The Pastures of Heaven (7 page)

A week later the stock dropped out of sight and the company disappeared. The moment he heard the news, Shark dragged out his ledger and entered the fact that he had sold his shares the day before the break, had sold with a two thousand dollar profit.

Pat Humbert, driving back from Monterey, stopped his car on the county road in front of Shark's house. “I heard you got washed out in that South County stock,” he observed.

 

Shark smiled contentedly. “What do you think I am, Pat? I sold out two days ago. You ought to know as well as the next man that I ain't a sucker. I knew that stock was bum, but I also knew it would take a rise so the backers could get out whole. When they unloaded, I did too.”

“The hell you did!” said Pat admiringly. And when he went into the General Store he passed the information on. Men nodded their heads and made new guesses at the amount of Shark's money. They admitted they'd hate to come up against him in a business deal.

At this time Shark borrowed four hundred dollars from a Monterey bank and bought a second-hand Fordson tractor.

Gradually his reputation for good judgment and foresight became so great that no man in the Pastures of Heaven thought of buying a bond or a piece of land or even a horse without first consulting Shark Wicks. With each of his admirers Shark went carefully into the problem and ended by giving startlingly good advice.

In a few years his ledger showed that he had accumulated one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars through sagacious investing. When his neighbors saw that he lived like a poor man, they respected him the more because his riches did not turn his head. He was nobody's fool. His wife and beautiful daughter still cared for the vegetables and prepared them for sale in Monterey, while Shark attended to the thousand duties of the orchard.

In Shark's life there had been no literary romance. At nineteen he took Katherine Mullock to three dances because she was available. This started the machine of precedent and he married her because her family and all of the neighbors expected it. Katherine was not pretty, but she had the firm freshness of a new weed, and the bridling vigor of a young mare. After her marriage she lost her vigor and her freshness as a flower does once it has received pollen. Her face sagged, her hips broadened, and she entered into her second destiny, that of work.

In his treatment of her, Shark was neither tender nor cruel. He governed her with the same gentle inflexibility he used on horses. Cruelty would have seemed to him as foolish as indulgence. He never talked to her as to human, never spoke of his hopes or thoughts or failures, of his paper wealth nor of the peach crop. Katherine would have been puzzled and worried if he had. Her life was sufficiently complicated without the added burden of another's thoughts and problems.

The brown Wicks house was the only unbeautiful thing on the farm. The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence. The yard was strewn with old sacks, with papers, bits of broken glass and tangles of baling wire. The only place on the farm where grass and flowers would not grow was the hard-packed dirt around the house, dirt made sterile and unfriendly by emptied tubs of soapy water. Shark irrigated his orchard, but he could see no reason for wasting good water around the house.

When Alice was born, the women of the Pastures of Heaven came herding into Shark's house prepared to exclaim that it was a pretty baby. When they saw it was a beautiful baby, they did not know what to say. Those feminine exclamations of delight designed to reassure young mothers that the horrible reptilian creatures in their arms are human and will not grow up to be monstrosities, lost their meaning. Furthermore, Katherine had looked at her child with eyes untainted by the artificial enthusiasm with which most women smother their disappointments. When Katherine had seen that the baby was beautiful, she was filled with wonder and with awe and misgiving. The fact of Alice's beauty was too marvelous to be without retribution. Pretty babies, Katherine said to herself, usually turned out ugly men and women. By saying it, she beat off some of the misgiving as though she had apprehended Fate at its tricks and robbed it of potency by her foreknowledge.

On that first day of visiting, Shark heard one of the women say to another in a tone of unbelief, “But it really is a pretty baby. How do you suppose it
could
be so pretty?”

Shark went back to the bedroom and looked long at his little daughter. Out in the orchard he pondered over the matter. The baby really was beautiful. It was foolish to think that he or Katherine or any of their relatives had anything to do with it for they were all homely even as ordinary people go. Clearly a very precious thing had been given to him, and, since precious things were universally coveted, Alice must be protected. Shark believed in God when he thought of it, of course, as that shadowy being who did everything he could not understand.

 

Alice grew and became more and more beautiful. Her skin was as lucent and rich as poppies; her black hair had the soft crispness of fern stems, her eyes were misty skies of promise. One looked into the child's serious eyes and started forward thinking—“Something is in there that I know, something I seem to remember sharply, or something I have spent all my life searching for.” Then Alice turned her head. “Why! It is only a lovely little girl.”

Shark saw this recognition take place in many people. He saw men blush when they looked at her, saw little boys fight like tigers when she was about.

He thought he read covetousness in every male face. Of ten when he was working in the orchard he tortured himself by imagining scenes wherein gypsies stole the little girl. A dozen times a day he cautioned her against dangerous things: the hind heels of horses, the highness of fences, the danger that lurked in gullies and the absolute suicide of crossing a road without carefully looking for approaching automobiles. Every neighbor, every pedlar, and worst of all, every stranger he looked upon as a possible kidnapper. When tramps were reported in the Pastures of Heaven he never let the little girl out of his sight. Picnickers wondered at Shark's ferocity in ordering them off his land.

As for Katherine, the constantly increasing beauty of Alice augmented her misgiving. Destiny was waiting to strike, and that could only mean that destiny was storing strength for a more violent blow. She became the slave of her daughter, hovered about and did little services such as one might accord an invalid who is soon to die.

In spite of the worship of the Wickses for their child and their fears for her safety and their miser-like gloating over her beauty, they both knew that their lovely daughter was an incredibly stupid, dull and backward little girl. In Shark, this knowledge only added to his fears, for he was convinced that she could not take care of herself and would become an easy prey to anyone who wished to make off with her. But to Katherine, Alice's stupidity was a pleasant thing since it presented so many means by which her mother could help her. By helping, Katherine proved a superiority, and cut down to some extent the great gap between them. Katherine was glad of every weakness in her daughter since each one made her feel closer and more worthy.

When Alice turned fourteen a new responsibility was added to the many her father felt concerning her. Before that time Shark had only feared her loss or disfigurement, but after that he was terrified at the thought of her loss of chastity. Little by little, through much dwelling on the subject, this last fear absorbed the other two. He came to regard the possible defloration of his daughter as both loss and disfigurement. From that time on he was uncomfortable and suspicious when any man or boy was near the farm.

The subject became a nightmare to him. Over and over he cautioned his wife never to let Alice out of her sight. “You just can't tell what might happen,” he repeated, his pale eyes flaring with suspicions. “You just can't tell what might happen.” His daughter's mental inadequateness greatly increased his fear. Anyone, he thought, might ruin her. Anyone at all who was left alone with her might misuse her. And she couldn't protect herself, because she was so stupid. No man ever guarded his prize bitch when she was in heat more closely than Shark watched his daughter.

After a time Shark was no longer satisfied with her purity unless he had been assured of it. Each month he pestered his wife. He knew the dates better than she did. “Is she all right?” he asked wolfishly.

Katherine answered contemptuously, “Not yet.”

A few hours later—“Is she all right?”

He kept this up until at last Katherine answered, “Of course she's all right. What did you think?”

This answer satisfied Shark for a month, but it did not decrease his watchfulness. The chastity was intact, therefore it was still to be guarded.

Shark knew that some time Alice would want to be married, but, often as the thought came to him, he put it away and tried to forget it, for he regarded her marriage with no less repugnance than her seduction. She was a precious thing, to be watched and preserved. To him it was not a moral problem, but an aesthetic one. Once she was deflorated, she would no longer be the precious thing he treasured so. He did not love her as a father loves a child. Rather he hoarded her, and gloated over the possession of a fine, unique thing. Gradually, as he asked his question—“Is she all right?”—month by month, this chastity came to symbolize her health, her preservation, her intactness.

One day when Alice was sixteen, Shark went to his wife with a worried look on his face. “You know we really can't tell if she's all right—that is—we couldn't really be sure unless we took her to a doctor.”

For a moment Katherine stared at him, trying to realize what the words meant. Then she lost her temper for the first time in her life. “You're a dirty, suspicious skunk,” she told him. “You get out of here! And if you ever talk about it again, I'll-I'll go away.”

Shark was a little astonished, but not frightened, at her outburst. He did, however, give up the idea of a medical examination, and merely contented himself with his monthly question.

Meanwhile, Shark's ledger fortune continued to grow. Every night, after Katherine and Alice had gone to bed, he took down the thick book and opened it under the hanging lamp. Then his pale eyes narrowed and his blunt face took on a crafty look while he planned his investments and calculated his interest. His lips moved slightly, for now he was telephoning an order for stock. A stem and yet sorrowful look crossed his face when he foreclosed a mortgage on a good farm. “I hate to do this,” he whispered. “You folks got to realize it's just business.”

Shark wetted his pen in the ink bottle and entered the fact of the foreclosure in his ledger. “Lettuce,” he mused. “Everybody's putting in lettuce. The market's going to be flooded. Seems to me I might put in potatoes and make some money. That's fine bottom land.” He noted in the book the planting of three hundred acres of potatoes. His eye traveled along the line. Thirty thousands dollars lay in the bank just drawing bank interest. It seemed a shame. The money was practically idle. A frown of concentration settled over his eyes. He wondered how San Jose Building and Loan was. It paid six per cent. It wouldn't do to rush into it blindly without investigating the company. As he closed the ledger for the night, Shark determined to talk to John Whiteside about it. Sometimes those companies went broke, the officers absconded, he thought uneasily.

 

Before the Munroe family moved into the valley, Shark suspected all men and boys of evil intent toward Alice, but when once he had set eyes on young Jimmie Munroe, his fear and suspicion narrowed until it had all settled upon the sophisticated Jimmie. The boy was lean and handsome of face, his mouth was well developed and sensual, and his eyes shone with that insulting cockiness high school boys assume. Jimmie was said to drink gin; he wore town clothes of wool—never overalls. His hair shone with oil, and his whole manner and posture were of a rakishness that set the girls of the Pastures of Heaven giggling and squirming with admiration and embarrassment. Jimmie watched the girls with quiet, cynical eyes, and tried to appear dissipated for their benefit. He knew that young girls are vastly attracted to young men with pasts. Jimmie had a past. He had been drunk several times at the Riverside Dance Palace; he had kissed at least a hundred girls, and, on three occasions, he had sinful adventures in the willows by the Salinas River. Jimmie tried to make his face confess his vicious life, but, fearing that his appearance was not enough, he set free a number of mischievous little rumors that darted about the Pastures of Heaven with flattering speed.

Shark Wicks heard the rumors. In Shark there grew up a hatred of Jimmie Munroe that was born of fear of Jimmie's way with women. What chance, Shark thought, would beautiful, stupid Alice have against one so steeped in knowledge of wordliness?

Before Alice had ever seen the boy, Shark forbade her to see him. He spoke with such vehemence that a mild interest was aroused in the dull brain of the girl.

“Don't you ever let me catch you talking to that Jimmie Munroe,” he told her.

“Who's Jimmie Munroe, Papa?”

“Never you mind who he is. Just don't let me catch you talking to him. You hear me! Why! I'll skin you alive if you even look at him.”

Shark had never laid a hand on Alice for the same reason that he would not have whipped a Dresden vase. He even hesitated to caress her for fear of leaving a mark. Punishment was never necessary. Alice had always been a good and tractable child. Badness must originate in an idea or an ambition. She had never experienced either.

And again—“You haven't been talking to that Jimmie Munroe, have you?”

“No, Papa.”