The Pastures of Heaven Page 5

  “I told the Superintendent these things, and he said the law required Tularecito to go to school until he is eighteen years old. That is seven years from now. For seven years my Little Frog will sit in the first grade be­cause the law says he must. It is out of my hands.”

  “He ought to be locked up,” Miss Martin broke in. “This creature is dangerous. You should have seen him today.”

  “No, Miss Martin, he should be allowed to go free. He is not dangerous. No one can make a garden as he can. No one can milk so swiftly nor so gently. He is a good boy. He can break a mad horse without riding it; he can train a dog without whipping it, but the law says he must sit in the first grade repeating ‘C-A-T, cat’ for seven years. If he had been dangerous he could easily have killed me when I whipped him.”

  Miss Martin felt that there were things she did not understand and she hated Franklin Gomez because of them. She felt that she had been mean and he generous. When she got to school the next morning, she found Tu­larecito before her. Every possible space on the wall was covered with animals.

  “You see?” he said, beaming over his shoulder at her, “Lots more. And I have a book with others yet, but there is no room for them on the wall.”

  Miss Martin did not erase the animals. Class work was done on paper, but at the end of the term she resigned her position, giving ill health as her reason.

  Miss Morgan, the new teacher, was very young and very pretty; too young and dangerously pretty, the aged men of the valley thought. Some of the boys in the upper grades were seventeen years old. It was seriously doubted that a teacher so young and so pretty could keep any kind of order in the school.

  She brought with her a breathless enthusiasm for her trade. The school was astounded, for it had been used to ageing spinsters whose faces seemed to reflect consistently tired feet. Miss Morgan enjoyed teaching and made school an exciting place where unusual things happened.

  From the first Miss Morgan was vastly impressed with Tularecito. She knew all about him, had read books and taken courses about him. Having heard about the fight, she laid off a border around the top of the blackboards for him to fill with animals, and, when he had completed his parade, she bought with her own money a huge drawing pad and a soft pencil. After that he did not bother with spelling. Every day he labored over his drawing board, and every afternoon presented the teacher with a marvelously wrought animal. She pinned his drawings to the schoolroom wall above the blackboards.

  The pupils received Miss Morgan’s innovations with enthusiasm. Classes became exciting, and even the boys who had made enviable reputations through teacher-baiting, grew less interested in the possible burning of the schoolhouse.

  Miss Morgan introduced a practice that made the pu­pils adore her. Every afternoon she read to them for half an hour. She read by installments, Ivanhoe and The Talisman; fishing stories by Zane Grey, hunting stories of James Oliver Curwood; The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild—not baby stories about the little red hen and the fox and geese, but exciting, grown-up stories.

  Miss Morgan read well. Even the tougher boys were won over until they never played hooky for fear of missing an installment, until they leaned forward gasping with interest.

  But Tularecito continued his careful drawing, only pausing now and then to blink at the teacher and to try to understand how these distant accounts of the actions of strangers could be of interest to anyone. To him they were chronicles of actual events—else why were they written down. The stories were like the lessons. Tulare­cito did not listen to them.

  After a time Miss Morgan felt that she had been humoring the older children too much. She herself liked fairy tales, liked to think of whole populations who believed in fairies and consequently saw them. Within the same circle of her tried and erudite acquaintance, she often said that “part of America’s cultural starvation was due to its boor­ish and superstitious denial of the existence of fairies.” For a time she devoted the afternoon half hour to fairy tales.

  Now a change came over Tularecito. Gradually, as Miss Morgan read about elves and brownies, fairies, pixies, and changelings, his interest centered and his busy pencil lay idly in his hand. Then she read about gnomes, and their lives and habits, and he dropped his pencil altogether and leaned toward the teacher to intercept her words.

  After school Miss Morgan walked half a mile to the farm where she boarded. She liked to walk the way alone, cutting off thistle heads with a switch or throwing stones into the brush to make the quail roar up. She thought she should get a bounding inquisitive dog that could share her excitements, could understand the glamour of holes in the ground, and scattering pawsteps on dry leaves, of strange melancholy bird whistles and the gay smells that came secretly out of the earth.

  One afternoon Miss Morgan scrambled high up the side of a chalk cliff to carve her initials on the white plane. On the way up she tore her finger on a thorn, and, instead of initials, she scratched: “Here I have been and left this part of me,” and pressed her bloody finger against the absorbent chalk rock.

  That night, in a letter, she wrote: “After the bare re­quisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone, or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.” She kept a copy of the letter.

  On the afternoon when she had read about the gnomes, as she walked home, the grasses beside the road threshed about for a moment and the ugly head of Tularecito ap­peared.

  “Oh! You frightened me,” Miss Morgan cried. “You shouldn’t pop up like that.”

  Tularecito stood up and smiled bashfully while he whipped his hat against his thigh. Suddenly Miss Morgan felt fear rising in her. The road was deserted—she had read stories of half-wits. With difficulty she mastered her trembling voice.

  “What—what is it you want?”

  Tularecito smiled more broadly and whipped harder with his hat.

  “Were you just lying there, or do you want something?”

  The boy struggled to speak, and then relapsed into his protective smile.

  “Well, if you don’t want anything, I’ll go on.” She was really prepared for flight.

  Tularecito struggled again. “About those people—”

  “What people?” she demanded shrilly. “What about people?”

  “About those people in the book—”

  Miss Morgan laughed with relief until she felt that her hair was coming loose on the back of her head. “You mean—you mean—gnomes?”

  Tularecito nodded.

  “What do you want to know about them?”

  “I never saw any,” said Tularecito. His voice neither rose nor fell, but continued on one low note.

  “Why, few people do see them, I think.”

  “But I knew about them.”

  Miss Morgan’s eyes squinted with interest. “You did? Who told you about them?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You never saw them, and no one told you? How could you know about them then?”

  “I just knew. Heard them, maybe. I knew them in the book all right.”

  Miss Morgan thought: “Why should I deny gnomes to this queer, unfinished child? Wouldn’t his life be richer and happier if he did believe in them? And what harm could it possibly do?”

  “Have you ever looked for them?” she asked.

  “No, I never looked. I just knew. But I will look now.”

  Miss Morgan found herself charmed with the situation. Here was paper on which to write, here was a cliff on which to carve. She could carve a lovely story that would be far more real than a book story ever could. “Where will you look?” she asked.

  “I’ll dig in holes,” said Tularecito soberly.

  “But the gnomes only come out at nigh
t, Tularecito. ~You must watch for them in the night. And you must come and tell me if you find any. Will you do that?”

  “I’ll come,” he agreed.

  She left him staring after her. All the way home she pic­tured him searching in the night. The picture pleased her. He might even find the gnomes, might live with them and talk to them. With a few suggestive words she had been able to make his life unreal and very wonderful, and separated from the stupid lives about him. She deeply envied him his searching.

  In the evening Tularecito put on his coat and took up a shovel. Old Pancho came upon him as he was leaving the tool shed. “Where goest thou, Little Frog?” he asked.

  Tularecito shifted his feet restlessly at the delay. “I go out into dark. Is that a new thing?”

  “But why takest thou the shovel? Is there gold, per­haps?”

  The boy’s face grew hard with the seriousness of his purpose. “I go to dig for the little people who live in the earth.”

  Now Pancho was filled with horrified excitement. “Do not go, Little Frog! Listen to your old friend, your father in God, and do not go! Out in the sage I found thee and saved thee from the devils, thy relatives. Thou art a little brother of Jesus now. Go not back to thine own people! Listen to an old man, Little Frog!”

  Tularecito stared hard at the ground and drilled his old thoughts with this new information. “Thou hast said they are my people,” he exclaimed. “I am not like the others at the school or here. I know that. I have loneli­ness for my own people who live deep in the cool earth.

  When I pass a squirrel hole, I wish to crawl into it and hide myself. My own people are like me, and they have called me. I must go home to them, Pancho.”

  Pancho stepped back and held up crossed fingers. “Go back to the devil, thy father, then. I am not good enough to fight this evil. It would take a saint. But see! At last I make the sign against thee and against all thy race.” He drew the cross of protection in the air in front of him.

  Tularecito smiled sadly, and turning, trudged off into the hills.

  The heart of Tularecito gushed with joy at his home­coming. All his life he had been an alien, a lonely outcast, and now he was going home. As always, he heard the voices of the earth—the far off clang of cow bells, the muttering of disturbed quail, the little whine of a coyote who would not sing this night, the nocturnes of a million insects. But Tularecito was listening for another sound, the movement of two-footed creatures, and the hushed voices of the hidden people.

  Once he stopped and called, “My father, I have come home,” and he heard no answer. Into squirrel holes he whispered, “Where are you, my people? It is only Tu­larecito come home.” But there was no reply. Worse, he had no feeling that the gnomes were near. He knew that a doe and fawn were feeding near him; he knew a wild­cat was stalking a rabbit behind a bush, although he could not see them, but from the gnomes he had no message.

  A sugar-moon arose out of the hills.

  “Now the animals will come out to feed,” Tularecito said in the papery whisper of the half witless. “Now the people will come out, too.”

  The brush stopped at the edge of a little valley and an orchard took its place. The trees were thick with leaves, and the land finely cultivated. It was Bert Munroe’s or­chard. Often, when the land was deserted and ghost-­ridden, Tularecito had come here in the night to lie on the ground under the trees and pick the stars with gentle fingers.

  The moment he walked into the orchard he knew he was nearing home. He could not hear them, but he knew the gnomes were near. Over and over he called to them, but they did not come.

  “Perhaps they do not like the moonlight,” he said.

  At the foot of a large peach tree, he dug his hole—three feet across and very deep. All night he worked on it, stopping to listen awhile and then digging deeper and into the cool earth. Although he heard nothing, was positive that he was nearing them. Only when the daylight came did he give up and retire into the bushes sleep.

  In midmorning Bert Munroe walked out to look at a coyote trap and found the hole at the foot of the tree. “What the devil!” he said. “Some kids must have been digging a tunnel. That’s dangerous! It’ll cave in on them, or somebody will fall into it and get hurt.” He walked back to the house, got a shovel and filled up the hole.

  “Manny,” he said to his youngest boy, “you haven’t been digging in the orchard, have you?”

  “Uh-uh!” said Manny.

  “Well, do you know who has?”

  “Uh-huh!” said Manny.

  “Well, somebody dug a deep hole out there. It’s dan­gerous. You tell the boys not to dig or they’ll get caved in.”

  The dark came and Tularecito walked out of the brush to dig in his hole again. When he found it filled up, he growled savagely, but then his thought changed and he laughed. “The people were here,” he said happily. “They didn’t know who it was, and they were frightened. They filled up the hole the way a gopher does. This time I’ll hide and when they come to fill the hole, I’ll tell them who I am. Then they will love me.”

  And Tularecito dug out the hole and made it much deeper than before, because much of the dirt was loose. Just before daylight, he retired into the brush at the edge of the orchard and lay down to watch.

  Bert Munroe walked out before breakfast to look at his trap again, and again he found the open hole. “The little devils!” he cried. “They’re keeping it up, are they? I’ll bet Manny is in it after all.”

  He studied the hole for a moment and then began to push dirt into it with the side of his foot. A savage growl spun him around. Tularecito came charging down upon him, leaping like a frog on his long legs, and swinging his shovel like a club.

  When Jimmie Munroe came to call his father to breakfast, he found him lying on the pile of dirt. He was bleeding at the mouth and forehead. Shovelfuls of dirt came flying out of the pit.

  Jimmie thought someone had killed his father and was getting ready to bury him. He ran home in a frenzy of terror, and by telephone summoned a band of neighbors.

  Half a dozen men crept up on the pit. Tularecito strug­gled like a wounded lion, and held his own until they struck him on the head with his own shovel. Then they tied him up and took him in to jail.

  In Salinas a medical board examined the boy. When the doctors asked him questions, he smiled blandly at them and did not answer. Franklin Gomez told the board what he knew and asked the custody of him.

  “We really can’t do it, Mr. Gomez,” the judge said finally. “You say he is a good boy. Just yesterday he tried to kill a man. You must see that we cannot let him go loose. Sooner or later he will succeed in killing someone.”

  After a short deliberation, he committed Tularecito to the asylum for the criminal insane at Napa.

  Five

  HELEN VAN DEVENTER was a tall woman with a sharp, handsome face and tragic eyes. A strong awareness of tragedy ran through her life. At fifteen she had looked like a widow after her Persian kitten was poisoned. She mourned for it during six months, not ostentatiously, but with a subdued voice and a hushed manner. When her father died, at the end of the kitten’s six months, the mourning continued uninterrupted. Seemingly she hun­gered for tragedy and life had lavishly heaped it upon her.

  At twenty-five she married Hubert Van Deventer, a florid, hunting man who spent six months out of every year trying to shoot some kind of creature or other. Three months after the wedding he shot himself when a black­berry vine tripped him up. Hubert was a fairly gallant man. As he lay dying under a tree, one of his companions asked whether he wanted to leave any message for his wife.

  “Yes,” said Hubert. “Tell her to have me mounted for that place in the library between the bull moose and the bighorn! Tell her I didn’t buy this one from the guide!”

  Helen Van Deventer closed off the drawing room with its trophies. Thereafter the room was holy to the spirit of Hubert. The curtains remained drawn. Anyone who felt it necessary to speak in the drawing room spoke softly. Hele
n did not weep, for it was not in her nature to weep, but her eyes grew larger, and she stared a great deal, with the vacant staring of one who travels over other times. Hubert had left her the house on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and a fairly large fortune.

  Her daughter Hilda, born six months after Hubert was killed, was a pretty, doll-like baby, with her mother’s great eyes. Hilda was never very well; she took all the children’s diseases with startling promptness. Her temper, which at first wore itself out with howling, became destructive as soon as she could move about. She shattered any break­able thing which came into the pathway of her anger. Helen Van Deventer soothed and petted her and usually succeeded in increasing the temper.

  When Hilda was six years old, Dr. Phillips, the family physician, told Mrs. Van Deventer the thing she had sus­pected for a long time.

  “You must realize it,” he said. “Hilda is not completely well in her mind. I suggest that she be taken to a psychia­trist.”

  The dark eyes of the mother widened with pain. “You are sure, doctor?”

  “Fairly sure. I am not a specialist. You’ll have to take her to someone who knows more than I do.”

  Helen stared away from hint. “I have thought so too, doctor, but I can’t take her to another man. You’ve al­ways had the care of us. I know you. I shouldn’t ever be sure of another man.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sure’?” Dr. Phillips exploded.

  “Don’t you know we might cure her if we went about it right?”

  Helen’s hands rose a trifle, and then dropped with hopelessness. “She won’t ever get well, doctor. She was born at the wrong time. Her father’s death—it was too much for me. I didn’t have the strength to bear a perfect child, you see.”

  “Then what do you intend to do? Your idea is foolish, if I may be permitted.”

  “What is there to do, doctor? I can wait and hope. I know I can see it through, but I can’t take her to another man. I’ll just watch her and care for her. That seems to be my life.” She smiled very sadly and her hands rose again.