The Sanchez House

The Sanchez House is the architectural heart of Adam Trask's failed Eden in the Salinas Valley, a thick-walled adobe dwelling that passes from Spanish grant to Swiss cow barn to the center of a shattered domestic dream. Built by the original Sanchez grantee in the early nineteenth century, the house was designed around a perennial spring in a small draw off the valley floor, its four-foot-thick mud walls and rawhide-tied pole rafters giving it the look of something that had grown out of the earth. By the time Adam Trask encounters it, the house has been used for decades as a cow barn by the Bordoni family, its deep recessed windows serving as openings for bovine heads. Bordoni, a Swiss immigrant with a national passion for cleanliness, distrusted the thick mud walls and built a frame house some distance away, leaving the old adobe to the cattle. The house's original construction method—rawhide ropes put on wet that shrank and pulled joist and rafter tight, becoming hard as iron—had one enduring drawback: rats would gnaw at the hide if they were let.

Adam's Renovation and the Edenic Dream

When Adam Trask buys the Bordoni ranch in 1900, he immediately sets about transforming the old Sanchez house into a permanent seat for his dynasty. The manure is scraped out, the old floors torn up, and neck-rubbed window casings ripped away. New sweet wood goes in—pine sharp with resin and velvety redwood—and a new roof of long split shakes is laid. The old thick walls suck in coat after coat of whitewash made with lime and salt water, which, as it dries, seems to have a luminosity of its own. Adam plans a garden with trimmed ancient roses, planted geraniums, and a vegetable flat, bringing the living spring in little channels to wander back and forth through the garden. In a shed, covered with tarpaulins, lie the crated heavy furniture sent from San Francisco and carted out from King City. Lee, Adam's Chinese cook, makes a special trip to Pajaro to buy pots, kettles, pans, kegs, jars, copper, and glass for his kitchen. A new pigsty is built far from the house and downwind, with chicken and duck runs near and a kennel for the dogs to keep the coyotes away. Adam inspects every wooden joint and studies paint samples on a shingle, wanting the house built strong with copper nails and hard wood—nothing to rust and rot. He is unhurried, for the child Cathy carries will be finished well before the house is ready.

The Birth of the Twins and the Unraveling

The house becomes the stage for the novel's most violent domestic rupture. In the big four-poster bed in the darkened bedroom—blankets tacked over the windows because Cathy claims light hurts her eyes—Samuel Hamilton delivers twin sons. The birth is incredibly quick, popping like a seed, and Cathy does not even touch the pulling rope Liza Hamilton had sent. When Samuel shows her the boys, she says flatly, "I don't want them." She demands the windows be covered and the light taken away. Samuel, his hand bitten by Cathy during the labor, feels a dreadfulness coming over the house. Lee, the Chinese servant, says he feels it too—a sense of strangeness that makes him think of Chinese fairy tales and demonology. After the birth, Cathy stays in her room for a week, gathering her strength. On a Saturday in October, she dresses in her neat traveling dress, shoots Adam in the shoulder with his .44 Colt, and walks out of the house, leaving the twins crying for their dinner. The house, left unfinished, becomes a monument to Adam's arrested life. The carpenters are fired, the new floorboards buckle and warp with moisture, and the laid-out vegetable gardens riot with weeds. The house stands half-plastered, its great sala with the line of white halfway around and then stopping, its deep windows remaining glassless, its crated wash basins, toilets, and chandeliers still waiting to be installed.

The House as Symbol and Setting

The Sanchez house functions as a physical correlative to Adam's psychological state after Cathy's departure. It is a place of suspended animation, where the new floor is streaked with water stain and a clutter of old papers and darkened nail bags with rusted nails fill the corners. A bat flies from the rear of the house when children enter. The house leaks a little but remains a place of play for the twins, Cal and Aron, and for Abra Bacon when she visits. It is in this unfinished house that Cal first begins to manipulate his brother, and where Abra, with her inexorable feminine logic, dismantles Lee's theory about identical and fraternal twins by asking which one is fried and which poached. The house's decay mirrors the decay of Adam's dream of a dynasty. Samuel Hamilton, visiting after the birth, feels wings over the house and a dreadfulness coming. Lee, the Chinese servant, says he feels it too—a sense of strangeness that makes him think of Chinese fairy tales and demonology. The house, with its thick walls and unfinished renovations, becomes a space where the novel's central themes of rejection, guilt, and the choice between good and evil are played out. It is the place where Adam's glory is born and where it dies, where the twins are named Caleb and Aaron, and where Adam, after Samuel's death, finally begins to emerge from his long sleep of grief.