The Pastures of Heaven (6 page)

As soon as the paint inside and out was dry, the new furniture arrived, overstuffed chairs and a davenport, an enameled stove, steel beds painted to look like wood and guaranteed to provide a mathematical comfort. There were mirrors with scalloped frames, Wilton rugs and prints of pictures by a modem artist who has made blue popular.

With the furniture came Mrs. Munroe and the three younger Munroes. Mrs. Munroe was a plump woman who wore a rimless pince nez on a ribbon. She was a good house manager. Again and again she had the new furniture moved about until she was satisfied, but once satisfied, once she had regarded the piece with a concentrated gaze and then nodded and smiled, that piece was fixed forever, only to be moved for cleaning.

Her daughter Mae was a pretty girl with round smooth cheeks and ripe lips. She was voluptuous of figure, but under her chin there was a soft, pretty curve which indicated a future plumpness like her mother's. Mae's eyes were friendly and candid, not intelligent, but by no means stupid. Imperceptibly she would grow to be her mother's double, a good manager, a mother of healthy children, a good wife with no regrets.

In her own new room, Mae stuck dance programs between the glass and the frame of the mirror. On the walls she hung framed photographs of her friends in Monterey, and laid out her photograph album and her locked diary on the little bedside table. In the diary she concealed from prying eyes a completely uninteresting record of dances, of parties, of recipes for candy and of mild preferences for certain boys. Mae bought and made her own room curtains, pale pink theatrical gauze to strain the light, and a valance of flowered cretonne. On her bedspread of gathered satin, she arranged five boudoir pillows in positions of abandon, and against them leaned a long-legged French doll with clipped blonde hair and with a cloth cigarette dangling from languid lips. Mae considered that this doll proved her openness of mind, her tolerance of things she did not quite approve. She liked to have friends who had pasts, for, having such friends and listening to them, destroyed in her any regret that her own life had been blameless. She was nineteen; she thought of marriage most of the time. When she was out with boys she talked of ideals with some emotion. Mae had very little conception of what ideals were except that in some manner they governed the kind of kisses one received while driving home from dances.

 

Jimmie Munroe was seventeen, just out of high school and enormously cynical. In the presence of his parents, Jimmie's manner was usually sullen and secretive. He knew he couldn't trust them with his knowledge of the world, for they would not understand. They belonged to a generation which had no knowledge of sin nor of heroism. A firm intention to give over one's life to science after gutting it of emotional possibilities would not be tenderly received by his parents. By science, Jimmie meant radios, archaeology and airplanes. He pictured himself digging up golden vases in Peru. He dreamed of shutting himself up in a cell-like workshop, and, after years of agony and ridicule, of emerging with an airplane new in design and devastating in speed.

Jimmie's room in the new house became a clutter of small machines as soon as he was settled. There was a radio crystal set with ear phones, a hand-powered magneto which operated a telegraph key, a brass telescope and innumerable machines partly taken to pieces. Jimmie, too, had a secret repository, an oaken box fastened with a heavy padlock. In the box were: half a can of dynamite caps, an old revolver, a package of Melachrino cigarettes, three contraptions known as Merry Widows, a small flask of peach brandy, a paper knife shaped like a dagger, four bundles of letters from four different girls, sixteen lipsticks pilfered from dance partners, a box containing mementos of current loves—dried flowers, handkerchiefs and buttons, and most prized of all, a round garter covered with black lace. Jimmie had forgotten how he really got the garter. What he did remember was far more satisfactory anyway. He always locked his bedroom door before he unlocked the box.

 

In high school Jimmie's score of sinfulness had been equaled by many of his friends and easily passed by some. Soon after moving to the Pastures of Heaven, he found that his iniquities were unique. He came to regard himself as a reformed rake, but one not reformed beyond possible outbreak. It gave him a powerful advantage with the younger girls of the valley to have lived so fully. Jimmy was rather a handsome boy, lean and well made, dark of hair and eyes.

Manfred, the youngest boy, ordinarily called Manny, was a serious child of seven, whose face was pinched and drawn by adenoids. His parents knew about the adenoids; they had even talked of having them removed. Manny became terrified of the operation, and his mother, seeing this, had used it as a deterrent threat when he was bad. Now, a mention of having his adenoids removed made Manny hysterical with terror. Mr. and Mrs. Munroe considered him a thoughtful child, perhaps a genius. He played usually by himself, or sat for hours staring into space, “dreaming,” his mother said. They would not know for some years that he was subnormal, his brain development arrested by his adenoidal condition. Ordinarily Manny was a good child, tractable and easily terrified into obedience, but, if he were terrified a little too much, a hysteria resulted that robbed him of his self-control and even of a sense of self-preservation. He had been known to beat his forehead on the floor until the blood ran into his eyes.

Bert Munroe came to the Pastures of Heaven because he was tired of battling with a force which invariably defeated him. He had engaged in many enterprises and every one had failed, not through any shortcoming on Bert's part, but through mishaps, which, if taken alone, were accidents. Bert saw all the accidents together and they seemed to him the acts of a Fate malignant to his success. He was tired of fighting the nameless thing that stopped every avenue to success. Bert was only fifty-five, but he wanted to rest; he was half convinced that a curse rested upon him.

Years ago he opened a garage on the edge of a town. Business was good; money began to roll in. When he considered himself safe, the state highway came through on another street and left him stranded without business. He sold the garage a year or so later and opened a grocery store. Again he was successful. He paid off his indebtedness and began to put money in the bank. A chain grocery crowded up against him, opened a price war and forced him from business. Bert was a sensitive man. Such things as these had happened to him a dozen times. Just when his success seemed permanent, the curse struck him. His self-confidence dwindled. When the war broke out his spirit was nearly gone. He knew there was money to be made from the war, but he was afraid, after having been beaten so often.

He had to reassure himself a great deal before he made his first contract for beans in the field. In the first year of business, he made fifty thousand dollars, the second year two hundred thousand. The third year he contracted for thousands of acres of beans before they were even planted. By his contracts, he guaranteed to pay ten cents a pound for the crops. He could sell all the beans he could get for eighteen cents a pound. The war ended in November, and he sold his crop for four cents a pound. He had a little less money than when he started.

This time he was sure of the curse. His spirit was so badly broken that he didn't leave his house very often. He worked in the garden, planted a few vegetables and brooded over the enmity of his fate. Slowly, over a period of stagnant years, a nostalgia for the soil grew in him. In farming, he thought, lay the only line of endeavor that did not cross with his fate. He thought perhaps he could find rest and security on a little farm.

The Battle place was offered for sale by a Monterey realty company. Bert looked at the farm, saw the changes that could be made, and bought it. At first his family opposed the move, but, when he had cleaned the yard, installed electricity and a telephone in the house, and made it comfortable with new furniture, they were almost enthusiastic about it. Mrs. Munroe thought any change desirable that would stop Bert's moping in the yard in Monterey.

The moment he had bought the farm, Bert felt free. The doom was gone. He knew he was safe from his curse. Within a month his shoulders straightened, and his face lost its haunted look. He became an enthusiastic farmer; he read exhaustively on farming methods, hired a helper and worked from morning until night. Every day was a new excitement to him. Every seed sprouting out of the ground seemed to renew a promise of immunity to him. He was happy, and because he was confident again, he began to make friends in the valley and to entrench his position.

It is a difficult thing and one requiring great tact quickly to become accepted in a rural community. The people of the valley had watched the advent of the Munroe family with a little animosity. The Battle farm was haunted. They had always considered it so, even those who laughed at the idea. Now a man came along and proved them wrong. More than that, he changed the face of the countryside by removing the accursed farm and substituting a harmless and fertile farm. The people were used to the Battle place as it was. Secretly they resented the change.

That Bert could remove this animosity was remarkable. Within three months he had become a part of the valley, a solid man, a neighbor. He borrowed tools and had tools borrowed from him. At the end of six months he was elected a member of the school board. To a large extent Bert's own happiness at being free of his Furies made the people like him. In addition he was a kindly man; he enjoyed doing favors for his friends, and, more important, he had no hesitancy in asking favors.

At the store he explained his position to a group of farmers, and they admired the honesty of his explanation. It was soon after he had come to the valley. T. B. Allen asked his old question.

“We always kind of thought that place was cursed. Lots of funny things have happened there. Seen any ghosts yet?”

Bert laughed. “If you take away all the food from a place, the rats will leave,” he said. “I took all the oldness and darkness away from that place. That's what ghosts live on.”

“You sure made a nice looking place of it,” Allen admitted. “There ain't a better place in the Pastures when it's kept up,”

Bert had been frowning soberly as a new thought began to work in his mind. “I've had a lot of bad luck,” he said. “I've been in a lot of businesses and every one turned out bad. When I came down here, I had a kind of an idea that I was under a curse.” Suddenly he laughed delightedly at the thought that had come to him. “And what do I do? First thing out of the box, I buy a place that's supposed to be under a curse. Well, I just happened to think, maybe my curse and the farm's curse got to fighting and killed each other off. I'm dead certain they've gone, anyway.”

The men laughed with him. T. B. Allen whacked his hand down on the counter. “That's a good one,” he cried. “But here's a better one. Maybe your curse and the farm's curse has mated and gone into a gopher hole like a pair of rattlesnakes. Maybe there'll be a lot of baby curses crawling around the Pastures the first thing we know.”

The gathered men roared with laughter at that, and T. B. Allen memorized the whole scene so he could repeat it. It was almost like the talk in a play, he thought.

III

Edward Wicks lived in a small, gloomy house on the edge of the country road in the Pastures of Heaven. Behind the house there was a peach orchard and a large vegetable garden. While Edward Wicks took care of the peaches, his wife and beautiful daughter cultivated the garden and got the peas and string beans and early strawberries ready to be sold in Monterey.

Edward Wicks had a blunt, brown face and small, cold eyes almost devoid of lashes. He was known as the trickiest man in the valley. He drove hard deals and was never so happy as when he could force a few cents more out of his peaches than his neighbors did. When he could, he cheated ethically in horse trades, and because of his acuteness he gained the respect of the community, but strangely became no richer. However, he liked to pretend that he was laying away money in securities. At school board meetings he asked the advice of the other members about various bonds, and in this way managed to give them the impression that his savings were considerable. The people of the valley called him “Shark” Wicks.

“Shark?” they said. “Oh, I'd guess he was worth around twenty thousand, maybe more. He's nobody's fool.”

And the truth was that Shark had never had more than five hundred dollars at one time in his life.

Shark's greatest pleasure came of being considered a wealthy man. Indeed, he enjoyed it so much that the wealth itself became real to him. Setting his imaginary fortune at fifty thousand dollars, he kept a ledger in which he calculated his interest and entered records of his various investments. These manipulations were the first joy of his life.

An oil company was formed in Salinas with the purpose of boring a well in the southern part of Monterey county. When he heard of it, Shark walked over to the farm of John Whiteside to discuss the value of its stock. “I been wondering about that South County Oil Company,” he said.

“Well, the geologist's report sounds good,” said John Whiteside. “I have always heard that there was oil in that section. I heard it years ago.” John Whiteside was often consulted in such matters. “Of course I wouldn't put too much into it.”

 

Shark creased his lower lip with his fingers and pondered for a moment. “I been turning it over in my mind,” he said. “It looks like a pretty good proposition to me. I got about ten thousand lying around that ain't bringing in what it should. I guess I'd better look into it pretty carefully. Just thought I'd see what your opinion was.”

But Shark's mind was already made up. When he got home, he took down the ledger and withdrew ten thousand dollars from his imaginary bank account. Then he entered one thousand shares of Southern County Oil Company stock to his list of securities. From that day on he watched the stock lists feverishly. When the price rose a little, he went about whistling monotonously, and when the price dropped, he felt a lump of apprehension forming in his throat. At length, when there came a quick rise in the price of South County, Shark was so elated that he went to the Pastures of Heaven General Store and bought a black marble mantel clock with onyx columns on either side of the dial and a bronze horse to go on top of it. The men in the store looked wise and whispered that Shark was about to make a killing.