Abra, the rabbit and the rain

The twins, eleven now and wearing turkey feathers at their temples, kill a rabbit in the river bottom. Cal manoeuvres over who gets the credit, then tries out his sharpest new weapon: he has heard men in the King City post office say their mother did not die but ran away. Aron refuses to believe it and comes at him with the rabbit; Cal calls it a joke and files the tool away. A cloudburst drives them home, where the county supervisor Mr. and Mrs. Bacon have sheltered with their daughter Abra. While the Bacons press Adam about renting his idle land and moving to Salinas for the schools, the three children go out to the half-finished Sanchez house. Abra takes charge, demolishes Lee's two-egg explanation of twins, plays at being their fairy godmother, and touches Aron's arm. Cal, reading her wish to be grown up, works on her until she is losing, invents a story about scars on Aron's back, and finally whispers that she has wet her pants. Abra throws Aron's box out of the moving buggy — with his proposal inside.

The twins are introduced through what each does with the same object: an anthill watched for hours, or kicked to pieces. Cal's cruelty is given its motive in the same paragraph as its method — he punishes those who prefer Aron, having forgotten it began as wanting to be loved that way. Abra is the only child in the book who can hold her own, and she is beaten anyway.