ONE FOG-LIDDED DAWN in summertime a city girl, whose name was Hester, stood near the whipping post on the Tunxis village green with half a hundred strangers waiting to round up woodchucks. It was but five o’clock in the morning, and though Hester was of the sort that is always looking for something new and for someone other than who is at hand, nevertheless this early start was something almost too novel for even such as she. Self-conscious in brand-new rough clothes, she knew she was standing gracelessly, for her whole body was gelid with damp summer-cold and sleepiness and embarrassment; she was obliged to be glad that the mist hid her urban awkwardness from the villagers around her. Most of the volunteers had convened here in front of the Grange Hall. Her friend Eben had been called off on some errand and had left her alone in the crowd of murmuring strangers, his townspeople of Tunxis, in whose early morning commonplaces she could hear truculence, humor, and half-wakened malice.
“Goin’ to rain?”
“Nope. This’ll burn off.”
“Positive?”
“Ayeh.”
“Never knew yourself to be wrong yet, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Never in your born days fired into the wrong flock, did you?”
“Nope.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“My knuckle joints.”
“Praise God from whom all blessin’s flow!”
“This’ll burn off.”
A huge form, the shape of a gigantic man, loomed and went shivering past Hester, drawing eddies of fog behind it.
Hester pulled back, startled, but then she remembered the enormous citizen with the woodwind voice at the caucus the night before, and she almost laughed out loud. What a confusion that meeting had been!—these outwardly dry Connecticut people standing up, in turn and out, stirring the ancient dust on the rafters of the Grange Hall with their angry shouts and sudden laughs, their protests, cheers, and challenges; townspeople arguing about a local woodchuck drive as if it were going to be as memorable in Tunxis history as the Revolutionary skirmish on Johnnycake Meadow that Eben was always talking about. Eben’s famous battle! With what funny, vainglorious ruefulness had Eben, who was at any rate a sorry antiquarian, often spoken to her in the city about that small old action! There had been trifling bravery spent in it, he had confessed; there had been only one casualty; a single embattled farmer had been given a musket ball in one of the hassocks of his seat, which he had put before the enemy during an impulsive resignation from the lists of human freedom. Yet the episode had been purified and formalized in the annals of the town, and every year during Eben’s boyhood on Training Day the townspeople had re-enacted the Engagement on the Meadow, he had told her, simulating the ill-clad Tunxismen in noble ambush of the hated, dandy Lobsterbacks, and oh, the memory of those Training Days seemed to figure grandly in Eben’s view of happiness: happiness to him still seemed to be a kind of grab barrel full of gingerbread, costumes, Chinee firecrackers, dedications, maple sugar chunks, flags, blank cartridges, and callithumpian orgies on the Legion drum.
Then, with a vividness that caught her by surprise, Hester saw again in recollection the figure of the Selectman the night before, moderating and controlling the wild palaver of the caucus, quiet, dignified, firm, yet strangely a target of much hard feeling—the Selectman, Eben’s father, who might become her father-in-law, or might not. Thinking of the Selectman’s easy presidency of the caucus, Hester remembered, without knowing why she did, that once Eben had said to her, “Father would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.”
Why did Eben say such things? When would Eben come back from his errand? When would these people get started?
Hester could barely see, to her right, the outline of the white Grange Hall, whose miniature Palladian façade, with its blistered and off-curling paint, Eben had called to her attention before the caucus the previous evening, for her to laugh at. She had obliged; she had laughed—the Hall was comically pretentious against its simple setting of elms and maples on the new-mown triangle of the town common, as out of place, she had thought, as a cameo pinned on the flank of a moo-cow.
Near her, now, on her left at the highwayside, a boy seemed to be climbing and gymnasticating on the platform before the town notice board. This bulletin board was bolted, the Selectman had told her while they had waited for the caucus, to a perdurable cypress log that had been brought from the Carolinas by Captain Thankful Pitkin, Puritan ancestor to the present Town Counsel, and had been used “until later than one would think,” Eben’s father had said, as a whipping post. The boy on the whipping platform was whistling, off key, Onward, Christian Soldiers. Hester merely sensed the whipping post and platform and the notice board, for she could not clearly see them in the fog; having seen them at sundown the day before, she fabricated them now from the sibilant phantom on her left. She shivered. A few more volunteers were straggling onto the common. She guessed there were by this time three score or more of groundhog hunters on the edge of the green between the post and the Hall.
A young fellow in the crowd suddenly cackled over some joke with indecent hilarity, like a concupiscent rooster who feels his loins stir as the earth rolls to morning.
Hester was embarrassed. She had not realized that Eben was bringing her out from the city for this weekend with such formal intent—to show his family his serious girl, as doubtless he thought of her, and as his blunt father had made her see herself during the drive home from the railway station the day before. Besides, she had not known, nor had Eben, that the woodchuck drive was to be held this weekend; and now, in her new blue jeans and white shirt, she worried because she wouldn’t know how to behave, she wouldn’t know how to walk like a native in the woods. She felt childishly shy, and again something like a chill shook her.
Someone bumped into her in the darkness.
“Who’s this? Belle?” a man’s voice asked, and she saw a head float through the vapor toward hers, apparently peering, but in the murk it had no face; it was like a coin worn out by a million thumbs. She supposed she was blank, too, and this made her a little bold.
“You don’t know me,” she said. “I’m visting the Avereds.”
“Oh,” the voice said. “Ayeh. We heard Eben was betwattled after a girl from where he moved to. They say”—the voice seemed emboldened, too; it was as if Hester and this man had had a chance encounter on an ocean voyage and were not inhibited by a fixed and reminding landscape—“they say you’re ripe enough to rattle.” Then, hastily, a decorous withdrawal: “Thought you were Belle Sessions.”
“Are we going to start soon?”
“Just waitin’ for the Selectman to blow his nose, I guess. Well, young lady, what do you think of all this to-do?”
“I don’t know when I’ve gotten up so early,” Hester cautiously answered.
“Groundhogs are up and about with the sun, they don’t keep city hours, I guess you know that.” Then the voice was unctuous, evidently in atonement for the mild rebuke: “Whose division you in, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“The captain’s a woman. I’ve forgotten her name.”
“You in Mrs. Tuller’s division? She drives to kill, that old girl, she’ll keep you rustlin’. She teaches school, I had her in school some while back. I was always late in the tide—on the hind end of nothin’, you might say, as far as arithmetic went, and b-r-r-r, I can still feel her ferule on my hand.”
“Her which on your hand?”
“She uses one to this day, you know, it’s a little slapper thing.” The voice had a pleading tone. “She don’t believe in all this new mollycoddlin’. She says Connecticut’s made of ledge and glacier stones and hardpan, she can’t see the sense of bringing in a lot of slush at this late date.”
Then suddenly, without Godspeed, the head and the voice were gone. Hester wished she had asked the man for his name; his voice had been perhaps a little too ingratiating. She considered for a moment the contemptuous phrase it had uttered: “…waiting for the Selectman to blow his nose.” A qualm stirred in her as she thought of the ugly scene at the caucus the night before, when such ill will and spite toward Eben’s father had been shown by the townspeople. Perhaps the Selectman’s intelligence made them want to destroy him, she thought, perhaps they resented his always seeming to be talking “afore folks,” with citified grammar, or perhaps his apparent goodness made them feel inwardly sick, perhaps they envied or feared him, or perhaps there was something she had not been able to discern in him that his neighbors and his son had found out. Surely their bitterness toward him was hard to understand.
The train had stopped with a squeal and a shudder as the dry brakes had seized.
“Tunxis!” the conductor, standing at the open door, cried, “Tunxis!”, pronouncing the name each time as if the n might become lodged in his nose forever.
Eben was all alight. Walking along the aisle of the car stooped forward, peering out the windows to find his mother and father, he bumped the suitcases against the seat arms again and again. Hester felt her face flush and wondered whether she had too much make-up on. At last she clattered down the car steps, and happy Eben came down after her, ungainly as the Jabberwock.
Hester saw a dull little station of gray clapboard, hooded by magnificent elms, and across the way she got a glimpse of a row of half a dozen store backs, cheaply built structures crowded together with a squalid, tenemental look far out of key with the clean landscapes of tilled valleys and traprock cliffs through which the train had come for the second of the two hours the trip from the city had taken; out of key, too, with the image of Tunxis that Eben had induced in her mind, of white houses and a white church breasting a quiet common. The center of Tunxis, she thought with disappointment, was to be after all just another montage of soft-drink signs, tar-paper shingles, gas-station pennants, and grinning billboards; somewhere beyond the stores she supposed she would find a rank growth of television masts, new bulrushes in a dark swamp.
Here came Eben’s father walking along the platform. It was clearly Eben’s father—the nose bigger than the son’s, the jaw set a little more aggressively, the brown eyes brimming with the same warmth; Eben’s father, no mistaking. There was a mole on the side of his chin, a small black badge as impossible to hide or forget as grief. He was wearing gray flannel trousers badly in need of a pressing and a walnut-colored coat garnished with buttons that were surely pewter. His hair was black and gray, and not fussily brushed; and he said to Eben, “Mother’s in the car. So this is our Hester.” Eben’s mother was sitting in an old green Pontiac, a woman with a face that seemed to be compounded of skim milk and strained virtue—round, barriered with rimless glasses, not the least like Eben’s in looks. She was noncommittal in her greetings, even to her own son. Hester saw in the first instant that Eben’s city pretensions, his manners and “style,” were, like those of so many young people they knew, erected on plain footings. On the train Eben had tolerantly analyzed his parents.
Eben got into the front seat with his father, Hester with Mrs. Avered in the back.
“Well, boy,” Eben’s father said, “how’s the great marketplace?”
“O.K.,” Eben said impatiently, and Hester imagined that his father must always ask about the city with some such ironical formula, always presumably knowing as he asked that the city was still the city, immutable.
All four were silent for a few moments. The car swung around onto a macadam road past the fronts of the stores Hester had seen from the platform; from the street they looked clean and charmingly awkward, good country stores with gambrel roofs and a brick-veneered post office. The faces of these buildings showed a fine character indigenous to their place, while the parts that were supposed to be hidden were cheap and foul in the universal way. The whole tone of the town was a pleasant surprise from this side of the tracks. The car took a right fork, moved around a curve, and rolled past the town green.
“This is Tunxis for you, Hester,” Eben’s father said. “We hope you’re going to like it—and we hope we’re going to like you.”
So, with a bluntness Eben had not inherited, his father had faced the fact, as she and Eben had openly not, that she had been brought to Tunxis for inspection.
Hester’s response to this frankness was delayed, because, as Eben’s father spoke, she was looking at the lovely village common, which was all that Eben had helped her to picture and more. She had not conceived the sense of community such a plot of ground, necklaced with inward-facing central-hall houses, could give. The homes were built with deference to neighbors; the church and the Grange, she could see, were for the use of all, the prosperous and the hard-pressed, the educated and the benighted, the wise and the foolish, who could walk with an illusion of equality on the common grass. Then, having quickly pondered this Tunxis, Hester understood, with a lurch of feeling, what Eben’s father had said and meant. She wanted to blurt out that she didn’t know whether she loved Eben and certainly hadn’t decided to marry him and that it was unfair to treat her like an extravagant purchase being brought home for a few days on approval; but instead she said, weakly, of the village, “It’s better than Eben described it.”
“He never was much at describing,” Mr. Avered said. “I recollect once when Eben was just a little spicket, he came home with a gash on his forehead that needed a seamstress to fix, not a doctor, and we asked him what had happened. He said Roswell Coit had done it, and that’s all he’d say. Had Roswell pitched a rock? No, Ros just did it; according to Eben. Well, had Ros tunked open his head with a tomahawk? Unh-unh, just did it. It took us a week o’ Sundays to find out what Eben’s ‘just did it’ was, but we found out. This Coit boy—he’s still around here, you’ll see him tomorrow—he’d asked Eben on a Saturday if he wanted to have some fun with the teeter board in the school yard, and he sat Eben on one end while he rolled over a barrel from the Booges’ place, other side the road, and upended it opposite the free end of the teeter board, and climbed up—talking a blue streak the whole time like a sleight-of-hand artist keeping his audience fuddled—and then took a flying leap off the barrel onto the stick-up end of the teeter board, and Eben, who was a lot smaller anyway, shot up into the heavens like the frog of Calaveras County, and of course landed kerflummox on his head. Do you think ‘just did it’ covers that case?”
Hester hardly knew how to answer; at last she said, “So that’s what the scar’s from.”
“It’s a blessing he didn’t have a concussion,” Mrs. Avered serenely said.
“Rubber head,” Eben said, and Hester saw that he was trying to make the best of something he had not liked.
“Son,” the Selectman said, not bothering to pick up loose ends, “we’re finally going to clean the woodchucks out of Thighbone Hollow.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Volunteers from the town.”
“Is this another of your crackpot ideas?” Eben asked with sudden, overblown, resigned weariness.
“This young runnygade,” Mr. Avered said over his shoulder to Hester in quick, strong mimicry of New England accents, “considers everythin’ out-a-line that ain’t done his way.” Then, in his own tones: “Mite arrogant, don’t you think? Matter of fact, he’s just ignorant. What he doesn’t know is that in the old days around here, when there was need or danger, we all did our jag of work together. We had house raisings, fence mendings, church daubings, bush stubbings on the roads, and all of that. We didn’t like the work or each other very much, but we got a lot done. As you know, Mr. Eben,” the father said mock-formally and rather severely to his son, “we’re long overdue to clean out Thighbone Hollow. Those creatures are about ready to move into our front parlors, they’re so full of gall.”
“I saw one walking right along Sodom Street the other day,” Mrs. Avered said, speaking gently to Eben, “that looked like he thought he was the Pinneys’ dog—just so pleased with himself!”
“We’re going to have a caucus tonight at the Grange,” Mr. Avered said, “to tell folks how the drive’ll be run off.”
“How can it be a caucus?” Eben asked. “A caucus is a political meeting.”
“It can be a caucus because I decided to call it a caucus, and I’m the Selectman, that’s how it can be a caucus.”
“Now don’t be high and mighty, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said.
“I don’t like this young aristocrat telling me what I can say and what I can’t say,” the father answered.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Mr. Avered neither accepted nor rejected the apology; he seemed not to notice it. He drove as if dreaming through the village streets at a very slow rate of speed. Now he said, “Expect to have some people raising high-tantrabogus at the caucus tonight”; and he explained to his son that since Eben’s last visit home, the town had split itself down the middle over the location of a new school; half the town wanted to place it down by the Leaming property, he said, near the state fish hatchery, and the other half wanted it on Johnnycake Meadow—both fair enough situations for schools, but people had grown obstinately set on one or the other site, for all sorts of meaningless reasons. “They’ve lost all their neighborliness,” he said. “I tell you, Hester, these folks in Tunxis can be real Yankees when they put a mind to it.”
Hester, still dismayed by the realization that she was on trial, and for a moment hoping that active curiosity might be thought to equate with good breeding, or with whatever the Avereds esteemed, asked lamely, “What is a Yankee, anyhow? I have some cousins in South Carolina, you see, and they seem to feel…”
Mr. Avered waited a few moments, after Hester’s voice trailed off, and then said, “Being a Yankee doesn’t have much to do with what I was just saying; cantankerousness is just a side issue. A Yankee, a real Yankee—well, that’s a person who’s an idealist even after he’s come to see how hopeless life is. The folks here in Tunxis know the whole situation is rotten right to the core. They know their private dreams’ll fail, sure as night follows day; they have a sneaking idea God’s mostly a hailstone-thrower. They hate each other, they feel good when somebody goes to pot. And yet they go on living with straight backs and high hopes as if they could make everything better. Of course where they run into trouble is trying to make each other better…. They know how bad things are, but at least they keep trying to be decent people.”
The phrase “decent people” caught in Hester’s mind, and she thought of a time in the city when Eben had…The sudden flashing memory made her think how much she loved the city…Something, something in what Eben’s father had said was disturbing…. It was in a tiny nightclub they had wandered into after seeing a musical; they had been glowing with the sentimental wish-dream into which they had for a few hours been transported. The place was just a small dark room with a bar and a piano. A waitress led Eben and Hester to a table near the piano. The piano player was a woman whose features were handsome but whose skin was evil with pockmarks—a livid battlefield, some indefinite time ago, of adolescence. There were several rather noisy, perhaps drunken, young men at the bar, revolving around one they called Duncan. After a while, Duncan went into the ladies’ room, and in a few minutes he came back out with paper towels on his head, arranged in careful overlapping scallops, with water poured over them so they would stay plastered in place, and he went out on the dance floor and did a dance by himself. He was very funny. He was obviously trying to attract the piano player’s attention; several of the young men tried to persuade Duncan to stop dancing and go back to the bar, but he waved them off and shouted at them, “Get away from me, all you phonies.” Hester and Eben laughed at his antics, and Eben said, “I bet I can get him over here,” and he walked out on the floor and invited Duncan to join them for a drink, and Duncan did. Perhaps Duncan accepted because there was a girl at the table; Eben seemed to feel grand. All the time Duncan continued to eye the piano player. He still had the towels on his head. He was really very tight. He fell out of his chair, finally, in a graceful, sprawling spill; his head hit the floor hard, and Hester thought he would have to be carried out. But he stood up. The piano player was laughing at him. Duncan began to shout that his watch had been stolen, and that he was going to get the police into the place. Before long a policeman did appear from somewhere and showed Duncan quietly out onto the street. “He was just mad because I laughed at him,” the piano player, still smiling, said to Hester across the piano. The waitress serving Hester and Eben seemed upset, and after the piano player had moved to the bar to take a rest, she told them that this little nightbox had used to be doing fine, but that now the managers were going crazy, because they had booked this piano player “and they billed her ‘Straight from the Tin Halo,’ you know,” she said, “you know, that place on Ransom Street, and the minute she walked in the door, they started coming in here. By the dozens. Drunks. You heard what he said: ‘Phonies.’ They hate daylight. Nothing to live for except staying up nights trying to forget the days. Look at their faces!” And then Eben, who had been laughing hard not long before, asked the waitress, evidently trying to keep his question light, “Where do we find the decent people in this town, anyway?”…Eben had already lived in the city for at least three years at that time, Hester realized…and now she was struck by this echo across the Avered generations, their vague and separate, though shared, quest for something they unclearly called decency.
“Whatever can they find to fight about tonight?” Mrs. Avered asked, leaning forward in the back seat.
“Some of these hardmouthed people can’t see any purpose in cleaning out the hollow,” the Selectman answered.
“They must be the ones who don’t grow any vegetables,” Mrs. Avered said. “If they’d had those creatures in their dooryards, they’d see some purpose.”
“No, I expect they do have gardens. They’re the ones who don’t want Tunxis to collect any taxes to speak of, but also get deathstruck with rage if the town doesn’t plow them out half an hour after a blizzard or if it leaves a puny frostheave on a back road where they have to drive.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll shame them, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said placidly, sitting back again.
Soon after that, they reached the homestead—a former farm just outside the settled area of the village. The house was red, with white trim. The Avereds led Hester around to the front door, though it was obvious, from where the car was parked, that familiars usually entered through the kitchen. Inside, the house was fairly clean and smelled of cooked bacon. In the small front hall, Eben’s father said sharply, “I declare, Uncle Jonathan’s stopped again.” He was quite angry. He opened the door of a grandfather clock and began to rattle the works. Hester remembered Eben’s accounts of his father’s four tall clocks, named for men who had owned them: Uncle Jonathan in the hall, after Eben’s grand-uncle; Ardon (Eben’s maternal grandfather) in the living room; Sam Jones, bought at an auction, in the kitchen; and, upstairs, Himself, which Eben’s father had made with his own hands. All four, including the one Mr. Avered had built, had wooden movements and brass chimes, and they tolled the hours, when all ran properly, not exactly together but one by one, in order of seniority, Ardon speaking deeply first, then Uncle Jonathan, one of whose brass pipes was cracked, Sam Jones next with a whang and a whine from beside the breadbox, and finally Himself at the head of the stairs with a slightly tipsy authority. Eben had said that his father had had the patience to spend the nights of four winters carving the cogwheels of cherry for Himself, the pinions of laurel, the case of maple, and the white-wood face with its warty, tuberous numbers, and time then had seemed the least of his worries; but nowadays if Ardon ran a minute slow or if Sam Jones slipped his chime a quarter hour, it apparently drove the Selectman into furies. It seemed that Uncle Jonathan was being troublesome this season. Eben’s father straightened up, turned with glowing cheeks and desperate eyes to his wife, and said, “That damned clock’ll be the death of me.”
The boy on the whipping platform abruptly stopped whistling in mid-hymn and began to make the noises of a rifle fired down onto a stony desert—percussion, the flight of bullet, whining ricochet; he was, it appeared, a Good Guy crouching in his eyrie, from whom all Bad Guys were getting their comeuppance as the mist thinned on the mesa. It was growing a bit lighter. An open truck drove up and parked behind another that had already been standing not far from the whipping post. Hester overheard two townspeople reviewing the caucus of the night before. “Didn’t you get the goose-pimples,” one voice, a woman’s, asked, “the way old man Leaming threatened to spit in his face?” And the reply, from a jolly-sounding man: “It was just as good as the Selectman hittin’ him in the potroast, the soft answer he gave him! You could most hear old Leaming groan.” There was a duet of merry, sadistic laughter.
Eben came back. Hester could tell even before he spoke that he was angry. “They’re gone and switched me to another division,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I won’t see you all day. I came up here to have a weekend with you, not to go thrashing around in the brush with these fogies. I knew it would be like this.”
“If you knew it would be like this…. Can’t you speak to someone?”
“Already complained to the Selectman,” Eben said. “He was a great help! He said to do as the Romans do. He thinks Tunxis is Rome.”
“Couldn’t you ask Mrs. Tuller?”
“I tell you I spoke to my father,” Eben said, as if there were no higher, no other appeal. Then he added petulantly, “I wanted to be with you.”
“Me, too,” Hester lied, recognizing as she said the words that she was, to the contrary, perversely relieved—perhaps because she was so self-conscious about how she would conduct herself in woods and swamps that she was glad she would not have Eben’s disapproving supervision of her every footfall. “I’m sure I’ll make a fool of myself,” she said.
“Don’t be anxious,” Eben said with quick concern, his anger and distress all gone. “It’ll be easy.” Hester was aware of his eager warmth, but for some reason she did not feel properly touched by it.
Someone called out from the steps of the Grange through a megaphone, telling the divisions to assemble at various points on the green. Division Four, Mrs. Tuller’s, was told to go to the big elm at the left end of the building. With the sound, now, of an urgent fire engine, the Good Guy hurried down from the whipping platform and howled off across the green to his rendezvous.
“What division did they move you into?” Hester asked hastily. “Where’ll I ever find you?”
“I’m in Three,” Eben said. “We’ll be next to yours, at least. I’ll try to find you when we rest—or at lunchtime, anyway.”
The two young infatuates were pulled apart by the mill of hurrying volunteers, and Hester made her way reluctantly to the big tree.
About a dozen people gathered there gradually. A short woman with a very big head, evidently Mrs. Tuller, began to speak in what seemed to Hester a gentle, kindly tone; Hester had expected gravel to come spitting out of the teacher’s mouth, after what that half-seen man’s pleading voice had told her in the fog. Mrs. Tuller reviewed the part Division Four was to play in the drive: It was to advance across the low ground of Thighbone Hollow, along the canal, on the right-hand end of the whole picket line. At first, she said, the division would echelon out to the right, each person about a hundred feet from the next, on a line of bearing that would connect the right flank of Division Three with the bend in the canal, which would be somewhat forward of the rest of the line at the start. Mrs. Tuller said that her group would have to wait, holding that diagonal line, about half an hour while the gang of advance men drove the woodchucks out of their burrows; this period would require patience and diligence, she said, since it was possible that the animals would be in a panic and might try to break backwards through the line, in a swarm. She reviewed the instructions on stamping, shouting, and especially whistling, and warned against rushing at the beasts. When the signal would come down the hill from Division One, up against the traprock ledge on the left flank, which was to move first, Division Four would slowly pivot forward on its fulcrum at the canal, keeping in contact with Three on its left, until it would be in a straight line with the rest of the drive, perpendicular to the axis of the hollow. Then it would move forward with the canal on its right, crowding a bit toward the canal, since the animals were liable to double back at the water’s edge. “We shall move forward in order and tranquillity,” Mrs. Tuller said, belying Hester’s anticipation of the event. And Mrs. Tuller said, “Don’t plunge too valorously into the cat brier. We want to catch the marmots in this drive, not ourselves. But hold your spacin’ if you possibly can. Keep track of each other by your whistlin’.” She said that to get to the starting place, the division would ride to the Spruce Gate on the Cherevoy farm in the second of the two trucks parked by the notice board, and would walk from there up Manross Lane through the woods to the mouth of Thighbone Hollow. Mrs. Tuller was done.
“Why don’t we have two lines, one in front the other?” a man’s husky voice behind Hester asked. “If the groundhogs form up in a tight patrol and bust through us when we’re in a single line, we’ll never in a dog’s age round ’em up again.”
“That’s a good question,” Mrs. Tuller said, dropping into the encouragingly patient manner of a schoolteacher speaking to a slow boy in class; “but as you know, it’s not up to us to think up ways of collarin’ these creatures that don’t fit in with the rest of the drive. The Selectman and his committee decided how we’re to proceed.”
“What in the name of Sam Hill does the Selectman know ’bout tactics? I don’t see why our division couldn’t try to do it right.”
Suddenly Mrs. Tuller’s voice, though it kept its warm timbre, was imperious and not lightly to be disregarded. “You’ll obey orders, Roswell. I guess even in the Rangers they expected you to obey orders, didn’t they?”
“I know one thing for a fact,” the young fellow grumbled in acquiescence. “We never would’ve used ice-age tactics in the Rangers.” He turned to whoever was beside him and loudly asked, “Where’d our great Selectman ever go to school to study tactics?”
This would be Roswell Coit, Hester realized, the one who had catapulted Eben from the seesaw, and she turned to look at him and could just see against the white Grange Hall a fine torso of a bully, a man as thick as his voice. Suddenly she thought of Eben as a habitual victim, dodging out of the way of arguments and fights, apt to whine under pressure, yet like a worried gamecock forever encountering, if not actually seeking out, adversaries—wits and brutes. She thought of a story of revenge he had once told her, and guessed that Roswell Coit might have been the one on whom the tables had been turned. A certain boy, Eben had said, who could “flax out any kid in school,” had stretched himself one day on a slope between a big, half-rotted sawmill log and a brook and had casually told the three smaller boys before whom he’d been showing off that they could, if they wished, roll the log down the hill over him and kill him—never dreaming, of course, that they could budge it. But with a united spasm of strength nourished on resentment, Eben and the others had managed to start the log, and before the big boy could scramble out of the way, it had struck him, rolled over him, and gone on into the brook. Hester remembered vividly Eben’s delighted description of the big boy standing up, his mouth full of dry rot, his nose bleeding, his eyes streaming tears, as he spewed out, in a hoarse Yankee drawl—yes, that huskily mimicked voice must have been Roswell Coit’s—his incredulous protest: “Gaul durn you boys! What on earth did you do that fur?”
Hester stood alone, at first, when the discussion was over, but soon Mrs. Tuller came over to her and said, “You’re Eben Avered’s friend, aren’t you? Mrs. Sessions told me about you.”
“Yes, I’m staying at the Avereds’,” Hester said.
“Eben always had a remarkable head of hair,” the teacher said. “There might be times when I’d use that expression to mean there wasn’t much to speak of underneath the hairline,” she added cryptically—giving Hester an impression, but scarcely a certainty, that this was not her intention in Eben’s case.
A middle-aged man with monstrously short and bowed legs rolled up to Mrs. Tuller and, in a suppliant voice that Hester recognized as belonging to the one who had bumped into her near the whipping post (how grotesque that brief fogbound intimacy seemed now that she could see the creature who housed the voice!), he said, “The Selectman’s given us the high sign to start, Mrs. Tuller. If you’d ask your people to load into the second truck—that’s the one Rulof Pitkin’ll be drivin’—we’ll get away in five minutes. ’Preciate it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Challenge,” Mrs. Tuller said. “You’re goin’ to fall in with our division later on, we hope?” The teacher spoke as graciously, Hester thought, as if she were inviting the oddly shaped man to some lawn party or open house.
“Pleasure,” Mr. Challenge said, reciprocating her formality, “—just as soon’s we stink the little boogers out their burrows. I’ll scamper back in your line quick’s I can. Believe Anak Welch is goin’ to do the same.”
“Fine and dandy,” Mrs. Tuller said.
Mr. Challenge half bowed to Hester, without seeming to recognize her, and then moved away on his cabriole legs, a self-important courier, to the next clump of people on the green.
“Mr. Challenge—he’s our local political genius,” Mrs. Tuller murmured to Hester, on a note of cautious contempt. “He pulls the wires of the Republican Party hereabouts. You can always count on fair dealin’s from Mr. Challenge—as long as you’re face to face with him.” Then, caution predominating, she added, “We all respect him. He wouldn’t lame a titmouse—though I calculate he could get a titmouse elected to office here in Tunxis, if he put his talents to it.”
Hester wondered if that last remark reflected on the Selectman but, suspecting that it did, held her tongue.
Mrs. Tuller rounded up her volunteers and ushered them to the hinder truck. As she passed its cab, she stopped at the window and spoke to the shadow within: “This your conveyance, Rulof?”
“Ayeh, this is me, ma’am,” the man at the wheel answered. “Would you folks like me to pull up to the whippin’ platform so’s you could load yourselves more convenient?”
“Oh, we’re all spry as pullets in this division, I guess,” Mrs. Tuller said, looking round at her flock. “We’ll just clamber on right here, Rulof.”
With that Mrs. Tuller moved from the cab to the rear wheel, put a foot up from the embankment of the green onto the tire, and, with an agility that was startling in a white-haired lady, moved like a spider up the web of the truck’s wooden side-racks. Hester did not know whether she herself could get up at all, and she hung back.
Roswell Coit was the third or fourth to go up, and as he climbed he grumbled, “What is this—a God damned obstacle course?”
“Mind your hairy tongue, Roswell,” Mrs. Tuller said with dreadful firmness.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the young man said. “I dreamt I was back at Camp Whisnant.”
Soon Hester, pushed by something half way between fear and vexation that was probably courage, moved forward and took her turn at the unsteady ladder. She was surprised at how easily she rose up, and at the top, where she knew she needed no help, Roswell Coit took her elbow and gave her an awkward boost that nearly upset her. Without thanking him, she edged away from him toward the tail-rack of the truck and watched in the dim morning for Eben or Eben’s father, but neither one came near the truck, which was soon packed full.
A tall, fair man of indefinite age, next to Hester, with enormous eyebrows over eyes so deepset that the dawn had not yet reached them, said to her in an accented voice, “Permit me. I am Friedrich Tuller. You are young Mr. Avered’s—um—houseguest, yes?”
Not sure that she liked being so widely famous in Tunxis, or perhaps notorious, Hester repeated the shaggy-browed man’s last word, “Yes.” Then, with a mischievous mockingbird fidelity of tone, she said, “You’re our captain’s—um—husband, yes?”
“Yes,” Tuller said, cheerfully playing the game, mimicking Hester’s treble in one syllable better than she had managed his tenor in a sentence. Then he added with ludicrous irony, “My rôle is camp follower, my wife is my captain! my captain!” Then, elaborately sociable: “How long do you honor Tunxis?”
“Just for the weekend.”
“I’m so sorry,” Tuller said, succeeding with his overstressed speech in sounding as if he were. “I hoped you were here on vacation and you’d come to my class. Mrs. Tuller teaches dunces, I teach the dance.” And he added, with a covetousness that had no danger in it, “You have nice long legs.”
“How do you know, when it’s hardly even daylight?”
“I scaled the walls of the citadel after you,” he said, nodding toward the side-racks. “I saw. You are ever so little knock-kneed—that helps for the dance, you know, makes you graceful.” He threw his big eyebrows up and murmured with facetious passion, “I want you.” For his class, he harmlessly meant, Hester understood.
“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing, “but you can’t have me. A metal desk on the seventeenth floor of a steel and concrete building in the midtown area has me, forever and ever.”
“What about Avered?” the dancing master simply asked.
“Oh, well,” Hester equivocated.
Then Hester realized that if the dancing teacher knew about her, she also knew at least one thing about him. At supper the night before, she remembered, Eben, picking up currency about various people in the town, had asked about the Tullers, and Eben’s father, after remarking that Mrs. Tuller still held the seventh grade in a state of cornered terror, had said, “As for Herr Tuller, he’s in his crystal-spangle phase”; and the Selectman had told how the dancing master had hired local workmen to dig up stumps from the bed of a stream and from the swamp near Johnnycake Meadow, and had dried the roots of the stumps, had cleaned certain gnarled forms, and then had suspended from the ugly pieces of water-grayed wood tiny glass spangles and droplets he had taken from an old chandelier, as if they were clear water dripping from the dead and rotten roots—“purity falling away from corruption,” the Selectman had said. Hester, wondering how this rarefied German dancing teacher had drifted to Tunxis and into the substantial arms, the loglike arms, of the elderly schoolteacher, decided she was beginning to feel something like awe for this town—this backwater, as she had condescendingly thought of it the day before.
Tunxis, Eben’s father had said to her during that same supper, was deep enough in Connecticut to be, as he put it, “apart.” It was too far from the metropolis to have been settled by a swarm of undesirable commuters, and was just far enough from the state capital, too, to be outside the easy range of those of its well-to-do who wanted the pretense of being simple countrymen. Tunxis had a scattering of summer people, the Selectman had said, dangerous drunken drivers who came to town meetings in city department-store blue jeans to vote in favor of local school appropriations. “I guess they do it,” he said, “because they think it’s charitable to pour a few mills of taxes into a poor little eddy in the stream like Tunxis, and gracious me! they are kind-hearted”—except, he had added, when a native trespasses on their precious land or when they get it in their heads that a Tunxis handyman or grass-cutter or plumber has been cheating them in his prices; “that’s when you feel like a manure-spreader’s just been hauled across you.” Then with a strange, fierce glitter in his eye the Selectman had said to his wife, “Our Eben’ll be taking a summer place up here one of these first years.” He had turned to his son. “Don’t forget to come to town meeting in a nice loud check shirt and brand spang new overhauls, son,” he had said. Hearing this bitterness of the Selectman’s against outsiders, Hester had recalled Eben’s telling her on the train coming to Tunxis that ever since his father had gone away to college—only twenty-three miles southwestward to a state normal school—and had come back with a certificate and a tranquil face and “a suitcase full of books and ‘doesn’ts’ and ‘isn’ts,’ ” he had walked through the village as one estranged, a magician, a clown, an Oriental wise man, respected, often called upon, rarely loved—really an outsider himself. That was what Eben had said.
The truck started up. “Wait till you see the incredible valley where we go today,” the dancing teacher said through teeth that chattered with the truck’s motion. Then motion and changing sights relieved Hester of the obligation to converse, and she was glad to be alone among the unknown creatures who pressed against her, as lonely as on a teeming subway car. Pulling away from the village green, the truck passed through the Tunxis that was “apart,” past modest porched houses standing free and away from each other, connected formally by sidewalks of huge, slanting, frost-thrown fieldstone slabs that glistened like wet steel, and informally by dark lawns lying back under great trees that still dammed back a large measure of the new day. The houses were gathered together in townhood, but they seemed to insist upon their separateness, their privacy; yew, hemlock, forsythia, and privet set up their definite screens and fortifications. The much-patched asphalt street had a steep-humping crown, which the truck seemed to have to keep struggling to surmount. Very soon the settled area of the village was behind them, and the road, after running beside a river for a short distance, turned away from it and began to oblige a series of farms. In time the truck swerved and entered one of them, bounced on a dirt road past its barns and through some of its fields, and fetched up, behind its companion, the other truck, at the edge of a meadow near a clump of evergreens, still black and mysterious in the half-morning. In the east a thin veil of sky-gauze had begun to glow with the softest of colors. “The sunup looks good on you,” the dancing master said to Hester, nodding his head, as they waited for their turns to disembark.
A few minutes later Mrs. Tuller took her division—the first to start, because its right flank would have the farthest to go of any unit to get into position for the drive—through a gap in the dark conifers, evidently the Spruce Gate, and along a path set between high, casual rows of wild laurel. The path ran through hip-deep grass that was covered with dew, and Hester’s blue jeans were quickly soaked. The lane climbed upward toward a kind of saddle.
The party soon reached the top of the divide, and Hester saw stretched out ahead of her the scoop of Thighbone Hollow. Up to the left was high ground, capped by a forbidding rampart of traprock, which, reaching away to the northward, set against the sky a dark, ragged limit to that side of the valley, while down to the right, running parallel to the ledge, could be seen a rigid, architectural stream of water, a gay ribbon of reflected cloud-tints, the canal. Between the parallels lay that part of Thighbone Hollow through which the drive was to go, a long, melancholy stretch of woods and stone-walled fields, sloping down to low ground, some distance away, then up again at the opposite end to another saddle like this one—a shape like a lengthwise half of a spoon’s bowl. At the lowest part of the scoop the fog still lay over the black terrain in pale, frayed heaps, and off to one side a sharp gray spike jutted up through the mist, a steeple with its belfry, which was, it seemed to Hester, askew, quite far from straight-standing.
Mrs. Tuller took her division diagonally across a wet meadow and through some gate bars at the far corner into a field beyond, where she stopped and said, “This is where our left flank is anchored. Roswell, will you keep the left pivot? Keep touch with Mr. Sessions’ division up above there. Then, dear,” Mrs. Tuller said, speaking to Hester and leading her along the stone wall, “you’d better be next here, let’s see, about a hundred feet. Just mull along easy, straight ahead, whistlin’ and shoutin’, when the time comes, and keep track of Roswell up there and of my dear decrepit husband on your right, I’m goin’ to put him next…. Now, Friedrich,” she said sharply, “you’re next and—let me think—we’ll slip Anak Welch next to him when he gets back….” Hester found herself alone at her starting point beside the wall.
She sat down on the stones, looking down into the somber hollow, shivering and waiting alone. Soon she heard, then saw, more people emerging from the laurel lane, another division taking its place; its drivers moved uphill to the leftward away from Hester, except for one man who came across the field toward Mrs. Tuller’s line. She saw that it was the Selectman, who had told her that he was eventually to be in the advance party that would drive the woodchucks from their burrows. He stopped for a moment and spoke to Coit, then turned and walked to her.
“Came to see how you’re making out,” he said, “while we wait.”
“I’m sopping,” she said. “Is that steeple in the distance cockeyed, or am I?”
“That’s the abandoned church,” Mr. Avered said. “The spire took a twist in the hurricane of ’thirty-eight.”
He sat down on the wall beside Hester and glanced at her. The sky had begun to glow more gaudily now, and the sunrise looked cheaper than Art, and Hester wondered whether the new, brighter downcast pinks were still becoming to her—if, indeed, the dancing master had not simply been flattering her when he had said she wore the first of the morning nicely.
“You look kind of streaked. Are you scared of something?” the Selectman asked.
“Yes, I guess I am,” Hester said.
“What of?”
She thought she was afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth. She remembered how, at the caucus the night before, the town dentist had talked about the marmots’ teeth. “Incisors like chisels,” he had said; and he had said the enamel is only on the fronts of the teeth, so the backs wear away and keep the chisels sharp. And she remembered he had said the jaws are hinged in such a way that they have no sidewise motion, only up and down and backwards and forwards. She was afraid of those rotating chisels. “I’m afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth,” she said.
“That’s silly.”
She was afraid of the thick skulls that woodchucks have, and what was it that the college boy with the glasses had said?—that their hides get to be a quarter of an inch thick! “They’ve got such thick skulls and thick skins,” she said, “how could you do anything to them?”
“It’s silly to be afraid of woodchucks.”
“I can believe you; I guess I can. But that doesn’t stop me from being afraid.”
“Being a little scared can’t harm you—just stirs you up. There’s a woman you’ll meet tonight, old Dorcas Thrall, you ought to know about her if you’re timid. She’s ninety-one. She was always very stout of wind and limb. To begin with, she had a queer family. There’s an old well that’s covered over now with a big flag of bluestone in the turnaround of the driveway on the Thrall place; they say it used to be eighty-five feet deep. One day Dorcas’s Uncle George went down that well head first, and no one ever knew whether he meant to go down or was just peering down there looking for something and lost his equilibrium. They never got him out; spoiled the drinking water. Her father was avaricious and tightfisted. Once he harvested a whole barnful of onions when the price of onions was on the rise, and he decided he’d hold the crop till the top of the market came, but before he knew it spring came instead, and the price fell kerplunk, and pretty soon the onions began to sprout and the shoots began to stick out between the boards; Evits Thrall’s hairy barn was famous all over the county. Oh, they were a queer lot. Now, about Dorcas being afraid. She was always physically powerful, as I say, but she had one weakness—she couldn’t abide birds. Sometimes in the evening she would be out on the lawn, and the swifts would begin to dart and dip, and Dorcas’s hands would flutter up around her head, and then she’d pick up her petticoats and run for safety. Birds abound in these hills, and especially around the Thrall place—it has so many chokeberries and crabapples—beautiful birds in May and June: you can hear the chestnut-sided warbler and the black-and-white warbler all day long, and wrens seem to love that house; and brown thrashers shouting their heads off! Dorcas was constantly in a panic in all the leafy seasons, as you can imagine, and the winters, with swarms of juncos and chickadees, weren’t much better. Once she went to the Tullers’ for tea, and the Tullers had a pine siskin they set great store by, no great shakes as a singer but a friendly codger, and the siskin got out of the cage in the room where Dorcas was, and for a few minutes everyone thought that Dorcas was crazy for good and all. She’s been fearful all her days, yet look at her: ninety-one years old, strong as a post of locust wood, and everyone says, ‘What a good and happy life old Dorcas Thrall has had.’ ”
“I don’t want to live till I’m ninety-one, and I’m still scared of woodchucks.”
“I’m kind of wary myself a lot of the time—but never of groundhogs! Jehosephat! Your trouble is, you don’t know enough about them.”
“What are you afraid of, then?”
“My friends and neighbors: these folks are so almighty censorious.”
“Don’t you know enough about them?”
“Too much! It may not be the same for you, but as for me, I’m as brave as the front of a bank building till it comes to two kinds of things—those I can’t see for the dark, and those I can see as clear as the pores on the back of my own hand. Half-knowledge makes me fierce and self-reliant. If I could know just a little but not too much about everything and everyone in this world, I’d never tremble or wake up in a drench in the night.”
He stood up. “I’d better get back up with my crowd,” he said. “About time for us to start.” He looked down over the hollow with a vague, abstracted look in his eyes that Hester had seen several times since her arrival, a look of awful, absent-minded involution, as if he were a helpless voyager in a searing, epic daydream that could only be interrupted for a few minutes at a time; he ran his tongue around his mouth over his lower teeth. “Be a hot day,” he finally said, coming part way back from his reverie. Then he turned and faced Hester and said straight to her, “I arranged to have Eben moved into Manly Sessions’ division, because I want to get to know something about you today and tomorrow without the boy around making cow eyes at you and forever shutting me up. Also want to tell you a little about him and us, if I’m able.” He looked back up toward the saddle where the laurel alley debouched and where a few townspeople were now moving to and fro; from this distance their scurryings seemed both urgent and aimless—insectile. “I don’t mean to be a busybody,” Mr. Avered said, “but by and large, the way two young people get themselves into a trance and get married…” Then, looking in Hester’s eyes again, so openly and cleanly returned from his daydream that she felt for a moment on the verge of true communication with another human being, he said, “I don’t want to try to manage anybody’s life”; whereupon she realized, with an inward shudder, that he was after all thinking mainly about himself, not about her or even about his son, and the ribbons that she had fancied about to run from his mind to hers and from her heart to his were suddenly frayed at the ends and now blew altogether away over the stone wall. Then the man himself was gone.
Even with the palpable landscape before her, its folds and recesses coming into view under the lightening sky and giving her, by the exposition at last of clear details, a testimony of reality, nevertheless she had for a moment after Mr. Avered left an uneasy feeling that perhaps she was daydreaming. Perhaps she was at her desk in the city daydreaming. Her situation—sitting on a New England stone wall waiting to take part in what the biologist at the caucus had called a “marmot drive”—was too unfamiliar, up to now too frightening and too marvelously beautiful, to partake of any reality she had previously experienced. To keep hold of the conviction that she was awake and reasonable, she tried to think what she actually knew and believed about what she was doing.
There were folding wooden double seats in the “speechin’ room” of the Grange for about two hundred people, and not only were all of the chairs filled; people were standing around the walls and in the doorway to the hall. The outdoor night was warm; here blood and breath and village envy increased the heat. There was a pitcher of icewater on the felted table on the platform, but the six glistening people in straight chairs behind the table looked to Hester as if they thirsted for more than water—for recognition, for lenity, for something they could call love. In the hot light of high bare bulbs their faces looked hard—hard yet painfully yearning; even the Selectman’s face looked oaken and awful. What a setting for “pure democracy”!—for that was how Eben had once characterized the regular town meetings of Tunxis. Here the governed villagers sat face to face with others of themselves, their own begrudgingly chosen governors, in a glaring clarity of overhead light.
The Selectman opened the meeting, speaking gravely and anxiously. “We all know why we’re here,” he said. “The creatures over in Thighbone Hollow are getting too froward and destructive, and we’ve come to a situation where we’ve plain got to clean them out. I don’t know how many of you folks have actually run across one of the groundhogs from the hollow lately, but if you have, you know they’re uncommon big and ferocious. I hefted one, about a fortnight since, and he was somewhere around the weight of the Swanson baby, which as you know is a healthy boy child more than a year old.”
For a few moments Hester entertained a picture of this unknown Swanson baby as a malevolent beast of the forest, and she lost the thread of the chairman’s remarks.
“…In June this summer,” he was saying when she rejoined him, “groundhogs took every leaf off of Alenam Rust’s acreage—that was beets and early lettuce transplants, wasn’t it, Alenam?—which is three miles from the hollow and hasn’t a burrow anywhere around it; Alenam’s looked into that. So you can see they’re bold and don’t mind a hike. We used to think they were lazy—ha! Anyhow, tonight we want to let some who’ve studied this thing tell you what we’re up against, and then we’ll have a discussion, and then tomorrow morning we’ll get after them.”
The first expert put forward by the Selectman, to tell how the problem had come up, was Anak Welch, a huge man, appreciably more than six and a half feet tall, whose forehead seemed incandescent, so close was it to a lightbulb hanging over him; a giant who looked as if parts of him were still growing and burl-like would never stop: his prognathous jaw, his hands like the beginnings of wings, his great ears that lent much, along with his persistent stoop, to his air of monstrous humility—for who, Hester thought, is as humble as a hearer? His voice was even, courteous, and low, and it commanded closer attention in the crowded, stifling hall than had the sharper note of the Selectman’s.
The huge man mildly said that the trouble had begun, in his opinion, during the last century, when the railroad had been put in, by-passing Tunxis and running round through Whigtown and Treehampstead. When the canal had come through in ’twenty-two, the village had thought it was “goin’ to turn into a little star or a wheel on the map of the state”—be a real center. It was just after that, he said, when the potash works, the two tanneries, the clock factory, the spoke works, the carding mill, and the mincing-knife factory had settled in Tunxis. “We were goin’ places! Yes, sirree!” But then in ’forty-seven, because of the way Beggar’s Mountain up north of town lined up with Thighbone Ledge, the railroad people decided they had to go round to the west and miss Tunxis. “Our biggest ’numeration was in ’fifty-two; we lost twenty-three men in the Civil War, and that was a terrible loss for a little hamlet; and we’ve been dyin’ on the bush ever since. D’you know the way sweet honeysuckle gets on a tree that’s let itself get weak and overwhelms it and kills it by-and-by? That’s what’s beginning, in my opinion, with these woodchucks. They calculate that Tunxis is on the wane, that’s the way I see it, and they’re movin’ in on us, they’d be glad to nudge us out altogether. We’ve got to tend to ’em early in the game and show ’em we have a mind to stay here, if we do. I, for one, do.
“We humans think we’re pretty high-soarin’, with our combustion engines and electric radios and now jimmyin’ open the almighty secret itself, splittin’ God to make explosions, but what we forget is that we’re still part of the woodlot where it grows rank and wild. We’re in it just as much as the volunteer hemlocks on the edge of Johnnycake Meadow and the black snakes on the lip of the Sessions quarry. We can’t afford to get absent-minded and forget that.”
“Stick to the subject, Anak!” a bass voice called out, and a gust of soft, refreshing laughter ran across the hall like a brief puff of northerly breeze in a hay meadow on a cloudless summer day.
The giant grinned. “You folks know me too well,” he said. It had been about seventeen years ago, he went on, just before Parson Churnstick died and the First Church was abandoned, when the men who worked the fields up toward Thighbone Ledge—old Mr. Manross, Romeo Bacon, and Frank Cherevoy were three he named—had begun to have bad trouble with groundhogs. They would put poison in all the burrows they could find and fill the mouths of the holes and set traps and shoot the creatures and do everything within their gifts, yet still they would lose their crops. They could grow nothing but sour weeds, and that was no way to farm. There was a bay in one of Romeo Bacon’s meadows, the big man said, with woodlots of chestnut, hemlock, and hickory on three sides of it, and the animals seemed to be gathering in that area—“buildin’ a village ’cross from ours, you might say. You remember Romeo got to be a case, about that time, and I think maybe the woodchucks had somethin’ to do with it, and old Mr. Manross died, and Frank Cherevoy moved away to the other side of Hartford—maybe he wanted to get those big insurance companies between him and Tunxis.” So for the next ten years, and all through the war, nothing was done about the woodchucks in the hollow. The Bacon meadows come up strongly in clover, and that just made the situation worse.
“By the time young John Leaming bought his track of land up there four years ago—without walkin’ over it careful enough, if you’ll pardon me sayin’ so, John—they’d really got themselves dug in, both in the old bay on Romeo’s acreage and in the woods and right up to the ledge itself. These weren’t fat old field chuckies. These were forest groundhogs, lean creatures, active as squirrels. They were pretty fierce, and some were tougher’n a hair halter, as George Challenge’s German police dog found out to its sorrow and doom. Some of ’em were turnin’ black—young Pliny Forward’ll tell you about the scientific side of all this; I’m no intellectual, as you folks know, and the only college I ever studied at was Doin’ It College. All I know is that these creatures were an everlastin’ bother. They were on the increase, too, faster’n the hordes of India. Nobody’s ever counted ’em, of course, but that time Mrs. Tuller went up there for an experiment and gave ’em a concert on the bull fiddle, the folks who were with her said at least two hundred groundhogs stood up on their mounds and listened to the music. Never heard nothin’ about none of the creatures clappin’ when the pieces were over and done, but that’s neither here nor there, is it, Mrs. Tuller?
“We first talked here in the town about tryin’ to control those creatures I’d say ten years ago, but we’d learned from Exodus not to covet our neighbor’s ox nor his ass—nor his troubles neither. So let old Romeo and Mr. Manross and Frank Cherevoy holler till their gills broke open, nobody’d listen—except Matthew Avered, I’ll say that for him, even if he’s a Republican and I ain’t. By and by-large, over the years, the colony of groundhogs was just a curiosity for professors and a dandy excuse for young folks who were sparkin’ to get ’emselves up into the woodlots. It wasn’t but three years ago, when the creatures begun to wayfare such great distances, that the town got in a fever about them. It’s too bad about Frank Cherevoy’s beanrows, but when they get into mine! That’s different! Well, the next thing we knew, we’d put Matthew Avered in the Selectman’s office on a split vote, and he’d been cogitatin’ about those creatures all along, and so here we are on a hot night, and that’s about all the history I can give you at the present sittin’.”
There was a brief rattle of applause, and as it died down, the voice of a man who had stood up near the back of the hall shouted, “Mr. Selectman!”
“Mr. Sessions has the floor,” Mr. Avered said.
“I just wanted to ask,” the man named Sessions said, “what the Selectman is tryin’ to pull off here. Looks to me like he’s advocatin’ the use of taxpayers’ money to help an individual property owner—to help young Leaming clear the pests out of his lots. Is that it, Mr. Selectman?”
For some reason, this question, which had been earnestly uttered, was greeted with laughter all around. This gust was different from the earlier easy laughter during the big man’s speech. This puff had force in it; this wind was harnessed to a storm.
Probably because of the laughter, the Selectman did (in retrospect it seemed) the wrong thing—he ignored the question and left Mr. Sessions dawdling on his feet, to sit down, eventually, turning his head from side to side, angrily scrutinizing his fellow citizens’ attitudes. “Our next speaker,” Mr. Avered blandly announced, “is a young man this town is rightly proud of, Mr. Pliny Forward. As you know, he walked off with all the brass-plated honors at Harvard College this last graduation. His strong point is biology, and because he got interested in this situation up in Thighbone Hollow some years back, he did his thesis on the groundhog, about which there’d previously been very little understanding in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where this particular college is seated. So you see he knows what’s what! He’s helped us no end with the planning for the cleanout, and we thought it would be time well spent if he told us a little about the animals we’re contending with. Mr. Forward, come forward!”
A pale young man wearing green plastic-rimmed glasses stepped to the podium and said in a shaking and startlingly cultured baritone, “Let us, to begin with, be accurate. The animal under consideration is a member of the marmot family. Our activity tomorrow and Sunday will be a marmot drive. Let us be exact.” For a moment Pliny Forward seemed to sag under the weight of his knowledge; he appeared to be fainting. Then he straightened up as if he had been watered just in time.
“Arctomys monax,” he managed to say. “ ‘The bear-mouse monk,’ the fellow’s called. And what more do we need in the way of description?”
The young biologist paused again, drooped again; Hester had for a moment the idea that since no more description was needed, he would give no more, but would subside and perhaps even expire then and there, he looked so feeble. She suffered a short panic for him; but again he revived.
“What we do need,” he said tremorously, “is to understand how the marmots in Thighbone Hollow differ from the ordinary field marmots in this part of the world. I’ll try to express the difference by ringing a change on the common names we use. We call the species woodchucks. Some think this may come from an Indian word, others think it comes from combining ‘wood’ with the diminutive once used for pigs in some farming districts in England, in Devonshire, for instance: woodland ‘chuckles’—forest piggies. We also call field marmots by another name, groundhogs. Now, to see the difference between our animals in Thighbone Hollow and other Connecticut marmots, we must think of the local animals, not as being like little piggies or fat, idle hogs, but as the counterparts of wild boars.”
Paler than ever, pouring off sweat, Pliny Forward nevertheless looked and sounded stronger now, for he was obviously on known and loved ground, forgetful of his environment and audience. “Let me cite you some actual differences between our local marmots and the common run in New England. To begin with, ours are bigger than their neighbors. Common woodchucks in Connecticut grow to about two feet in length, counting their tails, while the full-grown animals in Thighbone Hollow average twenty-eight or thirty inches. The ordinary ones become ludicrously fat, especially in the fall just before they crawl away to hibernate. Ours sleep less of the winter away, and they’re leaner and stronger; after all, they go several miles to eat. Ours have unusually thick skins and heavy skulls. I’ve skinned some and tanning the hides with hickory bark made leather a quarter inch thick. Their crowns are practically petrified.
“And take the matter of color. We biologists are taught that the standard ‘characters’ of the marmot are these: ‘Supra fusco cinereus’ ”—the young man chanted like a priest—“ ‘subtus subrufus, capite, cauda, pedibusque fuscis, naso et…’ ”
Someone in the hall let out a two-note whistle of admiration-derision.
Pliny Forward’s head turned slowly in the direction of the sound. “Whoever made that noise,” he said, the color of life suffusing his cheeks for the first time, “will be useful tomorrow and the next day. We usually hear that noise used as the mating call of the not yet fully adult male of the North American Homo sap., but its second note will be extremely useful in our pursuit of Arctomys monax, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. But to get back to color: The coat of the normal groundhog is a grizzly or yellowish gray, blackish-brownish on the back, crown, and tail, and rusty on the underbelly, whereas—this is eerie to me—a very large proportion of our animals in Thighbone Hollow are in what we call ‘the melanistic phase,’ which occurs only now and then among common eastern marmots. This means they are black or blackish all over.
“Now, about that whistle. Most of you probably think woodchucks are silent, but they’re not. When they’re terrified or furious, they’ll do one of two things—chatter their teeth together, so they sound like dangerous little chopping machines, or else give out intermittent, high, shrill whistles, warning their fellows. Connecticut marmots don’t have many occasions to use their alert call, but our local ones seem to have developed these shrieks to an unusual degree. In this, as in other ways, our woodchucks tend to be close to the Rocky Mountain marmots. We’ve found that by imitating the marmots’ whistle, we can alarm them and drive them along overground; and a little later we’ll demonstrate the sound.
“Why did this pack of abnormally wild marmots pick on Tunxis? From what I hear, some of our ancestors—not so far back, either: Parson Churnstick would be one—would have said we were being punished for horrible things we townspeople had done or even thought in our heads. On the other hand, we’ve got some people right here in this hall who think we’re all good and they—the marmots—are all bad, and that they are after us, as the evil always hunger to cannibalize the good. I try to be a scientist. I can only say that Mr. Welch must have been partly right when he put the beginnings of this thing a great many years ago—perhaps, as he said, about when the railroad came through the county. For one thing, most of the natural enemies of these creatures were stamped out about then—wildcats, foxes, eagles, big serpents, and even weasels. And I think Mr. Welch may have been right about the animals sensing the sapping of the vitality of our village, its gradual decadence. Marmots can see, they have eyes: the church in the hollow has been empty a long, long time, the mills on the canal smoke no more, the meadows up near the ledge haven’t been tended for more than ten years. But even that’s too simple. Why did clover come up so richly in the hollow? There must be complicated reasons for this visitation that I, in spite of all my education you people like to laugh at, don’t understand. Maybe some of you older people are wiser and know the real reasons. I leave them to you.”
Pliny Forward, who in these last sentences had grown rather bold and forceful in manner, sat down, and at first the mysteries he had webbed in his clumsy, callow way, and in his urbane university accent, lay like a shroud over a spiritless audience; then the people stirred and a few clapped rather angrily.
The Selectman stepped to the podium and said, “Dr. James Fantigh, our dentist, who has plugged up holes in most of our heads, has kindly agreed to highlight the main point of interest of these wicked animals we have heard about—their chinchoppers.” (In the early morning, on the stone wall under the pink sky, thinking back, Hester remembered the way the Selectman had gleaned that one small word, “wicked,” from young Forward’s speech. She wondered vaguely whether Mr. Avered’s unnecessarily pulling that word out had any meaning: whether it helped account for the Selectman’s longstanding interest in the woodchucks in the hollow; whether, in key with Pliny Forward’s blacks and whites, he saw evil in the beasts but not in himself—or the other way round; whether the light of this small word, in some refracted way, could illumine those long, staring abstractions of his.)
“My report,” Dr. Fantigh, a tidy man with hair parted in the middle, read verbatim from a filing card, “will be brief. The animal in question has upper and lower pairs of incisors, no canines, ten upper molars, and eight lowers. I have examined specimens brought to my office by Mr. Forward. The jaws are articulated in the vertical plane and have no sidewise motion. The incisors are like chisels, strong, narrow, and wedge-shaped, with enamel on the anterior surfaces only, so that by a constant wearing away of the posterior surfaces the teeth are kept filed to a very sharp edge. No caries was observed. If my patients”—the dentist looked up for the first time—“had teeth as sound as these, I’d be a poorer but happier man than at the present time.” He returned to his written words. “In summary, these teeth are dangerous. My professional advice is—keep away from them.”
The brevity, concreteness, and intensity of the dentist’s speech was in such sharp contrast to the troublesome, unanswerable, still overarching why? of Pliny Forward’s last sentences that the crowd now suddenly burst into a racket of clapping and happy laughing, as if Dr. Fantigh had brought much-desired good news from afar.
The memory of the rest of the caucus was confused in Hester’s mind. The rapid give and take of discussion, the intermittent instructions and warnings, the many mentions of names and places new to her, the swiftly mounting emotions of the crowd—all were blended in her recall with sensations of her own confusion and despair. She kept thinking that the facts she had heard about marmots, as the young biologist had called them, had fascinated her in exactly the same way as had Eben’s confidential and condescending lectures to her, back in the city, on new inventions in aviation, on the bowels of new instruments of war. It could have been, for all she knew, that the self-sharpening principle of the woodchucks’ dangerous incisors had only recently been contrived by ingenious scientists in secret laboratories of New England. She realized, with disappointment and then fear, the reach of her separation from natural things.
Hester did remember, all too clearly, the final scene of recrimination, spite, and comic bad manners, just before the caucus ended; most of what led up to it was hazy in her recollection. She remembered passages of the intervening time, but she could not piece together the logic of the crescendo of anger against the Selectman, if logic there had been. She sensed that there must have been some background of feeling in the town about which she had still to know, something beyond the division of the citizenry over the location of a new school—though that, too, was an explicit factor in the ruction.
After the dentist’s short report, Mr. Avered had spoken at some length about the tactics to be used in the drive. He had propped up on an easel a map of the hollow, and had described how the picket line of volunteers would, on the first day, dislodge the woodchucks from their homes and drive them along between the ledge and the canal until they had crossed Job’s Creek—a stream transecting the hollow, running down from springs on Thighbone Ledge to the canal. Plank bridges had been placed across this stream in recent days, and they would be withdrawn as soon as the animals were herded to the other side. Since the water-fearing woodchucks had never been known to cross either Job’s Creek or the canal, and because Thighbone Ledge beyond Job’s Creek was impossibly sheer for them to climb, there was virtually no likelihood of their trying to return to their community in the Bacon Meadows, once driven across the creek. They would probably burrow underground during that night and would have to be surfaced again the second morning. Then the picket line would drive the creatures forward into a long funnel of “rabbit-proof fence,” sunk under the ground as well as raised over it, at the constriction of the hollow four miles beyond Job’s Creek, known as the Lantern Flue. At its narrow end the funnel led into a corral of the same fencing, built, as the funnel had been, for this drive, on the edge of Judge Pitkin’s land. There the woodchucks would be destroyed; he did not say how.
The Selectman had continued in detail, explaining the system of divisions, naming the captains, assigning known volunteers, and outlining the duties of each division at each stage of the drive. Here Hester’s attention had wandered, as it had used to wander when she had been taken, much too young, week after week, to the church on the wide avenue. The pew-backs there had been hard, like the seats here in the Grange; she had used to lean sideways against her mother, who on Sundays had always borne the ineffable scent of a nameless flower. She was aware now of Eben beside her, breathing a little hard: poor Eben!—embarrassed by his father’s absorption in the minutiae of his beloved project.
How different Eben seemed in the city from here in Tunxis! Hester remembered how, when Mr. Avered had pointed out to her the previous afternoon a slender mourning dove in the high branches of a white pine near the homestead, she had suddenly thought of peanut-surfeited pigeons on befouled cornices above the sun-parched street across from the park in the city. Eben in the city was always congenial, and acquaintances took to him quickly, yet he was always, at last, alone like one of those birds on some high corner of sun-soaked, ordure-striped stone. She did not blame the city for that; on the contrary, she thought perhaps he had become practiced in loneliness as a child in this Tunxisful of defiant and separate identities. He had no intimacies but hers, and she was not sure that she was his friend. She remembered a conversation one evening when she and Eben were dining in a crowded restaurant in the far west side with the McCleods. Sam McCleod had gone to the same small New England college as Eben, and that night they began to talk about another classmate who lived in the city and whom all four of them knew, envied, and disliked.
“Wonder who’ll go to Cramp’s funeral when he dies,” McCleod had said. “D’you suppose enough people’ll show up to make it a proper funeral? D’you think they’ll be able to scrape up six pallbearers?”
“When I die,” Hester had said, “I don’t want any pallbearers. I haven’t asked my friends to carry me while I’m alive, and I’m not going to ask them to when I’m dead.”
“I don’t have six friends,” Peggy McCleod had said. “Who does?”
“Cramp does,” McCleod had said.
Peggy had answered, “Nonsense, he doesn’t have any friends. All he has is useful acquaintances. He has a system of mutual advantages, but no friends. Nobody has six real friends.”
At last Eben had spoken. “It won’t take six people to carry me,” he had said. “I’m going to be cremated. So it doesn’t matter whether I have six friends or not.”
But it did matter; that was what had made his utterance not mildly reckless and sophisticated, as he had seemed to mean it to be, but only mildly pathetic. The city was a frustrating place for Eben—and for Hester, too, since she was so much with him—because their life there consisted of a continuous search for intimacies, which had the maddening repetitive structure of a rondo, over and over and over: a series of explorations of a series of newly-met acquaintances, ending almost always in disappointment on one side or the other, as “attractiveness” was fragmented by familiarity into its too clearly seen elements; or ending, at any rate, in just happening not to meet again. In Tunxis there would almost never be new faces, there could almost never be new acquaintances; there must be a kind of stability of separateness and loneliness here, she thought, an atmosphere in which deep friendship might paradoxically be possible; though she was not at all sure—did the Selectman have any friends who were close and true?
“You’ve all probably seen the paths woodchucks beat across the meadows to their feeding places,” the Selectman was saying. “Follow those paths whenever you can and wherever they run along the general direction of our drive….” Hester heard him warn that groundhogs would turn and fight fiercely against attackers far bigger than themselves, if pressed too closely; so they shouldn’t be rushed. The drivers should take their time, stand back and whistle and stamp, and maybe shout, until the animals moved of their own free wills. Baby chuckies, “in their innocent valor,” he said, were the meanest and quickest fighters of all, though of course they couldn’t inflict such severe bites as their parents. It was expected that the animals would take refuge stubbornly in stone walls, where there might be big enough cavities to house them, or under the vaulting roots of partly washed-out hemlocks in the hanging wood below Thighbone Ledge, and if they did, they could be driven out with the same insect-spray bombs that were to be used to dislodge them from their burrows in the first place. Experiments had been run with DDT bombs, he said, and it had been found that the animals hated the smell of the insecticide vapor and would invariably move away from it….
The Selectman said the meeting was open for discussion.
From the very first the questions addressed to the chair showed a rancor that was puzzling to Hester, who thought the townspeople should be grateful to the Selectman and the others for the careful planning they had obviously done.
“I’d like to ask the Selectman,” one man declared, “why in heaven’s name he picked this particular time of year for his piece of funnin’, if that’s what ’tis. He knows this stretch of summertime is one of the very wust times of the hull year—for folks that have to work outdoors, that is, and there’s still some of ’em, you know.”
Polite as a basket of chips, the Selectman said, “Pliny, I think you’re the best one to answer that.”
(Later Hester thought perhaps Mr. Avered’s passing this first question on to Pliny Forward was a disastrous mistake, since the young biologist had already roused the resentment of the crowd with his superior accent and his unsettling why?)
“There are two reasons,” the pale young man said. “One is that in midsummer the marmots are widest awake and spryest; we can move them faster then than at any other time. The second is the more important reason. Marmots belong to the order of rodents, and almost all rodents have a very queer trait that shows up now and again: When they gather in close-packed communities that are perhaps a little too big—rodent cities, almost—there comes a time when they get restless, a mob feeling of the fidgets spreads through the whole city, the rodents want to get out and go somewhere else. In some cases, all of them do move; in others, part of the colony moves; and in still others—and this is often true of marmots—they just seem to go through the heebie-jeebies and stay where they are. You’ve all heard how lemmings migrate, sometimes with such hysterical impetus that the whole pack walks straight into the sea and drowns. Rat towns move this way, and sometimes end up in locations less favorable than the ones they have left, so far as food and comfort are concerned. I personally think it was because of this trait of rodents that the Pied Piper of Hamelin had the success he did. At any rate, a number of us who appreciate this phenomenon have been watching the marmot colony in Thighbone Hollow very closely for several seasons. You’ve heard how they started wandering three years ago. Real fidgets set in last summer, and came back even stronger this spring. We’re convinced that now is the time to push the marmots, as their own instincts might never be quite strong enough to do, out of a situation that gives them the willies.” The young man paused, then added, “As a matter of fact, this trait isn’t confined to marmots: don’t we see it sometimes in ourselves? Haven’t you ever had the feeling we all ought to clear out?”
“Got it right now!” a woman cried from the audience. Her shout was arched, it was a joke; the humor was nasty, and the crowd emitted the storm-laugh again.
Apparently the guffaws roused the man named Sessions, who had been laugh-tossed earlier in the evening, and now he was up again, saying, “I want to repeat what I asked before: Are you proposin’, Mr. Selectman, that we use taxpayers’ money to help an individual property owner?”
This time an intense silence followed the question, for now people seemed to want an answer to the question they had ridiculed before.
“The taxpayers’ money isn’t being used for this,” Mr. Avered said, a note of querulousness barely audible in his voice. “All we’ve asked for is volunteers.”
“What about those plank bridges? What about all that fencin’?”
“Mr. Leaming, Senior, contributed the fence posts and planks, and I paid for the wire mesh myself, as it happens, because I’ve been wanting for ten years to see this chore done with. There are about a dozen young men who helped plant the fence, and I’ve already thanked them in writing.”
“What’s old man Leaming up to, lettin’ loose all that lumber?” asked a man who did not choose to stand. “Tryin’ to influence the Selectman’s office when it comes to locatin’ the school?”
“I resent that,” shouted a white-haired, crimson-faced man, evidently Mr. Leaming, Senior, who stood up to cry out his three heartfelt words and then sat down again.
“Why’n’t you just trap the creatures?” asked a sober-faced man in a black suit, with a strong tone of resentment. “Trappin’ seemed to suit our forefathers. My father and his father kept our land spandy clean with traps, and so should I, if I’d’ve tended to the fields and hadn’t a-gone into my present occupation.”
“Traps won’t work with so many, Enos,” the Selectman said. “We couldn’t buy and service that many traps. Leave a groundhog in a trap for half an hour and he’ll gnaw his foot off. I’ll tell you one thing, too, Enos, though maybe you know it already: A groundhog is a lot more economical about such things than other animals, muskrats, for instance; where a muskrat’ll leave two or three inches of his leg above the jaws of the trap, your groundhog’ll trim himself off right at the steel, neat as a burnt-out candle.”
“Trappin’ was good enough for our forefathers,” the man named Enos said in heavy reproach as he sat down.
“There’s a modern way!” exclaimed an excited young man who had been on his feet raising his hand school-fashion for some time. “You back a car up at midday, when woodchucks are always to home, then run a hose down from the exhaust into the burrow, block off both ends of the burrow, and start your motor—that’s all! It’s a gas chamber! That ought to do the job thorough and easy.”
“Are you going to back your beautiful Chevvy with the fenders taken off it up into the bay on Romeo’s acres, Eustace Thrall?” the Selectman asked. “You ever been up there? And what about the ones in the woods?”
The excited young man flushed and sat down.
Then, from somewhere outside the hall and close to it, through the windows at Hester’s right, came a shrill and penetrating whistle.
Pliny Forward struggled to his feet on the platform as if the sound had dizzied him. “Did you hear that?” he said tensely to the crowd. “That was a marmot’s shriek, that was the alarm I was talking about. But it’s strange! I never heard one at night before.”
“Mebbe none never hearn you at night afore,” shouted the woman who had had a success with her previous quip, now vulgarizing her speech; but this time no one laughed, no one at all.
“Do you suppose they know what we’re doing?” the Selectman asked Pliny Forward. A smile showed that he, too, meant to be humorous, but his eyes were not enlivened by his joke; he seemed wan.
There was a long silence in the hall; the crowd was appalled. Finally the Selectman faced the audience and said, “Now that we’ve heard from the opposition…”
A sudden, surprising roar of laughter arose, as the crowd’s ridiculous tensions—its fear, its fear of fear, its hatred of fear, the understanding it must have had that fear had been, in those moments, unwarranted but ineluctably epidemic in the hall—were suddenly released. It was possible, too, Hester thought later, that the crowd was unconsciously laughing over the ambiguity, perhaps itself unconscious, in what the Selectman had said, for his “opposition” could be understood as of either woodchucks or townspeople. For a few minutes, at any rate, the latter sort was abated by the whistling episode, and perfunctory talk of tactics ensued.
But anger, like a hungry dog coming back to the scene of an unforgotten feast, soon returned. Hester, who had been daydreaming again, could not be sure what smell of a new repast attracted it back to the hall. She had picked up a note of cruelty in what Eben’s father had said about trapped animals gnawing themselves free, and that had made her think of a time when she had been driving with Eben in Florida, during the vacation they had shared there, and they had passed a runover cat on the road, and Eben had said, “Once in ’forty-seven I drove to Springfield and I killed twelve cats on the road,” and she had said, flaring up, “Pleased every time, I’ll bet,” and he had said, with comic-book finality, “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
By the time a sense of renewed tension brought her interest back into the Grange Hall, Hester gathered that the school issue had come into play.
“When are we going to have a decision?” Mr. Sessions asked.
“We’re here to talk about Thighbone Hollow,” the Selectman said. “Can’t we dispose of one problem at a time?”
“With due respect,” Mr. Sessions said, in a voice raucous with a want of respect, “I don’t see how we can. All our problems in this town are tied in together. My attitude on Thighbone Hollow depends on your attitude on the school—specially since the Leaming boy is mixed up in this groundhog business. No, you can’t take things one by one here in Tunxis, Mr. Selectman.”
Several people stood at once and poured out their cross-purposed sentences without waiting for recognition by the Selectman: a woman do-gooder saying in hectic presidential tones that the school was badly needed, there would be double sessions in another year, the hot-lunch program was imperiled; Mr. Leaming, Senior, tempting apoplexy with his still outraged protests that his son had nothing to do with the school issue, “in fact, he’s dead set against me on the whereabouts of the schoolhouse”; the man named Enos, saying that when he was a boy, he’d walked four miles to school in the snowdrifts, and he couldn’t see why we needed all these buses and moving-picture machines and frills nowadays; and others and still others, in a compulsive outpouring of anger that frightened Hester. There seemed to be no continuity, no progression; yet steadily there was built up a triangle of heat and hate—the Leaming faction against the Johnnycake Meadow crowd, and both, with bitterest force, against the symbol of authority, the Selectman. By a roundabout course, amid the fury, Mr. Leaming, Senior, who had seemed to be closely co-operative with the Selectman on Thighbone Hollow, came to be abusive toward him on the school issue. The Selectman gave him firm answers. Mr. Leaming blushed dangerously between shouts. The Selectman offered the worst provocation: He kept his temper. Mr. Leaming, who seemed to have mislaid his temper several seasons back, occasionally stammered, as if he were rooting around in the corners of his mind in search of his lost self-control.
Finally, apparently beyond caring what people thought of him, Mr. Leaming cried out, “If I was only close enough to that plat-plat-platform, Mr. Selectman, I’d spi-spit in your face.”
Quietly, with a humility so profound that it seemed insane, the Selectman answered, “Why don’t you step up here and do it, Mr. Leaming, if it would make you feel any better? I could wipe it off easy as pie.”
The crowd sat aghast. Mr. Leaming looked sick at his stomach. People who had been clamoring for a chance to talk sat down. As if nothing had happened (except that he seemed ever so slightly short of breath as he spoke), the Selectman said he thought most of the points on the woodchuck drive had been covered—but would the gang of advance men, who were going to gas the groundhogs out of their burrows, mind staying a few minutes to talk over their program? Then, if there was no further business, he said, the caucus would stand adjourned. Murmuring, the crowd arose and broke. Hester had a feeling that its anger, though checked, was far from sated. Mr. Leaming was still rocking on his feet.