The Pastures of Heaven (9 page)

 

Shark heard a car coming and stepped into the brush while it roared by, with a wide open throttle. He would be getting there pretty soon, and he didn't hate Jimmie Munroe. He didn't hate anything except the hollow feeling that had entered him when he heard of Alice's loss of virtue. Now he could only think of his daughter as one who was dead.

 

Ahead of him, he could see the lights of the Munroe house now. And Shark knew that he couldn't shoot Jimmie. Even if he were laughed at he couldn't shoot the boy. There was no murder in him. He decided that he would look in at the gate and then go along home. Maybe people would laugh at him, but he simply could not shoot anybody.

Suddenly a man stepped from the shadow of a bush and shouted at him. “Put down that gun, Wicks, and put up your hands.”

Shark laid the rifle on the ground with a kind of tired obedience. He recognized the voice of the deputy sheriff. “Hello Jack,” he said.

Then there were people all around him. Shark saw Jimmie's frightened face in the background. Bert Munroe was frightened too. He said, “What did you want to shoot Jimmie for? He didn't hurt you. Old T. B. phoned me. I've got to put you where you can't do any harm.”

“You can't jail him,” the deputy said. “He hasn't done anything. Only thing you can do is put him under bond to keep the peace.”

“Is that so? I guess I have to do that then.” Bert's voice was trembling.

“You better ask for a big bond,” the deputy went on. “Shark's a pretty rich man. Come on! We'll take him into Salinas now, and you can make your complaint.”

The next morning Shark Wicks walked listlessly into his house and lay down on his bed. His eyes were dull and tired but he kept them open. His arms lay as loosely as a corpse's arms beside him. Hour after hour he lay there.

Katherine, from the vegetable garden, saw him go into the house. She was bitterly glad of the slump of his shoulders and of his head's weak carriage, but when she went in to get luncheon ready, she walked on her toes and cautioned Alice to move quietly.

At three o'clock Katherine looked in at the bedroom door. “Alice was all right,” she said. “You should have asked me before you did anything.”

Shark did not answer her nor change his position.

“Don't you believe me?” The loss of vitality in her husband frightened her. “If you don't believe me, we can get a doctor. I'll send for one right now if you don't believe me.”

Shark's head did not turn. “I believe you,” he said lifelessly.

As Katherine stood in the doorway, a feeling she had never experienced crept into her. She did a thing she had never contemplated in her life. A warm genius moved in her. Katherine sat down on the edge of the bed and with a sure hand, took Shark's head on her lap. This was instinct, and the same sure, strong instinct set her hand to stroking Shark's forehead. His body seemed boneless with defeat.

Shark's eyes did not move from the ceiling, but under the stroking, he began to talk brokenly. “I haven't any money,” his monotonous voice said. “They took me in and asked for a ten thousand dollar bond. I had to tell the judge. They all heard. They all know—I haven't any money. I never had any. Do you understand? That ledger was nothing but a lie. Every bit of it was lies. I made it all up. Now everybody knows. I had to tell the judge.”

Katherine stroked his head gently and the great genius continued to grow in her. She felt larger than the world. The whole world lay in her lap and she comforted it. Pity seemed to make her huge in stature. Her soothing breasts yearned toward the woe of the world.

“I didn't mean to hurt anyone,” Shark went on. “I wouldn't have shot Jimmie. They caught me before I could turn back. They thought I meant to kill him. And now everybody knows. I haven't any money.” He lay limply and stared upward.

Suddenly the genius in Katherine became power and the power gushed in her body and flooded her. In a moment she knew what she was and what she could do. She was exultantly happy and very beautiful. “You've had no chance,” she said softly. “All of your life you've been out on this old farm and there's been no chance for you. How do you know you can't make money? I think you can. I know you can.”

She had known she could do this. As she sat there the knowledge of her power had been born in her, and she knew that all of her life was directed at this one moment. In this moment she was a goddess, a singer of destiny. It did not surprise her when his body gradually stiffened. She continued to stroke his forehead.

“We'll go out of here,” she chanted. “We'll sell this ranch and go away from here. Then you'll get the chance you never had. You'll see. I know what you are. I believe in you.”

Shark's eyes lost their awful lifelessness. His body found strength to turn itself. He looked at Katherine and saw how beautiful she was in this moment, and, as he looked, her genius passed into him. Shark pressed his head tightly against her knees.

 

She lowered her head and looked at him. She was frightened now the power was leaving her. Suddenly Shark sat up on the bed. He had forgotten Katherine, but his eyes shone with the energy she had given him.

“I'll go soon,” he cried. “I'll go just as soon as I can sell the ranch. Then I'll get in a few licks. I'll get my chance then. I'll show people what I am.”

IV

The origin of Tularecito is cast in obscurity, while his discovery is a myth which the folks of the Pastures of Heaven refuse to believe, just as they refuse to believe in ghosts.

Franklin Gomez had a hired man, a Mexican Indian named Pancho, and nothing else. Once every three months, Pancho took his savings and drove into Monterey to confess his sins, to do his penance, and be shriven and to get drunk, in the order named. If he managed to stay out of jail, Pancho got into his buggy and went to sleep when the saloons closed. The horse pulled him home, arriving just before daylight, and in time for Pancho to have breakfast and go to work. Pancho was always asleep when he arrived; that is why he created so much interest on the ranch when, one morning, he drove into the corral at a gallop, not only awake, but shouting at the top of his voice.

Franklin Gomez put on his clothes and went out to interview his ranch hand. The story, when it was stretched out of its tangle of incoherencies, was this: Pancho had been driving home, very sober as always. Up near the Blake place, he heard a baby crying in the sage brush beside the road. He stopped the horse and went to investigate, for one did not often come upon babies like that. And sure enough he found a tiny child lying in a clear place in the sage. It was about three months old by the size of it, Pancho thought. He picked it up and lighted a match to see just what kind of a thing he had found, when—horror of horrors!—the baby winked maliciously and said in a deep voice, “Look! I have very sharp teeth.” Pancho did not look. He flung the thing from him, leaped into his buggy and galloped for home, beating the old horse with the butt end of the whip and howling like a dog.

Franklin Gomez pulled his whiskers a good deal. Pancho's nature, he considered, was not hysterical even under the influence of liquor. The fact that he had awakened at all rather proved there must be something in the brush. In the end, Franklin Gomez had a horse saddled, rode out and brought in the baby. It did not speak again for nearly three years; nor, on inspection, did it have any teeth, but neither of these facts convinced Pancho that it did not make that first ferocious remark.

The baby had short, chubby arms, and long, loose-jointed legs. Its large head sat without interval of neck between deformedly broad shoulders. The baby's flat face, together with its peculiar body, caused it automatically to be named Tularecito, Little Frog, although Franklin Gomez often called it Coyote, “for,” he said, “there is in this boy's face that ancient wisdom one finds in the face of a coyote.”

“But surely the legs, the arms, the shoulders, Senor,” Pancho reminded him. And so Tularecito the name remained. It was never discovered who abandoned the misshapen little creature. Franklin Gomez accepted him into the patriarchate of his ranch, and Pancho took care of him. Pancho, however, could never lose a little fear of the boy. Neither the years nor a rigorous penance eradicated the effect of Tularecito's first utterance.

 

The boy grew rapidly, but after the fifth year his brain did not grow any more. At six Tularecito could do the work of a grown man. The long fingers of his hands were more dexterous and stronger than most men's fingers. On the ranch, they made use of the fingers of Tularecito. Hard knots could not long defy him. He had planting hands, tender fingers that never injured a young plant nor bruised the surfaces of a grafting limb. His merciless fingers could wring the head from a turkey gobbler without effort. Also Tularecito had an amusing gift. With his thumbnail he could carve remarkably correct animals from sandstone. Franklin Gomez kept many little effigies of coyotes and mountain lions, of chickens and squirrels, about the house. A two-foot image of a hovering hawk hung by wires from the ceiling of the dining room. Pancho, who had never quite considered the boy human, put his gift for carving in a growing category of diabolical traits definitely traceable to his supernatural origin.

While the people of the Pastures of Heaven did not believe in the diabolic origin of Tularecito, nevertheless they were uncomfortable in his presence. His eyes were ancient and dry; there was something troglodytic about his face. The great strength of his body and his strange and obscure gifts set him apart from other children and made men and women uneasy.

Only one thing could provoke anger in Tularecito. If any person, man, woman or child, handled carelessly or broke one of the products of his hands, he became furious. His eyes shone and he attacked the desecrator murderously. On three occasions when this had happened, Franklin Gomez tied his hands and feet and left him alone until his ordinary good nature returned.

Tularecito did not go to school when he was six. For five years thereafter, the county truant officer and the school superintendent sporadically worked on the case. Franklin Gomez agreed that he should go to school and even went so far as to start him off several times, but Tularecito never got there. He was afraid that school might prove unpleasant, so he simply disappeared for a day or so. It was not until the boy was eleven, with the shoulders of a weight lifter and the hands and forearms of a strangler that the concerted forces of the law gathered him in and put him in school.

As Franklin Gomez had known, Tularecito learned nothing at all, but immediately he gave evidence of a new gift. He could draw as well as he could carve in sandstone. When Miss Martin, the teacher, discovered his ability, she gave him a piece of chalk and told him to make a procession of animals around the blackboard. Tularecito worked long after school was dismissed, and the next morning an astounding parade was shown on the walls. All of the animals Tularecito had ever seen were there; all the birds of the hills flew above them. A rattlesnake crawled behind a cow; a coyote, his brush proudly aloft, sniffed at the heels of a pig. There were tomcats and goats, turtles and gophers, every one of them drawn with astonishing detail and veracity.

Miss Martin was overcome with the genius of Tularecito. She praised him before the class and gave a short lecture about each one of the creatures he had drawn. In her own mind she considered the glory that would come to her for discovering and fostering this genius.

“I can make lots more,” Tularecito informed her.

Miss Martin patted his broad shoulder. “So you shall,” she said. “You shall draw every day. It is a great gift that God has given you.” Then she realized the importance of what she had just said. She leaned over and looked searchingly into his hard eyes while she repeated slowly, “It is a
great gift
that God has given you.” Miss Martin glanced up at the clock and announced crisply, “Fourth grade arithmetic—at the board.”

The fourth grade struggled out, seized erasers and began to remove the animals to make room for their numbers. They had not made two sweeps when Tularecito charged. It was a great day. Miss Martin, aided by the whole school, could not hold him down, for the enraged Tularecito had the strength of a man, and a madman at that. The ensuing battle wrecked the schoolroom, tipped over the desks, spilled rivers of ink, hurled bouquets of Teacher's flowers about the room. Miss Martin's clothes were torn to streamers, and the big boys, on whom the burden of the battle fell, were bruised and battered cruelly. Tularecito fought with hands, feet, teeth and head. He admitted no honorable rules and in the end he won. The whole school, with Miss Martin guarding its rear, fled from the building, leaving the enraged Tularecito in possession. When they were gone, he locked the door, wiped the blood out of his eyes and set to work to repair the animals that had been destroyed.

That night Miss Martin called on Franklin Gomez and demanded that the boy be whipped.

Gomez shrugged. “You really wish me to whip him, Miss Martin?”

The teacher's face was scratched; her mouth was bitter. “I certainly do,” she said. “If you had seen what he did today, you wouldn't blame me. I tell you he needs a lesson.”

Gomez shrugged again and called Tularecito from the bunk house. He took a heavy quirt down from the wall. Then, while Tularecito smiled blandly at Miss Martin, Franklin Gomez beat him severely across the back. Miss Martin's hand made involuntary motions of beating. When it was done, Tularecito felt himself over with long, exploring fingers, and still smiling, went back to the bunk house.

Miss Martin had watched the end of the punishment with horror. “Why, he's an animal,” she cried. “It was just like whipping a dog.”