The Pastures of Heaven

by Steinbeck, John

  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-centre 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 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 that 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 shot gun 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 the ten years the house looked like a huge mound of roses. People passing by on the county road paused t
o 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 post card 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.”

  “Well, there isn’t much chance of that. Mrs. Allen says no one in the valley has been in that house since Pat’s father and mother died, and that’s ten years ago. She didn’t say whether it was pretty.”

  “With a rose like that on the outside, the inside must be pretty. I wonder if Mr. Humbert will let me see it sometime.” The two women walked on out of hearing.

  When they were gone, Pat stood up and looked at the great rose. He had never seen how beautiful it was—a haystack of green leaves and nearly covered with white roses. “It is pretty,” he said. “And it’s like a nice house in Vermont. It’s like a Vermont house, and—well, it is pretty, a pretty bush.” Then, as though he had seen through bush and through the wall, a vision of the parlor came to him. He went quickly back to his work among the berries, struggling to put the house out of his mind. But Mae’s words came back to him over and over again, “It must be pretty inside.” Pat wondered what a Vermont house looked like inside. John Whiteside’s solid and grand house he knew, and, with the rest of the valley, he had admired the plush comfort of Bert Munroe’s house, but a pretty house he had never seen, that is, a house he could really call pretty. In his mind he went over all the houses he knew and not one of them was what Mae must have meant. He remembered a picture in a maga­zine, a room with a polished floor and white woodwork and a staircase; it might have been Mt. Vernon. That pic­ture had impressed him. Perhaps that was what Mae meant.

  He wished he could see the post card of the Vermont house, but if he asked to see it, they would know he had been listening. As he thought of it, Pat became obsessed with a desire to see a pretty house that looked like his. He put his hoe away and walked in front of his house. Truly the rose was marvelous. It dropped a canopy over the porch, hung awnings of white stars over the closed windows. Pat wondered why he had never noticed it before.

  That night he did something he couldn’t have contem­plated before. At the Munroe door, he broke an engage­ment to spend an evening in company. “There’s some business in Salinas I’ve got to attend to,” he explained. “I stand to lose some money if I don’t go right in.”

  In Salinas he went straight to the public library. “Have you got any pictures of Vermont houses—pretty ones?” he asked the librarian.

  “You’ll probably find some in the magazines. Come! I’ll show you where to look.”

  They had to warn him when the library was about to close. He had found pictures of interiors, but of interiors he had never imagined. The rooms were built on a plan; each decoration, each piece of furniture, even the floors and walls were related, were a part of the plan. Some deep and instinctive feeling in him for arrangement, for color and line had responded to the pictures. He hadn’t known rooms could be like that—all in one piece. Every room he had ever seen was the result of a gradual and accidental accumulation. Aunt Sophie sent a vase, father bought a chair. They put a stove in the fireplace because it threw more heat; the Sperry Flour Company issued a big calendar and mother had its picture framed; a mail order house advertised a new kind of lamp. That was the way rooms were assembled. But in the pictures someone had an idea, and everything in the room was a part of the idea. Just before the library closed he came upon two pictures side by side. One showed a room like those he knew, and right beside it was another picture of the same room with all the clutter gone, and with the idea in it. It didn’t look like the same place at all. For the first time in his life, Pat was anxious to go home. He wanted to lie in his bed and to think, for a strange new idea was squirming into being in the back of his mind.

  Pat could not sleep that night. His head was too full of plans. Once he got up and lighted the lamp to look in his bank book. A little before daylight he dressed and cooked his breakfast, and while he ate, his eyes wandered again and again to the locked door. There was a light of malicious joy in his eyes. “It’ll be dark in there,” he said. “I better rip open the shutters before I go in there.”

  When the daylight came at last, he took a crowbar and walked around the house, tearing open the nailed shutters as he went. The parlor windows he did not touch, for he didn’t want to disturb the rose bush. Finally he went back into the kitchen and stood before the locked door. For a moment the old vision stopped him. “But it will be just for a minute,” he argued. “I’ll start in tearing it to pieces right away.” The crowbar poised and crashed on the lock. The door sprang open crying miserably on its dry hinges, and the horrible room lay before him. The air was foggy with cobwebs; a musty, ancient odor flowed through the door. There were the two rocking chairs on either side of the rusty stove. Even through the dust he could see the little hollows in their cushions. But these were not the terrible things. Pat knew where lay the centre of his fears. He walked rapidly through the room brushing the cobwebs from his eyes as he went. The parlor was still dark for its shutters were closed. Pat didn’t have to grope for the table; he knew exactly where it was. Hadn’t it haunted him for ten years? He picked up table and Bible together, ran out through the kitchen and hurled them into the yard.

  Now he could go more slowly. The fear was gone. The windows were stuck so hard that he had to use the bar to pry them open. First the rocking chairs went out, rolling and jumping when they hit the ground, then the pictures, the ornaments from the mantel, the stuffed orioles. And when the movable furniture, the clothing, the rugs and vases were scattered about under the windows, Pat ripped up the carpets and crammed them out, too. Finally he brought buckets of water and splashed the walls and ceilings thoroughly. The work was an in­tense pleasure to him. He tried to break the legs from the chairs when he threw them out. While the water was soaking into the old dark wall paper, he collected all of the furniture from under the windows, piled it up and set fire to it. Old musty fabrics and varnished wood smoldered sullenly and threw out a foul stench of dust and dampness. Only when a bucket of kerose
ne was thrown over the pile did the flame leap up. The table and chairs cracked as they released their ghosts into the fire. Pat surveyed the pile joyfully.

  “You would sit in there all these years, wouldn’t you?” he cried. “You thought I’d never get up the guts to bum you. Well, I just wish you could be around to see what I’m going to do, you rotten stinking trash.” The green carpets burned through and left red, flaky coals. Old vases and jars cracked to pieces in the heat. Pat could hear the sizzle of mentholatum and painkiller gushing from con­tainers and boiling into the fire. He felt that he was presiding at the death of his enemy. Only when the pile had burned down to coals did he leave it. The walls were soaked thoroughly by now, so that the wall paper peeled off in long, broad ribbons.

  That afternoon Pat drove in to Salinas and bought all e magazines on house decoration he could find. In the evening, after dinner he searched the pages through. At last, in one of the magazines, he found the perfect room.

  There had been a question about some of the others; there was none about this one. And he could make it quite easily. With the partition between the sitting room and the parlor torn out, he would have a room thirty feet long and fifteen wide. The windows must be made wide, the fireplace enlarged and the floor sandpapered, stained and polished. Pat knew he could do all these things. His hands ached to be at work. “Tomorrow I’ll start,” he said. Then another thought stopped him. “She thinks it’s pretty now. I can’t very well let her know I’m doing it now. Why, she’d know I heard her say that about the Vermont house. I can’t let people know I’m doing it. They’d ask why I’m doing it.” He wondered why he was doing it. “It’s none of their darn business why,” he ex­plained to himself. “I don’t have to go around telling people why. I’ve got my reasons. By God! I’ll do it at night,” Pat laughed softly to himself. The idea of secretly changing his house delighted him. He could work here alone, and no one would know. Then, when it was all finished, he could invite a few people in and pretend it was always that way. Nobody would remember how it was ten years ago.