The Pastures of Heaven (22 page)

Raymond smiled in faint amusement. “Sure. Nearly always somebody faints. Then the kid reporters from the papers cry sometimes, cry like babies, and some people are sick, you know, really sick—lose their dinner right there. Mostly first timers are that way. Let's have another bottle of beer, Mr. Munroe. It's good and cold, isn't it?”

“Yes, it's fine beer all right,” Bert agreed absently. “I'll have to get your recipe. A man ought to have a little beer ready for the hot weather. I've got to go now, Mr. Banks. Thank you for showing me around the place. You could give some pointers to these Petaluma people about chickens, I guess.”

Raymond flushed with pleasure. “I try to keep up with new things. I'll let you know when I hear from Ed, Mr. Munroe.”

During the next two weeks Bert Munroe was nervous and extremely irritable. This was so unusual that his wife protested. “You're not well, Bert. Why don't you drive in and let a doctor look you over.”

“Oh! I'm all right,” he insisted. He spent most of his time at work on the farm, but his eyes roved to the county road every time an automobile drove by. It was on a Saturday that Raymond Banks drove up in his light truck and parked before the Munroe gate. Bert dropped a shovel and went out to meet him. When one farmer meets another they seldom go into a house. Instead, they walk slowly over the land, pulling bits of grass from the fields, or leaves from the trees and testing them with their fingers while they talk. Summer was beginning. The leaves on the fruit trees had not yet lost their tender, light greens, but the blossoms were all gone and the fruit set. Already the cherries were showing a little color. Bert and Raymond walked slowly over the cultivated ground under the orchard trees.

“Birds are thick this year,” said Bert. “They'll get most of the cherries, I guess.” He knew perfectly well why Raymond had come.

“Well, I heard from Ed, Mr. Munroe. He says it will be all right for you to go up with me. He says they don't let many come, because they try to keep the morbidly curious people away. But he says any friend of mine is all right. We'll go up next Thursday. There's an execution Friday.” (Bert walked along in silence, his eyes on the ground). “Ed's a nice fellow. You'll like him,” Raymond went on. “We'll stay with him Thursday night.”

Bert picked up an overlooked pruning from the ground and bent it to a tense bow in his hands. “I've been thinking about it,” he said. “Would it make any difference to you if I pulled out the last minute?”

Raymond stared at him. “Why, I thought you wanted to go. What's the matter?”

“You'll think I'm pretty soft, I guess, if I tell you. The fact is—I've been thinking about it and—I'm scared to go. I'm scared I couldn't get it out of my head afterwards.”

“It's not as bad as it sounds,” Raymond protested.

“Maybe it isn't. I don't know about that. But I'm scared it would be bad for me. Everybody don't see a thing the same way.”

“No, that's true.”

“I'll try to give you an idea how I feel, Mr. Banks. You know I don't eat chicken. I never tell anybody why I don't eat it. Just say I don't like it. I've put you to a lot of trouble. I'll tell you—to kind of explain.” The stick snapped in his hands, and he threw the two ends away and thrust his hands in his pockets.

“When I was a kid, about twelve years old, I used to deliver a few groceries before school. Well, out by the brewery an old crippled man lived. He had one leg cut off at the thigh, and, instead of a wooden leg, he had one of those old-fashioned crutches—kind of a crescent on top of a round stick. You remember them. He got around on it pretty well, but kind of slow. One morning, when I went by with my basket of groceries, this old man was out in his yard killing a rooster. It was the biggest Rhode Island Red I ever saw. Or maybe it was because I was so little that the chicken looked so big. The old man had the crutch braced under his armpit, and he was holding the rooster by the legs.” Bert stopped and picked another pruning from the ground. This one, too, bent under his hands. His face was growing pale as he talked.

“Well,” he continued, “this old man had a hatchet in his other hand. Just as he made a cut at the rooster's neck, his crutch slipped a little bit, the chicken twisted in his hand, and he cut off one of the wings. Well, then that old man just about went crazy. He cut and he cut, always in the wrong place, into the breast and into the stomach. Then the crutch slipped some more and threw him clear off balance just as the hatchet was coming down. He cut off one of the chicken's legs and sliced right through his own finger.” Bert wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Raymond was heaping a little mountain of dirt with the side of his shoe.

“Well, when that happened, the old man just dropped the rooster on the ground and hobbled into the house holding on to his finger. And that rooster went crawling off with all its guts hanging out on the ground—went crawling off and kind of croaking.” The stick snapped again, and this time he threw the pieces violently from him. “Well, Mr. Banks, I've never killed a chicken since then, and I've never eaten one. I've tried to eat them, but every time, I see that damned Rhode Island Red crawling away.” For the first time he looked directly at Raymond Banks. “Do you see how that would happen?”

Raymond dodged his eyes and looked away. “Yes. Yes, sir, that must have been pretty awful.”

Bert crowded on. “Well, I got to thinking about this hanging. It might be like the chicken. I dreamed about that chicken over and over again, when I was a kid. Every time my stomach would get upset and give me a nightmare, I'd dream about that chicken. Now suppose I went to this hanging with you. I might dream about it, too. Not long ago they hung a woman in Arizona, and the rope pulled her head right off. Suppose that happened. It would be a hundred times worse than the chicken. Why I'd never get over a thing like that.”

“But that practically never happens,” Raymond protested. “I tell you it's not nearly as bad as it sounds.”

Bert seemed not to hear him. His face was working with horror at his thoughts. “Then you say some people get sick and some of them faint. I know why that is. It's because those people are imagining they're up on the gallows with the rope around their necks. They really feel like the man it's happening to. I've done that myself. I imagined I was going to be hung in twenty-four hours. It's like the most god-awful nightmare in the world. And I've been thinking —what's the use of going up there and horrifying myself? I'd be sick. I know I would. I'd just go through everything the poor devil on the gallows did. Just thinking about it last night, I felt the rope around my neck. Then I went to sleep, and the sheet got over my face, and I dreamed it was that damned black cap.”

“I tell you, you don't think things like that,” Raymond cried angrily. “If you think things like that you haven't got any right to go up with me. I tell you it isn't as terrible as that, when you see it. It's nothing. You said you wanted to go up, and I got permission for you. What do you want to go talking like this for? There's no need to talk like you just did. If you don't want to go, why the hell don't you just say so and then shut up?”

The look of horror went out of Bert's eyes. Almost eagerly he seized upon anger. “No need to get mad, Mr. Banks. I was just telling you why I didn't want to go. If you had any imagination, I wouldn't have to tell you. If you had any imagination, you'd see for yourself, and you wouldn't go up to see some poor devil get killed.”

Raymond turned away contemptuously. “You're just yellow,” he said and strode away to his truck. He drove furiously over the road to his ranch, but when he had arrived and covered the truck, he walked slowly toward his house. His wife was cutting roses.

“What's the matter with you, Ray? You look sick,” she cried.

Raymond scowled. “I've got a headache, that's all. It'll go away. You know Bert Munroe that wanted to go up with me next week?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now he don't want to go.”

“What's the matter with him?”

“He's lost his nerve, that's what. He's scared to see it.”

His wife laughed uneasily. “Well, I don't know as I'd like to see it myself.”

“You're a woman, but he's supposed to be a man.”

The next morning Raymond sat down listlessly to breakfast and ate very little. His wife looked worried. “You've still got that headache, Ray. Why don't you do something for it?”

Raymond ignored her question. “I've got to write to Ed, and I don't know what to say to him.”

“What do you mean, you don't know.”

“Well, I'm afraid I'm getting a cold. I don't know whether I'll be in shape to go up there Thursday. It's a long trip, and cold crossing the bay.”

Mrs. Banks sat in thought. “Why don't you ask him to come down here sometime. He's never been here; you've been there lots of times.”

Raymond brightened up. “By George! That's an idea. I've been going up to see him for years. I'll just drop him a note to come and see us.”

“We could give him a barbecue,” Mrs. Banks suggested.

Raymond's face clouded over. “Oh, I don't think so. A close friend like Ed would rather not have a crowd. But beer—say, you should see how Ed loves his beer. I'll drop him a note now.” He got out a pen and a little pad of writing paper and an ink bottle. As his pen hesitated over the paper, his face dropped back into a scowl. “Damn that Munroe anyway! I went to a lot of trouble for him. How'd I know he was going to turn yellow on me.”

Pat Humbert's parents were middle-aged when he was born; they had grown old and stiff and spiteful before he was twenty. All of Pat's life had been spent in an atmosphere of age, of the aches and illness, of the complaints and self-sufficiency of age. While he was growing up, his parents held his opinions in contempt because he was young. “When you've lived as long as we have, you'll see things different,” they told him. Later, they found his youth hateful because it was painless. Their age, so they implied, was a superior state, a state approaching god-head in dignity and infallibility. Even rheumatism was desirable as a price for the great wisdom of age. Pat was led to believe that no young thing had any virtue. Youth was a clumsy, fumbling preparation for excellent old age. Youth should think of nothing but the duty it owed to age, of the courtesy and veneration due to age. On the other hand, age owed no courtesy whatever to youth.

When Pat was sixteen, the whole work of the farm fell upon him. His father retired to a rocking chair beside the air-tight stove in the sitting room, from which he issued orders, edicts and criticisms.

The Humberts dwelt in an old, rambling farmhouse of five rooms: a locked parlor, cold and awful as doom, a hot, stuffy sitting room smelling always of pungent salves and patent medicines, two bedrooms and a large kitchen. The old people sat in cushioned rocking chairs and complained bitterly if Pat did not come in from the farm work to replenish the fire in the stove several times a day. Toward the end of their lives, they really hated Pat for being young.

They lived a long time. Pat was thirty when they died within a month of each other. They were unhappy and bitter and discontented with their lives, and yet each one clung tenaciously to the poor spark and only died after a long struggle.

There were two months of horror for Pat. For three weeks he nursed his mother while she lay rigid on the bed, her breath clattering in and out of her lungs. She watched him with stony, accusing eyes as he tried to make her comfortable. When she was dead, her eyes still accused him.

Pat unlocked the terrible parlor; the neighbors sat in rows before the coffin, a kind of audience, while the service went on. From the bedroom came the sound of old Mr. Humbert's peevish weeping.

The second period of nursing began immediately after the first funeral, and continued for three weeks more. Then the neighbors sat in rows before another coffin. Before the funerals, the parlor had always been locked except during the monthly cleaning. The blinds were drawn down to protect the green carpets from the sun. In the center of the room stood a gilt-legged marble topped table which bore, on a tapestry of Millet's “Angelus,” a huge Bible with a deeply tooled cover. On either side of the Bible sat squat vases holding tight bouquets of everlasting flowers. There were four straight chairs in the parlor, one against each of the four walls—two for the coffin and two for the watchers. Three large pictures in gilt frames hung on the walls: colored, enlarged photographs of each of the old Humberts looking stem and dead, but so taken that their eyes followed an intruder about the room. The third picture showed the corpse of Elaine in its boat on the thin sad river. The shroud hung over the gunwale and dipped into the water. On a comer table stood a tall glass bell in which three stuffed orioles sat on a cherry branch. So cold and sepulchral was this parlor that it had never been entered except by corpses and their attendants. It was indeed a little private mortuary chamber. Pat had seen three aunts and an uncle buried from that parlor.

Pat stood quietly by the graveside while his neighbors shaped up a tent of earth. Already his mother's grave had sunk a little, leaving a jagged crack all around its mound. The men were patting the new mound now, drawing a straight ridgepole and smoothing the slope of the sides. They were good workmen with the soil; they liked to make a good job with it whether it be furrow or grave mound. After it was perfect, they still walked about patting it lightly here and there. The women had gone back to the buggies and were waiting for their husbands to come. Each man walked up to Pat and shook his hand and murmured some solemn friendly thing to him. The wagons and surreys and buggies were all moving away now, disappearing one by one in the distance. Still Pat stood in the cemetery staring at the two graves. He didn't know what to do now there was no one to demand anything of him.