Old Sanchez house

The Old Sanchez house, built by the first Sanchez grantee in the early nineteenth century, stands in a tiny opening in the foothills of the Salinas Valley, a miniature valley fed by a precious ever-running spring of sweet water. Its walls are four feet thick, made of adobe, and the round pole rafters are tied on with rawhide ropes which had been put on wet; the hide shrank and pulled joist and rafter tight together, and the leather ropes became hard as iron and nearly imperishable. The only drawback to this building method is that rats will gnaw at the hide if they are let. The old house seemed to have grown out of the earth, and it was lovely. Huge live oaks shaded the valley, and the earth had a richness and a greenness foreign to this part of the country. The original Sanchez house was still usable when Adam Trask bought the land, but Bordoni, the Swiss immigrant who owned it before Adam, distrusted the thick mud walls and built a frame house some distance away, using the old Sanchez house as a cow barn, with his cows putting their heads out the deep recessed windows.

Adam's Renovation and the Edenic Dream

When Adam Trask purchased the Bordoni ranch, he decided to live in the old Sanchez house, seeing it as a place in which to plant his dynasty. He undertook a thorough renovation: the manure was scraped out, the old floors torn up, neck-rubbed window casings ripped away. New sweet wood was going in, pine sharp with resin and velvety redwood, and a new roof of long split shakes. The old thick walls sucked in coat after coat of whitewash made with lime and salt water, which, as it dried, seemed to have a luminosity of its own. Adam planned a permanent seat. A gardener had trimmed the ancient roses, planted geraniums, laid out the vegetable flat, and brought the living spring in little channels to wander back and forth through the garden. Adam foretasted comfort for himself and his descendants. In a shed, covered with tarpaulins, lay the crated heavy furniture sent from San Francisco and carted out from King City. He wanted it built strong, with copper nails and hard wood, nothing to rust and rot. The workmen were still hammering when Cathy gave birth to the twins, and the house was not yet finished when Cathy shot Adam and abandoned the family.

Decay and Abandonment

After Cathy's departure, Adam drew into himself and the unfinished Sanchez house lay open to wind and rain. The new floorboards buckled and warped with moisture. The laid-out vegetable gardens rioted with weeds. The house entered its second decay. The great sala all along the front was half plastered, the line of white halfway around and then stopping, just as the workmen had left it over ten years before. The deep windows with their rebuilt sashes remained glassless. The new floor was streaked with water stain, and a clutter of old papers and darkened nail bags with their nails rusted to prickly balls filled the corner of the room. A bat flew from the rear of the house, its gray shape swooping from side to side and disappearing through the doorway. Closets held wash basins and toilets and chandeliers, still crated and waiting to be installed. A smell of mildew and of wet paper was in the air.

The Twins' Playground and the Meeting with Abra

Years later, the abandoned house became a playground for the twins, Cal and Aron. When Abra Bacon visited the Trask ranch with her parents, the boys took her to the old Sanchez house to play. They walked on tiptoe and did not speak for fear of the echoes from the walls of the empty house. In the big sala, the twins faced their guest. Cal boldly invited her to come and play with them there, and Aron offered her the rabbit he had shot. It was in this decaying, half-finished space that Abra first asserted her control over the boys, dismissing Lee's theory about twins with the question, "Which one of you is fried? And which one is poached?" The house, a monument to Adam's abandoned ambitions, became the setting for the children's first negotiations of power and affection.

Narrative Significance

The Old Sanchez house is a powerful symbol of the novel's central themes. It represents Adam's failed attempt to create an Eden, a paradise that is destroyed by the serpent of Cathy's evil. Its decay mirrors Adam's own emotional and spiritual paralysis after Cathy's betrayal. Yet it also holds the potential for renewal: it is the birthplace of the twins, and it is the place where the next generation—Cal, Aron, and Abra—begin to forge their own relationships and identities. The house's unfinished state, with its crated chandeliers and half-plastered walls, embodies the novel's sense that the story of good and evil, of choice and consequence, is never complete, always waiting to be finished by those who come after.