The Long Valley (15 page)

“What do you mean, ‘was’?”

“Well, except for one week a year I was good. I don’t know what I’ll do now....” His face grew angry. “Except one thing.” He stood up and stripped off his coat and his shirt. Over his underwear there was a web harness that pulled his shoulders back. He unhooked the harness and threw it off. Then he dropped his trousers, disclosing a wide elastic belt. He shucked this off over his feet, and then he scratched his stomach luxuriously before he put on his clothes again. He smiled at Ed, the strange, wondering smile, again. “I don’t know how she got me to do things, but she did. She didn’t seem to boss me, but she always made me do things. You know, I don’t think I believe in an after-life. When she was alive, even when she was sick, I had to do things she wanted, but just the minute she died, it was—why like that harness coming off! I couldn’t stand it. It was all over. I’m going to have to get used to going without that harness.” He shook his finger in Ed’s direction. “My stomach’s going to stick out,” he said positively. “I’m going to let it stick out. Why, I’m fifty years old.”

Ed didn’t like that. He wanted to get away. This sort of thing wasn’t very decent. “If you’ll just take one of these, you’ll get some sleep,” he said weakly.

Peter had not put his coat on. He was sitting on the sofa in an open shirt. “I don’t want to sleep. I want to talk. I guess I’ll have to put that belt and harness on for the funeral, but after that I’m going to burn them. Listen, I’ve got a bottle of whiskey in the barn. I’ll go get it.”

“Oh no,” Ed protested quickly. “I couldn’t drink now, not at a time like this.”

Peter stood up. “Well, I could. You can sit and watch me if you want. I tell you, it’s all over.” He went out the door, leaving Ed Chappell unhappy and scandalized. It was only a moment before he was back. He started talking as he came through the doorway with the whiskey. “I only got one thing in my life, those trips. Emma was a pretty bright woman. She knew I’d’ve gone crazy if I didn’t get away once a year. God, how she worked on my conscience when I came back!” His voice lowered confidentially. “You know what I did on those trips?”

Ed’s eyes were wide open now. Here was a man he didn’t know, and he was becoming fascinated. He took the glass of whiskey when it was handed to him. “No, what did you do?”

Peter gulped his drink and coughed, and wiped his mouth with his hand. “I got drunk,” he said. “I went to fancy houses in San Francisco. I was drunk for a week, and I went to a fancy house every night.” He poured his glass full again. “I guess Emma knew, but she never said anything. I’d’ve busted if I hadn’t got away.”

Ed Chappell sipped his whiskey gingerly. “She always said you went on business.”

Peter looked at his glass and drank it, and poured it full again. His eyes had begun to shine. “Drink your drink, Ed. I know you think it isn’t right—so soon, but no one’ll know but you and me. Kick up the fire. I’m not sad.”

Chappell went to the grate and stirred the glowing wood until lots of sparks flew up the chimney like little shining birds. Peter filled the glasses and retired to the sofa again. When Ed went back to the chair he sipped from his glass and pretended he didn’t know it was filled up. His cheeks were flushing. It didn’t seem so terrible, now, to be drinking. The afternoon and the death had receded into an indefinite past.

“Want some cake?” Peter asked. “There’s half a dozen cakes in the pantry.”

“No, I don’t think I will thank you for some.”

“You know,” Peter confessed, “I don’t think I’ll eat cake again. For ten years, every time Emma was sick, people sent cakes. It was nice of ’em, of course, only now cake means sickness to me. Drink your drink.”

Something happened in the room. Both men looked up, trying to discover what it was. The room was somehow different than it had been a moment before. Then Peter smiled sheepishly. “It was that mantel clock stopped. I don’t think I’ll start it any more. I’ll get a little quick alarm clock that ticks fast. That clack-clack-clack is too mournful.” He swallowed his whiskey. “I guess you’ll be telling around that I’m crazy, won’t you?”

Ed looked up from his glass, and smiled and nodded. “No, I will not. I can see pretty much how you feel about things. I didn’t know you wore that harness and belt.”

“A man ought to stand up straight,” Peter said. “I’m a natural sloucher.” Then he exploded: “I’m a natural fool! For twenty years I’ve been pretending I was a wise, good man—except for that one week a year.” He said loudly, “Things have been dribbled to me. My life’s been dribbled out to me. Here, let me fill your glass. I’ve got another bottle out in the barn, way down under a pile of sacks.”

Ed held out his glass to be filled. Peter went on, “I thought how it would be nice to have my whole river flat in sweet peas. Think how it’d be to sit on the front porch and see all those acres of blue and pink, just solid. And when the wind came up over them, think of the big smell. A big smell that would almost knock you over.”

“A lot of men have gone broke on sweet peas. ’Course you get a big price for the seed, but too many things can happen to your crop.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Peter shouted. “I want a lot of everything. I want forty acres of color and smell. I want fat women, with breasts as big as pillows. I’m hungry, I tell you, I’m hungry for everything, for a lot of everything.”

Ed’s face became grave under the shouting. “If you’d just take one of these, you’d get some sleep.”

Peter looked ashamed. “I’m all right. I didn’t mean to yell like that. I’m not just thinking these things for the first time. I been thinking about them for years, the way a kid thinks of vacation. I was always afraid I’d be too old. Or that I’d go first and miss everything. But I’m only fifty, I’ve got plenty of vinegar left. I told Emma about the sweet peas, but she wouldn’t let me. I don’t know how she made me do things,” he said wonderingly. “I can’t remember. She had a way of doing it. But she’s gone. I can feel she’s gone just like that harness is gone. I’m going to slouch, Ed—slouch all over the place. I’m going to track dirt into the house. I’m going to get a big fat housekeeper—a big fat one from San Francisco. I’m going to have a bottle of brandy on the shelf all the time.”

Ed Chappell stood up and stretched his arms over his head. “I guess I’ll go home now, if you feel all right. I got to get some sleep. You better wind that clock, Peter. It don’t do a clock any good to stand not running.”

The day after the funeral Peter Randall went to work on his farm. The Chappells, who lived on the next place, saw the lamp in his kitchen long before daylight, and they saw his lantern cross the yard to the barn half an hour before they even got up.

Peter pruned his orchard in three days. He worked from first light until he couldn’t see the twigs against the sky any more. Then he started to shape the big piece of river flat. He plowed and rolled and harrowed. Two strange men dressed in boots and riding breeches came out and looked at his land. They felt the dirt with their fingers and ran a post-hole digger deep down under the surface, and when they went away they took little paper bags of the dirt with them.

Ordinarily, before planting time, the farmers did a good deal of visiting back and forth. They sat on their haunches, picking up handsful of dirt and breaking little clods between their fingers. They discussed markets and crops, recalled other years when beans had done well in a good market, and other years when field peas didn’t bring enough to pay for the seed hardly. After a great number of these discussions it usually happened that all the farmers planted the same things. There were certain men whose ideas carried weight. If Peter Randall or Clark DeWitt thought they would put in pink beans and barley, most of the crops would turn out to be pink beans and barley that year; for, since such men were respected and fairly successful, it was conceded that their plans must be based on something besides chance choice. It was generally believed but never stated that Peter Randall and Clark DeWitt had extra reasoning powers and special prophetic knowledge.

When the usual visits started, it was seen that a change had taken place in Peter Randall. He sat on his plow and talked pleasantly enough. He said he hadn’t decided yet what to plant, but he said it in such a guilty way that it was plain he didn’t intend to tell. When he had rebuffed a few inquiries, the visits to his place stopped and the farmers went over in a body to Clark DeWitt. Clark was putting in Chevalier barley. His decision dictated the major part of the planting in the vicinity.

But because the questions stopped, the interest did not. Men driving by the forty-five acre flat of the Randall place studied the field to try to figure out from the type of work what the crop was going to be. When Peter drove the seeder back and forth across the land no one came in, for Peter had made it plain that his crop was a secret.

Ed Chappell didn’t tell on him, either. Ed was a little ashamed when he thought of that night; ashamed of Peter for breaking down, and ashamed of himself for having sat there and listened. He watched Peter narrowly to see whether his vicious intentions were really there or whether the whole conversation had been the result of loss and hysteria. He did notice that Peter’s shoulders weren’t back and that his stomach stuck out a little. He went to Peter’s house and was relieved when he saw no dirt on the floor and when he heard the mantel clock ticking away.

Mrs. Chappell spoke often of the afternoon. “You‘d’ve thought he lost his mind the way he carried on. He just howled. Ed stayed with him part of the night, until he quieted down. Ed had to give him some whiskey to get him to sleep. But,” she said brightly, “hard work is the thing to kill sorrow. Peter Randall is getting up at three o’clock every morning. I can see the light in his kitchen window from my bedroom.”

The pussywillows burst out in silver drops, and the little weeds sprouted up along the roadside. The Salinas River ran dark water, flowed for a month, and then subsided into green pools again. Peter Randall had shaped his land beautifully. It was smooth and black; no clod was larger than a small marble, and under the rains it looked purple with richness.

And then the little weak lines of green stretched out across the black field. In the dusk a neighbor crawled under the fence and pulled one of the tiny plants. “Some kind of legume,” he told his friends. “Field peas, I guess. What did he want to be so quiet about it for? I asked him right out what he was planting, and he wouldn’t tell me.”

The word ran through the farms, “It’s sweet peas. The whole God-damn’ forty-five acres is in sweet peas!” Men called on Clark DeWitt then, to get his opinion.

His opinion was this: “People think because you can get twenty to sixty cents a pound for sweet peas you can get rich on them. But it’s the most ticklish crop in the world. If the bugs don’t get it, it might do good. And then come a hot day and bust the pods and lose your crop on the ground. Or it might come up a little rain and spoil the whole kaboodle. It’s all right to put in a few acres and take a chance, but not the whole place. Peter’s touched in the head since Emma died.”

This opinion was widely distributed. Every man used it as his own. Two neighbors often said it to each other, each one repeating half of it. When too many people said it to Peter Randall he became angry. One day he cried, “Say, whose land is this? If I want to go broke, I’ve got a damn good right to, haven’t I?” And that changed the whole feeling. Men remembered that Peter was a good farmer. Perhaps he had special knowledge. Why, that’s who those two men in boots were—soil chemists! A good many of the farmers wished they’d put in a few acres of sweet peas.

They wished it particularly when the vines spread out, when they met each other across the rows and hid the dark earth from sight, when the buds began to form and it was seen the crop was rich. And then the blooms came; forty-five acres of color, forty-five acres of perfume. It was said that you could smell them in Salinas, four miles away. Busses brought the school children out to look at them. A group of men from a seed company spent all day looking at the vines and feeling the earth.

Peter Randall sat on his porch in a rocking-chair every afternoon. He looked down on the great squares of pink and blue, and on the mad square of mixed colors. When the afternoon breeze came up, he inhaled deeply. His blue shirt was open at the throat, as though he wanted to get the perfume down next to his skin.

Men called on Clark DeWitt to get his opinion now. He said, “There’s about ten things that can happen to spoil that crop. He’s welcome to his sweet peas.” But the men knew from Clark’s irritation that he was a little jealous. They looked up over the fields of color to where Peter sat on his porch, and they felt a new admiration and respect for him.

Ed Chappell walked up the steps to him one afternoon. “You got a crop there, mister.”

“Looks that way,” said Peter.

“I took a look. Pods are setting fine.”

Peter sighed. “Blooming’s nearly over,” he said. “I’ll hate to see the petals drop off.”

“Well, I’d be glad to see ’em drop. You’ll make a lot of money; if nothing happens.”

Peter took out a bandana handkerchief and wiped his nose, and jiggled it sideways to stop an itch. “I’ll be sorry when the smell stops,” he said.

Then Ed made his reference to the night of the death. One of his eyes drooped secretly. “Found somebody to keep house for you?”

“I haven’t looked,” said Peter. “I haven’t had time.” There were lines of worry about his eyes. But who wouldn’t worry, Ed thought, when a single shower could ruin his whole year’s crop.

If the year and the weather had been manufactured for sweet peas, they couldn’t have been better. The fog lay close to the ground in the mornings when the vines were pulled. When the great piles of vines lay safely on spread canvasses, the hot sun shone down and crisped the pods for the threshers. The neighbors watched the long cotton sacks filling with round black seeds, and they went home and tried to figure out how much money Peter would make on his tremendous crop. Clark DeWitt lost a good part of his following. The men decided to find out what Peter was going to plant next year if they had to follow him around. How did he know, for instance, that this year’d be good for sweet peas? He
must
have some kind of special knowledge.