagery is both phallic and female here. He implies that not only is her life dulled but that she needs a new edge of sharpening to her life and offers her sharp-as-new shears that can cut through the bondage of her humdrum life. “Sharpening scissors,” he says, “is the worst kind,” stating that people ruin scissors trying to sharpen them. For years Elisa has tried to sharpen her scissors by using them correctly, snipping away annually at her chrysanthemum stems, creating larger and larger blooms for a seedless variety of flowers. Chrysanthemums, one should note, must be cut, like the steers, if they are to be profitable and productive, for they carry no seeds of their own. Then they must be, ironically, inserted into sandy, not fertile, soil. And it is not only Elisa’s scissors that need sharpening: the stranger offers to pound away at the punctures in her farm pots and in her farm life-until they have been plugged and will hold liquid again. He promises to fix them “like new.” The sign on his wagon proclaims his own gift. Because of Elisa’s curt insistence that she has nothing for the stranger to do, he knows that he has upset her. Thus, he tries a new tactic. His face falls to an exaggerated sadness and his voice assumes a whining undertone. He teases for her pity, explaining that he will have no supper that night and that he has always had to depend for his living on the kindness of others. Then, skillfully, he returns to the subject of her chrysanthemums. His ignorance about flowersand his interest about the chrysanthemumssoothe Elisa’s irritation. Child-like, she The Red Pony 40

confesses that she alone can raise such giant white and yellow flowers. But he gambles too quickly that he has wholly charmed her, however, for she sharply retorts that her chrysanthemums do not have a nasty smell, and he is quick to agree with her that the flowers have a good, if bitter, smellone that he likes. Leaning ever farther across the fence, the stranger offers to be a messenger for her, offering to carry’s Elisa’s chrysanthemums to a woman who also appreciates beauty but whose garden lacks chrysanthemums. This woman has begged the stranger to bring her any if he ever happens to discover some and, now (miraculously) he has found some. His appeal to Elisa makes her overly generous. She explains fervently that chrysanthemums are very special flowers and require special rooting because of their lack of seeds. We sense that she imagines herself and the stranger forming a team. She will transfer some shoots into a pot and he will take them to be transplanted. Together they will create a new small world that was devoid of chrysanthemums. He inquires if the flowers will be as beautiful as she promises and she impetuously tears off her battered hat, repeating the word “beautiful” and loosens her dark, pretty hair, exposing her loveliness. In a moment of exuberant trust, she urges the stranger to enter her garden. Elisa’s new-found happiness becomes ecstatic. She runs excitedly to the back of the house and returns with a big red flowerpot. Her once-protective gloves are now discarded and forgotten. No longer does she don them to avoid contact with the raw earth. She kneels before the stranger and digs into the soil with her fingers, pressing new starts of life into the sand and tamping around them with her knuckles. She explains to the stranger what must be done as she entrusts her prized chrysanthemums to him, and she promises that they will soon take root. Later, in the heat of midsummer they must be cut back to a length of eight inches above the ground before they erupt with buds. Her zeal overwhelms her and then she suddenly stops. Her next set of instructions to him are difficult. They deal with nothing as rational and pragmatic as what she has been speaking of. Now she must attempt to share a knowledge that is private and almost mystical. Speaking to the stranger intimately, she reveals that the true secret of her chrysanthemums lies in what she terms “planting hands.” No amount of specific gardening knowledge is necessary The Red Pony 41

or crucial. One must release one’s instincts and allow one’s fingers to selectively choose which buds are unnecessary. A loosened sense of procreation must be released to flow down into the finger tips while one sits back and watches the fingers, unimpeded and unchecked, pluck the buds until the rhythm of plucking and creating are joined and become one with the plant. When one can achieve that harmony one cannot be wrong. Elisa’s breasts swell passionately as she asks the stranger if he understands the primitive creation she has been speaking of. The sensuousness of her husky voice and the erotic quality of her conversation about the chrysanthemums release his cautiousness. His interpretation of what Elisa has uttered about her flowers he translates into rough, dangerous language. He conjures before her certain nights when he has been alone and when the silence was black and when he felt the sharpness of the stars so keenly that when he rose up with his body, he was impaled on them. And he diedin their hot, sharp loveliness. The language is frankly sexualand successfuland his payoff occurs when Elisa hesistantly reaches from her kneeling position and allows her fingers almost to touch his trousers. The stranger does not have to demand any more from her. He has won her as surely as if his seduction had been physical. Above her, watching her crouching low, he reminds her coldly that such excitement is “nice,” but not “when you don’t have no dinner.” Elisa is transformed. She scurries off to find a couple of old battered saucepans for him to mend and his manner now becomes professional. Elisa ponders his skill with the anvil and the small machine hammer. She notices as his mouth grows sure and knowing, and she asks him where he sleeps, envying his carefree life, a way of living which most people believe to be impossible for a woman. But it is a way of life that she can envisage for herself until he asserts with masculine possessiveness that “it ain’t the right kind of life for a woman.” He will flatter her in exchange for work, but he will not allow her to daydream about living a life similar to his. He is alarmed at Elisa’s pride in herself and he is uncomfortable at her suggestion that she too could be able of beating dents out of little pots and sharpening scissors. Elisa is serious: she is confident that she could show him what a woman might do. The idea that his style of living would be too lonely for a woman and the possibility that the nights might be infested with animals creeping under the wagon does not frighten her. Nor does the stranger’s abrupt leaving. She watches as he steadies himself The Red Pony 42

in the seat, promises to follow her instructions, and also promises lackadaisically to keep the sand damp around the new flower shoots. Then the wagon turns and crawls back onto the road. Elisa whispers good-bye to him aloud, startling herself, then attempts to shake herself free from a hypnotic glowing within her. Running hurriedly into the house, she tears off her soiled gardening clothes and flings them into a corner. She grabs up a pumice stone and begins to bathe herself until her thighs, and loins, chest and arms are scratched and red. When she is finished, she stands before a mirror, tightens her stomach, and thrusts out her full breasts. Her bathing has been a thorough cleansing away of old attitudes toward herself, old habits, and old clothes, and her fervor is so intense that her blood is heightened. She is proud and stately as she views her new magnificence. She dresses with youthful care, pulling on her newest underclothing, her nicest stockings, and a dress that is “the symbol of her prettiness.” She begins then with her face, rediscovering the clearness of its color, highlighting her lips with rouge and fashioning her eyebrows. Henry calls to her from outside, but she avoids him. She urges him to begin his own bath as she lays out his clothes and shoes, then goes to the porch and gazes toward the river road. Henry is dumbfounded by the striking change that has occurred within his wife. She wants, even demands, compliments from him and he is further confused. He feels helpless before her and can only joke that she looks “strong enough to break a calf over her knee and happy enough to eat it like a watermelon.” He hastens to the car but his joke lies heavily between them. The two set out and it is only minutes until Elisa spies a dark speck far ahead. When they reach it, she sees the chrysanthemum sprouts lying abandoned in the road. Her eyes try to avoid them but she cannot, and alongside the chrysanthemums, her children, lie her dreams. The flowerpot, she notices, is missing; the stranger was so greedy that he dumped out the flowers and kept it. She averts her eyes as she and her husband pass the stranger’s covered wagon and then she manages to rein in her fierce disappointment. “It will be a good dinner tonight,” she proclaims, determined to salvage herself and this evening. She inquires if they can have wine and, assured by Henry that they can, she asks if the fights are as bloody as she has read that they are; do the gloves really become heavy and soggy with blood? Revenge and rage fester The Red Pony 43

within her. She is livid that she has allowed herself to become so weak and defenseless and dreamy that she shared her private secrets with a stranger who betrayed her. Henry offers to take her to the fights but Elisa suddenly refuses; she is not strong enough to wrestle with a steer or eat it like a watermelon or continue her contest with the savage intruder. Her resolve crumbles and she turns up her coat collar to hide herself and her tears. The strength she felt only hours before is gone; she has become an old woman.

The Red Pony 44

Flight Once more, Steinbeck writes about a young boy and his initiation into manhood, but this time Steinbeck does not give us the leisurely developed, many-situation structured narratives that composed the stories in The Red Pony. In those stories, young Jody Tiflin learned the values of happiness and despair of adulthood because of his witnessing the deaths of two horses (which he passionately loved) and by his hearing the philosophies and wisdom of two old men (Jody’s grandfather and a Mexican peasant). In the story “Flight,” young Pepé Torres’ manhood also depends on his dealing with death, but in this story, Steinbeck focuses upon the impending death of Pepé himself during a tense and harrowing chase. Briefly, Pepé Torres rides into Monterey, California, to do an errand for his mother. He is insulted and kills a man; as a result, he must flee for his life, and it is this flight that is the substance of the story. Steinbeck begins his narrative much as he did in The Red Ponythat is, he carefully describes the setting first of all. Steinbeck is concerned that his readers can clearly view and understand the settings of his stories and novels. Thus, his characters become more vividly realistic because they reflect the values of their towns or farms or their regions. This, in turn, helps explain their actions and the motivations for the events that occur in the story. Here, Steinbeck shows us the Torres’ farm. He does not say, in a word, that the family is poor. He parallels their poverty with that of the land. They do not live on level ground, for example; their farm is situated on a few sloping acres above a cliff that drops sharply into the sea. They must eke out a living on a landscape that is threatening and uncivilized. In addition, the land is as dramatic as the story itself will become. Note, particularly, the lean and chiseled sentences into which Steinbeck inserts adjectives that enhance and create suspense within the reader even before the story itself unfolds. The ocean that is below the Torres’ farm “hisses,” and the farm buildings on the hillside “huddle” like “little clinging aphids.” The Torres family, thus, is much like their farm buildings. Yet they are a unit and they “huddle” for protection from the elements and from the large white Anglo settlement that surrounds them in the towns and those who farm the rich fertile fields of the upper lands, far above the Torres. As Mexicans, and in particular as poor Mexicans, the Torres are like The Red Pony 45

aphids to the white community because they are equated with pests, nuisances to the so-called civilized white community. Furthermore, the Torres’ farm buildings are described as being “crouched” low to the ground, and Steinbeck says that it seems as though they might blow into the sea. But they do not, and this fact is important, for although the Torres’ house is described as a shack and the barn is “rattling” and “rotten,” and although the buildings are “bitten” with sea salt and “beaten” by the winds that lash the stony hills, the Torres family and their farm survive because of their determination and their defiance. It is partly because of this defiance that Pepé commits murder. He learned many years ago from his family that they must defy the poor soil and the weather and the lack of friends to survive. When Pepé is insulted by a man of the Anglo community, he defies this man who has never known or experienced poverty and the prejudice which has plagued the Torres family. In Monterey, the Anglo community where Pepé must do an errand for his mother, he is considered merely another Mexican kid, a non-person whose life or death is unimportant. But to Pepé life is extremely importantespecially today, for he rides into town alone and, for the first time, he feels like a man. He rides in to buy only medicine and salt, and his mother does not acknowledge that he is a man yet; but, to Pepé this journey is proof that he can be trusted to ride into town alone. This journey, in fact, is one of the few acts that Pepé has done which has been of importance to him. Heretofore, his mother has taunted him for his laziness, joking that there must have been a lazy cow in his father’s heritage or that a lazy coyote must have looked at her while she was carrying Pepé. Ironically, she calls his knife, one of his most prized possessions, a “toy-baby” and chides him for playing games with it. But to Pepé his knife is no toy; it is a part of himself. In the Spanish culture, a young girl’s fifteenth birthday is usually celebrated; her coming of age is given the most expensive celebration that the family can either afford to pay for or to borrow for the event; it is not so with the young men in the community. A young man must do something daring or brave in order to be called a man. One of the key statements that Mama Torres makes is when she answers young Emilio’s questions concerning Pepé. He asks The Red Pony 46

his mother, “Did Pepé come to be a man today?” Her answer is that a boy “gets to be a man when a man is needed.” Pepé in a sense, is aware of this philosophy although we have not heard his mother discuss it with him. Today, though, a man is needed to ride to Monterey because there is no one else to go and because Pepé’s father has been dead for ten years, and because he is the oldest boy, he assumes that his mission is of great importance. Later, he does, in fact, become a man because of the code of the Torres family. It was necessary for Pepé to kill a man who insulted him; those words were uttered by a man who called him “names ... I could not allow.” We assume that a white man taunted him about his race, and that Pepé impulsively killed the manpartly because of his new-found pride in being needed to ride into town and partly because of his pride in himself, his family, and his heritage. We are not wholly surprised to learn that Pepé impulsively killed the man; earlier in the story, Steinbeck alerted us to the fact that Pepé was quick with his knife. When he was practicing with it and playing with it to amuse Emilo and Rosy, Steinbeck described the knife as though it were almost alive, as though it were an extension of Pepé’s hand. An Anglo might have slugged another Anglo because of an insultbut not Pepé. He used the extension of his armin this case, his knife. Earlier, too, Steinbeck described Pepé’s knife as being “flicked like the head of a snake.” It is a deadly weapon and the only weapon that Pepé can use within the white community to defend himself. From his small farm, he rode away and entered into another world, a world whose values were more complicated than his, and it was a world for which Pepé was unprepared. But because Pepé violated the code of the larger world because of his own code, he had to escape. It will be an escape into a world, however, of no order; from his highly defined code of conduct, and from that of the white man’s code of Monterey, Pepé will enter primitive hills, but even these hills he will challenge, proving his manhood as he struggles against forces he cannot control and does not understand. Steinbeck develops this story with classic simplicity, dividing it into three sections. In the first section, the emphasis is upon the simple, poor, but deeply loving family in which Pepé was reared. The section emphasizes, furthermore, Pepé’s immaturity and simplicity. Pepé’s days are spent, for the most part, playing with the knife he inherited from his father. As pointed out earlier, the The Red Pony 47

emphasis here is on Pepé’s adroit handling of the knife; this foreshadows his using it as a fatal weapon. Also, Pepé’s desire to wear his father’s hat and green scarf also characterize his simple nature as he “plays” at being a man. The first section moves quickly from Pepé’s innocence into the focus of the second section: Pepé’s manhood. When Pepé returns from Monterey, his face has changed. He has lost that “fragile quality ... there was no laughter in his eyes any more.” Now Pepé must accept his role in the world, and he must leave his sanctuary of simple values. The third section presents Pepé’s (or man’s) struggle with life and death. By introducing this concept into the story, Steinbeck creates a story that is far more than that of a mere “pursuer-andpursued” story; he uses the story to comprise a concept of man’s constant struggle against opposing forces. Pepé enters into his flight prepared for his struggle, but gradually he is divested of all vestments of even his simple world and is rendered, finally, into, seemingly, a mere animal. Steinbeck’s ultimate idea, perhaps, concerns man’s constant struggle against the hostile forces which surround him. We live in a hostile world where we are constantly confronted by vicious forces that try to destroy man. Pepé in passing from innocence to manhood, comes into contact with these forces and we, the readers, are keenly made aware that a knowledge of manhood is equivalent to a knowledge of the hostile forces which work toward man’s destruction. As we investigate Steinbeck’s story more thoroughly, we realize more fully how Pepé’s plight is so often our own and, yet, how Steinbeck’s story is not visibly allegorized, but how masterfully he controls his tale within the context of the poor Mexican family and its struggle to survive. As in the stories that encompass The Red Pony, the violence of “Flight” begins, ironically, on a sunny day. The daily life of the Torres family is described after Pepé leaves for Monterey. His mother grinds corn and pats out tortillas for her family, while the young children beat abalones to make them tender. That night, Mama Torres is at peace, thinking that her oldest son is having good food in Monterey. But before the beds for the children are described, the make-shift beds of straw and sheepskins, and before Emilo and Mama discuss Pepé’s becoming a man, note that Steinbeck told us that the red sun of the evening “plunged” into the ocean, an image The Red Pony 48

of violence precluding the evening peace of the Torres family. When Pepé returns home, it is dawn, and it is the dawn of what will be his test of his self-defined manhood. The mountain tops are misty with light; Pepé’s hopes for escape are also misty, not clear, and certainly not as sunny as was the morning just one day earlier. Now, Steinbeck emphasizes the code by which Pepé felt compelled to kill by emphasizing Pepé’s Spanish heritage. His mother addresses him as “thou,” and the appellation is startling, but it is simply a literal rendering of the intimate form of “you.” It is a word form that is used, particularly by Pepé’s mother, with her children. But Pepé is no longer a child. He has done a deed of a man and he committed this deed because it was part of a code of his people. Yet his mother is slow to realize that the boy whom she sent over the rim of the mountains to Monterey is no longer a child. If he has wine; if that is the reason for his talking so strangely, then he should go to bed. It is only when she lights a candle that she fully realizes how Pepé has changed. No longer does he seem fragile and no longer is there laughter in his eyes. Nor does he seem the lazy “peanut,” or the “big sheep,” or the “foolish chicken.” Now he is sharply purposeful and responsible. His account of the knife fight is brief; his mother hears, understands, and prepares him for his flight. Pepé knows that he is, at last, a man, and his mother and brother and sister know this fact and the seriousness of his commencement into manhood. The preparation for Pepé’s flight is quickly accomplished, as is Steinbeck’s prose as he readies us for Pepé’s leaving his family. The family, at this time, reacts as a unit; no motion is wasted: waterbags, blankets, and beef jerkyall are packed and are ready within minutes. The family understands the importance of Pepé’s departure and, finally, and, most important, Pepé takes his father’s hat. He is also given his father’s rifle. There is no time for ceremony, only the rapid caution and swift preparation for Pepé’s journey. Note, here, how Mama Torres teaches the children her code of values. She says that Pepé is a man and that he has a man’s thing to dothat is, survive, by his wits and with luck. Earlier, when Mama Torres was confident that Pepé was safe in Monterey, she was unaware that the sun had “plunged” into the sea; now, as Pepé leaves her, in flight for his life, Steinbeck tells us that the white moon has nearly disappeared into the sea. All this has happeneda death has occurred, a young Mexican’s life is in peril, and Steinbeck is showing us that, as the world turns in a single revolution, that we must be conscious of its everlasting The Red Pony 49

revolving as we struggle, individually, or as a family, to survive within our small confines on this vast planet. As Mama Torres’ words to Emilio were significant about the definition of a man, so she gives her last words to Pepé words which are of deep value to Pepé and to the meaning of this story. She tells him not to be “caught like a chicken”that is, he must die like a man. She, we feel, has little hope for her son, but she is demanding in her own gentle way. Her son’s manhood is most important to her, to him, and to his dead father’s memory. Soon he will be tested and if he must die, he must die like a man. And Pepé answers, with conviction and compassion: “I am a man.” Pepé leaves his home, as the title of this story suggests, upward. He follows a little trail through the mountains. We are never told where Pepé hopes to find safety. Surely he himself does not know; perhaps that is why Steinbeck entitled his story with a single word, connoting a soaring above whatever is threatening, with no destination ahead. The emphasis is on the flight itself, with no goal other than survival. Pepé’s “flight” began on horseback; he escaped his humdrum life on the ranch, proud of his being entrusted to bring home medicine; instead, he brought home to his mother a man. Now he must prove to himself that he is worthy of his manhood. Yet, as he rides away from his home, his body is struck by two lightsthe last rays of the night and the new day’s lights, warring rays akin to the divergent codes which were responsible for his murdering the insulting white man. Then, as Pepé leaves his familiar home and the entrenched values within his culture, he loses even the symbolic coloring of Steinbeck’s dramatic narrative. He becomes a “grey, indefinite shadow.” Pepé is now entering a region unknown to him, a mountainous world that he chooses because of a blind necessity to flee from the white man’s justice. And while Pepé begins his deep journey into the mountains, his mother begins her formal wail, then a whine, then a moan. She does not pray. She repeats this ritual three timesdeath-like in its absoluteness, then goes inside the house and shuts the door. From now on, Steinbeck will focus on Pepé and his torturous flight. Pepé is scared. Steinbeck does not tell us, but he says, Pepé looked back,” noting that Pepé looked suspiciously, and that Pepé’s face is now “relentless and manly.” And while Pepé allows his horse to guide its way through the mountains, Steinbeck describes the trail as being cleft-like, as eroding, and made of The Red Pony 50

broken granite. Whistling above, soars a red-tailed hawk. The scene is ominous, especially as the sun descends, and Pepé sees a rider, a dark rider who disappears as quickly as he appears. The story turns dramatically when Pepé stops for the night, ties his horse and reaches for his knife. It is gone. The valley darkens; Pepé is threatened by a bobcat who disappears, but at last the boy sleeps. The night is not easy; it is interrupted by the sounds of the wind sweeping and “rustling” down from the peaks, the coyotes looking for prey, and the owls looking for mice and rabbits. Like prey himself, Pepé is being hunted and it is only after his horse whinnies and jumps to its feet, that Pepé is again reminded that he is being hunted and it is only after his hand rises up to his horse’s head to reassure him, that he realizes that his father’s hat is gone. Slowly, as he traverses the steep slopes, we will see him slowly lose more important and symbolic segments of his manhood. The path which Pepé takes is unknown to him; as far as we know, he is not a curious boy. Despite the fact that these mountains have been a part of his heritage and his home for years, this is the first time that he has ridden a horse among its redwoods and fern covered underbrush. As he travels farther within these mountains, Steinbeck tells us that the “sun was lost,” a phrase that suggests that Pepé’s path is perilous. When Pepé eats, he does so sparingly, as his mother has taught him, but his fatigue is evident. Steinbeck says that Pepé sits “half-over” in his saddle, his leg dangling loosely. He rides with his horse guiding the way as he succumbs to the rhythm of the hooves on the trail. Steinbeck then describes more fully the upward trail which Pepé’s horse takes-toward no goal; the two are simply in flight. Steinbeck pauses here, emphasizing the disappearance of the stream, then the trees, and, finally, even the sage is gone. Pepé is going ever higher, until even the earth changes color; now, only lizards and bizarre-edged mountains tops are before him. But he continues, upward. Steinbeck stresses Pepé’s isolation by noting that the small, grey rabbits skitter past him and that the birds make a “monotonous high creaking sound” and that the mountain tops are “pale and powder dry.” Pepé is alien to these desert-like elements in the same way that he was alien to the social and legal code of The Red Pony 51

Monterey. Yet he continues upward, in his flight, seeing occasionally what Steinbeck describes as a “black rider.” We do not know who these men are, nor will we at the story’s end. We know only about Pepé’s sighting them, knowing that they exist and that one must never “show interest in them.” At dawn, Pepé’s horse “struggles” forward; the ridge above them is “snaggled,” and it is also “rotten” and “eaten by the winds of time.” Pepé’s trousers are ripped, he noticesand then his horse is shot! It thrashes below him, and then another shot-aimed at Pepé-causes him to fling himself behind a bush. After a few moments, Pepé peers out and, here, note the words which Steinbeck uses to describe Pepé’s movements: “he moved with the instinctive care of an animal”; he “wormed his way toward …”; and he “wriggled forward on his stomach …” Slowly, Pepé is becoming a hunted man, but he is cowering and protecting himself not as a man but as an animal. While buzzards hover above, note how uneasy Pepé becomes; he fires his rifle at a slight movement in the chaparralan act he should not have done for he is shot at immediatelyand, still, he does not know who pursues him. When he is wounded, like an animal, Pepé tends to himself in the way that an animal mightthat is, he applies the soft webs of another animal, a spider. And, afterward, he continues on his wayto where, Steinbeck never tells usand as he moves, he “crawls.” Three times, Steinbeck describes his moving forward as “crawling.” Slowly, Pepé is losing his sense of his manhood; he is surviving as he has seen animals survive. A man survives by his courage and daring; an animal survives with cunning and craftiness. When the sun is high, Pepé “crawls” for cover under a mountain peak; yet he is far from his indefinite goal because he fails to perceive what it is that he searches for. Animal-like, his lips and tongue grow thick and heavy. His saliva writhes, and his eyes begin to become uneasy and suspicious. He sleeps, often crawling blindly farther, but always he “wriggles” to the safety of a bit of shade. At sundown, Pepé’s hand is swollen, his tongue is full, yet he must struggle farther, and he must struggle even harder through thick brushever upwardsand although he continues to reach ridge after ridge, he sees before him yet another mountain. At last, he falls and tumbles down a hill. No longer can he act The Red Pony 52

like a man. He scoops a handful of mud into his hands and sucks it for its moisture. His manhood has been tested. He hears human sounds; his arm is swelling, and his armpit throbs. He knows that he is doomed. He tries to relieve the green and black swelling along his arm and whines “like a dog” as he scrapes a stone along the length of his wound. When Pepé reaches the last slope of the mountains, he looks no longer like a man. His coarse black hair is littered with twigs and bits of spider webs. His eyes have retreated back into his head and his tongue has begun to protrude between his lips. A bird circles above him, but he does not notice it; there are matters more important. He knows that he is dying, but that he will not die like a hunted animal. After crossing himself, as his mother has taught him to do, he stands forwardand welcomesthe shots that cut through his body. He has challenged and scorned those who would hunt him. He has proven himself a man. He has not been “caught like a chicken.” He entered his flight, at first, with a sense of daring, viewing his flight as an adventure. He relished his freedom, the lovely streams and the colorful berries and bushes. All of these seemed to mean that life was good, especially since he had his horse, some food, his rifle, his knife, and some water. Then, suddenly, he encountered “dark riders” and, once again, he was reminded of the dangers of life. With this realization, the trail became harsher, more steep and more difficult, more desolate and isolated. Gradually, he began to lose the raiments of his civilization. He lost his knife, then his horse was killed. On foot, he was forced to crawl like an animal. When he was wounded, he cared for his wound in the primitive manner of a savage or an animal. When he became sick, he dropped his coat, forgot his rifle, and discovered that he was unable to speak. He was then reliant upon instinctive powers, powers that had been weakened during his flight. He was rendered naked against the elements and the relentless pursuit of the posse and the dark riders. Pepé, however, dies like a man. He refuses to be killed like a cowering animal. He raises his weakened body upward and he makes a man kill another man. As he falls and the earth covers him, as it might an insignificant animal, Pepé, knows that he died well, with all the courage and the convictions of his race and of himself.

The Red Pony 53

Review Questions 1. In “The Gift” and “The Promise,” describe Jody Tiflin’s relationship with his father and contrast it with his relationship with Billy Buck. 2. In “The Gift,” what is the cause of Gabilan’s death? 3. Explain Jody’s fascination with the Great Mountains. 4. What is Jody’s reaction to and feelings about Old Gitano’s leaving the Tiflin farm? 5. Account for the irony in the title of “The Promise.” 6. Steinbeck seems more concerned with Billy Buck than with Jody in “The Promise.” Why? 7. In “The Leader of the People,” what does Carl Tiflin object to concerning his father-in-law’s visit to the farm? 8. In “The Leader of the People,” what does the term “westering” mean? 9. In The Chrysanthemums, what qualities about the traveling repairman excite Elisa most? 10.

Why does he deceive Elisa?

11. In Flight, contrast the code of manhood in Monterey with the Torres’ code of manhood. 12. Describe Pepé’s death in terms of his manhood.

The Red Pony 54

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Fontenrose, Joseph. John Sleinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: 1963. French, Warren. John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne, 1961. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958. Moore, Harry T. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study. Chicago: Normandie House, 1939. Tedlock, E. W. Jr., and Wicker, C. V., eds. Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Tiventy-Five Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957. Watt, F. W. John Steinbeck. New York: Grove Press, 1962.

The Red Pony 55

LIST OF STEINBECK’S WORKS 1929 Cap of Gold 1932 The Pastures of Heaven 1933 To a God Unknown The Red Pony (short story collection and later a film) 1934 “The Murder” (an 0. Henry prize short story, 1934) 1935 Tortilla Flat (Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal and later a film) 1936 In Dubious Battle 1937 Of Mice and Men (novel, play and later a film) 1938 The Long Valley (short story collection) 1939 The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer Prize and later a film) 1941 The Sea o Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research The Forgotten Village (semi-documentary Mexican film) 1942 Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team The Moon Is Down (play-novella and later a film) 1945 Cannery Row 1947 The Wayward Bus (novel and later a film) The Pearl (novella and later a film) 1948 A Russian Journal 1950 Burning Bright (novella and play) Viva Zapata (film) 1951 The Log From the Sea of Cortez (the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez with a tribute “About Ed Ricketts”) 1952 East of Eden (novel and later a film) 1954 Sweet Thursday (novel and later a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical-comedy, Pipe Dream) 1959 Once There Was a War 1961 The Winter of Our Discontent 1962 Travels with Charley in Search of America

The Red Pony 56

NOTES

The Red Pony 57