Read Online The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck - Free Book Online Page B

asked his question—“Is she all right?”—month by month, this chastity came to symbolize her health, her preservation, her intactness.
    One day when Alice was sixteen, Shark went to his wife with a worried look on his face. “You know we really can’t tell if she’s all right—that is—we couldn’t really be sure unless we took her to a doctor.”
    For a moment Katherine stared at him, trying to realize what the words meant. Then she lost her temper for the first time in her life. “You’re a dirty, suspicious skunk,” she told him. “You get out of here! And if you ever talk about it again, I’ll-I’ll go away.”
    Shark was a little astonished, but not frightened, at her outburst. He did, however, give up the idea of a medical examination, and merely contented himself with his monthly question.
    Meanwhile, Shark’s ledger fortune continued to grow. Every night, after Katherine and Alice had gone to bed, he took down the thick book and opened it under the hanging lamp. Then his pale eyes narrowed and his blunt face took on a crafty look while he planned his investments and calculated his interest. His lips moved slightly, for now he was telephoning an order for stock. A stem and yet sorrowful look crossed his face when he foreclosed a mortgage on a good farm. “I hate to do this,” he whispered. “You folks got to realize it’s just business.”
    Shark wetted his pen in the ink bottle and entered the fact of the foreclosure in his ledger. “Lettuce,” he mused. “Everybody’s putting in lettuce. The market’s going to be flooded. Seems to me I might put in potatoes and make some money. That’s fine bottom land.” He noted in the book the planting of three hundred acres of potatoes. His eye traveled along the line. Thirty thousands dollars lay in the bank just drawing bank interest. It seemed a shame. The money was practically idle. A frown of concentration settled over his eyes. He wondered how San Jose Building and Loan was. It paid six per cent. It wouldn’t do to rush into it blindly without investigating the company. As he closed the ledger for the night, Shark determined to talk to John Whiteside about it. Sometimes those companies went broke, the officers absconded, he thought uneasily.
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    Before the Munroe family moved into the valley, Shark suspected all men and boys of evil intent toward Alice, but when once he had set eyes on young Jimmie Munroe, his fear and suspicion narrowed until it had all settled upon the sophisticated Jimmie. The boy was lean and handsome of face, his mouth was well developed and sensual, and his eyes shone with that insulting cockiness high school boys assume. Jimmie was said to drink gin; he wore town clothes of wool—never overalls. His hair shone with oil, and his whole manner and posture were of a rakishness that set the girls of the Pastures of Heaven giggling and squirming with admiration and embarrassment. Jimmie watched the girls with quiet, cynical eyes, and tried to appear dissipated for their benefit. He knew that young girls are vastly attracted to young men with pasts. Jimmie had a past. He had been drunk several times at the Riverside Dance Palace; he had kissed at least a hundred girls, and, on three occasions, he had sinful adventures in the willows by the Salinas River. Jimmie tried to make his face confess his vicious life, but, fearing that his appearance was not enough, he set free a number of mischievous little rumors that darted about the Pastures of Heaven with flattering speed.
    Shark Wicks heard the rumors. In Shark there grew up a hatred of Jimmie Munroe that was born of fear of Jimmie’s way with women. What chance, Shark thought, would beautiful, stupid Alice have against one so steeped in knowledge of wordliness?
    Before Alice had ever seen the boy, Shark forbade her to see him. He spoke with such vehemence that a mild