The Long Valley (14 page)

Once inside, the raiders were uneasy. They stood in a half-circle about the two men, scowling, waiting for some one to move.

Young Root glanced sidewise at Dick and saw that the older man was looking at him coldly, critically, as though he judged his deportment. Root shoved his trembling hands in his pockets. He forced himself forward. His voice was shrill with fright. “Comrades,” he shouted, “you’re just men like we are. We’re all brothers—” A piece of two-by-four lashed out and struck him on the side of the head with a fleshy thump. Root went down to his knees and steadied himself with his hands.

The men stood still, glaring.

Root climbed slowly to his feet. His split ear spilled a red stream down his neck. The side of his face was mushy and purple. He got himself erect again. His breath burst passionately. His hands were steady now, his voice sure and strong. His eyes were hot with an ecstasy. “Can’t you see?” he shouted. “It’s all for you. We’re doing it for you. All of it. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Kill the red rats!”

Some one giggled hysterically. And then the wave came. As he went down, Root caught a moment’s glimpse of Dick’s face smiling a tight, hard smile.

He came near the surface several times, but didn’t quite make it into consciousness. At last he opened his eyes and knew things. His face and head were heavy with bandages. He could only see a line of light between his puffed eyelids. For a time he lay, trying to think his way out. Then he heard Dick’s voice near to him.

“You awake, kid?”

Root tried his voice and found that it croaked pretty badly. “I guess so.”

“They sure worked out on your head. I thought you was gone. You was right about your nose. It ain’t going to be very pretty.”

“What’d they do to you, Dick?”

“Oh, they bust my arm and a couple of ribs. You got to learn to turn your face down to the ground. That saves your eyes.” He paused and drew a careful breath. “Hurts some to breathe when you get a rib bust. We are lucky. The cops picked us up and took us in.”

“Are we in jail, Dick?”

“Yeah! Hospital cell.”

“What they got on the book?”

He heard Dick try to chuckle, and gasp when it hurt him. “Inciting to riot. We’ll get six months, I guess. The cops got the lit’ature.”

“You won’t tell them I’m under age, will you, Dick?”

“No. I won’t. You better shut up. Your voice don’t sound so hot. Take it easy.”

Root lay silent, muffled in a coat of dull pain. But in a moment he spoke again. “It didn’t hurt, Dick. It was funny. I felt all full up—and good.”

“You done fine, kid. You done as good as anybody I ever seen. I’ll give you a blow to the committee. You just done fine.”

Root struggled to get something straight in his head. “When they was busting me I wanted to tell them I didn’t care.”

“Sure, kid. That’s what I told you. It wasn’t them. It was the System. You don’t want to hate them. They don’t know no better.”

Root spoke drowsily. The pain was muffling him under. “You remember in the Bible, Dick, how it says something like ‘Forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing’?”

Dick’s reply was stern. “You lay off that religion stuff, kid.” He quoted, “ ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ ”

“Sure, I know,” said Root. “But there wasn’t no religion to it. It was just—I felt like saying that. It was just kind of the way I felt.”

Peter Randall was one of the most highly respected farmers of Monterey County. Once, before he was to make a little speech at a Masonic convention, the brother who introduced him referred to him as an example for young Masons of California to emulate. He was nearing fifty; his manner was grave and restrained, and he wore a carefully tended beard. From every gathering he reaped the authority that belongs to the bearded man. Peter’s eyes were grave, too; blue and grave almost to the point of sorrowfulness. People knew there was force in him, but force held caged. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, his eyes grew sullen and mean, like the eyes of a bad dog; but that look soon passed, and the restraint and probity came back into his face. He was tall and broad. He held his shoulders back as though they were braced, and he sucked in his stomach like a soldier. Inasmuch as farmers are usually slouchy men, Peter gained an added respect because of his posture.

Concerning Peter’s wife, Emma, people generally agreed that it was hard to see how such a little skin-and-bones woman could go on living, particularly when she was sick most of the time. She weighed eighty-seven pounds. At forty-five, her face was as wrinkled and brown as that of an old, old woman, but her dark eyes were feverish with a determination to live. She was a proud woman, who complained very little. Her father had been a thirty-third degree Mason and Worshipful Master of the Grand Lodge of California. Before he died he had taken a great deal of interest in Peter’s Masonic career.

Once a year Peter went away for a week, leaving his wife alone on the farm. To neighbors who called to keep her company she invariably explained, “He’s away on a business trip.”

Each time Peter returned from a business trip, Emma was ailing for a month or two, and this was hard on Peter, for Emma did her own work and refused to hire a girl. When she was ill, Peter had to do the housework.

The Randall ranch lay across the Salinas River, next to the foothills. It was an ideal balance of bottom and upland. Forty-five acres of rich level soil brought from the cream of the county by the river in old times and spread out as flat as a board; and eighty acres of gentle upland for hay and orchard. The white farmhouse was as neat and restrained as its owners. The immediate yard was fenced, and in the garden, under Emma’s direction, Peter raised button dahlias and immortelles, carnations and pinks.

From the front porch one could look down over the flat to the river with its sheath of willows and cottonwoods, and across the river to the beet fields, and past the fields to the bulbous dome of the Salinas courthouse. Often in the afternoon Emma sat in a rocking-chair on the front porch, until the breeze drove her in. She knitted constantly, looking up now and then to watch Peter working on the flat or in the orchard, or on the slope below the house.

The Randall ranch was no more encumbered with mortgage than any of the others in the valley. The crops, judiciously chosen and carefully tended, paid the interest, made a reasonable living and left a few hundred dollars every year toward paying off the principal. It was no wonder that Peter Randall was respected by his neighbors and that his seldom spoken words were given attention even when they were about the weather or the way things were going. Let Peter, say, “I’m going to kill a pig Saturday,” and nearly every one of his hearers went home and killed a pig on Saturday. They didn’t know why, but if Peter Randall was going to kill a pig, it seemed like a good, safe, conservative thing to do.

Peter and Emma were married for twenty-one years. They collected a houseful of good furniture, a number of framed pictures, vases of all shapes, and books of a sturdy type. Emma had no children. The house was unscarred, uncarved, unchalked. On the front and back porches footscrapers and thick cocoa-fiber mats kept dirt out of the house.

In the intervals between her illnesses, Emma saw to it that the house was kept up. The hinges of doors and cupboards were oiled, and no screws were gone from the catches. The furniture and woodwork were freshly varnished once a year. Repairs were usually made after Peter came home from his yearly business trips.

Whenever the word went around among the farms that Emma was sick again, the neighbors waylaid the doctor as he drove by on the river road.

“Oh, I guess she’ll be all right,” he answered their questions. “She’ll have to stay in bed for a couple of weeks.”

The good neighbors took cakes to the Randall farm, and they tiptoed into the sickroom, where the little skinny bird of a woman lay in a tremendous walnut bed. She looked at them with her bright little dark eyes.

“Wouldn’t you like the curtains up a little, dear?” they asked.

“No, thank you. The light worries my eyes.”

“Is there anything we can do for you?”

“No, thank you. Peter does for me very well.”

“Just remember, if there’s anything you think of—”

Emma was such a tight woman. There was nothing you could do for her when she was ill, except to take pies and cakes to Peter. Peter would be in the kitchen, wearing a neat, clean apron. He would be filling a hot water bottle or making junket.

And so, one fall, when the news traveled that Emma was down, the farm-wives baked for Peter and prepared to make their usual visits.

Mrs. Chappell, the next farm neighbor, stood on the river road when the doctor drove by. “How’s Emma Randall, doctor?”

“I don’t think she’s so very well, Mrs. Chappell. I think she’s a pretty sick woman.”

Because to Dr. Marn anyone who wasn’t actually a corpse was well on the road to recovery, the word went about among the farms that Emma Randall was going to die.

It was a long, terrible illness. Peter himself gave enemas and carried bedpans. The doctor’s suggestion that a nurse be employed met only beady, fierce refusal in the eyes of the patient; and, ill as she was, her demands were respected. Peter fed her and bathed her, and made up the great walnut bed. The bedroom curtains remained drawn.

It was two months before the dark, sharp bird eyes veiled, and the sharp mind retired into unconsciousness. And only then did a nurse come to the house. Peter was lean and sick himself, not far from collapse. The neighbors brought him cakes and pies, and found them uneaten in the kitchen when they called again.

Mrs. Chappell was in the house with Peter the afternoon Emma died. Peter became hysterical immediately. Mrs. Chappell telephoned the doctor, and then she called her husband to come and help her, for Peter was wailing like a crazy man, and beating his bearded cheeks with his fists. Ed Chappell was ashamed when he saw him.

Peter’s beard was wet with his tears. His loud sobbing could be heard throughout the house. Sometimes he sat by the bed and covered his head with a pillow, and sometimes he paced the floor of the bedroom bellowing like a calf. When Ed Chappell self-consciously put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come on, Peter, come on, now,” in a helpless voice, Peter shook his hand off. The doctor drove out and signed the certificate.

When the undertaker came, they had a devil of a time with Peter. He was half mad. He fought them when they tried to take the body away. It was only after Ed Chappell and the undertaker held him down while the doctor stuck him with a hypodermic, that they were able to remove Emma.

The morphine didn’t put Peter to sleep. He sat hunched in the corner, breathing heavily and staring at the floor.

“Who’s going to stay with him?” the doctor asked. “Miss Jack?” to the nurse.

“I couldn’t handle him, doctor, not alone.”

“Will you stay, Chappell?”

“Sure, I’ll stay.”

“Well, look. Here are some triple bromides. If he gets going again, give him one of these. And if they don’t work, here’s some sodium amytal. One of these capsules will calm him down.”

Before they went away, they helped the stupefied Peter into the sitting-room and laid him gently down on a sofa. Ed Chappell sat in an easy-chair and watched him. The bromides and a glass of water were on the table beside him.

The little sitting-room was clean and dusted. Only that morning Peter had swept the floor with pieces of damp newspaper. Ed built a little fire in the grate, and put on a couple of pieces of oak when the flames were well started. The dark had come early. A light rain spattered against the windows when the wind drove it. Ed trimmed the kerosene lamps and turned the flames low. In the grate the blaze snapped and crackled and the flames curled like hair over the oak. For a long time Ed sat in his easy-chair watching Peter where he lay drugged on the couch. At last Ed dozed off to sleep.

It was about ten o’clock when he awakened. He started up and looked toward the sofa. Peter was sitting up, looking at him. Ed’s hand went out toward the bromide bottle, but Peter shook his head.

“No need to give me anything, Ed. I guess the doctor slugged me pretty hard, didn’t he? I feel all right now, only a little dopey.”

“If you just take one of these you’ll get some sleep.”

“I don’t want sleep.” He fingered his draggled beard and then stood up. “I’ll go out and wash my face, then I’ll feel better.”

Ed heard him running water in the kitchen. In a moment he came back into the living-room, still drying his face on a towel. Peter was smiling curiously. It was an expression Ed had never seen on him before, a quizzical, wondering smile. “I guess I kind of broke loose when she died, didn’t I?” Peter said.

“Well—yes, you carried on some.”

“It seemed like something snapped inside of me,” Peter explained. “Something like a suspender strap. It made me all come apart. I’m all right, now, though.”

Ed looked down at the floor and saw a little brown spider crawling, and stretched out his foot and stomped it.

Peter asked suddenly, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

Ed Chappell squirmed. He didn’t like to talk about such things, for to talk about them was to bring them up in his mind and think about them. “Well, yes. I suppose if you come right down to it, I do.”

“Do you believe that somebody that’s—passed on—can look down and see what we’re doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know as I’d go that far—I don’t know.”

Peter went on as though he were talking to himself. “Even if she could see me, and I didn’t do what she wanted, she ought to feel good because I did it when she was here. It ought to please her that she made a good man of me. If I wasn’t a good man when she wasn’t here, that’d prove she did it all, wouldn’t it? I was a good man, wasn’t I, Ed?”