The Pastures of Heaven (27 page)

John did not get married for six years. During that time his mother dried up until she was a tiny skeleton covered with bluish, almost transparent skin, and still she held on to life. Her eyes followed her son reproachfully; he felt ashamed when she looked at him. At length a classmate of John's came to the West to look about and brought his sister with him. They visited at the Whiteside farm for a month, and at the end of that time John proposed to Willa and was accepted. When he told his mother, she demanded to be alone with the girl. Half an hour later, Willa emerged from the sickroom blushing violently.

“What's the matter, dear?” John asked.

“Why, it's nothing. It's all right. Your mother asked me a great many questions, and then she looked at me for a long time.”

“She's so old,” John explained. “Her mind is so old.” He went into his mother's room. The feverish frowning look was gone from her face and instead there was the old quizzical smile of knowledge.

“It's all right, John,” she said. “I'd like to wait to see the children, but I can't. I've clung to life as long as I can. I'm tired of it.” It was almost possible to see the tenacious will release its grip on her body. In the night she became unconscious and three days later she died as quietly and gently as though she had dozed.

John Whiteside did not think of the house exactly as his father had. He loved it more. It was the outer shell of his body. Just as his mind could leave his body and go traveling off, so could he leave the house, but just as surely he must come back to it. He renewed the white paint every two years, planted the garden himself and trimmed the box hedge. He did not occupy the powerful place in the valley his father had. John was less stem, less convinced of everything. Faced with an argument to decide, he was too prone to find endless ramifications on both sides. The big meerschaum pipe was very dark now, almost a black in which there were red lights.

Willa Whiteside loved the valley from the beginning. Alicia had been aloof and quiet, rather a frightening person. The people of the valley seldom saw her, and when they did, she treated them gently and kindly, was generous and careful of their feelings. She made them feel like peasants calling at the castle.

Willa liked to make calls on the women of the valley. She liked to sit in their kitchens drinking harsh tea and talking of the innumerable important things that bear on housekeeping. She grew to be an extensive trader of recipes. When she went to make a call, she carried a little notebook in which to write confided formulae. Her neighbors called her Willa and often came in the morning to drink tea in her kitchen. Perhaps it was partly her influence that caused John to become gregarious. He lost the power his father had held through aloofness. John liked his neighbors. On warm summer afternoons he sat in his canvas chair on the veranda and entertained such men as could get away from work. There were political caucuses on the veranda, little meetings over glasses of lemonade. The social and political structure of the whole valley was built on this porch, and always it was built amusingly. John looked at the life about him with a kind of amused irony, and due to his outlook, there ceased to exist in the valley any of the ferocious politics and violent religious opinions which usually poison rural districts. When, during the discussions among the men, some local or national climax or calamity was spoken of, John liked to bring out the three great books and to read aloud of some parallel situation in the ancient world. He had as great a love for the ancients as his father had.

There were the Sunday dinners with a neighbor couple and perhaps an itinerant minister as guests. The women helped in the kitchen until the mid-day dinner was ready. At the table the minister felt the pitiless fire of his mission slipping away in the air of gentle tolerance, until, when the dessert was brought in and the cider drunk, a fiery Baptist had been known to laugh heartily at a bit of quiet ridicule aimed at total immersion.

John enjoyed these things deeply, but his sitting room was the center of his existence. The leather chairs, whose hollows and bumps were casts of comfortable anatomy, were pieces of him. On the wall were the pictures he had grown up with, steel engravings of deer and Swiss Alpine climbers and of mountain goats. The pictures were so closely bound up with his life that he didn't see them any more, but the loss of any article would have been as painful as an amputation. In the evening his greatest pleasure came. A little fire was burning in the red brick fireplace. John sat in his chair caressing the big meerschaum. Now and then to oil it he stroked the polished bowl along the side of his nose. He was reading the Georgics or perhaps Varro on farming. Willa, under her own lamp, pursed her lips tightly while she embroidered doilies in floral designs as Christmas presents for eastern relatives who sent doilies to her.

John closed his book and went over to his desk. The roll top always stuck and required pampering. It gave suddenly and went clattering up. Willa unpursed her mouth. The look of intense agony she wore when she was doing a thing carefully left her face.

“What in the world are you doing?”

“Oh! Just seeing about some things.”

For an hour he worked behind the desk, then—“Listen to this, Willa.”

She relaxed again. “I thought so—poetry.”

He read his verses and waited apologetically. Willa, with tact, kept silence. The silence lengthened until it was no longer tactful. “I guess it isn't very good.” He laughed ruefully.

“No, it isn't.”

He crumpled the paper and threw it into the fire. “For a few minutes I thought it was going to be good.”

“What had you been reading, John?”

“Well, I was just looking through my Virgil and I thought I'd try my hand at a verse, because I didn't want to—oh, well, it's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing. No matter.” He rolled down the desk cover and picked a new book from the bookcase.

The sitting room was his home. Here he was complete, perfect and happy. Under the Rochester lamps every last scattered particle of him was gathered together into a definite, boundaried entity.

Most lives extend in a curve. There is a rise of ambition, a rounded peak of maturity, a gentle downward slope of disillusion and last a flattened grade of waiting for death. John Whiteside lived in a straight line. He was ambitionless; his farm not only made him a good living, but paid enough so he could hire men to work it for him. He wanted nothing beyond what he had or could easily procure. He was one of the few men who could savor a moment while he held it. And he knew it was a good life he was leading, a uniquely good life.

Only one need entered his existence. He had no children. The hunger for children was almost as strong in him as it had been in his father. Willa did not have children although she wanted them as badly as he did. The subject embarrassed them, and they never spoke of it.

In the eighth year of their marriage, through some accident, chemical or divine, Willa conceived, went through a painless, normal period of pregnancy and delivered a healthy child.

The accident never occurred again, but both Willa and John were thankful, almost devoutly thankful. The strong desire for self-perpetuation which had been more or less dormant in John rose up to the surface. For a few years he ripped the land with the plow, scratched it with the harrow and flogged it with the roller. Where he had been only a friend to the farm, the awakening duty to the generations changed him to a master. He plunged the seeds into the earth and waited covetously for the green crops to appear.

Willa did not change as her husband did. She took the boy William as a matter of course, called him Bill and refused to worship him. John saw his father in the boy although no one else did.

“Do you think he is bright?” John asked his wife. “You're with him more than I am. Do you think he has any intelligence?”

“Just so-so. Just normal.”

“He seems to develop so slowly,” John said impatiently. “I want the time to come when he'll begin to understand things.”

On Bill's tenth birthday John opened his thick Herodotus and began to read to him. Bill sat on the floor, blankly regarding his father. Every night John read a few pages from the book. After about a week of it, he looked up from his book one evening and saw that Willa was laughing at him.

“What's the matter?” he demanded.

“Look under your chair.”

He leaned down and saw that Bill had constructed a house of matches. The child was so absorbed in the work that he was not aware the reading had stopped. “Hasn't he been listening at all?”

“Not a word. He hasn't heard a word since the first night when he lost interest in the second paragraph.”

John closed the book and put it in the bookcase. He did not want to show how badly he was wounded. “Probably he's not old enough. I'll wait a year and then try him again.”

“He won't ever like it, John. He isn't built like you nor like your father.”

“What is he interested in, then?” John asked in dismay.

“Just the things the other boys in the valley like, guns and horses and cows and dogs. He has escaped you, John, and I don't think you can ever catch him.”

“Tell me the truth, Willa. Is he—stupid?”

“No,” she said consideringly. “No, he's not stupid. In some ways he's harder and brighter than you are. He isn't your kind, John, and you might just as well know it now as later.”

John Whiteside felt his interest in the land lapsing. The land was safe. Bill would farm it some day. The house was safe, too. Bill was not stupid. From the first he seemed to have a good deal of mechanical interest and ability. He made little wagons, and, as Christmas presents, demanded toy steam engines. John noticed another difference about the boy, a side that was strange to the Whiteside family. He was not only very secretive, but sharp in a business sense. He sold his possessions to other boys, and, when they were tired of them, bought them back at a lower price. Little gifts of money multiplied in his hands in mysterious ways. It was a long time before John would admit to himself that he could not communicate with his son. When he gave Bill a heifer, and Bill immediately traded it for a litter of pigs which he raised and sold, John laughed at himself.

“He is certainly brighter than I am,” he told Willa. “Once my father gave me a heifer, and I kept her until she died of old age. Bill is a throwback of some kind, to a pirate, maybe. His children will probably be Whitesides. It's a powerful blood. I wish he weren't so secret about everything he does, though.”

 

John's leather chair and his black meerschaum and his books reclaimed him again from the farm. He was elected clerk of the school board. Again the farmers gathered in his house to talk. John's hair was turning white, and his influence in the valley was growing stronger as his age came upon him.

The house of Whiteside was John's personality solidified. When the people of the valley thought of him, it was never of the man alone in a field, or in a wagon, or at the store. A mental picture of him was incomplete unless it included his house. He was sitting in his leather chair, smiling at his thick books, or reclining in one of the porch chairs on his wide, gracious veranda, or, with little shears and a basket, snipping flowers in the garden, or at the head of his own table carving a roast with artistry and care.

In the West, where, if two generations of one family have lived in a house, it is an old house and a pioneer family, a kind of veneration mixed with contempt is felt for old houses. There are very few old houses in the West. Those restless Americans who have settled up the land have never been able to stay in one place for very long. They build flimsy houses and soon move on to some new promise. Old houses are almost invariably cold and ugly.

When Bert Munroe moved his family to the Battle farm in the Pastures of Heaven, he was not long in understanding the position John Whiteside held. As soon as he could, he joined the men who gathered on the Whiteside veranda. His farm adjoined the Whiteside land. Soon after his arrival, Bert was elected to the school board, and then he was brought into official contact with John. One night at a Board meeting John quoted some lines from Thucydides. Bert waited until the other members had gone home.

“I wanted to ask you about that book you were talking about tonight, Mr. Whiteside.”

“You mean the Peloponnesian Wars?” He brought the book and laid it in Bert's hands.

“I thought I'd like to read it, if you wouldn't mind lending it to me.”

For a second John hesitated. “Of course—take it with you. It was my father's book. When you finish it, I have some others you might like to read.”

From this incident a certain intimacy sprang up between the two families. They exchanged dinners and made little calls on each other. Bert felt at liberty to borrow tools from John.

On an evening when the Munroes had been in the valley for a year and a half, Bill walked stiffly into the Whiteside sitting room and confronted his parents. In his nervousness he was harsh. “I'm going to get married,” he said. His manner made it seem like bad news.

“What's this?” John cried. “Why haven't you told us anything about it? Who is it?”

“Mae Munroe.”

Suddenly John realized that this was good news, not a confession of a crime. “Why—why that's good! I'm glad. She's a fine girl—isn't she, Willa?” His wife avoided his eyes. She had been calling on the Munroes that morning.

Bill was planted stolidly in the center of the room. “When are you going to do it?” Willa asked. John thought her tone almost unfriendly.

“Pretty soon now. Just as soon as we get the house finished in Monterey.”