The Pastures of Heaven

  Molly felt a sick dread rising in her. The men were laughing at the story. "You're too soft, Bert. You can't afford to keep an entertainer on the place. I'd sure get rid of him quick."

  Molly stood up. She was dreadfully afraid someone would ask the man's name. "I'm not feeling very well tonight," she said. "If you gentlemen will excuse me, I think I'll go to bed." The men stood up while she left the room. In her bed she buried her head in the pillow. "It's crazy," she said to herself. "There isn't a chance in the world. I'm forgetting all about it right now." But she found to her dismay that she was crying.

  The next few weeks were agonizing to Molly. She was reluctant to leave the house. Walking to and from school she watched the road ahead of her. "If I see any kind of a stranger I'll run away. But that's foolish. I'm being a fool." Only in her own room did she feel safe. Her terror was making her lose color, was taking the glint out of her eyes.

  "Molly, you ought to go to bed," Mrs. Whiteside insisted. "Don't be a little idiot. Do I have to smack you the way I do Bill to make you go to bed?" But Molly would not go to bed. She thought too many things when she was in bed.

  The next time the board met, Bert Munroe did not appear. Molly felt reassured and almost happy at his absence.

  "You're feeling better, aren't you, Miss Morgan."

  "Oh, yes. It was only a little thing, a kind of a cold. If I'd gone to bed I might have been really sick."

  The meeting was an hour gone before Bert Munroe came in. "Sorry to be late," he apologized. "The same old thing happened. My so-called hay hand was asleep in the street in Salinas. What a mess! He's out in the car sleeping it off now. I'll have to hose the car out tomorrow."

  Molly's throat closed with terror. For a second she thought she was going to faint. "Excuse me, I must go," she cried, and ran out of the room. She walked into the dark hallway and steadied herself against the wall. Then slowly and automatically she marched out of the front door and down the steps. The night was filled with whispers. Out in the road she could see the black mass that was Bert Munroe's car. She was surprised at the way her footsteps plodded down the path of their own volition. "Now I'm killing myself," she said. "Now I'm throwing everything away. I wonder why." The gate was under her hand, and her hand flexed to open it. Then a tiny breeze sprang up and brought to her nose the sharp foulness of vomit. She heard a blubbering, drunken snore. Instantly something whirled in her head. Molly spun around and ran frantically back to the house. In her room she locked the door and sat stiffly down, panting with the effort of her run. It seemed hours before she heard the men go out of the house, calling their good-nights. Then Bert's motor started, and the sound of it died away down the road. Now that she was ready to go she felt paralyzed.

  John Whiteside was writing at his desk when Molly entered the sitting room. He looked up questioningly at her. "You aren't well, Miss Morgan. You need a doctor."

  She planted herself woodenly beside the desk. "Could you get a substitute teacher for me?" she asked.

  "Of course I could. You pile right into bed and I'll call a doctor."

  "It isn't that, Mr. Whiteside. I want to go away tonight."

  "What are you talking about? You aren't well."

  "I told you my father was dead. I don't know whether he's dead or not. I'm afraid--I want to go away tonight."

  He stared intently at her. "Tell me what you mean," he said softly.

  "If I should see that drunken man of Mr. Munroe's--" she paused, suddenly terrified at what she was about to say.

  John Whiteside nodded very slowly.

  "No," she cried. "I don't think that. I'm sure I don't."

  "I'd like to do something, Molly."

  "I don't want to go, I love it here--But I'm afraid. It's so important to me."

  John Whiteside stood up and came close to her and put his arm about her shoulders. "I don't think I understand, quite," he said. "I don't think I want to understand. That isn't necessary." He seemed to be talking to himself. "It wouldn't be quite courteous--to understand."

  "Once I'm away I'll be able not to believe it," Molly whimpered.

  He gave her shoulders one quick squeeze with his encircling arm. "You run upstairs and pack your things, Molly," he said. "I'll get out the car and drive you right in to Salinas now."

  IX

  Of all the farms in the Pastures of Heaven the one most admired was that of Raymond Banks. Raymond kept five thousand white chickens and one thousand white ducks. The farm lay on the northern flat, the prettiest place in the whole country. Raymond had laid out his land in squares of alfalfa and of kale. His long, low chicken houses were whitewashed so often that they looked always immaculate and new. There was never any of the filth so often associated with poultry farms, about Raymond's place.

  For the ducks there was a large round pond into which fresh water constantly flowed from a two inch pipe. The overflow from the pond ran down rows of thick sturdy kale or spread itself out in the alfalfa patches. It was a fine thing on a sunny morning to see the great flock of clean, white chickens eating and scratching in the dark green alfalfa, and it was even finer to see the thousand white ducks sailing magnificently about on the pond. Ducks swam ponderously, as though they were as huge as the Leviathan. The ranch sang all day with the busy noise of chickens.

  From the top of a nearby hill you could look down on the squares of alfalfa on which the thousands of moving white specks eddied and twisted like bits of dust on a green pool. Then perhaps a red-tail hawk would soar over, carefully watching Raymond's house. The white specks instantly stopped their meaningless movements and scuttled to the protecting roosters, and up from the fields came the despairing shrieks of thousands of hawk-frightened chickens. The back door of the farmhouse slammed, and Raymond sauntered out carrying a shotgun. The hawk swung up a hundred feet in the air and soared away. The little white bunches spread out again and the eddying continued.

  The patches of green were fenced from each other so that one square could rest and recuperate while the chickens were working in another. From the hill you could see Raymond's whitewashed house set on the edge of a grove of oak trees. There were many flowers around the house: calendulas and big African marigolds and cosmos as high as trees; and, behind the house, there was the only rose garden worthy the name in the valley of the Pastures of Heaven. The local people looked upon this place as the model farm of the valley.

  Raymond Banks was a strong man. His thick, short arms, wide shoulders and hips and heavy legs, even the stomach which bulged his overalls, made him seem magnificently strong, strong for pushing and pulling and lifting. Every exposed part of him was burned beef-red by the sun, his heavy arms to the elbows, his neck down into his collar, his face, and particularly his ears and nose were painfully burned and chapped. Thin blond hair could not protect his scalp from reddening under the sun. Raymond's eyes were remarkable, for, while his hair and eyebrows were pale yellow, the yellow that usually goes with light blue eyes, Raymond's eyes were black as soot. His mouth was full-lipped and jovial and completely at odds with his long and villainously beaked nose. Raymond's nose and ears were terribly punished by the sun. There was hardly a time during the year when they were not raw and peeled.

  Raymond Banks was forty-five and very jolly. He never spoke softly, but always in a heavy half-shout full of mock fierceness. He said things, even the commonest of things, as though they were funny. People laughed whenever he spoke. At Christmas parties in the schoolhouse, Raymond was invariably chosen as the Santa Claus because of his hearty voice, his red face and his love for children. He abused children with such a heavy ferocity that he kept them laughing all the time. In or out of his red Santa Claus suit, the children of the valley regarded Raymond as a kind of Santa Claus. He had a way of flinging them about, of wrestling and mauling them, that was caressing and delightful. Now and then, he turned serious and told them things which had the import of huge lessons.

  Sometimes on Saturday mornings a group of little boys walked to the Banks farm t
o watch Raymond working. He let them peep into the little glass windows of the incubators. Sometimes the chicks were just coming out of the shells, shaking their wet wings and wabbling about on clumsy legs. The boys were allowed to raise the covers of the brooders and to pick up whole armfuls of yellow, furry chicks which made a noise like a hundred little ungreased machines. Then they walked to the pond and threw pieces of bread to the grandly navigating ducks. Most of all, though, the boys liked the killing time. And strangely enough, this was the time when Raymond dropped his large bantering and became very serious.

  Raymond picked a little rooster out of the trap and hung it by its legs on a wooden frame. He fastened the wildly beating wings with a wire clamp. The rooster squawked loudly. Raymond had the killing knife with its spear-shaped blade on the box beside him. How the boys admired that knife, the vicious shape of it and its shininess; the point was as sharp as a needle.

  "Now then, old rooster, you're done for," said Raymond. The boys crowded closer. With sure, quick hands, Raymond grasped the chicken's head and forced the beak open. The knife slipped like a flash of light along the roof of the beak and into the brain and out again. The wings shuddered and beat against their clamp. For a moment the neck stretched yearningly from side to side, and a little rill of blood flowed from the tip of the beak.

  "Now watch!" Raymond cried. His forked hand combed the breast and brought all the feathers with it. Another combing motion and the back was bare. The wings were not struggling so hard now. Raymond whipped the feathers off, all but the wing-tip feathers. Then the legs were stripped, a single movement for each one. "You see? You've got to do it quick," he explained as he worked. "There's just about two minutes that the feathers are loose. If you leave them in, they get set." He took the chicken down from the frame, snicked another knife twice, pulled, and there were the entrails in a pan. He wiped his red hands on a cloth.

  "Look!" the boys shrieked. "Look! What's that?"

  "That's the heart."

  "But look! It's still moving. It's still alive."

  "Oh, no, it isn't," Raymond assured them. "That rooster was dead just the second the knife touched his brain. That heart just beats on for a while, but the rooster is dead all right."

  "Why don't you chop them like my father does, Mr. Banks?"

  "Well, because this is cleaner and quicker, and the butchers want them with their heads on. They sell the heads in with the weight, you see. Now, come on, old rooster!" He reached into the trap for another struggling squawker. When the killing was over, Raymond took all the chicken crops out of the pan and distributed them among the boys. He taught them how to clean and blow up the crops to make chicken balloons. Raymond was always very serious when he was explaining his ranch. He refused to let the boys help with the killing, although they asked him many times.

  "You might get excited and miss the brain," he said. "That would hurt the chicken, if you didn't stick him just right."

  Mrs. Banks laughed a great deal--clear, sweet laughter which indicated mild amusement or even inattention. She had a way of laughing appreciatively at everything anyone said, and, to merit this applause, people tried to say funny things when she was about. After her work in the house was finished, she dug in the flower garden. She had been a town girl; that was why she liked flowers, the neighbors said. Guests, driving up to the house, were welcomed by the high, clear laughter of Cleo Banks, and they chuckled when they heard it. She was so jolly. She made people feel good. No one could ever remember that she said anything, but months after hearing it, they could recall the exact tones of her laughter.

  Raymond Banks rarely laughed at all. Instead he pretended a sullenness so overdrawn that it was accepted as humor. These two people were the most popular hosts in the valley. Now and then they invited everyone in the Pastures of Heaven to a barbecue in the oak grove beside their house. They broiled little chickens over coals of oak bark and set out hundreds of bottles of home brewed beer. These parties were looked forward to and remembered with great pleasure by the people of the valley.

  When Raymond Banks was in high school, his chum had been a boy who later became the warden at San Quentin prison. The friendship had continued, too. At Christmas time they still exchanged little presents. They wrote to each other when any important thing happened. Raymond was proud of his acquaintance with the warden. Two or three times a year he received an invitation to be a witness at an execution, and he always accepted it. His trips to the prison were the only vacations he took.

  Raymond liked to arrive at the warden's house the night before the execution. He and his friend sat together and talked over their school days. They reminded each other of things both remembered perfectly. Always the same episodes were recalled and talked about. Then, the next morning, Raymond liked the excitement, the submerged hysteria of the other witnesses in the warden's office. The slow march of the condemned aroused his dramatic sense and moved him to a thrilling emotion. The hanging itself was not the important part, it was the sharp, keen air of the whole proceeding that impressed him. It was like a super-church, solemn and ceremonious and somber. The whole thing made him feel a fullness of experience, a holy emotion that nothing else in his life approached. Raymond didn't think of the condemned any more than he thought of the chicken when he pressed the blade into its brain. No strain of cruelty nor any gloating over suffering took him to the gallows. He had developed an appetite for profound emotion, and his meager imagination was unable to feed it. In the prison he could share the throbbing nerves of the other men. Had he been alone in the death chamber with no one present except the prisoner and the executioner, he would have been unaffected.

  After the death was pronounced, Raymond liked the second gathering in the warden's office. The nerve-wracked men tried to use hilarity to restore their outraged imaginations. They were more jolly, more noisily happy than they ordinarily were. They sneered at the occasional witness, usually a young reporter, who fainted or came out of the chamber crying. Raymond enjoyed the whole thing. It made him feel alive; he seemed to be living more acutely than at other times.

  After it was all over, he had a good dinner with the warden before he started home again. To some little extent the same emotion occurred to Raymond when the little boys came to watch him kill chickens. He was able to catch a slight spark of their excitement.

  The Munroe family had not been long in the Pastures of Heaven before they heard about the fine ranch of Raymond Banks and about his visits to the prison. The people of the valley were interested, fascinated and not a little horrified by the excursions to see men hanged. Before he ever saw Raymond, Bert Munroe pictured him as a traditional executioner, a lank, dark man, with a dull, deathly eye; a cold, nerveless man. The very thought of Raymond filled Bert with a kind of interested foreboding.

  When he finally met Raymond Banks and saw the jolly black eyes and the healthy, burned face, Bert was disillusioned, and at the same time a little disgusted. The very health and heartiness of Raymond seemed incongruous and strangely obscene. The paradox of his good nature and his love for children was unseemly.

  On the first of May, the Bankses gave one of their parties under the oak trees on the flat. It was the loveliest season of the year; lupins and shooting stars, gallitos and wild violets smoldered with color in the new, short grass on the hillsides. The oaks had put on new leaves as shiny and clean as washed holly. The sun was warm enough to drench the air with sage, and all the birds made frantic, noisy holiday. From the chicken yards came the contented gabbling of scratching hens and the cynical, self-satisfied quacking of the ducks.

  At least fifty people were standing about the long tables under the trees. Hundreds of bottles of beer were packed in washtubs of salt and ice, a mixture so cold that the beer froze in the necks of the bottles. Mrs. Banks went about among the guests, laughing in greeting and in response to greeting. She rarely said a word. At the barbecue pits, Raymond was grilling little chickens while a group of admiring men stood about, offering jocular advice.
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  "If any of you can do it better, just step up," Raymond shouted at them. "I'm going to put on the steaks now for anyone that's crazy enough not to want chicken."

  Bert Munroe stood nearby watching the red hands of Raymond. He was drinking a bottle of the strong beer. Bert was fascinated by the powerful red hands constantly turning over the chickens on the grill.

  When the big platters of broiled chicken were carried to the tables, Raymond went back to the pits to cook some more for those fine men who might require a second or even a third little chicken. Raymond was alone now, for his audience had all flocked to the tables. Bert Munroe looked up from his plate of beef steak and saw that Raymond was alone by the pits. He put down his fork and strolled over.

  "What's the matter, Mr. Munroe? Wasn't your chicken good?" Raymond asked with genial anxiety.

  "I had steak, and it was fine. I eat pretty fast, I guess. I never eat chicken, you know."

  "That so? I never could understand how anyone wouldn't like chicken, but I know plenty of people don't. Let me put on another little piece of meat for you."

  "Oh! I guess I've had enough. I always think people eat too much. You ought to get up from the table feeling a little bit hungry. Then you keep well, like the animals."

  "I guess that's right," said Raymond. He turned the little carcasses over the fire. "I notice I feel better when I don't eat so much."