The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck Page B

Manny.
    â€œWell, somebody dug a deep hole out there. It’s dangerous. You tell the boys not to dig or they’ll get caved in.”
    The dark came and Tularecito walked out of the brush to dig in his hole again. When he found it filled up, he growled savagely, but then his thought changed and he laughed. “The people were here,” he said happily. “They didn’t know who it was, and they were frightened. They filled up the hole the way a gopher does. This time I’ll hide, and when they come to fill the hole, I’ll tell them who I am. Then they will love me.”
    And Tularecito dug out the hole and made it much deeper than before, because much of the dirt was loose. Just before daylight, he retired into the brush at the edge of the orchard and lay down to watch.
    Bert Munroe walked out before breakfast to look at his trap again, and again he found the open hole. “The little devils!” he cried. “They’re keeping it up, are they? I’ll bet Manny is in it after all.”
    He studied the hole for a moment and then began to push dirt into it with the side of his foot. A savage growl spun him around. Tularecito came charging down upon him, leaping like a frog on his long legs, and swinging his shovel like a club.
    When Jimmie Munroe came to call his father to breakfast, he found him lying on the pile of dirt. He was bleeding at the mouth and forehead. Shovelfuls of dirt came flying out of the pit.
    Jimmie thought someone had killed his father and was getting ready to bury him. He ran home in a frenzy of terror, and by telephone summoned a band of neighbors.
    Half a dozen men crept up on the pit. Tularecito struggled like a wounded lion, and held his own until they struck him on the head with his own shovel. Then they tied him up and took him in to jail.
    In Salinas a medical board examined the boy. When the doctors asked him questions, he smiled blandly at them and did not answer. Franklin Gomez told the board what he knew and asked the custody of him.
    â€œWe really can’t do it, Mr. Gomez,” the judge said finally. “You say he is a good boy. Just yesterday he tried to kill a man. You must see that we cannot let him go loose. Sooner or later he will succeed in killing someone.”
    After a short deliberation, he committed Tularecito to the asylum for the criminal insane at Napa.

V
    Helen Van Deventer was a tall woman with a sharp, handsome face and tragic eyes. A strong awareness of tragedy ran through her life. At fifteen she had looked like a widow after her Persian kitten was poisoned. She mourned for it during six months, not ostentatiously, but with a subdued voice and a hushed manner. When her father died, at the end of the kitten’s six months, the mourning continued uninterrupted. Seemingly she hungered for tragedy and life had lavishly heaped it upon her.
    At twenty-five she married Hubert Van Deventer, a florid hunting man who spent six months out of every year trying to shoot some kind of creature or other. Three months after the wedding he shot himself when a blackberry vine tripped him up. Hubert was a fairly gallant man. As he lay dying under a tree, one of his companions asked whether he wanted to leave any message for his wife.
    â€œYes,” said Hubert. “Tell her to have me mounted for that place in the library between the bull moose and the bighom! Tell her I didn’t buy this one from the guide!”
    Helen Van Deventer closed off the drawing room with its trophies. Thereafter the room was holy to the spirit of Hubert. The curtains remained drawn. Anyone who felt it necessary to speak in the drawing room spoke softly. Helen did not weep, for it was not in her nature to weep, but her eyes grew larger, and she stared a great deal, with the vacant staring of one who travels over other times. Hubert had left her the house on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and a fairly large fortune.
    Her daughter Hilda, born six months after