The Pastures of Heaven (23 page)

Fall was in the air, the sharp smell of it and the little jerky winds of it breathing up and then dying in mid-blow. Wild doves sat in a line on the cemetery fence all facing one way, all motionless. A piece of old brown newspaper scudded along the ground and clung about Pat's ankles. He stooped and picked it off, looked at it for a moment and then threw it away. The sound of grating buggy wheels came from the road. T. B. Allen tied his horse to the fence and walked up to Pat. “We thought you'd be going someplace tonight,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “If you feel like it, we'd like you to come to supper at our house—and stay the night, too.”

Pat started out of the coma that had fallen on him. “I should be going away from here,” he said. He fumbled for another thought. “I'm not doing any good here.”

“It's better to get away from it,” Allen said.

“It's hard to leave, Mr. Allen. It's a thing you'll sometimes want to remember, and other times you'll want to forget it, I guess. But it's hard to leave because then you know it's all over—forever.”

“Well, why don't you come to supper over at our house?”

All of Pat's guards were down; he confessed, “I never had supper away from home in my life. They”—he nodded toward the graves—“They didn't like to be out after dark. Night air wasn't good for them.”

“Then maybe it would be good for you to eat at our house. You shouldn't go back to the empty place, at least not tonight. A man ought to save himself a little.” He took Pat's arm and swung him toward the gate. “You follow me in your wagon.” And as they went out of the gate a little elegy escaped from him. “It's a fit thing to die in the fall,” he said. “It wouldn't be good to die in the spring and never to know about the rainfall nor how the crops shaped. But in the fall everything's over.”

“They wouldn't care, Mr. Allen. They didn't ever ask about the crops, and they hated the rain because of their rheumatism. They just wanted to live. I don't know why.”

For supper there were cold cuts of beef, and potatoes fried raw with a few onions, and bread pudding with raisins. Mrs. Allen tried to help Pat in his trouble by speaking often of his parents, of how good and kind they were, of his father's honesty and his mother's famous cookery. Pat knew she was lying about them to help him, and he didn't need it. He was in no agony of grief. The thick lethargy still hung over him so that it was a great effort to move or to speak.

He was remembering something that had happened at the funeral. When the pall-bearers lifted the casket from its two chairs, one of the men tripped against the marble-topped table. The accident tipped over one of the vases of everlastings and pushed the Bible askew on its tapestry. Pat knew that in decency he should restore the old order. The chairs should be pushed against their walls and the Bible set straight. Finally he should lock up the parlor again. The memory of his mother demanded these things of him.

The Aliens urged him to stay the night, but after a while, he bade them a listless good night and dragged himself out to harness his horse. The sky was black and cold between the sharp stars, and the hills hummed faintly under a lowering temperature. Through his lethargy, Pat heard the clopping of the horse's hooves on the road, the crying of night birds and the whisk of wind through the drying leaves. But more real to him were his parents' voices sounding in his head. “There'll be frost,” his father said. “I hate the frost worse than rats.” And his mother chimed in, “Speaking of rats—I have a feeling there's rats in the cellar. I wonder if Pat has set the traps this year past. I told him to, but he forgets everything I tell him.”

Pat answered the voices. “I put poison in the cellar. Traps aren't as good as poison.”

“A cat is best,” his mother's whining voice said. “I don't know why we never have a cat or two. Pat never has a cat.”

“I get cats, mother, but they eat gophers and go wild and run away. I can't keep cats.”

The house was black and unutterably dreary when he arrived. Pat lighted the reflector lamp and built a fire in the stove to warm the kitchen. As the flame roared through the wood, he sank into a chair and found that he was very comfortable. It would be nice, he thought, to bring his bed into the kitchen and to sleep beside the stove. The straightening of the house could be done tomorrow, or any day for that matter.

When he threw open the door into the sitting room, a wave of cold, lifeless air met him. His nostrils were assailed by the smell of funeral flowers and age and medicine. He walked quickly to his bedroom and carried his cot into the warm and lighted kitchen.

After a while Pat blew out the light and went to bed. The fire cricked softly in the stove. For a time the night was still, and then gradually the house began to swarm with malignant life. Pat discovered that his body was tense and cold. He was listening for sounds from the sitting room, for the creak of the rocking chairs and for the loud breathing of the old people. The house cracked, and although he had been listening for sounds, Pat started violently. His head and legs became damp with perspiration. Silently and miserably he crept from his bed and locked the door into the sitting room. Then he went back to his cot and lay shivering under the covers. The night had become very still, and he was lonely.

The next morning Pat awakened with a cold sense of duty to be performed. He tried to remember what it was. Of course, it was the Bible lying off-center on its table. That should be put straight. The vase of everlastings should be set upright, and after that the whole house should be cleaned. Pat knew he should do these things in spite of the reluctance he felt for opening the door into the sitting room. His mind shrank from the things he would see when he opened the door—the two rocking chairs, one on either side of the stove; the pillows in the chair seats would be holding the impressions of his parents' bodies. He knew the odors of age and of unguents and of stale flowers that were waiting for him on the other side of the door. But the thing was a duty. It must be done.

He built a fire and made his breakfast. It was while he drank the hot coffee that a line of reasoning foreign to his old manner of life came to him. The unusual thoughts that thronged upon him astounded him at once for their audacity and for their simplicity.

“Why should I go in there?” he demanded. “There's no one to care, no one even to know. I don't have to go in there if I don't want to.” He felt like a boy who breaks school to walk in a deep and satisfying forest. But to combat his freedom, his mother's complaining voice came to his ears. “Pat ought to clean the house. Pat never takes care of things.”

The joy of revolt surged up in him. “You're dead!” he told the voice. “You're just something that's happening in my mind. Nobody can expect me to do things any more. Nobody will ever know if I don't do things I ought to. I'm not going in there, and I'm never going in there.” And while the spirit was still strong in him, he strode to the door, plucked out the key and threw it into the tall weeds behind the house. He closed the shutters on all the windows except those in the kitchen, and nailed them shut with long spikes.

The joy of his new freedom did not last long. In the daytime the farm work kept him busy, but before the day was out, he grew lonely for the old duties which ate up the hours and made the time short. He knew he was afraid to go into the house, afraid of those impressions in the cushions and of the disarranged Bible. He had locked up two thin old ghosts, but he had not taken away their power to trouble him.

That night, after he had cooked his supper, he sat beside the stove. An appalling loneliness like a desolate fog fell upon him. He listened to the stealthy sounds in the old house, the whispers and little knockings. So tensely did he listen that after a while he could hear the chairs rocking in the other room, and once he made out the rasping sound of a lid being unscrewed from a jar of salve. Pat could not stand it any longer. He went to the barn, harnessed his horse and drove to the Pastures of Heaven General Store.

Three men sat around the fat-bellied stove, contemplating its corrugations with rapt abstraction. They made room for Pat to draw up a chair. None of the men looked at him, because a man in mourning deserves the same social immunities a cripple does. Pat settled himself in his chair and gazed at the stove. “Remind me to get some flour before I go,” he said.

All of the men knew what he meant. They knew he didn't need flour, but each one of them, under similar circumstances, would have made some such excuse. T. B. Allen opened the stove door and looked in and then spat on the coals. “A house like that is pretty lonely at first,” he observed. Pat felt grateful to him although his words constituted a social blunder.

“I'll need some tobacco and some shotgun shells, too, Mr. Allen,” he said by way of payment.

Pat changed his habits of living after that. Determinedly he sought groups of men. During the daytime he worked on his farm, but at night he was invariably to be found where two or three people were gathered. When a dance or a party was given at the schoolhouse, Pat arrived early and stayed until the last man was gone. He sat at the house of John Whiteside; he arrived first at fires. On election days he stayed at the polls until they closed. Wherever a group of people gathered, Pat was sure to show up. From constant stalking of company he came to have almost an instinct for discovering excitements which would draw crowds.

Pat was a homely man, gangling, big-nosed and heavy-jawed. He looked very much like Lincoln as a young man. His figure was as unfitted for clothes as Lincoln's was. His nostrils and ears were large and full of hair. They looked as though furry little animals were hiding in them. Pat had no conversation; he knew he added little to the gatherings he frequented, and he tried to make up for his lack by working, by doing favors, by arranging things. He liked to be appointed to committees for arranging school dances, for then he could call on the other committeemen to discuss plans; he could spend evenings decorating the school or running about the valley borrowing chairs from one family and dishes from another. If on any evening he could find no gathering to join, he drove his Ford truck to Salinas and sat through two moving-picture shows. After those first two nights of fearful loneliness, he never spent another evening in his closed-up house. The memory of the Bible, of the waiting chairs, or the years-old smells were terrifying to him.

For ten years Pat Humbert drove about the valley in search of company. He had himself elected to the school board; he joined the Masons and the Odd Fellows in Salinas and was never known to miss a meeting.

In spite of his craving for company, Pat never became a part of any group he joined. Rather he hung on the fringes, never speaking unless he was addressed. The people of the valley considered his presence inevitable. They used him unmercifully and hardly knew that he wished nothing better.

When the gatherings were over, when Pat was finally forced home, he drove his Ford into the barn and then rushed to bed. He tried with little success to forget the terrible rooms on the other side of the door. The picture of them edged into his mind sometimes. The dust would be thick now, and the cobwebs would be strung in all the corners and on all the furniture. When the vision invaded and destroyed his defenses before he could go to sleep, Pat shivered in his bed and tried every little soporific formula he knew.

Since he so hated his house, Pat took no care of it. The old building lay moldering with neglect. A white Banksia rose, which for years had been a stubby little bush, came suddenly to life and climbed up the front of the house. It covered the porch, hung festoons over the closed windows and dropped long streamers from the eaves. Within ten years the house looked like a huge mound of roses. People passing by on the county road paused to marvel at its size and beauty. Pat hardly knew about the rose. He refused to think about the house when he could refuse.

The Humbert farm was a good one. Pat kept it well and made money from it, and, since his expenses were small, he had quite a few thousand dollars in the bank. He loved the farm for itself, but he also loved it because it kept him from fear in the daytime. When he was working, the terror of being solitary, the freezing loneliness, could not attack him. He raised good fruit, but his berries were his chief interest. The lines of supported vines paralleled the county road. Every year he was able to market his berries earlier than anyone in the valley.

Pat was forty years old when the Munroes came into the valley. He welcomed them as his neighbors. Here was another house to which he might go to pass an evening. And since Bert Munroe was a friendly man, he liked to have Pat drop in to visit. Pat was a good farmer. Bert often asked his advice. Pat did not take very careful notice of Mae Munroe except to see, and to forget, that she was a pretty girl. He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.

One afternoon when the summer was dawning, Pat worked among his berry vines. He kneeled between the rows of vines and dug among the berry roots with a hoe. The berries were fast forming now, and the leaves were pale green and lovely. Pat worked slowly down the row. He was contented with the work, and he did not dread the coming night for he was to have supper at the Munroe house. As he worked he heard voices from the road. Although he was concealed among the vines, he knew from the tones that Mrs. Munroe and her daughter Mae were strolling by his house. Suddenly he heard Mae exclaim with pleasure.

“Mama, look at that!” Pat ceased his work to listen. “Did you ever see such a beautiful rose in your life, Mama?”

“It's pretty, all right,” Mrs. Munroe said.

“I've just thought what it reminds me of,” Mae continued. “Do you remember the postcard of that lovely house in Vermont? Uncle Keller sent it. This house, with the rose over it, looks just like that house in the picture. I'd like to see the inside of it.”