The Grapes of Wrath

“Like a damn ol’ graveyard ghos’. I been goin’ aroun’ the places where stuff happened. Like there’s a place over by our forty; in a gully they’s a bush. Fust time I ever laid with a girl was there. Me fourteen an’ stampin’ an’ jerkin’ an’ snortin’ like a buck deer, randy as a billy-goat. So I went there an’ I laid down on the groun’, an’ I seen it

A fella builds his own sins right up from the groun

where my own pa’s blood is part of it.’’ He paused uneasily. “You fellas think I’m touched?’’

She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken.

It’s too much—livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me.

She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

I seen fellas like you before. You ain’t askin’ nothin’; you’re jus’ singin’ a kinda song. ‘What we comin’ to?’ You don’ wanta know. Country’s movin’ aroun’, goin’ places. They’s folks dyin’ all aroun’. Maybe you’ll die pretty soon, but you won’t know nothin

no Joads or no Hazletts, neither, ever refusin’ food an’ shelter or a lift on the road to anybody that asked. They’s been mean Joads, but never that mean.’’

“Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’