The Pastures of Heaven

by Steinbeck, John

  John plunged the kerosene torch into the thick brush and drew a line of fire along its edge. The brush crackled and snapped fiercely. The flame ran along the ground among the resinous stems, Slowly the men worked along behind the fire, up the sharp little hill.

  “That’s about enough here,” Bert called, “There’s plenty of distance from the house now. I think two of us better fire it from the upper side now.” He started walking up around the brush patch, followed by Jimmie. At that moment the little autumn whirlwind danced down the hill, twisting and careening as it came. It made a co­quettish dash into the fire, picked up sparks and embers and flung them against the white house. Then, as though tired of the game, the little column of air collapsed. Bert and Jimmie were running back. The five men searched the ground and stamped out every spark. “It’s lucky we saw that,” said John. “Silly little thing like that might burn the house down.”

  Bert and Jimmie circled the patch and fired it from the upper side. John and his two men worked up the hill, keeping between the flames and the house. The air was dense and blue with smoke. In a quarter of an hour the brush patch was nearly burned off.

  Suddenly they heard a scream from the direction of the house. The house itself was barely visible through the smoke from the burning brush. All five of the men turned about and broke into a run. As the smoke grew thinner, they could see a thick grey eddy, gushing from one of the upper windows.

  Willa was running distractedly toward them over the burned ground. John stopped when he came to her.

  “I heard a noise in the basement,” she cried. “I opened the door in the kitchen that leads to the basement, and the thing just swooped past me. It’s all over the house now.”

  Bert and Jimmie charged up to them. “Are the hoses by the tank house?” Bert shouted.

  John tore his gaze from the burning house. “I don’t know,” he said uncertainly.

  Bert took him by the arm. “Come on! What are you waiting for? We can save some of it. We can get some of the furniture out anyway.”

  John disengaged his arm and started to saunter down the hill toward the houses. “I don’t think I want to save any of it,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” Bert cried. He ran on and plunged about the tank house, looking for the hoses.

  Now the smoke and flame were pouring from the win­dow. From inside the house came a noise of furious com­motion; the old building was fighting for its life.

  One of the hired men walked up beside John. “If only that window was closed, we’d have a chance,” he said in a tone of apology. “It’s so dry, that house. And it’s got a draft like a chimbley.”

  John walked to the wood pile and sat in the sawbuck. Willa looked at his face for a moment and then stood quietly beside him. The outside walls were smoking now, and the house roared with the noise of a great wind.

  Then a very strange and a very cruel thing happened. The side wall fell outward like a stage set, and there, twelve feet above the ground was the sitting room un­touched as yet by the fire. As they watched the long tongues lashed into the room. The leather chairs shivered and shrank like live things from the heat. The glass on the pictures shattered and the steel engravings shriveled to black rags. They could see the big black meerschaum pipe hanging over the mantel. Then the flame covered the square of the room and blotted it out. The heavy slate roof crashed down, crushing walls and floor under its weight, and the house became a huge bonfire without shape.

  Bert had come back and was standing helplessly be­side John. “It must of been that whirlwind,” he explained. “A spark must of gone down the cellar and got into the coal oil. Yes, sir, it must of been that coal oil.”

  John looked up at him and smiled with a kind of horri­fied amusement. “Yes, sir, it must have been that coal oil,” he echoed.

  The fire burned smoothly now that its victory was gained; a field of growing flame rose high up in the air. It no longer resembled a house at all. John Whiteside stood up from the sawbuck and straightened his shoulders and sighed. His eyes rested for a moment on a place in the flame fifteen feet from the ground where the sitting room had been. “Well, that’s over,” he said. “And I think I know how a soul feels when it sees its body buried in the ground and lost. Let’s go to your house, Bert. I want to telephone Bill. He will probably have a room for us.”

  “Why don’t you stay with us? We have plenty of room.”

  “No, we’ll go to Bill” John looked around once more at the burning pile. Willa put out her hand to take his arm, but withdrew it before she had touched him. He saw the gesture and smiled at her. “I wish I could have saved my pipe,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Bert broke in effusively. “That was the best colored meerschaum I ever saw. They have pipes in museums that aren’t colored any better than that. That pipe must have been smoked a long time.”

  “It was,” John agreed. “A very long time. And you know, it had a good taste, too.”

  Twelve

  AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon the sight-seeing bus left its station in Monterey for a tour of the penin­sula. As it moved along over the roads of the publicized Seventeen Mile Drive

  , the travelers peered out at the spectacular houses of very rich people. The sightseers felt a little shy as they looked out of the dusty windows, a little like eaves-droppers, but privileged, too. The bus crawled through the town of Carmel and over a hill to the brown Mission Carmelo with its crooked dome, and there the young driver pulled to the side of the road and put his feet on the dashboard while his passengers were led through the dark old church.

  When they returned to their seats some of the barriers traveling people build about themselves were down.

  “Did you hear?” said the prosperous man. “The guide said the church is built like a ship with a stone keel and hull deep in the ground under it? That’s for the earth­quakes—like a ship in a storm, you see. But it wouldn’t work.”

  A young priest with a clean rosy face and a pride in his new serge cassock answered from two seats behind: “But it has worked. There have been earthquakes, and the mis­sion still stands; built of mud and it still stands.”

  An old man broke in, an old and healthy man with eager eyes. “Funny things happen,” he said. “I lost my wife last year. Been married over fifty years.” He looked smilingly about for some comment, and forgot the funny things that happen.

  A honeymooning couple sat arm in arm. The girl squeezed tightly. “Ask the driver where we’re going now.”

  The bus moved slowly on, up the Carmel Valley—past orchards and past fields of artichokes, and past a red cliff, veined with green creepers. The afternoon was waning now, and the sun sank toward the seaward mouth of the Valley. The road left the Carmel River and climbed up a hillside until it ran along the top of a narrow ridge. Here the driver cut his bus sharply to the roadside and backed and pulled ahead four times before he had faced around. Then he shut off the motor and turned to his passengers. “This is as far as we go, folks. I always like to stretch my legs before we start back. Maybe some of you folks would like to get out and walk around.”

  They climbed stiffly from their seats and stood on the ridge peak and looked down into the Pastures of Heaven. And the air was as golden gauze in the last of the sun. The land below them was plotted in squares of green orchard trees and in squares of yellow grain and in squares of violet earth. From the sturdy farmhouses, set in their gar­dens, the smoke of the evening fires drifted upward until the hill-breeze swept it cleanly off. Cowbells were softly clashing in the valley; a dog barked so far away that the sound rose up to the travelers in sharp little whispers. Di­rectly below the ridge a band of sheep had gathered under an oak tree against the night.

  “It’s called Las Pasturas del Cielo,” the driver said. “They raise good vegetables there—good berries and fruit earlier here than any place else. The name means Pas­tures of Heaven.”

  The passengers gazed into the valley.

  The successful man cleared his thr
oat. His voice had a tone of prophecy. “If I have any vision, I tell you this:

  Some day there’ll be big houses in that valley, stone houses and gardens, golf links and big gates and iron work. Rich men will live there—men that are tired of working away in town, men that have made their pile and want a quiet place to settle down to rest and enjoy them­selves. If I had the money, I’d buy the whole thing, I’d hold on to it, and sometime I’d subdivide it.” He paused and made a little gathering gesture with his hand. “Yes, and by God I’d live there myself.”

  His wife said: “Sh!” He looked guiltily around and saw that no one was listening to him.

  The purple hill-shadow was creeping out toward the centre of the valley; somewhere below a pig screamed angrily. The young man raised his eyes from the land and smiled a confession to his new wife, and she smiled firmly and reprovingly back at him. His smile had said: “I almost let myself think of it. It would be nice—but I can’t, of course.”

  And hers had answered: “No, of course you can’t! There’s ambition to think of, and all our friends expect things of us. There’s your name to make so I can be proud of you. You can’t run away from responsibility and cover your head in a place like this. But it would be nice.” And both smiles softened and remained in their eyes.

  The young priest strolled away by himself. He whis­pered a prayer, but practice had taught him to pray and to think about something else. “There might be a little church down there,” he thought. “No poverty here, no smells, no trouble. My people might confess small whole­some sins that fly off with the penance of a few Hail Marys. It would be quiet there; nothing dirty nor violent would ever happen there to make me sorry nor doubtful nor ashamed. The people in those houses there would love me. They would call me Father, and I’d be just with them when it was kindly to be just.” He frowned and punished the thought. “I am not a good priest. I’ll scourge my­self with the poor, with the smell of them and with their fighting. I can’t run from the tragedies of God.” And he thought, “Maybe I’ll come to a place like this when I am dead.”

  The old man stared into the valley with his eager eyes, and in his deafened ears the silence surged like a little wind blowing in a cypress tree. The farther hills were blurred to him, but he could see the golden light and the purple dark. His breathing choked and tears came into his eyes. He beat his hands helplessly against his hips. “I’ve never had time to think. I’ve been too busy with troubles ever to think anything out. If I could go down there and live down there for a little—why, I’d think over all the things that ever happened to me, and maybe I could make something out of them, something all in one piece that had a meaning, instead of all these trailing ends, these raw and dragging tails. Nothing would bother me down there and I could think.”

  The bus driver dropped his cigarette in the road and stepped it into the dirt. “Come on, folks,” he called. “We ought to be getting along.” He helped them in and shut the doors on them, but they crowded close to the windows and looked down into the Pastures of Heaven where the air lay blue like a lake now, and the farms were sub­merged in the quiet.

  “You know,” the driver said, “I always think it would be nice to have a little place down there. A man could keep a cow and a few pigs and a dog or two. A man could raise enough to eat on a little farm.” He kicked the starter and the motor roared for a moment before he throttled it down. “I guess it sounds kind of funny to you folks, but I always like to look down there and think how quiet and easy a man could live on a little place.” He thrust the gear lever; the car gathered speed and swept down the grade toward the long Carmel Valley and toward the sun where it was setting in the ocean at the Valley’s mouth.