Lee's mother on the shale

At supper the twins discover that their father has begun to listen to them, and are made timid by it. Cal steers the talk to their mother's grave; Adam lies smoothly and instantly — she is buried back east — and Lee covers for him. Adam raises the idea of moving to Salinas, which settles it for Aron, since Abra lives there. Afterwards Lee produces ten years of accounts and argues against the lie: not because the boys will be hurt by the truth but because a discovered lie will infect every true thing they are told. To persuade him, Lee tells his own story. His father, indebted, signed a railroad contract and sailed in the hold from Canton; his mother came aboard disguised as a man and was already pregnant. In a Sierra camp of woman-starved men the two planned to run to a mountain lake for the birth. A boulder broke his father's leg, labour came early, the cry of "Woman" went up, and Lee was clawed out of his dying mother with his father's fingernails. Then the whole camp raised him. Afterwards Adam writes to Charles for the first time in ten years.

Lee argues against the lie and then, when argument fails, tells the worst thing he knows about his own mother to demonstrate what he means. His father's line about the storytellers at the city gate is the book defending its own method. The letter to Charles is the flattest prose in the novel — "their mother is not here" — which measures how little Adam's new clarity reaches paper.