The Pastures of Heaven (14 page)

“Yes, and it is good, too,” said Jakob.

Junius laid a hand on his hired man's knee. “Those horses,” he said. “Those lovely horses—bound for a celestial pasture. Those eager and yet dignified young men setting out for an incredible fiesta that's being celebrated just around the cornice. I wonder how a man can know what a horse feels like when it is very happy; and that sculptor must have known or he couldn't have carved them so.”

That was the way it went. Junius could not stay on a subject. Often the men went hungry because they failed to find a hen's nest in the grass when it came suppertime.

The son of Junius was named Robert Louis. Junius called him that when he thought of it, but Jakob Stutz rebelled at what he considered a kind of literary preciousness. “Boys must be named like dogs,” he maintained. “One sound is sufficient for the name. Even Robert is too long. He should be called ‘Bob.' ” Jakob nearly got his way.

“I'll compromise with you,” said Junius. “We'll call him Robbie. Robbie is really shorter than Robert, don't you think?”

 

He often gave way before Jakob, for Jakob continually struggled a little against the webs that were being spun about him. Now and then, with a kind of virtuous fury, he cleaned the house.

 

Robbie grew up gravely. He followed the men about, listening to their discussions. Junius never treated him like a little boy, because he didn't know how little boys should be treated. If Robbie made an observation the two men listened courteously and included the remark in their conversation, or even used it as the germ of an investigation. They tracked down many things in the course of an afternoon. Every day there were several raids on Junius' Encyclopedia.

A huge sycamore put out a horizontal limb over the meadow stream, and on it the three sat, the men hanging their feet into the water and moving pebbles with their toes while Robbie tried extravagantly to imitate them. Reaching the water was one of his criteria of manhood. Jakob had by this time given up shoes; Robbie had never worn any in his life.

The discussions were erudite. Robbie couldn't use childish talk, for he had never heard any. They didn't make conversation ; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange fruit their conversation bore, for they didn't direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many people do.

There on the limb the three sat. Their clothes were rags and their hair was only hacked off to keep it out of their eyes. The men wore long, untrimmed beards. They watched the water-skaters on the surface of the pool below them, a pool which had been deepened by idling toes. The giant tree above them whisked softly in the wind, and occasionally dropped a leaf like a brown handkerchief. Robbie was five years old.

“I think sycamore trees are good,” he observed when a leaf fell in his lap. Jakob picked up the leaf and stripped the parchment from its ribs.

“Yes,” he agreed, “they grow by water. Good things love water. Bad things always been dry.”

“Sycamores are big and good,” said Junius. “It seems to me that a good thing or a kind thing must be very large to survive. Little good things are always destroyed by evil little things. Rarely is a big thing poisonous or treacherous. For this reason, in human thinking, bigness is an attribute of good and littleness of evil. Do you see that, Robbie?”

“Yes,” said Robbie. “I see that. Like elephants.”

“Elephants are often evil, but when we think of them, they seem gentle and good.”

“But water,” Jakob broke in. “Do you see about water too?”

“No, not about water.”

“But I see,” said Junius. “You mean that water is the seed of life. Of the three elements water is the sperm, earth the womb and sunshine the mold of growth.”

Thus they taught him nonsense.

The people of the Pastures of Heaven recoiled from Junius Maltby after the death of his wife and his two boys. Stories of his callousness during the epidemic grew to such proportions that eventually they fell down of their own weight and were nearly forgotten. But although his neighbors forgot that Junius had read while his children died, they could not forget the problem he was becoming. Here in the fertile valley he lived in fearful poverty. While other families built small fortunes, bought Fords and radios, put in electricity and went twice a week to the moving pictures in Monterey or Salinas, Junius degenerated and became a ragged savage. The men of the valley resented his good bottom land, all overgrown with weeds, his untrimmed fruit trees and his fallen fences. The women thought with loathing of his unclean house with its littered dooryard and dirty windows. Both men and women hated his idleness and his complete lack of pride. For a while they went to visit him, hoping by their near examples to drag him from his sloth-fulness. But he received them naturally and with the friendliness of equality. He wasn't a bit ashamed of his poverty nor of his rags. Gradually his neighbors came to think of Junius as an outcast. No one drove up the private road to his house any more. They outlawed him from decent society and resolved never to receive him should he visit them.

Junius knew nothing about the dislike of his neighbors. He was still gloriously happy. His life was as unreal, as romantic and as unimportant as his thinking. He was content to sit in the sun and to dangle his feet in the stream. If he had no good clothes, at least he had no place to go which required good clothes.

Although the people almost hated Junius, they had only pity for the little boy Robbie. The women told one another how horrible it was to let the child grow up in such squalor. But, because they were mostly good people, they felt a strong reluctance for interfering with Junius' affairs.

“Wait until he's school age,” Mrs. Banks said to a group of ladies in her own parlor. “We couldn't do anything now if we wanted to. He belongs to that father of his. But just as soon as the child is six, the county'll have something to say, let me tell you.”

Mrs. Allen nodded and closed her eyes earnestly. “We keep forgetting that he's Mamie Quaker's child as much as Maltby's. I think we should have stepped in long ago. But when he goes to school we'll give the poor little fellow a few things he never had.”

“The least we can do is to see that he has enough clothes to cover him,” another of the women agreed.

It seemed that the valley lay crouched in waiting for the time when Robbie should go to school. When, at term opening, after his sixth birthday, he did not appear, John Whiteside, the clerk of the school board, wrote a letter to Junius Maltby.

“I hadn't thought of it,” Junius said when he read it. “I guess you'll have to go to school.”

“I don't want to go,” said Robbie.

“I know. I don't much want you to go, either. But we have laws. The law has a self-protective appendage called penalty. We have to balance the pleasure of breaking the law against the punishment. The Carthaginians punished even misfortune. If a general lost a battle through bad luck, he was executed. At present we punish people for accidents of birth and circumstance in much the same manner.”

In the ensuing discussion they forgot all about the letter. John Whiteside wrote a very curt note.

“Well, Robbie, I guess you'll have to go,” said Junius, when he received it. “Of course they'll teach you a great many useful things.”

“Why don't you teach me?” Robbie pleaded.

“Oh, I can't. You see I've forgotten the things they teach.”

 

“I don't want to go at all. I don't want to learn things.”

“I know you don't, but I can't see any other way out.”

And so one morning Robbie trudged to school. He was clad in an ancient pair of overalls, out at the knees and seat, a blue shirt from which the collar was gone, and nothing else. His long hair hung over his grey eyes like the forelock of a range pony.

The children made a circle around him in the school yard and stared at him in silence. They had all heard of the poverty of the Maltbys and of Junius' laziness. The boys looked forward to this moment when they could torture Robbie. Here was the time come; he stood in their circle, and they only stared at him. No one said, “Where'd you get them clothes,” or, “Look at his hair,” the way they had intended to. The children were puzzled by their failure to torment Robbie.

 

As for Robbie, he regarded the circle with serious eyes. He was not in the least frightened. “Don't you play games?” he asked. “My father said you'd play games.”

And then the circle broke up with howls. “He doesn't know any games.”—“Let's teach him pewee.”—“No, nigger-baby.” “Listen! Listen! Prisoner's base first.”—“He doesn't know any games.”

And, although they didn't know why, they thought it rather a fine thing not to know games. Robbie's thin face was studious. “We'll try pewee first,” he decided. He was clumsy at the new games, but his teachers did not hoot at him. Instead they quarreled for the privilege of showing him how to hold the pewee stick. There are several schools of technique in pewee. Robbie stood aside listening for a while, and at last chose his own instructor.

Robbie's effect on the school was immediate. The older boys let him entirely alone, but the younger ones imitated him in everything, even tearing holes in the knees of their overalls. When they sat in the sun with their backs to the school wall, eating their lunches, Robbie told them about his father and about the sycamore tree. They listened intently and wished their fathers were lazy and gentle, too.

Sometimes a few of the boys, disobeying the orders of their parents, sneaked up to the Maltby place on a Saturday. Junius gravitated naturally to the sycamore limb, and while they sat on both sides of him, he read
Treasure Island
to them, or described the Gallic wars or the battle of Trafalgar. In no time at all, Robbie, with the backing of his father, became the king of the school yard. This is demonstrated by the facts that he had no chum, that they gave him no nickname, and that he arbitrated all the disputes. So exalted was his station that no one even tried to fight with him.

Only gradually did Robbie come to realize that he was the leader of the younger boys of the school. Something self-possessed and mature about him made his companions turn to him for leadership. It wasn't long before his was the voice which decided the game to be played. In baseball he was the umpire for the reason that no other boy could make a ruling without causing a riot. And while he played the games badly himself, questions of rules and ethics were invariably referred to him.

 

After a lengthy discussion with Junius and Jakob, Robbie invented two vastly popular games, one called Slinkey Coyote, a local version of Hare and Hounds, and the other named Broken Leg, a kind of glorified tag. For these two games he made rules as he needed them.

Miss Morgan's interest was aroused by the little boy, for he was as much a surprise in the schoolroom as he was in the yard. He could read perfectly and used a man's vocabulary, but he could not write. He was familiar with numbers, no matter how large, yet he refused to learn even the simplest arithmetic. Robbie learned to write with the greatest of difficulty. His hand wavered crazy letters on his school pad. At length Miss Morgan tried to help him.

“Take one thing and do it over and over until you get it perfectly,” she suggested. “Be very careful with each letter.”

Robbie searched his memory for something he liked. At length he wrote, “There is nothing so monsterous but we can belief it of ourselfs.” He loved that “monsterous.” It gave timbre and profundity to the thing. If there were words, which through their very sound-power could drag unwilling genii from the earth, ‘monsterous' was surely one of them. Over and over he wrote the sentence, putting the greatest of care and drawing on his 'monsterous.' At the end of an hour, Miss Morgan came to see how he was getting on.

“Why, Robert, where in the world did you hear that?”

“It's from Stevenson, ma'am. My father knows it by heart almost.”

 

Of course Miss Morgan had heard all the bad stories of Junius, and in spite of them had approved of him. But now she began to have a strong desire to meet him.

Games in the school yard were beginning to fall off in interest. Robbie lamented the fact to Junius one morning before he started off to school. Junius scratched his beard and thought. “Spy is a good game,” he said at last. “I remember I used to like Spy.”

“Who shall we spy on, though?”

“Oh, anyone. It doesn't matter. We used to spy on Italians.”

 

Robbie ran off excitedly to school, and that afternoon, following a lengthy recourse to the school dictionary, he organized the B.A.S.S.F.E.A. J. Translated, which it never was above a whisper, this was the Boys' Auxiliary Secret Service For Espionage Against the Japanese. If for no other reason, the very magnificence of the name of this organization would have made it a force to be reckoned with. One by one Robbie took the boys into the dim greenness under the school-yard willow tree, and there swore them to secrecy with an oath so ferocious that it would have done credit to a lodge. Later, he brought the group together. Robbie explained to the boys that we would undoubtedly go to war with Japan some day.

“It behoofs us to be ready,” he said. “The more we can find out about the nefarious practices of this nefarious race, the more spy information we can give our country when war breaks out.”

The candidates succumbed before this glorious diction. They were appalled by the seriousness of a situation which required words like these. Since spying was now the business of the school, little Takashi Kato, who was in the third grade, didn't spend a private moment from then on. If Takashi raised two fingers in school, Robbie glanced meaningly at one of the Boy Auxiliaries, and a second hand sprung frantically into the air. When Takashi walked home after school, at least five boys crept through the brush beside the road. Eventually, however, Mr. Kato, Takashi's father, fired a shot into the dark one night, after seeing a white face looking in his window. Robbie reluctantly called the Auxiliary together and ordered that espionage be stopped at sun-down. “They couldn't do anything really important at night,” he explained.