The patches of green were fenced from each other so that one square could rest and recuperate while the chickens were working in another. From the hill you could see Raymond’s whitewashed house set on the edge of a grove of oak trees. There were many flowers around the house:
Calendulas and big African marigolds and cosmos as high as trees; and, behind the house, there was the only rose garden worthy the name in the valley of the Pastures of Heaven. The local people looked upon this place as the model farm of the valley.
Raymond Banks was a strong man. His thick, short arms, wide shoulders and hips and heavy legs, even the stomach which bulged his overalls, made him seem magnificently strong, strong for pushing and pulling and lifting. Every exposed part of him was burned beef red by the sun, his heavy arms to the elbows, his neck down into his collar, his face, and particularly his ears and nose were painfully burned and chapped. Thin, blond hair could not protect his scalp from reddening under the sun. Raymond’s eyes were remarkable, for, while his hair and eyebrows were pale yellow, the yellow that usually goes with light blue eyes, Raymond’s eyes were black as soot. His mouth was full lipped and jovial and completely at odds with his long and villainously beaked nose. Raymond’s nose and ears were terribly punished by the sun. There was hardly a time during the year when they were not raw and peeled.
Raymond Banks was forty-five and very jolly. He never spoke softly, but always in a heavy half shout full of mock fierceness. He said things, even the commonest of things, as though they were funny. People laughed whenever he spoke. At Christmas parties in the schoolhouse, Raymond was invariably chosen as the Santa Claus because of his hearty voice, his red face and his love for children. He abused children with such a heavy ferocity that he kept them laughing all the time. In or out of his red Santa Claus suit, the children of the valley regarded Raymond as a kind of Santa Claus. He had a way of flinging them about, of wrestling and mauling them, that was caressing and delightful. Now and then, he turned serious and told them things which had the import of huge lessons.
Sometimes on Saturday mornings a group of little boys walked to the Banks farm to watch Raymond working. He let them peep into the little glass windows of the incubators. Sometimes the chicks were just coming out of the shells, shaking their wet wings and wobbling about on clumsy legs. The boys were allowed to raise the covers of the brooders and to pick up whole armfuls of yellow, furry chicks which made a noise like a hundred little ungreased machines. Then they walked to the pond and threw pieces of bread to the grandly navigating ducks. Most of all, though, the boys liked the killing time. And strangely enough, this was the time when Raymond dropped his large bantering and became very serious.
Raymond picked a little rooster out of the trap and hung it by its legs on a wooden frame. He fastened the wildly beating wings with a wire clamp. The rooster squawked loudly. Raymond had the killing knife with its spear-shaped blade on the box beside him. How the boys admired that knife, the vicious shape of it and its shininess; the point was as sharp as a needle.
“Now then, old rooster, you’re done for,” said Raymond. The boys crowded closer. With sure, quick hands, Raymond grasped the chicken’s head and forced the beak open. The knife slipped like a flash of light along the roof of the beak and into the brain and out again. The wings shuddered and beat against their clamp. For a moment the neck stretched yearningly from side to side, and a little rill of blood flowed from the tip of the beak.
“Now watch!” Raymond cried. His forked hand combed the breast and brought all the feathers with it. Another combing motion and the back was bare. The wings were not struggling so hard now. Raymond whipped the feathers off, all but the wing tip feathers. Then the legs were stripped, a single movement for each one. “You see? You’ve got to do it quick,” he explained as he worked. “There’s just about two minutes that the feathers are loose. If you leave them in, they get set.” He took the chicken down from the frame, snicked another knife twice, pulled, and there were the entrails in a pan. He wiped his red hands on a cloth.
“Look!” the boys shrieked. “Look! what’s that?”
“That’s the heart.”
“But look! It’s still moving. It’s still alive.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Raymond assured them. “That rooster was dead just the second the knife touched his brain. That heart just beats on for a while, but the rooster is dead all right.”
“Why don’t you chop them like my father does, Mr. Banks?”
“Well, because this is cleaner and quicker, and the butchers want them with their heads on. They sell the heads in with the weight, you see. Now, come on, old rooster!” He reached into the trap for another struggling squawker. When the killing was over, Raymond took all the chicken crops out of the pan and distributed them among the boys. He taught them how to clean and blow up all the crops to make chicken balloons. Raymond was always very serious when he was explaining his ranch. He refused to let the boys help with the killing, although they asked him many times.
“You might get excited and miss the brain,” he said. “That would hurt the chicken, if you didn’t stick him just right.”
Mrs. Banks laughed a great deal—clear, sweet laughter which indicated mild amusement or even inattention. She had a way of laughing appreciatively at everything anyone said, and, to merit this applause, people tried to say funny things when she was about. After her work in the house was finished, she dug in the flower garden. She had been a town girl; that was why she liked flowers, the neighbors said. Guests, driving up to the house, were welcomed by the high, clear laughter of Cleo Banks, and they chuckled when they heard it. She was so jolly. She made people feel good. No one could ever remember that she said anything, but months after hearing it, they could recall the exact tones of her laughter.
Raymond Banks rarely laughed at all. Instead, he pretended a sullenness so overdrawn that it was accepted as humor. These two people were the most popular hosts in the valley. Now and then they invited everyone in the Pastures of Heaven to a barbecue in the oak grove beside their house. They broiled little chickens over coals of oak bark and set out hundreds of bottles of home brewed beer. These parties were looked forward to and remembered with great pleasure by the people of the valley.
When Raymond Banks was in high school, his chum had been a boy who later became the warden at San Quentin prison. The friendship had continued, too. At Christmas time they still exchanged little presents. They wrote to each other when any important thing happened. Raymond was proud of his acquaintance with the warden. Two or three times a year he received an invitation to be a witness at an execution, and he always accepted it. His trips to the prison were the only vacations he took.
Raymond liked to arrive at the warden’s house the night before the execution. He and his friend sat together and talked over their school days. They reminded each other of things both remembered perfectly. Always the same episodes were recalled and talked about. Then, the next morning, Raymond liked the excitement, the submerged hysteria of the other witnesses in the warden’s office. The slow march of the condemned aroused his dramatic sense and moved him to a thrilling emotion The hanging itself was not the important part, it was the sharp, keen air of the whole proceeding that impressed him. It was like a superchurch, solemn and ceremonious and somber. The whole thing made him feel a fullness of experience, a holy emotion that nothing else in his life approached. Raymond didn’t think of the condemned any more than he thought of the chicken when he pressed the blade into its brain. No strain of cruelty nor any gloating over suffering took him to the gallows. He had developed an appetite for profound emotion, and his meager imagination was unable to feed it. In the prison he could share the throbbing nerves of the other men. Had he been alone in the death chamber with no one present except the prisoner and the executioner, he would have been unaffected.
After the death was pronounced, Raymond liked the second gathering in the warden’s office. The nerve-racked men tried to use hilarity to restore their outraged imaginations. They were more jolly, more noisily happy than they ordinarily were. They sneered at the occasional witness, usually a young reporter, who fainted or came out of the chamber crying. Raymond enjoyed the whole thing. It made him feel alive; he seemed to be living more acutely than at other times.