One day Junius went into Monterey and hired an old German to help him on the farm. He gave his new servant five dollars on account, and never paid him again. Within two weeks the hired man was so entangled in laziness that he did no more work than his employer. The two of them sat around the place together discussing things which interested and puzzled them—how color comes to flowers—whether there is a symbology in nature—where Atlantis lay—how the Incas interred their dead. In the spring they planted potatoes, always too late, and without a covering of ashes to keep the bugs out. They sowed beans and corn and peas, watched them for a time, and then forgot them. The weeds covered everything from sight. It was no unusual thing to see Junius burrow into a perfect thicket of mallow weeds and emerge carrying a pale cucumber. He had stopped wearing shoes because he liked the feeling of the warm earth on his feet, and because he had no shoes.
In the afternoon, Junius talked to Jakob Stutz a great deal. “You know,” he said, “when the children died, I thought I had reached a peculiar high peak of horror. Then, almost while I thought it, the horror turned to sorrow and the sorrow dwindled to sadness. I didn’t know my wife nor the children very well, I guess. Perhaps they were too near to me. It’s a strange thing, this knowing. It is nothing but an awareness of details. There are long visioned minds and short visioned. I’ve never been able to see things that are close to me. For instance, I am much more aware of the Parthenon than of my own house over there.” Suddenly Junius’ face seemed to quiver with feeling, and his eyes brightened with enthusiasm. Jakob,” he said, “have you ever seen a picture of the frieze of the Parthenon?”
“Yes, and it is good, too,” said Jakob.
Junius laid a hand on his hired man’s knee. “Those horses,” he said. “Those lovely horses—bound for a celestial pasture. Those eager and yet dignified young men setting out for an incredible fiesta that’s being celebrated just around the cornice. I wonder how a man can know what a horse feels like when it is very happy; and that sculptor must have known or he couldn’t have carved them so.”
That was the way it went. Junius could not stay on a subject. Often the men went hungry because they failed to find a hen’s nest in the grass when it came suppertime.
The son of Junius was named Robert Louis. Junius called him that when he thought of it, but Jakob Stutz rebelled at what he considered a kind of literary preciousness. “Boys must be named like dogs,” he maintained. “One sound is sufficient for the name. Even Robert is too long. He should be called ‘Bob.’ ” Jakob nearly got his way.
“I’ll compromise with you,” said Junius. “We’ll call him Robbie. Robbie is really shorter than Robert, don’t you think?”
He often gave way before Jakob, for Jakob continually struggled a little against the webs that were being spun about him. Now and then, with a kind of virtuous fury, he cleaned the house.
Robbie grew up gravely. He followed the men about, listening to their discussions. Junius never treated him like a little boy, because he didn’t know how little boys should be treated. If Robbie made an observation the two men listened courteously and included the remark in their conversation, or even used it as the germ of an investigation. They tracked down many things in the course of an afternoon. Every day there were several raids on Junius’ Encyclopedia.
A huge sycamore put out a horizontal limb over the meadow stream, and on it the three sat, the men hanging their feet into the water and moving pebbles with their toes while Robbie tried extravagantly to imitate them. Reaching the water was one of his criteria of manhood. Jakob had by this time given up shoes; Robbie had never worn any in his life.
The discussions were erudite. Robbie couldn’t use childish talk, for he had never heard any. They didn’t make conversation; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange fruit their conversation bore, for they didn’t direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many people do.
There on the limb the three sat. Their clothes were rags and their hair was only hacked off to keep it out of their eyes. The men wore long, untrimmed beards. They watched the water-skaters on the surface of the pool below them, a pool which had been deepened by idling toes. The giant tree above them whisked softly in the wind, and occasionally dropped a leaf like a brown handkerchief. Robbie was five years old.
“I think sycamore trees are good,” he observed when a leaf fell in his lap. Jakob picked up the leaf and stripped the parchment from its ribs.
“Yes,” he agreed, “they grow by water. Good things love water. Bad things always been dry.”
“Sycamores are big and good,” said Junius. “It seems to me that a good thing or a kind thing must be very large to survive. Little good things are always destroyed by evil little things. Rarely is a big thing poisonous or treacherous. For this reason, in human thinking, bigness is an attribute of good and littleness of evil. Do you see that, Robbie?”
“Yes,” said Robbie. “I see that. Like elephants.”
“Elephants are often evil, but when we think of them, they seem gentle and good.”
“But water,” Jakob broke in. “Do you see about water too?”
“No, not about water.”
“But I see,” said Junius. “You mean that water is the seed of life. Of the three elements water is the sperm, earth the womb and sunshine the mould of growth.”
Thus they taught him nonsense.
The people of the Pastures of Heaven recoiled from Junius Maltby after the death of his wife and his two boys. Stories of his callousness during the epidemic grew to such proportions that eventually they fell down of their own weight and were nearly forgotten. But although his neighbors forgot that Junius had read while his children died, they could not forget the problem he was becoming. Here in the fertile valley he lived in fearful poverty. While other families built small fortunes, bought Fords and radios, put in electricity and went twice a week to the moving pictures in Monterey or Salinas, Junius degenerated and became a ragged savage. The men of the valley resented his good bottom land, all overgrown with weeds, his untrimmed fruit trees and his fallen fences. The women thought with loathing of his unclean house with its littered dooryard and dirty windows. Both men and women hated his idleness and his complete lack of pride. For a while they went to visit him, hoping by their neat examples to drag him from his slothfulness. But he received them naturally and with the friendliness of equality. He wasn’t a bit ashamed of his poverty nor of his rags. Gradually his neighbors came to think of Junius as an outcast. No one drove up the private road to his house any more. They outlawed him from decent society and resolved never to receive him should he visit them.
Junius knew nothing about the dislike of his neighbors. He was still gloriously happy. His life was as unreal, as romantic and as unimportant as his thinking. He was content to sit in the sun and to dangle his feet in the stream. If he had no good clothes, at least he had no place to go which required good clothes.
Although the people almost hated Junius, they had only pity for the little boy Robbie. The women told one another how horrible it was to let the child grow up in such squalor. But, because they were mostly good people, they felt a strong reluctance for interfering with Junius’ affairs.
“Wait until he’s school age,” Mrs. Banks said to a group of ladies in her own parlor. “We couldn’t do anything now if we wanted to. He belongs to that father of his. But just as soon as the child is six, the county’ll have something to say, let me tell you.”
Mrs. Allen nodded and closed her eyes earnestly. “We keep forgetting that he’s Mamie Quaker’s child as much as Maltby’s. I think we should have stepped in long ago. But when he goes to school we’ll give the poor little fellow a few things he never had.”
“The least we can do is to see that he has enough clothes to cover him,” another of the women agreed.
It seemed that the valley lay crouched in waiting for the time when Robbie should go to school. When, at term opening, after his sixth birthday, he did not appear, John Whiteside, the clerk of the school board, wrote a letter to Junius Maltby.