Timshel, and the medicine for Adam

Samuel makes his farewell calls, keeping the Trask place for last. Lee has cut off his queue and describes the twins as two sides of a medal: Cal sharp, dark and fighting for his life, Aron liked before he speaks. Samuel presses Adam about his fallow land and his fallow self, describes exactly how the dream Cathy comes to his bed at night, and admits he has kept such a caller himself for fifty years. Adam offers to build the garden if Samuel will help; Samuel refuses and sends him to Tom. At dinner Lee tells the story he has been saving: troubled by "thou shalt" against "do thou", he took the passage to four aged scholars of the Lee family association, who learned Hebrew over two years and brought up the word timshel — "Thou mayest rule over sin" — a choice rather than a promise or an order. Then, by the shed, Samuel gives Adam his medicine: Cathy is in Salinas and owns the worst house in the county. Adam runs into the dark.

Two acts of the same courage, arranged so the second follows from the first: Lee's word, then Samuel using it. The chapter earns the cruelty of the telling by spending pages on tenderness beforehand — the rabbits, the secret birthday buck, the thirty-three-year-old horse nobody has found a good thing about. The argument over shooting Doxology sets up who may decide another is better off spared.