Cal Burns the Money

Cal Trask burns the fifteen thousand dollars he earned from his bean speculation, a dramatic act of self-punishment after his father Adam rejects the money and condemns the profit as tainted by war. The scene marks the climax of Cal's guilt over revealing their mother Kate to Aron, and it crystallizes the novel's central struggle between inherited evil and the power of choice.

The Rejection and the Decision to Destroy

On Thanksgiving Day, after Adam had refused the gift of fifteen thousand dollars in gold certificates—crisp new bills the Monterey County Bank had sent to San Francisco to obtain—Cal retreated to his room. Adam had told him, "I don't want the money, Cal. And the lettuce—I don't think I did that for a profit. It was a kind of game to see if I could get the lettuce there, and I lost. I don't want the money." He added that he would have been happier if Cal could have given him "what your brother has—pride in the thing he's doing, gladness in his progress." Cal sat at his desk, his forehead streaming with perspiration, and felt a choking sensation. He tried to let weeping start but tears could not pass the hot iron in his head. After a time his breathing steadied and he watched his brain go to work slyly, quietly. He fought the quiet hateful brain down and it slipped aside and went about its work. Hate was seeping all through his body, poisoning every nerve. Then there came a point where the control and the fear were gone and his brain cried out in an aching triumph. His hand went to a pencil and he drew tight little spirals one after another on his blotting pad. When Lee came in an hour later there were hundreds of spirals, and they had become smaller and smaller. Lee brought him coffee and tried to reach him, saying, "He couldn't help it, Cal. That's his nature. It was the only way he knew. He didn't have any choice. But you have. Don't you hear me? You have a choice." Cal replied quietly, "Aren't you making a fuss about nothing? You must be slipping. You'd think from your tone that I'd killed somebody." He drank the coffee scalding as it was and went into the living room, where he apologized to his father and put the package of money in the inside pocket of his coat.

The Burning

The next day, Cal went to his bureau and got the flat package from under his handkerchiefs in his drawer. He looked around the room and brought a porcelain pin tray to his desk. He breathed deeply and found the cool air good tasting. He lifted one of the crisp bills, creased it in the middle so that it made an angle, and then he scratched a match under his desk and lighted the bill. The heavy paper curled and blackened, the flame ran upward, and only when the fire was about his fingertips did Cal drop the charred chip in the pin tray. He stripped off another bill and lighted it. When six were burned Lee came in without knocking. "I smelled smoke," he said, and then he saw what Cal was doing. "Oh!" he said. Cal braced himself for intervention but none came. Lee folded his hands across his middle and stood silently—waiting. Cal doggedly lighted bill after bill until all were burned, and then he crushed the black chips down to powder and waited for Lee to comment, but Lee did not speak or move. At last Cal said, "Go ahead—you want to talk to me. Go ahead!" Lee replied, "No, I don't. And if you have no need to talk to me—I'll stay a while and then I'll go away." He squatted in a chair, folded his hands, and waited, smiling to himself.

Lee's Intervention and the Question of Choice

After a few moments Cal said peevishly, "I wish you'd get on with your lecture." Lee said he didn't have a lecture. Cal admitted he had gotten drunk the night before, his first time drinking. "I was afraid if I didn't get drunk I'd shoot myself," he said. Lee replied, "You'd never do that. You're too mean." Cal cried, "Why did I do it—why did I do it?" Lee said, "Don't make it complicated. You know why you did it. You were mad at him, and you were mad at him because your father hurt your feelings. That's not difficult. You were just mean." Cal asked, "I guess that's what I wonder—why I'm mean. Lee, I don't want to be mean. Help me, Lee!" Lee then asked whether burning the money had given him much pleasure, and whether he was enjoying his despair. "You're pretty full of yourself," Lee said. "You're marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask—Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose kid—mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and curiously pure in your mind?" He told Cal that he was very like all the other snot-nose kids, and asked whether he was trying to attract dignity and tragedy to himself because his mother was a whore. Cal turned slowly back to his desk. Lee watched him, holding his breath the way a doctor watches for the reaction to a hypodermic. He could see the reactions flaring through Cal—the rage at insult, the belligerence, and the hurt feelings following behind, and out of that—just the beginning of relief. Lee sighed. He had worked so hard, so tenderly, and his work seemed to have succeeded.

Thematic Significance: Guilt, Punishment, and the Possibility of Redemption

Cal's burning of the money is a ritual of self-destruction that mirrors the novel's deepest concerns. He had made the money through a bean speculation with Will Hamilton, buying futures at five cents and selling when the price jumped to twelve and a half cents as the war drove demand. Adam rejected it not because it was dishonestly earned but because he could not take a profit on war while signing boys to die. Cal's act of burning the bills—fifteen crisp gold certificates—is an attempt to annihilate the evidence of his own nature, which he believes is poisoned by his mother Kate's blood. Lee's intervention, with its blunt refusal to let Cal wallow in self-pity, echoes the novel's central message: that a man has the choice to be good or evil, and that choice is not determined by ancestry. The scene leaves Cal at a threshold, stripped of his money and his self-justification, but not yet of his capacity to choose differently.