The Pastures of Heaven (20 page)

The year wheeled around. Pussywillows had their kittens, and wild flowers covered the hills. Molly found herself wanted and needed in the valley. She even attended school board meetings. There had been a time when those secret and august conferences were held behind closed doors, a mystery and a terror to everyone. Now that Molly was asked to step into John Whiteside's sitting room, she found that the board discussed crops, told stories, and circulated mild gossip.

Bert Munroe had been elected early in the fall, and by the springtime he was the most energetic member. He it was who planned dances at the schoolhouse, who insisted upon having plays and picnics. He even offered prizes for the best report cards in the school. The board was coming to rely pretty much on Bert Munroe.

One evening Molly came down late from her room. As always, when the board was meeting, Mrs. Whiteside sat in the dining room. “I don't think I'll go in to the meeting,” Molly said. “Let them have one time to themselves. Sometimes I feel that they would tell other kinds of stories if I weren't there.”

“You go on in, Molly! They can't hold a board meeting without you. They're so used to you, they'd be lost. Besides, I'm not at all sure I want them to tell those other stories.”

Obediently Molly knocked on the door and went into the sitting room. Bert Munroe paused politely in the story he was narrating. “I was just telling about my new farm hand, Miss Morgan. I'll start over again, 'cause it's kind of funny. You see, I needed a hay hand, and I picked this fellow up under the Salinas River bridge. He was pretty drunk, but he wanted a job. Now I've got him, I find he isn't worth a cent as a hand, but I can't get rid of him. That son of a gun has been every place. You ought to hear him tell about the places he's been. My kids wouldn't let me get rid of him if I wanted to. Why he can take the littlest thing he's seen and make a fine story out of it. My kids just sit around with their ears spread, listening to him. Well, about twice a month he walks into Salinas and goes on a bust. He's one of those dirty, periodic drunks. The Salinas cops always call me up when they find him in a gutter, and I have to drive in to get him. And you know, when he comes out of it, he's always got some kind of present in his pocket for my kid Manny. There's nothing you can do with a man like that. He disarms you. I don't get a dollar's worth of work a month out of him.”

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 to 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.”