The Pastures of Heaven Page 2

  In her own new room, Mae stuck dance programs be­tween the glass and the frame of the mirror. On the walls she hung framed photographs of her friends in Monterey, and laid out her photograph album and her locked diary on the little bedside table. In the diary she concealed from prying eyes a completely uninteresting record of dances, of parties, of recipes for candy and of mild preferences for certain boys. Mae bought and made her own room curtains, pale pink theatrical gauze to strain the light, and a valance of flowered cretonne. On her bedspread of gathered satin, she arranged five boudoir pillows in positions of abandon, and against them leaned a long-legged French doll with clipped blonde hair and with a cloth cigarette dangling from languid lips. Mae considered that this doll proved her openness of mind, her tolerance of things she did not quite approve. She liked to have friends who had pasts, for having such friends and listening to them, destroyed in her any regret that her own life had been blameless. She was nineteen; she thought of marriage most of the time. When she was out with boys she talked of ideals with some emotion. Mae had very little conception of what ideals were except that in some manner they governed the kind of kisses one received while driving home from dances.

  Jimmie Munroe was seventeen, just out of high school and enormously cynical. In the presence of his parents, Jimmie’s manner was usually sullen and secretive. He knew he couldn’t trust them with his knowledge of the world, for they would not understand. They belonged to a generation which had no knowledge of sin nor of heroism. A firm intention to give over one’s life to science after gutting it of emotional possibilities would not be tenderly received by his parents. By science, Jimmie meant radios, archeology and airplanes. He pictured himself digging up golden vases in Peru. He dreamed of shutting himself up in a cell-like workshop, and, after years of agony and ridicule, of emerging with an airplane new in design and devastating in speed.

  Jimmie’s room in the new house became a clutter of small machines as soon as he was settled. There was a radio crystal set with ear phones, a hand-powered mag­neto which operated a telegraph key, a brass telescope and innumerable machines partly taken to pieces. Jimmie, too, had a secret repository, an oaken box fas­tened with a heavy padlock. In the box were: half a can of dynamite caps, an old revolver, a package of Melachrino cigarettes, three contraptions known as Merry Widows, a small flask of peach brandy, a paper knife shaped like a dagger, four bundles of letters from four different girls, sixteen lipsticks pilfered from dance partners, a box containing mementos of current loves—dried flowers, handkerchiefs and buttons, and most prized of all, a round garter covered with black lace. Jimmie had forgotten how he really got the garter. What he did remember was far more satisfactory anyway. He always locked his bedroom door before he unlocked the box.

  In high school Jimmie’s score of sinfulness had been equaled by many of his friends and easily passed by some. Soon after moving to the Pastures of Heaven, he found that his iniquities were unique. He came to re­gard himself as a reformed rake, but one not reformed beyond possible outbreak. It gave him a powerful ad­vantage with the younger girls of the valley to have lived so fully. Jimmie was rather a handsome boy, lean and well made, dark of hair and eyes.

  Manfred, the youngest boy, ordinarily called Manny, was a serious child of seven, whose face was pinched and drawn by adenoids. His parents knew about the adenoids; they had even talked of having them re­moved. Manny became terrified of the operation, and his mother, seeing this, had used it as a deterrent threat when he was bad. Now, a mention of having his ade­noids removed made Manny hysterical with terror. Mr. and Mrs. Munroe considered him a thoughtful child, perhaps a genius. He played usually by himself, or sat for hours staring into space, “dreaming,” his mother said. They would not know for some years that he was subnormal, his brain development arrested by his ade­noidal condition. Ordinarily Manny was a good child, tractable and easily terrified into obedience, but, if he were terrified a little too much, an hysteria resulted that robbed him of his self-control and even of a sense of self-preservation. He had been known to beat his forehead on the floor until the blood ran into his eyes.

  Bert Munroe came to the Pastures of Heaven because he was tired of battling with a force which invariably defeated him. He had engaged in many enterprises and every one had failed, not through any shortcoming on Bert’s part, but through mishaps, which, if taken alone, were accidents. Bert saw all the accidents together and they seemed to him the acts of a Fate malignant to his success. He was tired of fighting the nameless thing that stopped every avenue to success. Bert was only fifty-five, but wanted to rest; he was half convinced that a curse rested upon him.

  Years ago he opened a garage on the edge of a town. Business was good; money began to roll in. When he considered himself safe, the state highway came through on another street and left him stranded without busi­ness. He sold the garage a year or so later and opened a grocery store. Again he was successful. He paid off his indebtedness and began to put money in the bank. A chain grocery crowded up against him, opened a price war and forced him from business. Bert was a sensitive man. Such things as these had happened to him a dozen times. Just when his success seemed permanent, the curse struck him. His self-confidence dwindled. When the war broke out his spirit was nearly gone. He knew there was money to be made from the war, but he was afraid, after having been beaten so often.

  He had to reassure himself a great deal before he made his first contract for beans in the field. In the first year of business, he made fifty thousand dollars, the second year two hundred thousand. The third year he contracted for thousands of acres of beans before they were even planted. By his contracts, he guaranteed to pay ten cents a pound for the crops. He could sell all the beans he could get for eighteen cents a pound. The war ended in November, and he sold his crops for four cents a pound. He had a little less money than when he started

  This time he was sure of the curse. His spirit was so badly broken that he didn’t leave his house very often. He worked in the garden, planted a few vegetables and brooded over the enmity of his fate. Slowly, over a period of stagnant years, a nostalgia for the soil grew in him. In farming, he thought, lay the only line of endeavor that did not cross with his fate. He thought perhaps he could find rest and security on a little farm.

  The Battle place was offered for sale by a Monterey realty company. Bert looked at the farm, saw the changes that could be made, and bought it. At first his family opposed the move, but, when he had cleaned the yard, installed electricity and a telephone in the house, and made it comfortable with new furniture they were almost enthusiastic about it. Mrs. Munro thought any change desirable that would stop Bert’s moping in the yard in Monterey.

  The moment he had bought the farm, Bert felt free. The doom was gone. He knew he was safe from his curse. Within a month his shoulders straightened, and his face lost its haunted look. He became an enthusiastic farmer; he read exhaustively on farming methods, hired a helper and worked from morning until night. Every day was a new excitement to him. Every seed sprouting out of the ground seemed to renew a promise of immun­ity to him. He was happy, and because he was confi­dent again, he began to make friends in the valley and to entrench his position.

  It is a difficult thing and one requiring great tact quickly to become accepted in a rural community. The people of the valley had watched the advent of the Munroe family with a little animosity. The Battle farm was haunted. They had always considered it so, even those who laughed at the idea. Now a man came along and proved them wrong. More than that, he changed the face of the countryside by removing the accursed farm and substituting a harmless and fertile farm. The people were used to the Battle place as it was. Secretly they resented the change.

  That Bert could remove this animosity was remark­able. Within three months he had become a part of the valley, a solid man, a neighbor. He borrowed tools and had tools borrowed from him. At the end of six months he was elected a member of the school board. To a large extent Bert’s own happines
s at being free of his Furies made the people like him. In addition he was a kindly man; he enjoyed doing favors for his friends, and, more important, he had no hesitancy in asking favors.

  At the store he explained his position to a group of farmers, and they admired the honesty of his explana­tion. It was soon after he had come to tile valley. T. B. Allen asked his old question.

  “We always kind of thought that place was cursed. Lots of funny things have happened there. Seen any ghosts yet?”

  Bert laughed. “If you take away all the food from a place, the rats will leave,” he said. “I took all the old­ness and darkness away from that place. That’s what ghosts live on.”

  “You sure made a nice looking place of it,” Allen admitted. “There ain’t a better place in the Pastures when it’s kept up.”

  Bert had been frowning soberly as a new thought began to work in his mind. “I’ve had a lot of bad luck,” be said. “I’ve been in a lot of businesses and every one turned out bad. When I came down here, I had a kind of an idea that I was under a curse.” Suddenly he laughed delightedly at the thought that had come to him. “And what do I do? First thing out of the box, I buy a place that’s supposed to be under a curse. Well, I just happened to think, maybe my curse and the farm’s curse got to fighting and killed each other off. I’m dead certain they’ve gone, anyway.”

  The men laughed with him. T. B. Allen whacked his hand down on the counter. “That’s a good one,” he cried. “But here’s a better one. Maybe your curse and the farm’s curse has mated and gone into a gopher hole like a pair of rattlesnakes. Maybe there’ll be a lot of baby curses crawling around the Pastures the first thing we know.”

  The gathered men roared with laughter at that, and T. B. Allen memorized the whole scene so he could repeat it. It was almost like the talk in a play, he thought.

  Three

  EDWARD WICKS lived in a small, gloomy house on the edge of the county road in the Pastures of Heaven. Be­hind the house there was a peach orchard and a large vegetable garden. While Edward Wicks took care of the peaches, his wife and beautiful daughter cultivated the garden and got the peas and string beans and early strawberries ready to be sold in Monterey.

  Edward Wicks had a blunt, brown face, and small, cold eyes almost devoid of lashes. He was known as the trickiest man in the valley. He drove hard deals and was never so happy as when he could force a few cents more out of his peaches than his neighbors did. When he could, he cheated ethically in horse trades, and because of his acute­ness he gained the respect of the community, but strange­ly became no richer. However he liked to pretend that he was laying away money in securities. At school board meetings he asked the advice of the other members about various bonds, and in this way managed to give them the impression that his savings were considerable. The people of the valley called him “Shark” Wicks.

  “Shark?” they said, “Oh, I guess he was worth around twenty thousand, maybe more. He’s nobody’s fool.”

  And the truth was that Shark had never had more than five hundred dollars at one time in his life.

  Shark’s greatest pleasure came of being considered a wealthy man. Indeed, he enjoyed it so much that the wealth itself became real to him. Setting his imaginary fortune at fifty thousand dollars, he kept a ledger in which he calculated his interest and entered records of his various investments. These manipulations were the first joy of his life.

  An oil company was formed in Salinas with the purpose of boring a well in the southern part of Monte­rey county. When he heard of it, Shark walked over to the farm of John Whiteside to discuss the value of its stock. “I been wondering about that South County Oil Company,” he said.

  “Well, the geologist’s report sounds good,” said John Whiteside. “I have always heard that there was oil in that section. I heard it years ago.” John Whiteside was often consulted in such matters. “Of course I wouldn’t put too much into it.”

  Shark creased his lower lip with his fingers and pondered for a moment. “I been turning it over in my mind,” he said. “It looks like a pretty good proposition to me. I got about ten thousand lying around that ain’t bringing in what it should. I guess I’d better look into it pretty carefully. Just thought I’d see what your opinion was.”

  But Shark’s mind was already made up. When he got home, he took down the ledger and withdrew ten thou­sand dollars from his imaginary bank account. Then he entered one thousand shares of Southern County Oil Company stock to his list of securities. From that day on he watched the stock lists feverishly. When the price rose a little, he went about whistling monotonously, and when the price dropped, he felt a lump of apprehension forming in his throat. At length, when there came a quick rise in the price of South County, Shark was so elated that he went to the Pastures of Heaven General Store and bought a black marble mantel clock with onyx columns on either side of the dial and a bronze horse to go on top of it. The men in the store looked wise and whispered that Shark was about to make a killing.

  A week later the stock dropped out of sight and the company disappeared. The moment he heard the news, Shark dragged out his ledger and entered the fact that he had sold his shares the day before the break, had sold with a two thousand dollar profit.

  Pat Humbert, driving back from Monterey, stopped his car on the county road in front of Shark’s house. “I heard you got washed out in that South County stock,” he observed.

  Shark smiled contentedly. “What do you think I am, Pat? I sold out two days ago. You ought to know as well as the next man that I ain’t a sucker. I knew that stock was bum, but I also knew it would take a rise so the backers could get out whole. When they unloaded, I did too.”

  “The hell you did!” said Pat admiringly. And when he went into the General Store he passed the informa­tion on. Men nodded their heads and made new guesses at the amount of Shark’s money. They admitted they’d hate to come up against him in a business deal.

  At this time Shark borrowed four hundred dollars from a Monterey bank and bought a second-hand Fordson tractor.

  Gradually his reputation for good judgment and fore­sight became so great that no man in the Pastures of Heaven thought of buying a bond or a piece of land or even a horse without first consulting Shark Wicks. With each of his admirers Shark went carefully into the prob­lem and ended by giving startlingly good advice.

  In a few years his ledger showed that he had ac­cumulated one hundred and twenty-five thousand dol­lars through sagacious investing. When his neighbors saw that he lived like a poor man, they respected him the more because his riches did not turn his head. He was nobody’s fool. His wife and beautiful daughter still cared for the vegetables and prepared them for sale in Monterey, while Shark attended to the thousand duties of the orchard.

  In Shark’s life there had been no literary romance. At nineteen he took Katherine Mullock to three dances because she was available. This started the machine of precedent and he married her because her family and all of the neighbors expected it. Katherine was not pretty, but she had the firm freshness of a new weed, and the bridling vigor of a young mare. After her marriage she lost her vigor and her freshness as a flower does once it has received pollen. Her face sagged, her hips broadened, and she entered into her second destiny, that of work.

  In his treatment of her, Shark was neither tender nor cruel. He governed her with the same gentle inflexibility he used on horses. Cruelty would have seemed to him as foolish as indulgence. He never talked to her as to human, never spoke of his hopes or thoughts or failures, of his paper wealth nor of the peach crop. Katherine would have been puzzled and worried if he had. Her life was sufficiently complicated without the added burden of another’s thoughts and problems.

  The brown Wicks house was the only unbeautiful thing on the farm. The trash and litter of nature dis­appears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man’s litter has more permanence. The yard was strewn with old sacks, with papers, bits of broken glass and tangles of baling wire. The on
ly place on the farm where grass and flowers would not grow was the hard-packed dirt around the house, dirt made sterile and un­friendly by emptied tubs of soapy water. Shark irrigated his orchard, but he could see no reason for wasting good water around the house.

  When Alice was born, the women of the Pastures of Heaven came herding into Shark’s house prepared to exclaim that it was a pretty baby. When they saw it was a beautiful baby, they did not know what to say. Those feminine exclamations of delight designed to reassure young mothers that the horrible reptilian creatures in their arms are human and will not grow up to be monstrosities, lost their meaning. Furthermore, Katherine had looked at her child with eyes untainted by the arti­ficial enthusiasm with which most women smother their disappointments. When Katherine had seen that the baby was beautiful, she was filled with wonder and with awe and misgiving. The fact of Alice’s beauty was too marvelous to be without retribution. Pretty babies, Katherine said to herself, usually turned out ugly men and women. By saying it, she beat off some of the mis­giving as though she had apprehended Fate at its tricks and robbed it of potency by her foreknowledge.

  On that first day of visiting, Shark heard one of the women say to another in a tone of unbelief, “But it really is a pretty baby. How do you suppose it could be so pretty?”

  Shark went back to the bedroom and looked long at his little daughter. Out in the orchard he pondered over the matter. The baby really was beautiful. It was foolish to think that he or Katherine or any of their relatives had anything to do with it for they were all homely even as ordinary people go. Clearly a very precious thing had been given to him, and, since precious things were universally coveted, Alice must be protected. Shark be­lieved in God when he thought of it, of course, as that shadowy being who did everything he could not under­stand.

  Alice grew and became more and more beautiful. Her skin was as lucent and rich as poppies; her black hair had the soft crispness of fern stems, her eyes were misty skies of promise. One looked into the child’s serious eyes and started forward thinking—“Some thing is in there that I know, something I seem to remember sharply, or something I have spent all my life searching for.” Then Alice turned her head. “Why! it is only a lovely little girl.”