The Pastures of Heaven (24 page)

“Well, there isn't much chance of that. Mrs. Allen says no one in the valley has been in that house since Pat's father and mother died, and that's ten years ago. She didn't say whether it was pretty.”

“With a rose like that on the outside, the inside must be pretty. I wonder if Mr. Humbert will let me see it sometime.” The two women walked on out of hearing.

When they were gone, Pat stood up and looked at the great rose. He had never seen how beautiful it was—a haystack of green leaves and nearly covered with white roses. “It is pretty,” he said. “And it's like a nice house in Vermont. It's like a Vermont house, and—well, it is pretty, a pretty bush.” Then, as though he had seen through the bush and through the wall, a vision of the parlor came to him. He went quickly back to his work among the berries, struggling to put the house out of his mind. But Mae's words came back to him over and over again, “It must be pretty inside.” Pat wondered what a Vermont house looked like inside. John Whiteside's solid and grand house he knew, and, with the rest of the valley, he had admired the plush comfort of Bert Munroe's house, but a pretty house he had never seen, that is, a house he could really call pretty. In his mind he went over all the houses he knew and not one of them was what Mae must have meant. He remembered a picture in a magazine, a room with a polished floor and white woodwork and a staircase; it might have been Mt. Vernon. That picture had impressed him. Perhaps that was what Mae meant.

He wished he could see the postcard of the Vermont house, but if he asked to see it, they would know he had been listening. As he thought of it, Pat became obsessed with a desire to see a pretty house that looked like this. He put his hoe away and walked in front of his house. Truly the rose was marvelous. It dropped a canopy over the porch, hung awnings of white stars over the closed windows. Pat wondered why he had never noticed it before.

That night he did something he couldn't have contemplated before. At the Munroe door, he broke an engagement to spend an evening in company. “There's some business in Salinas I've got to attend to,” he explained. “I stand to lose some money if I don't go right in.”

In Salinas he went straight to the public library. “Have you got any pictures of Vermont houses—pretty ones?” he asked the librarian.

“You'll probably find some in the magazines. Come! I'll show you where to look.”

They had to warn him when the library was about to close. He had found pictures of interiors, but of interiors he had never imagined. The rooms were built on a plan; each decoration, each piece of furniture, even the floors and walls were related, were a part of the plan. Some deep and instinctive feeling in him for arrangement, for color and line, had responded to the pictures. He hadn't known rooms could be like that—all in one piece. Every room he had ever seen was the result of a gradual and accidental accumulation. Aunt Sophie sent a vase, father bought a chair. They put a stove in the fireplace because it threw more heat; the Sperry Flour Company issued a big calendar and mother had its picture framed; a mail order house advertised a new kind of lamp. That was the way rooms were assembled. But in the pictures someone had an idea, and everything in the room was a part of the idea. Just before the library closed he came upon two pictures side by side. One showed a room like those he knew, and right beside it was another picture of the same room with all the clutter gone, and with the idea in it. It didn't look like the same place at all. For the first time in his life, Pat was anxious to go home. He wanted to lie in his bed and to think, for a strange new idea was squirming into being in the back of his mind.

Pat could not sleep that night. His head was too full of plans. Once he got up and lighted the lamp to look in his bank book. A little before daylight he dressed and cooked his breakfast, and while he ate, his eyes wandered again and again to the locked door. There was a light of malicious joy in his eyes. “It'll be dark in there,” he said. “I better rip open the shutters before I go in there.”

When the daylight came at last, he took a crowbar and walked around the house, tearing open the nailed shutters as he went. The parlor windows he did not touch, for he didn't want to disturb the rose bush. Finally he went back into the kitchen and stood before the locked door. For a moment the old vision stopped him. “But it will be just for a minute,” he argued. “I'll start in tearing it to pieces right away.” The crowbar poised and crashed on the lock. The door sprang open crying miserably on its dry hinges, and the horrible room lay before him. The air was foggy with cobwebs ; a musty, ancient odor flowed through the door. There were the two rocking chairs on either side of the rusty stove. Even through the dust he could see the little hollows in their cushions. But these were not the terrible things. Pat knew where lay the center of his fears. He walked rapidly through the room, brushing the cobwebs from his eyes as he went. The parlor was still dark, for its shutters were closed. Pat didn't have to grope for the table; he knew exactly where it was. Hadn't it haunted him for ten years? He picked up table and Bible together, ran out through the kitchen and hurled them into the yard.

Now he could go more slowly. The fear was gone. The windows were stuck so hard that he had to use the bar to pry them open. First the rocking chairs went out, rolling and jumping when they hit the ground, then the pictures, the ornaments from the mantel, the stuffed orioles. And when the movable furniture, the clothing, the rugs and vases were scattered about under the windows, Pat ripped up the carpets and crammed them out, too. Finally he brought buckets of water and splashed the walls and ceilings thoroughly. The work was an intense pleasure to him. He tried to break the legs from the chairs when he threw them out. While the water was soaking into the old dark wallpaper, he collected all of the furniture from under the windows, piled it up and set fire to it. Old musty fabrics and varnished wood smoldered sullenly and threw out a foul stench of dust and dampness. Only when a bucket of kerosene was thrown over the pile did the flame leap up. The tables and chairs cracked as they released their ghosts into the fire. Pat surveyed the pile joyfully.

“You
would
sit in there all these years, wouldn't you?” he cried. “You thought I'd never get up the guts to burn you. Well, I just wish you could be around to see what I'm going to do, you rotten stinking trash.” The green carpets burned through and left red, flaky coals. Old vases and jars cracked to pieces in the heat. Pat could hear the sizzle of mentholatum and painkiller gushing from containers and boiling into the fire. He felt that he was presiding at the death of his enemy. Only when the pile had burned down to coals did he leave it. The walls were soaked thoroughly by now, so that the wallpaper peeled off in long, broad ribbons.

That afternoon Pat drove in to Salinas and bought all the magazines on house decoration he could find. In the evening, after dinner, he searched the pages through. At last, in one of the magazines, he found the perfect room. There had been a question about some of the others; there was none about this one. And he could make it quite easily. With the partition between the sitting room and the parlor torn out, he would have a room thirty feet long and fifteen wide. The windows must be made wide, the fireplace enlarged and the floor sandpapered, stained and polished. Pat knew he could do all these things. His hands ached to be at work. “Tomorrow I'll start,” he said. Then another thought stopped him. “She thinks it's pretty now. I can't very well let her know I'm doing it now. Why, she'd know I heard her say that about the Vermont house. I can't let people know I'm doing it. They'd ask why I'm doing it.” He wondered why he was doing it. “It's none of their darn business why,” he explained to himself. “I don't have to go around telling people why. I've got my reasons. By God! I'll do it at night.” Pat laughed softly to himself. The idea of secretly changing his house delighted him. He could work here alone, and no one would know. Then, when it was all finished, he could invite a few people in and pretend it was always that way. Nobody would remember how it was ten years ago.

This was the way he ordered his life: During the day he worked on the farm, and at night rushed into the house with a feeling of joy. The picture of the completed room was tacked up in the kitchen. Pat looked at it twenty times a day. While he was building window seats, putting up the French-grey paper, coating the woodwork with cream-colored enamel, he could see the completed room before him. When he needed supplies, he drove to Salinas late in the evening and brought back his materials after dark. He worked until midnight and went to bed breathlessly happy.

The people of the valley missed him from their gatherings. At the store they questioned him, but he had his excuse ready. “I'm taking one of those mail courses,” he explained. “I'm studying at night.” The men smiled. Loneliness was too much for a man, they knew. Bachelors on farms always got a little queer sooner or later.

“What are you studying, Pat?”

“Oh! What? Oh! I'm taking some lessons in—building.”

“You ought to get married, Pat. You're getting along in years.”

Pat blushed furiously. “Don't be a damn fool,” he said.

As he worked on the room, Pat was developing a little play, and it went like this: The room was finished and the furniture in place. The fire burned redly; the lamps threw misty reflections on the polished floor and on the shiny furniture. “I'll go to her house, and I'll say, off-hand, ‘I hear you like Vermont houses.' No! I can't say that. I'll say, ‘Do you like Vermont houses? Well, I've got a room that's kind of like a Vermont room.' ” The preliminaries were never quite satisfactory. He couldn't come on the perfect way for enticing her into his house. He ended by skipping that part. He could think it out later.

Now she was entering the kitchen. The kitchen wouldn't be changed, for that would make the other room a bigger surprise. She would stand in front of the door, and he would reach around her and throw it open. There was the room, rather dark, but full of dark light, really. The fire flowed up like a broad stream, and the lamps reflected on the floor. You could make out the glazed chintz hangings and the fat tiger of the overmantel hooked rug. The pewter glowed with a restrained richness. It was all so warm and snug. Pat's chest contracted with delight.

Anyway, she was standing in the door and—what would she say? Well, if she felt the way he did, maybe she wouldn't say anything. She might feel almost like crying. That was peculiar, the good full feeling as though you were about to cry. Maybe she'd stand there for a minute or two, just looking. Then Pat would say—“Won't you come in and sit for a while?” And of course that would break the spell. She would begin talking about the room in funny choked sentences. But Pat would be off-hand about it all. “Yes, I always kind of liked it.” He said this out loud as he worked. “Yes, I always thought it was kind of nice. It came to me the other day that you might like to see it.”

The play ended this way: Mae sat in the wingback chair in front of the fire. Her plump pretty hands lay in her lap. As she sat there, a far-away look came into her eyes.... And Pat never went any farther than that, for at that point a self-consciousness overcame him. If he went farther, it would be like peeking in a window at two people who wanted to be alone. The electric moment, the palpitating moment of the whole thing was when he threw open the door; when she stood on the threshhold, stunned by the beauty of the room.

At the end of three months the room was finished. Pat put the magazine picture in his wallet and went to San Francisco. In the office of a furniture company, he spread his picture on the desk. “I want furniture like that,” he said.

“You don't mean originals, of course.”

“What do you mean, originals?”

“Why, old pieces. You couldn't get them for under thirty thousand dollars.”

Pat's face fell. His room seemed to collapse. “Oh!—I didn't know.”

“We can get you good copies of everything here,” the manager assured him.

“Why of course. That's good. That's fine. How much would the copies cost?”

A purchasing agent was called in. The three of them went over the articles in the picture and the manager made a list; pie-crust table, drop-leaf gate-leg table, chairs: one windsor, one rush seat ladderback, one wingback, one fireplace bench; rag rugs, glazed chintz hangings, lamps with frosted globes and crystal pendants; one open-faced cupboard, pictorial bone-china, pewter candlesticks and sconces.

“Well, it will be around three thousand dollars, Mr. Humbert.”

Pat frowned with thought. After all, why should he save money? “How soon can you send it down?” he demanded.

While he waited for a notice that the furniture had arrived in Salinas, Pat rubbed the floor until it shone like a dull lake. He walked backward out of the room erasing his faint foot marks with a polisher. And then, at last, the crates arrived at the freight depot. It took four trips to Salinas in his truck to get them, trips made secretly in the night. There was an air of intrigue about the business.

Pat uncrated the pieces in the barn. He carried in chairs and tables, and, with a great many looks at the picture, arranged them in their exact places. That night the fire flowed up, and the frosted lamps reflected on the floor. The fat tiger on the hooked rug over the fireplace seemed to quiver in the dancing flame-light.

Pat went into the kitchen and closed the door. Then, very slowly he opened it again and stood looking in. The room glowed with warmth, with welcoming warmth. The pewter was even richer than he had thought it would be. The plates in the open-faced cupboard caught sparks on their rims. For a moment Pat stood in the doorway trying to get the right tone in his voice. “I always kind of liked it,” he said in his most offhand manner. “It just came to me the other day that you might like to see it.” He paused, for a horrible thought had come to him. “Why, she can't come here alone. A girl can't come to a single man's house at night. People would talk about her, and besides, she wouldn't do it.” He was bitterly disappointed. “Her mother will have to come with her. But—maybe her mother won't get in the way. She can stand back here, kind of, out of the way.”