The Pastures of Heaven

by Steinbeck, John

  The patches of green were fenced from each other so that one square could rest and recuperate while the chick­ens were working in another. From the hill you could see Raymond’s whitewashed house set on the edge of a grove of oak trees. There were many flowers around the house:

  Calendulas and big African marigolds and cosmos as high as trees; and, behind the house, there was the only rose garden worthy the name in the valley of the Pastures of Heaven. The local people looked upon this place as the model farm of the valley.

  Raymond Banks was a strong man. His thick, short arms, wide shoulders and hips and heavy legs, even the stomach which bulged his overalls, made him seem mag­nificently strong, strong for pushing and pulling and lifting. Every exposed part of him was burned beef red by the sun, his heavy arms to the elbows, his neck down into his collar, his face, and particularly his ears and nose were painfully burned and chapped. Thin, blond hair could not protect his scalp from reddening under the sun. Raymond’s eyes were remarkable, for, while his hair and eyebrows were pale yellow, the yellow that usually goes with light blue eyes, Raymond’s eyes were black as soot. His mouth was full lipped and jovial and completely at odds with his long and villainously beaked nose. Ray­mond’s nose and ears were terribly punished by the sun. There was hardly a time during the year when they were not raw and peeled.

  Raymond Banks was forty-five and very jolly. He never spoke softly, but always in a heavy half shout full of mock fierceness. He said things, even the commonest of things, as though they were funny. People laughed when­ever he spoke. At Christmas parties in the schoolhouse, Raymond was invariably chosen as the Santa Claus be­cause of his hearty voice, his red face and his love for children. He abused children with such a heavy ferocity that he kept them laughing all the time. In or out of his red Santa Claus suit, the children of the valley regarded Raymond as a kind of Santa Claus. He had a way of flinging them about, of wrestling and mauling them, that was caressing and delightful. Now and then, he turned serious and told them things which had the import of huge lessons.

  Sometimes on Saturday mornings a group of little boys walked to the Banks farm to watch Raymond working. He let them peep into the little glass windows of the in­cubators. Sometimes the chicks were just coming out of the shells, shaking their wet wings and wobbling about on clumsy legs. The boys were allowed to raise the covers of the brooders and to pick up whole armfuls of yellow, furry chicks which made a noise like a hundred little ungreased machines. Then they walked to the pond and threw pieces of bread to the grandly navigating ducks. Most of all, though, the boys liked the killing time. And strangely enough, this was the time when Raymond dropped his large bantering and became very serious.

  Raymond picked a little rooster out of the trap and hung it by its legs on a wooden frame. He fastened the wildly beating wings with a wire clamp. The rooster squawked loudly. Raymond had the killing knife with its spear-shaped blade on the box beside him. How the boys admired that knife, the vicious shape of it and its shini­ness; the point was as sharp as a needle.

  “Now then, old rooster, you’re done for,” said Raymond. The boys crowded closer. With sure, quick hands, Raymond grasped the chicken’s head and forced the beak open. The knife slipped like a flash of light along the roof of the beak and into the brain and out again. The wings shuddered and beat against their clamp. For a moment the neck stretched yearningly from side to side, and a little rill of blood flowed from the tip of the beak.

  “Now watch!” Raymond cried. His forked hand combed the breast and brought all the feathers with it. Another combing motion and the back was bare. The wings were not struggling so hard now. Raymond whipped the feathers off, all but the wing tip feathers. Then the legs were stripped, a single movement for each one. “You see? You’ve got to do it quick,” he explained as he worked. “There’s just about two minutes that the feathers are loose. If you leave them in, they get set.” He took the chicken down from the frame, snicked another knife twice, pulled, and there were the entrails in a pan. He wiped his red hands on a cloth.

  “Look!” the boys shrieked. “Look! what’s that?”

  “That’s the heart.”

  “But look! It’s still moving. It’s still alive.”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t,” Raymond assured them. “That rooster was dead just the second the knife touched his brain. That heart just beats on for a while, but the rooster is dead all right.”

  “Why don’t you chop them like my father does, Mr. Banks?”

  “Well, because this is cleaner and quicker, and the butchers want them with their heads on. They sell the heads in with the weight, you see. Now, come on, old rooster!” He reached into the trap for another struggling squawker. When the killing was over, Raymond took all the chicken crops out of the pan and distributed them among the boys. He taught them how to clean and blow up all the crops to make chicken balloons. Raymond was always very serious when he was explaining his ranch. He refused to let the boys help with the killing, although they asked him many times.

  “You might get excited and miss the brain,” he said. “That would hurt the chicken, if you didn’t stick him just right.”

  Mrs. Banks laughed a great deal—clear, sweet laughter which indicated mild amusement or even inattention. She had a way of laughing appreciatively at everything anyone said, and, to merit this applause, people tried to say funny things when she was about. After her work in the house was finished, she dug in the flower garden. She had been a town girl; that was why she liked flowers, the neighbors said. Guests, driving up to the house, were welcomed by the high, clear laughter of Cleo Banks, and they chuckled when they heard it. She was so jolly. She made people feel good. No one could ever remember that she said anything, but months after hearing it, they could recall the exact tones of her laughter.

  Raymond Banks rarely laughed at all. Instead, he pretended a sullenness so overdrawn that it was accepted as humor. These two people were the most popular hosts in the valley. Now and then they invited everyone in the Pastures of Heaven to a barbecue in the oak grove beside their house. They broiled little chickens over coals of oak bark and set out hundreds of bottles of home brewed beer. These parties were looked forward to and remembered with great pleasure by the people of the valley.

  When Raymond Banks was in high school, his chum had been a boy who later became the warden at San Quentin prison. The friendship had continued, too. At Christmas time they still exchanged little presents. They wrote to each other when any important thing happened. Raymond was proud of his acquaintance with the war­den. Two or three times a year he received an invitation to be a witness at an execution, and he always accepted it. His trips to the prison were the only vacations he took.

  Raymond liked to arrive at the warden’s house the night before the execution. He and his friend sat together and talked over their school days. They reminded each other of things both remembered perfectly. Always the same episodes were recalled and talked about. Then, the next morning, Raymond liked the excitement, the submerged hysteria of the other witnesses in the warden’s office. The slow march of the condemned aroused his dramatic sense and moved him to a thrilling emotion The hanging itself was not the important part, it was the sharp, keen air of the whole proceeding that impressed him. It was like a superchurch, solemn and ceremonious and somber. The whole thing made him feel a fullness of experience, a holy emotion that nothing else in his life approached. Raymond didn’t think of the condemned any more than he thought of the chicken when he pressed the blade into its brain. No strain of cruelty nor any gloating over suffering took him to the gallows. He had developed an appetite for profound emotion, and his meager im­agination was unable to feed it. In the prison he could share the throbbing nerves of the other men. Had he been alone in the death chamber with no one present ex­cept the prisoner and the executioner, he would have been unaffected.

  After the death was pronounced, Raymond liked the second gathering in the warden’s office. The nerve-racked men tried to use hilari
ty to restore their outraged imagi­nations. They were more jolly, more noisily happy than they ordinarily were. They sneered at the occasional wit­ness, usually a young reporter, who fainted or came out of the chamber crying. Raymond enjoyed the whole thing. It made him feel alive; he seemed to be living more acutely than at other times.

  After it was all over, he had a good dinner with the warden before he started home again. To some little ex­tent the same emotion occurred to Raymond when the little boys came to watch him kill chickens. He was able to catch a slight spark of their excitement.

  The Munroe family had not been long in the Pastures of Heaven before they heard about the fine ranch of Ray­mond Banks and about his visits to the prison. The people of the valley were interested, fascinated and not a little horrified by the excursions to see men hanged. Before he ever saw Raymond, Bert Munroe pictured him as a tradi­tional executioner, a lank, dark man, with a dull, deathly eye, a cold, nerveless man. The very thought of Raymond filled Bert with a kind of interested foreboding.

  When he finally met Raymond Banks and saw the jolly black eyes and the healthy, burned face, Bert. was dis­illusioned, and at the same time a little disgusted. The very health and heartiness of Raymond seemed incongru­ous and strangely obscene. The paradox of his good na­ture and his love for children was unseemly.

  On the first of May, the Banks’ gave one of their parties under the oak trees on the flat. It was the loveliest sea­son of the year, lupines and shooting stars, gallitos and wild violets smoldered with color in the new, short grass on the hillsides. The oaks had put on new leaves as shiny and clean as washed holly. The sun was warm enough to drench the air with sage, and all the birds made frantic, noisy holiday. From the chicken yards came the contented gabbling of scratching hens and the cynical, self-satisfied quacking of the ducks.

  At least fifty people were standing about the long tables under the trees. Hundreds of bottles of beer were packed in washtubs of salt and ice, a mixture so cold that the beer froze in the necks of the bottles. Mrs. Banks went about among the guests, laughing in greeting and in re­sponse to greeting. She rarely said a word. At the barbe­cue pits, Raymond was grilling little chickens while a group of admiring men stood about, offering jocular ad­vice.

  “If any of you can do it better, just step up,” Raymond shouted at them. “I’m going to put on the steaks now for anyone that’s crazy enough not to want chicken.”

  Bert Munroe stood nearby watching the red hands of Raymond. He was drinking a bottle of the strong beer. Bert was fascinated by the powerful red hands constantly turning over the chickens on the grill.

  When the big platters of broiled chicken were carried to the tables, Raymond went back to the pits to cook some more for those fine men who might require a second or even a third little chicken. Raymond was alone now, for his audience had all flocked to the tables. Bert Munroe looked up from his plate of beefsteak and saw that Ray­mond was alone by the pits. He put down his fork and strolled over.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Munroe? Wasn’t your chicken good?” Raymond asked with genial anxiety.

  “I had steak, and it was fine. I eat pretty fast, I guess. I never eat chicken, you know.”

  “That so? I never could understand how anyone wouldn’t like chicken, but I know plenty of people don’t. Let me put on another little piece of meat for you.”

  “Oh! I guess I’ve had enough. I always think people eat too much. You ought to get up from the table feeling a little bit hungry. Then you keep well, like the animals.”

  “I guess that’s right,” said Raymond. He turned the little carcasses over the fire. “I notice I feel better when I don’t eat so much.”

  “Sure you do. So do I. So would everybody. Everybody eats too much.” The two men smiled warmly at each other because they had agreed on this point, although neither of them believed it very strongly.

  “You sure got a nice piece of land in here,” Raymond observed, to double their growing friendship with a sec­ond agreement.

  “Well, I don’t know. They say there’s loco weed on it, but I haven’t seen any yet.”

  Raymond laughed. “They used to say the place was haunted before you came and fixed it up so nice. Haven’t seen any ghosts, have you?”

  “Not a ghost. I’m more scared of loco weed than I am of ghosts. I sure do hate loco weed.”

  “Don’t know as I blame you. Course with chickens it doesn’t bother me much, but it raises hell with you people that run stock.”

  Bert picked up a stick from the ground and knocked it gently on the winking coals. “I hear you’re acquainted with the warden up to San Quentin.”

  “Know him well. I went to school with Ed when I was a kid. You acquainted with him, Mr. Munroe?”

  “Oh, no—no. He’s in the papers quite a bit. A man in his position gets in the papers quite a bit.”

  Raymond’s voice was serious and proud. “Yeah. He gets a lot of publicity all right. But he’s a nice fella, Mr. Mun­roe, as nice a fella as you’d want to meet. And in spite of having all those convicts on his hands, he’s just as jolly and friendly. You wouldn’t think to talk to him., that he had a big responsibility like that.”

  “Is that so? You wouldn’t think that. I mean, you’d think he’d be kind of worried with all those convicts on his hands. Do you see him often?”

  “Well—yes. I do. I told you I went to school with him. I was kind of chums with him. Well, he hasn’t forgot me. Every once in a while he asks me up to the prison when there’s a hanging.”

  Bert shuddered in spite of the fact that he had been digging for this. “Is that so?”

  “Yes. I think it’s quite an honor. Not many people get in except newspaper men and official witnesses, sheriffs and police. I have a good visit with Ed every time too, of course.”

  A strange thing happened to Bert. He seemed to be standing apart from his body. His voice acted without his volition. He heard himself say, “I don’t suppose the warden would like it if you brought a friend along.” He listened to his words with astonishment. He had not wanted to say that at all.

  Raymond was stirring the coals vigorously. He was embarrassed. “Why, I don’t know, Mr. Munroe. I never thought about it. Did you want to go up with me?”

  Again Bert’s voice acted alone. “Yes,” it said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do then. I’ll write to Ed (I write to him pretty often, you see, so he won’t think any­thing of it) . I’ll just kind of slip it in the letter about you wanting to go up. Then maybe he’ll send two invitations next time. Of course I can’t promise, though. Won’t you have another little piece of steak?”

  Bert was nauseated. “No. I’ve had enough,” he said. “I’m not feeling so good. I guess I’ll go lie down under a tree for a little while.”

  “Maybe you shook up some of the yeast in that beer, Mr. Munroe. You’ve got to be pretty careful when you pour it.”

  Bert sat on the crackling dry leaves at the foot of an oak tree. The tables, lined with noisy guests, were on his right. The hoarse laughing of the men and the shrill cries of communicating women came to him faintly through a wall of thought. Between the tree trunks he could see Raymond Banks still moving about the meat pits, grilling chickens for those few incredible appetites that remained unappeased. The nausea which had forced him away was subtly changing. The choked feeling of illness was becom­ing a strange panting congestion of desire. The desire puzzled Bert and worried him. He didn’t want to go to San Quentin. It would make him unhappy to see a man hanged. But he was glad he had asked to go. His very gladness worried him. As Bert watched, Raymond rolled his sleeves higher up on his thick red arms before he cleaned the grates. Bert jumped up and started toward the pits. Suddenly the nausea arose in him again. He swerved around and hurried to the table where his wife sat shrilling pleasantries around the gnawed carcass of a chicken.

  “My husband never eats chicken,” she was crying.

  “I’m going to walk home,” Bert said. �
��I feel rotten.”

  His wife laid down the carcass of the chicken and wiped her fingers and mouth on a paper napkin. “What’s the matter with you, Bert?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel kind of rotten.”

  “Do you want me to go home with you in the car?”

  “No, you stay. Jimmie’ll drive you home.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Munroe, “you better say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Banks.”

  Bert turned doggedly away. “You tell them good-bye for me,” he said. “I’m feeling too rotten.” And he strode quickly away.

  A week later Bert Munroe drove to the Banks farm and stopped his Ford in front of the gate. Raymond came from behind a bush where he had been trying a shot at a hawk. He sauntered out and shook hands with his caller.

  “I’ve heard so much about your place, I thought I’d just come down for a look,” Bert said.

  Raymond was delighted. “Just let me put this gun away, and I’ll show you around.” For an hour they walked over the farm, Raymond explaining and Bert admiring the cleanliness and efficiency of the chicken ranch. “Come on in and have a glass of beer,” Raymond said, when they had covered the place. “There’s nothing like cold beer on a day like this.”

  When they were seated Bert began uneasily, “Did you write that letter to the warden, Mr. Banks?”

  “Yes—I did. Ought to have an answer pretty soon now.”

  “I guess you wonder why I asked you? Well, I think a man ought to see everything he can. That’s experience. The more experience a man has, the better. A man ought to see everything.”

  “I guess that’s right, all right.” Raymond agreed.

  Bert drained his glass and wiped his mouth. “Of course I’ve read in the papers about hangings, but it isn’t like seeing one really. They say there’re thirteen steps up to the gallows for bad luck. That right?”