The Pastures of Heaven (25 page)

Now that he was ready, a powerful reluctance stopped him. Evening after evening passed while he put off asking her to come. He went through his play until he knew exactly where she would stand, how she would look, what she would say. He had alternative things she might say. A week went by, and still he put off the visit that would bring her to see his room.

One afternoon he built up his courage with layers of will. “I can't put it off forever. I better go tonight.” After dinner, he put on his best suit and set out to walk to the Munroe house. It was only a quarter of a mile away. He wouldn't ask her for tonight. He wanted to have the fire burning and the lamps lighted when she arrived. The night was cold and very dark. When Pat stumbled in the dust of the road, he thought with dismay how his polished shoes would look.

There were a great many lights in the Munroe house. In front of the gate, a number of cars were parked. “It's a party,” Pat said to himself, “I'll ask her some other night. I couldn't do it in front of a lot of people.” For a moment he even considered turning back. “It would look funny though, if I asked her the first time I saw her in months. She might suspect something.”

When he entered the house, Bert Munroe grasped him by the hand. “It's Pat Humbert,” he shouted. “Where have you been keeping yourself, Pat?”

“I've been studying at night.”

“Well it's lucky you came over. I was going to go over to see you tomorrow. You heard the news, of course!”

“What news?”

“Why, Mae and Bill Whiteside are going to get married next Saturday. I was going to ask you to help at the wedding. It'll just be a home affair with refreshments afterwards. You used to help at the schoolhouse all the time before you got this studying streak.” He took Pat's arm and tried to lead him down the hall. The sound of a number of voices came from the room at the end of the hall.

Pat resisted firmly. He exerted all his training in the offhand manner. “That's fine, Mr. Munroe. Next Saturday, you say? I'd be glad to help. No, I can't stay now. I got to run to the store right away.” He shook hands again and walked slowly out the door.

In his misery he wanted to hide for a while, to burrow into some dark place where no one could see him. His way was automatically homeward. The rambling house was dark and unutterably dreary when he arrived. Pat went into the barn and with deliberate steps climbed the short ladder and lay down in the hay. His mind was shrunken and dry with disappointment. Above all things he did not want to go into the house. He was afraid he might lock up the door again. And then, in all the years to come, two puzzled spirits would live in the beautiful room, and in his kitchen, Pat would understand how they gazed wistfully into the ghost of a fire.

When Richard Whiteside came to the far West in '50, he inspected the gold workings and gave them up as objects for his effort. “The earth gives only one crop of gold,” he said. “When that crop is divided among a thousand tenants, it feeds no one for very long. This is bad husbandry.”

Richard drove about over the fields and hills of California; in his mind there was the definite intention of founding a house for children not yet born and for their children. Few people in California in that day felt a responsibility toward their descendants.

On the evening of a fine clear day, he drove his two bay horses to the top of the little hills which surround the Pastures of Heaven. He pulled up his team and gazed down on the green valley. And Richard knew that he had found his home. In his wandering about the country he had come upon many beautiful places, but none of them had given him this feeling of consummation. He remembered the colonists from Athens and from Lacedaemon looking for new lands described by vague oracles; he thought of the Aztecs plodding forward after their guiding eagle. Richard said to himself, “Now if there could be a sign, it would be perfect. I know this is the place, but if only there could be an omen to remember and to tell the children.” He looked into the sky, but it was clean of both birds and clouds. Then the breeze that blows over the hills in the evening sprang up. The oaks made furtive little gestures toward the valley, and on the hillside a tiny whirlwind picked up a few leaves and flung them forward. Richard chuckled. “Answer! Many a fine city was founded because of a hint from the gods no more broad than that.”

After a little while he climbed out of his light wagon and unhitched his horses. Once hobbled, they moved off with little mincing steps toward the grass at the side of the road. Richard ate a supper of cold ham and bread, and afterwards he unrolled his blankets and laid them on the grass of the hillside. As the grey dusk thickened in the valley, he lay on his bed and gazed down on the Pastures of Heaven which was to be his home. On the far side, near a grove of fine oaks was the place; behind the chosen spot there was a hill and a little brushy crease, a stream surely. The light became uncertain and magical. Richard saw a beautiful white house with a trim garden in front of it and nearby, the white tower of a tank house. There were little yellow lights in the windows, little specks of welcoming lights. The broad front door opened, and a whole covey of children walked out on the veranda—at least six children. They peered out into the growing darkness, looked particularly up at the hill where Richard lay on his blankets. After a moment they went back into the house, and the door shut behind them. With the closing of the door, the house, the garden and the white tank house disappeared. Richard sighed with contentment and lay on his back. The sky was prickling with stars.

For a week Richard drove furiously about the valley. He bought two hundred and fifty acres in the Pastures of Heaven; he drove to Monterey to have the title searched and the deed recorded, and, when the land was surely his, he visited an architect.

It took six months to build his house, to carpet and furnish it, to bore a well and build the towering tank house over it. There were workmen about the Whiteside place the whole first year of Richard's ownership. The land was untouched with seed.

A neighbor who was worried by this kind of procedure drove over and confronted the new owner. “Going to have your family come out, Mr. Whiteside?”

“I haven't any family,” said Richard. “My parents are dead. I have no wife.”

“Then what the hell are you building a big house like that for?”

Richard's face grew stem. “I'm going to live here. I've come to stay. My children and their children and theirs will live in this house. There will be a great many Whitesides born here, and a great many will die here. Properly cared for, the house will last five hundred years.”

“I see what you mean, all right,” said the neighbor. “It sounds fine, but that's not how we work out here. We build a little shack, and if the land pays, we build a little more on it. It isn't good to put too much into a place. You might want to move.”

“I don't want to move,” Richard cried. “That's just what I'm building against. I shall build a structure so strong that neither I nor my descendants will be able to move. As a precaution, I shall be buried here when I die. Men find it hard to leave the graves of their fathers.” His face softened. “Why, man, don't you see what I'm doing? I'm founding a dynasty. I'm building a family and a family seat that will survive, not forever, but for several centuries at least. It pleases me, when I build this house, to know that my descendants will walk on its floors, that children whose great grandfathers aren't conceived will be born in it. I'll build the germ of a tradition into my house.” Richard's eyes were sparkling as he talked. The pounding of carpenter's hammers punctuated his speech.

The neighbor thought he was dealing with a madman, but he felt a kind of reverence for the madness. He desired to salute it in some manner. Had he not been an American, he would have touched his hat with two fingers. This man's two grown sons were cutting timber three hundred miles away, and his daughter had married and gone to Nevada. His family was broken up before it was really started.

Richard built his house of redwood, which does not decay. He modeled it after the style of the fine country houses of New England, but, as a tribute to the climate of the Pastures of Heaven, he surrounded the whole building with a wide veranda. The roof was only temporarily shingled, but, as soon as his order could be received in Boston and a ship could get back again, the shingles were ripped off and eastern slate substituted. This roof was an important and symbolic thing to Richard. To the people of the valley the slate roof was the show piece of the country. More than anything else it made Richard Whiteside the first citizen of the valley. This man was steady, and his home was here. He didn't intend to run off to a new gold field. Why—his roof was slate. Besides, he was an educated man. He had been to Harvard. He had money, and he had the faith to build a big, luxurious house in the valley. He would rule the land. He was the founder and patriarch of a family, and his roof was of slate. The people appreciated and valued the Pastures of Heaven more because of the slate roof. Had Richard been a politician with a desire for local preferment, he could have made no more astute move than thus roofing his house with slate. It glimmered darkly in the rain; the sun made a steel mirror of it.

Finally the house was finished, two hired men were set to planting the orchards and to preparing the land for seed. A little band of sheep nibbled the grass on the hillside behind the house. Richard knew that his preparation was complete. He was ready for a wife. When a letter came from a distant relative, saying he had arrived in San Francisco with his wife and daughter and would be glad to see Richard, Richard knew he need not search farther. Before he went to San Francisco, he knew he would marry that daughter. It was the fit thing. There would be no accidents of blood if he married this girl.

Although they went through the form of courtship, the matter was settled as soon as they met. Alicia was glad to leave the domination of her mother and to begin a domestic empire of her own. The house had been made for her. She had not been in it twenty-four hours before she had spread scalloped and perforated papers on the pantry shelves, of the exact kind Richard remembered in his mother's pantry. She ordered the house in the old, comfortable manner, the unchangeable, the cyclic manner—washing Monday, ironing Tuesday and so forth—carpets up and beaten twice a year; jams, tomatoes and pickles preserved and shelved in the basement every fall. The farm prospered, the sheep and cows increased, and in the garden, bachelor buttons, sweet william, carnations, hollyhocks settled down to a yearly blooming. And Alicia was going to have a baby.

Richard had known all this would happen. The dynasty was established. The chimneys wore black smudges around their crowns. The fireplace in the sitting room smoked just enough to fill the house with a delicious incense of wood smoke. The great meerschaum pipe his father-in-law had given him was turning from its new, chalky white to a rich, creamy yellow.

When the child was coming, Richard treated Alicia almost like an invalid. In the evening when they sat before the fire, he tucked a robe about her feet. His great fear was that something would go wrong with the bearing of the child. They talked of the picture she should look at to influence the appearance of the firstling, and, to surprise her, Richard sent to San Francisco for a little bronze copy of the Michelangelo
David.
Alicia blushed at its nakedness, but before very long she became passionately fond of the little figure. When she went to bed it stood on her bedside table. During the day she took it from room to room with her as she worked, and in the evening it stood on the mantel in the sitting room. Often when she gazed at its clean, hard limbs a tiny smile of knowledge and of seeking came and went on her face. She was thoroughly convinced that her child would look like the
David.

Richard sat beside her and stroked her hand soothingly. She liked to have him stroke the palm of her hand, firmly enough so it did not tickle. He talked to her quietly. “The curse is removed,” he said. “You know, Alicia, my people, and yours a little farther removed, lived in one house for a hundred and thirty years. From that central hearth our blood was mingled with the good true blood of New England. One time my father told me that seventy-three children were born in the house. Our family multiplied until my grandfather's time. My father was an only child, and I was an only child. It was the sadness of my father's life. He was only sixty when he died, Alicia, and I was his only child. When I was twenty-five and hadn't really begun to live, the old house burned down. I don't know what started the fire.” He laid her hand down on the arm of his chair as gently as though it were a weak little animal. An ember had rolled out of the fireplace and off the brick hearth. He pushed it back among the other coals and then took up Alicia's hand again. She smiled faintly at the
David
on the mantel.

“There was a practice in ancient times,” Richard continued. His voice became soft and far away as though he spoke from those ancient times. Later in life Alicia could tell by the set of his head, by the tone of his voice and by his expression when he was about to speak of ancient times. For the Ancient Times of Herodotus, of Xenophon, of Thucydides were personal things to him. In the illiterate West the stories of Herodotus were as new as though he had invented them. He read the Persian War, the Peloponnesian Wars and the Ten Thousand every year. Now he stroked Alicia's hand a little more firmly.

“In ancient times when, through continued misfortunes, the people of a city came to believe themselves under a curse or even under disfavor of some god, they put all of their movable possessions in ships and sailed away to found a new city. They left their old city vacant and open to anyone who wanted it.”