THE SUN WAS UP. Across the meadow from Hester’s right Mrs. Tuller came, and as she strode through the tall grass the teacher swung her right arm back and forth across her body, gracefully snapping her wrist at the end of each swing so her hand seemed to be weightless and followed her forearm like a flag waved to and fro; and Hester, still sitting on the stone wall, realized soon that Mrs. Tuller’s right hand was manipulating a nonexistent musical bow, and then Hester saw that the fingers of Mrs. Tuller’s left hand, which had seemed to be scratching her left shoulder, were instead drumming out on the throat-strings of a phantom instrument the stops of a passage of music that must have been, to judge by the transported expression on the teacher’s massive face, cause for ecstasy on a summer morning. As Mrs. Tuller came closer, Hester heard her humming in time with her shadow-playing. The teacher sat on the wall beside Hester, spread her knees to grip the imagined violoncello, and played a final passage, a desperate trilling run up the fingerboard of air, her outsized head bent over the work and wagging slightly in counterweight to her flying bow arm, her left hand trembling a vibrato when her little finger at last hovered over the final ghost-tone.
“Practicing?” Hester foolishly asked when the teacher finally dropped her arms.
“Wish I played the piccolo,” Mrs. Tuller said; “something you could just slip in your pocket and take wherever you went. There ain’t time enough in a day in the summer.”
“What were you playing?”
“Brahms’s violin and ’cello concerto, opus one hundred and two; doubt if you know it.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard records of it,” Hester pretentiously lied.
“Isaac Stern was on the violin part with me there, and the Boston Symphony was carryin’ the background. Koussevitzky—only he’s dead. Wish you could’ve heard us!”
“So do I.”
“That’s the trouble,” the teacher sighed. “It sounds so much better in my head than when the blighted instrument is right there in my embrace.”
“I used to play the piano,” Hester said. “I gave it up when I went away to college.”
“There’s more music nowadays,” Mrs. Tuller said, “more music everywhere. When I was a girl, nobody’d ever heard of Johannes Brahms up here. On the Sabbath the only musical instruments they allowed in this village were churchbells, the trumpet, and the jew’s harp. No one ever got sent to the whippin’ post in my lifetime for breakin’ that rule, but they did in my great-grandfather’s time—my father told me that.”
When Mrs. Tuller spoke of the whipping post, a light came into her eyes, a kind of fervency, a gleam of allegiance to a fearful and wonderful past. Mrs. Tuller seemed to have an abnormally large head, but Hester realized that this was at least partly illusion, for the teacher wore her voluminous gray hair in a vast system of cranial bunting, a large turban of braids and loops and buns that made her quite topheavy. Still, the head was big; her face was broad, her eyes wideset, her lips generous, her earlobes redly drooping. Her mouth and eyes were sweet and warm, but they held between them, as if a hostile and scarcely manageable captive, a mean, sharp, Puritanical nose which seemed, now and then, to infect its neighbors with its own bleakness, so that the lips would suddenly seem thin and blue, the eyes metallic and cold; these moments were brief, however, mere glints as of ice, sun, and cloud on a winter’s day of open-and-shut. Such was the glint when she spoke of the whipping post. Mrs. Tuller’s shoulders were narrow and sloping, her torso compact, her hips and legs sturdy and thick, and she wore a delicate light blue blouse and a cotton skirt made bold with large checks of black and white.
“Last night they mentioned a concert you gave the woodchucks once,” Hester said. “Did that really happen?”
“Sure it did. Best attended recital I ever gave. Young Forward had noticed the woodchucks perked up whenever he sang to ’em, so he asked me to go up to Romeo Bacon’s lots and play to ’em one sundown, and I did. I sat on a foldin’ chair right in the feedgrass in the middle of their mounds, and they came out there by the score and set up as quizzical’s could be, turnin’ their heads back and forth and settin’ there more patient, if you ask me, than humans. I think they liked Sindbad’s music from Scheherazade best of all. They just hated Mozart, and that’s one reason I hate them.”
“You must dislike a lot of human beings on that count.”
“I do, child.”
“Why were people so angry at Mr. Avered last night?” Hester asked.
“Some people in the town think he’s a little too stuffed with brains. You know the expression, ‘Missin’ a few buttons’? Well, these people think the Selectman has a few too many buttons, and that they’re sewed on peculiar. There was a whisperin’ campaign goin’ round durin’ the election that his father and grandfather were both very meanderin’ in their declinin’ years, due to excess brains, and that our Matthew was about ready to follow in their footsteps. They think he just imagines the threat of these groundhogs.”
“But he doesn’t, does he? They came to your recital, didn’t they?”
“Yes, there’re groundhogs up here, all right. Maybe not so many nor so serious as the Selectman thinks. I do believe his imagination’s a shade too sprightly.”
Pushing down an impulse to make a remark about Mrs. Tuller’s just-completed performance with Stern and the Boston Symphony, the applause for which must scarce have died down in the teacher’s ears, Hester asked instead, “But what about all the evidence that young biologist had?”
“Pliny Forward? Gracious me, he is addled. They said at Harvard College that he’s a genius, but I taught him, I know better. There’s an old sayin’ that fits him: ‘He’s too bright to be right.’ ”
“Do you mean you think there’s no reason to hold this marmot drive?”
“I can’t say as to that. May be and may not be.”
“But you’re a captain of a division. You must believe in it.”
“I believe in holdin’ with my fellow townsfolk.”
“Should I marry Eben?” Hester blurted out.
“Gracious, child, what a question!” Mrs. Tuller said. “I can’t answer that. Do you want to?”
“Oh, yes; at least I think so. But you…you frighten me, with the things you say.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Mrs. Tuller said. “Matthew Avered’s a kind-hearted man. Barrin’ Anak Welch, who’s so tall he’s obliged to be mild-mannered, there’s no more gentlemanlike person in Tunxis than our Selectman. More than that, he loves us all! That’s his weakness! You’re old enough to know, child, there’s somethin’ terrible troublesome to plain mortals about saints and near-saints. Bein’ a saint is gettin’ awful close to the edge…. By the bye, they say the only witch we ever had in Tunxis in the old days was an Avered. She was the daughter of Philemon Avered—he was a famous doctor here that tended people durin’ the spotted fever in the seventeen fifties. As they tell it, this girl, Nell Avered, was terrible saucy, and she married a blacksmith, name of Pinney, and bore him a son. Right after a new wild-eyed preacher came down from Massachusetts and started frenzyin’ the village, Nell bust out with a temper like a tomcat—it came out mostly at night and made an awful noise through the whole neighborhood. She began to lay spells on Pinney, so that if he shod a horse when she’d put the wrath onto him, no matter how careful he was, no matter how sound the hoof and how strong the nails, the shoe would loosen and the horse would throw it in a matter of minutes, after the animal was led away from Pinney’s smithy. Before long Nell’s ways got so scandalous she was branded a witch, and the blacksmith was forced to turn her out or else be considered by the parson and the congregation to be in league with Old Harry. Nell took her son and went up to Zion Hill and built a shack o’ poles and boards, with filthy straw on the floor, and she supported herself and her boy by beggin’ from door to door. No one dared refuse her. Once she asked a Pitkin housewife for pork ribs; the Pitkin denied her them; and afterwards that family’s hogs all failed—they became like the lean kine of Genesis, and nothin’, not even fresh oats and whole milk, could fatten ’em. If she’d come in on a housewife spinnin’, the band of the wheel’d fly off. If she visited a churnin’, no butter’d form. They tell how once a man whose wife couldn’t get a churnin’ to cease remembered that Nell had dropped in to see her while she worked, so the man heated a poker to burn the witch out of the cream and stuck it in the chum—and the butter formed right off. One day a party of girls, includin’ one of Nell’s younger sisters, went up near her cabin to pick grapes. They moved secret and posted a sentinel between the vines and the cabin, and after a while the sentinel warned the others that Nell was cormin’, and though they ran across lots so’s Nell never saw ’em direct, all the same the grapes proved spoilt and unfit and no good. Nell and her son both died from exposure durin’ their first winter in the cabin, so the village was spared havin’ to take steps…. But that was all near two hundred years ago, child.”
Hester, conscious that her sickly looks must have brought that final assuaging protest, remained silent; she had begun to understand what the pleading voice in the half-dark had meant when it had talked about Mrs. Tuller’s ferule.
“I wonder,” Mrs. Tuller said pleasantly, surveying the hollow, “what’s holdin’ us up. Can’t imagine what they’re waitin’ for, unless it’s the Earl of Chatham.”
“The Earl of Chatham?” Hester asked, on the verge of tears.
“The Earl of Chatham, sword all drawn,
Was waitin’ for Sir Richard Strachan;
Sir Richard, eager to be at ’em,
Was waitin’ for the Earl of Chatham.”
Dimly on the left Hester heard whistling and shouting. Nearly half an hour had passed since Mrs. Tuller’s brief visit, the sun was well up, the world’s oven was getting warm; and Hester had begun to wonder whether discord among the leaders of this adventure, or stubbornness among the hunted in their burrows, had caused a delay that would never be overcome. She half hoped so; she was not sure she wanted to go into the dark woods ahead. Then the noise of the suddenly stirred-up drivers drifted down to her from the woodland toward the ledge, and she stood up; Coit waved to her, and she waved back with a sudden festive thrill. They waited for the group on their immediate left to start moving. She considered what Eben, in that group, might be thinking just then. He was so boyishly ambitious, she thought, and his ambition was so vague and objectless.
“What do you want in life?” she had asked him during one of their very first conversations, when they had been eagerly discovering each other.
“Something big!” he had said, his eyes a-smoke.
She could see him, in her imagination, standing alone in the untended, half-overgrown meadows up to the left, rather tense, determined to excel, to make himself famous with some heroic exploit, in this drive that he thought ridiculous; intent upon himself, as was his fixed habit of being, and only incidentally ringing in his relationship to the objective world—to woodchucks, now, to his father, and to her. He was in a kind of lingering hobbledehoyhood. He was forever looking in a mirror and seeing an untrue image; he and his real self were bare acquaintances. He wanted to be big; she had a fear that he might some day prove merely swollen, inflated, pompous, lighter than the summer air—yet see himself as big. Sweetly she ached; motherly pity, wearing a mask, so that she thought she recognized it as love, warmed her, and she suddenly hurt all over for him, as if feverish, and a feeling of incipient power flowed into her; she would help him to be full and big, whatever true bigness he might strive for or drift toward. Ah, Eben, she thought, I love you and I’ll manage you.
She saw Roswell Coit put his fingers to his lips and then she heard a piercing whistle that would make woodchucks prick up their ears all the way to New Hampshire; she decided she would shout, not whistle, during the drive, for she couldn’t compete with that metallic mouth of Coit’s. But shout what? Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the absurdity of what she was doing. She saw Coit cup his hands and heard him call to her, “Move forward slowly!”
Caught in a team, she made her own delicate megaphone and shrilled to the dancing master on her right, “Move forward slowly!”
“O.K., dearie,” Friedrich Tuller called back to her; and then he passed the message down the line.
Hester stepped into the jeweled meadow before her. Unlike the adjacent fields up toward the ledge, this one had been kept up for hay, and its good-shafted grass, just coming into seed, bent slightly now in the shallow sunlight under a treasure of sparkling dew. Moving at last, wading through better-than-diamonds, Hester felt giddily happy. The field sloped fairly steeply forward and somewhat to the right, and beyond it began a stretch of second-growth woods. Hester’s legs grew soaking wet again. On both sides of her along the picket line, now near, now distant, she heard the sharp-pointed whistling of young men who knew how to make their breath scream through fingers and lips, while down to the right Friedrich Tuller hallooed as if to nearby, visible creatures that needed his persuasion, “Hi! Hi on, now! Go on, woodchucks! Go on, now! Hi on, there! Aha! Move along, my friends!” Timidly Hester began to mimic him; she heard other cries up and down the line, and soon she felt less self-conscious and quite recklessly shouted. She thought of the image someone had used at the caucus of a fence of noise, and as she walked and called she began to feel that she was part of a substantial moving barrier that would surely contain its quarry. The pace of the line was very slow; it was hard to picture this leisurely amble as a serious hunt. Nevertheless it seemed soon, too soon, that Hester approached the hedgerow at the beginning of the woods, into which she was loath to go. The sun, coming from the right and from beyond the woods, touched only the elegant crowns of the trees; below, from where she came near, could be seen only darkness, dampness, impenetrability. She walked into the shadow; her cries grew anguished, as if she were the threatened, not the threatener. On her right, since the line of the division was echeloned that way, the dancing master had already been engulfed by the thicket, and from within it she could hear him shouting, “Hi on, there, you woodchucks! Get on!” Coit to her left was still out in the sunlight in the precious meadow. She hesitated. She saw a wall covered with vines that she recognized as honeysuckle (for Eben had, the previous afternoon, showed her the shape of poison ivy and cat brier leaves—“the only things you really need to know for this damn-fool drive of Father’s”—and, in passing, of those of honeysuckle, too). Low along the wall, on both sides of it, there was a screen of young trees and shrubs, honeysuckle-heavy; she parted it, climbed the wall, and broke through into the woods themselves. She had gone forward only about twenty feet when she heard Coit’s voice bellowing, “Hold up, Avered’s girl! Pass the word to hold up!”
“They say to hold up!” she called to Tuller, and she heard the dancing master’s rather merry call to his next neighbor.
Hester looked around her. She was twenty-four years old; she had never been in woods like these before—wild, undisciplined woods like these. She had been in city parks; she had been in thin groups of man-subservient trees on the edges of the Massachusetts town where she had gone to college; and she had been in clean pine woods in the South. But here the honeysuckle fighting the trees for light made an equatorial jungle in New England. It climbed trunks and hummocked triumphantly over underbrush it had long since choked. The gloomy, embattled green was islanded with patches of in-sneaking sunlight. Now that the line of the hunters was silent, Hester suddenly heard the sweet clamor of hundreds of startled birds, themselves drawn back somewhat from the fence of human noise and apparently trying to raise a stockade of sounds of their own. Hester felt exhilarated by the woods; to her surprise, she felt relieved of fear and entranced.
Then her fear returned, as down to the left, ahead in the falling-off forest, she heard a noise that moved: limbs and twigs were being broken, there was a swish of continuous motion toward herself, or at any rate toward the line. She had to be in the open where she could see; she scrambled back to the wall and out into the field and ran part way to Coit and called to him, “Something’s coming up through the woods! Do you hear it?”
“Don’t wet your pants, baby doll,” Coit said. “I heard it. Ain’t naught but some of the advance men comin’ back to the line. You better hold your position.”
Hester, furious at her panic and Coit’s contempt, said, “My panties are no dewier than yours, my friend,” and felt badly unsatisfied with her retort.
She went chagrined back into the woods.
In a few minutes three men—the Selectman, Anak Welch, and George Challenge—showed themselves approaching the line half way between her post and Coit’s. Because she was in the woods on their side of the hedgerow, they saw her first.
“Where’s your captain?” the Selectman called, as if Hester were no one he knew.
“Mrs. Tuller’s down by the canal,” Hester answered. “Roswell Coit’s anchoring this end of the division, right back there in the field.”
“Here I am,” Coit, evidently overhearing, called; and he pushed into the woods toward the three men. Hester moved over to them, too. Their faces were red with exertion and excitement. The Selectman’s two companions each carried a pair of insect bombs.
“They’re up ahead,” the Selectman exultantly said. “They flushed easily. So many you couldn’t count ’em.”
“You ought to’ve seen ’em, Ros,” George Challenge said to Coit.
“At least four hundred. Four to five hundred, I’d calculate,” Mr. Avered said, pounding a fist into an open palm.
“Less, I’d say,” the huge Mr. Welch softly disagreed. “I’d say around two hundred.”
“Oh, Anak, there were twice that many!” the Selectman vehemently urged.
“Two hundred at the outside,” the big man insisted.
“What does it matter? What does it matter?” the Selectman said, childishly joyful, verbally capering. “We’ve got ’em on the run.”
“They could hear the line back here—it made ’em move,” said George Challenge.
“We’ve got to tell everybody,” the Selectman said. He commanded Challenge to go down and find Mrs. Tuller and Coit to run up to the pivot of the next division; word should be passed along the whole line that a very large number of woodchucks had been successfully surfaced and were moving northward along the hollow; that a small party of advance men were deployed beyond the burrows to keep the animals from coming back to ground; and that the line should move forward firmly and vigilantly now. Hester was surprised at the peremptoriness of the Selectman’s orders, and, seeing the others stiffen at his lack of tact, she was visited by a disquieting reminder of the anger that had not been wholly laid to rest at the caucus the night before.
Coit said Mrs. Tuller had wanted Mr. Welch just beyond her husband in the line; he didn’t know where she wanted Mr. Challenge. Hester noticed with interest and satisfaction the thickset bully, the dauntless Ranger, using respectful “misters” after hearing harsh commands.
“I’ll walk with this young lady for now,” the Selectman said, falling in with Hester.
“Never saw it to fail,” Coit grumbled loud enough to be heard, in another kind of response to heavy authority. “The brass gettin’ itself a setup.”
“There were hundreds of them,” the Selectman said to Hester, acting as if he had not heard Coit’s impudence. “Almost all black, Pliny was right. Oh, what a sight!”
The others moved away.
“This means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” Hester said, slowly leading Mr. Avered back toward her place in the line.
“It means I can look these Tunxis people straight in the eye,” the Selectman said. “Last night took the gimp all out of me—I believe some of the folks at the caucus thought these groundhogs were just some kind of nightmare I’d had, and I swan, I began to think so myself.”
“It’s a good thing you have witnesses.”
“You ought to see those dark creatures moving in a herd,” the Selectman exclaimed.
How like one of Eben’s mild raptures, Hester thought. The capacity for excitement and happiness, for being lifted toward ecstasy by commonplace surprises—this was one of the qualities she liked and admired in Eben, though she could wish it augmented a hundredfold, for in truth his joys were somewhat pale. What she did not yet know was whether Eben could be exalted by extraordinary surprises beyond the verge, right over into the realm of shattering delight she sometimes experienced, into such a state of rapture as that into which she had been momentarily dissolved when she had stepped out into the dew-spangled meadow a few minutes ago, giving her an instant, as insubstantial as the fast-drying magical droplets that had inspired it, worth a whole month of bickering, grubbing, moping lazy and alone in a city. Could Eben, could the Selectman, transact such delight? They were both articulate men, they used their tongues readily enough—but seldom, it seemed, to speak of deep emotions. Hester wondered whether, keeping too long their Puritanical silence on all such feelings, they might, in the end, cease altogether to feel.
“I’ll tell you what made things so bad last night: These people didn’t really want me for Selectman in the first place,” Mr. Avered said. “It was all very chancy, my getting this job, and now I don’t know if I want it.”
“Mr. Welch—is that the giant’s name?—said something about a split vote,” Hester said, trying to be sympathetic; disappointed to see Eben’s father’s near-bliss aborted by self-pity.
“It was because of the school fight,” he said. “People weren’t going to vote regular, they couldn’t agree on a candidate. I was a compromise—and now it curdles ’em to see that I won’t compromise. I just refuse to whop over from this side to that when I believe in things.”
“Did George Challenge help you get elected? Mrs. Tuller said something this morning…”
“George Challenge? Don’t mind his bowlegs: some say he’s taller sitting down than he is standing up.”
“Did he pull wires for you?”
“He’s crookeder than a ram’s horn. You remember what old Hosea Biglow said?—that rubber trees fust begun bearin’ when political consciences come into wearin’? That’s George Challenge for you.”
“Did he help you?”
“Nobody can get elected, not even as dog warden, around here unless Mr. Challenge nods in his direction. Just the way you can’t buy fresh meat at the market without the little blue pure-food stamp on it. Can’t you see ‘George Challenge’ stamped across my forehead?” Mr. Avered’s eyes were like those of a small boy, appealing for help.
This was degrading; Hester wanted no more. “Then your witnesses aren’t worth much,” she said cruelly. “The giant is for you anyhow—he made a speech for your drive last night. And now it turns out you’re George Challenge’s poodle. Your witnesses are no good to you at all.”
“There were others who saw the crowd of woodchucks. Don’t worry, girl. There are others up there right now looking at ’em. And you’ll see ’em soon enough yourself, buck teeth, shoe-leather hides, and all.” She had said she feared the teeth, the skins, the skulls; so, Hester thought, cruelty always answers cruelty. She wanted to make amends, but before she could, he had taken a startling jump.
“Now tell me about you,” he said, with a kind of gentleness, as if she had not been attacking him; though there was, to be sure, a note of determination in his gentleness.
Hester almost had to stop and think who she was. She knew she was standing beside a handsome older man in a woodsy place, among buoyant young trees that were menaced by sweet-smelling, murderous vines; she and this man were waiting; they were employed in an outlandish experience; they were alone, all alone, glimpsed in their green privacy only by the indifferent sun. “Now tell me about you,” he had suddenly said. Hester cast about for an easy, evasive answer, for she had been trying for weeks—for the whole period of Eben’s courtship, certainly—to discover exactly what she was, to make sure of her identity, to try to find out whether it matched, or complemented, or could be melted wholly away by, Eben’s, and so far she had not found any insights she could depend on, she was still only guessing at herself; she would have to put off Eben’s father’s demand with some vague reply. She thought for a moment of her own father, of one of the last times she had seen him. She had been about twelve years old—it was half her life ago! The family—mother, father, Hester, and Pete—were living in the national capital then, in three dark rented rooms in a house of orange brick on an avenue named for a state. It was midsummer. Her unemployed father sat on the edge of his bed in the back room perspiring in an undershirt, some seersucker pants, and a pair of slippers; she was sitting in a straight wooden chair with a cane seat in the next room, which was connected with her parents’ by a doorless archway, trying to read; he kept breaking in. “What’re you reading?” he asked. A book by an English woman. “Good girl. Take care of your eyes, Hes,” he said. “Have you enough light there?” She had. “Don’t burn your eyes out, my Hes. You’re going to need those hazel eyes. The world’s going to need your eyes.” The more his personal failure bore in upon him, the more convinced he became that his children had the potentials of success. The world would some day be grateful for famous Hes, for the great Pete. How bitterly she and her brother had learned that aspiration wouldn’t buy groceries! That was probably why she was so afraid of Eben’s undirected ambition. Yet how lovable, too, that overleaping naïve hopefulness had been in her broken father. “Eyes on the lodestar!” he had used often to exhort his children. Looking now at the blur that, coming into focus, became Eben’s father, she wondered how Mr. Avered could be as complacent as he seemed, so satisfied with his small orbit…. She thought how, sitting at her metal desk on the seventeenth floor, she was always careful to have enough light for her hazel eyes to see by, just in case…. Mr. Avered lived here in his smallness perfectly satisfied with himself and openly contemptuous of Eben’s efforts to “better” himself.
“I’ve always lived in cities,” she said.
“Can’t hold that against you,” he said.
“It makes me feel awkward here.”
“You don’t seem so to me.”
“I’d be lonely here.”
“You can’t lick loneliness by huddling up with half a trillion strangers, can you?”
“I don’t know. Where can you? Do you have any friends here in Tunxis? I mean real friends.”
“I have a lot of neighbors. I’ll go that far.”
“I mean friends.”
“I had a friend once,” the Selectman said.
“Who was that?”
“My wife, Mrs. Matthew Avered.”
“Why the past tense?”
“I don’t know, we’ve taken our ways. I talk all the time and she hardly says a word, unless it’s to tell me I have a goneness about me. She’s so tired most of the time she can barely stiver along from day to day.”
“She seems wonderfully placid to me.”
“She is. She’s as calm as a pond that doesn’t have any inlet or outflow: some call it stagnant…. Whoa, girl, we were supposed to be talking about you.”
“I’ve always lived in cities,” Hester said, smiling. “My father wanted to be a lawyer. Some of the time he was a clerk in post offices. Toward the end I guess you’d say he was a bum—no good to anyone, anyway.”
“You’re just right for Eben,” the Selectman said. “We Avereds always try to marry the daughters of tramps and hobos…. How did you get to know so much about people?”
“Out of books,” she said. “Whenever I read, I’m careful to have plenty of light, so I’ll be sure to see everything that’s there.”
“I used to read a lot,” the Selectman said. “Did you ever read the poems of Patmore?”
This was a real surprise to Hester. “We had to read some of his sonnets in college,” she said. “All I remember is, I liked his name better than his verses: Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore—that I’ll never forget.”
“Well, girl, you’re about to tie yourself down, you ought to read his long one about marriage. Then pick it up twenty-five years later, the way I did night before last, when I got thinking about you and Eben, and see whether it sounds the same to you. One grows and learns.”
Hester felt an onrush of anxiety. What was the Selectman trying to tell her? Why did everyone always traffic so much in hints, why couldn’t people speak out their straight thoughts? Why was everyone here trying to discourage her about Eben? Hester’s defenses rallied to a quickened drumbeat of her heart. She began to be defiant. Let them try, she cried to herself, let them just try to discourage me! And she said to herself for the first time that she was sure about Eben. It did not matter to her that she felt, in her turn, not a real softening of the spirit that could be called love, but determination.
“Listen!” the Selectman said.
Up to the left the noisemaking had begun again, and soon Hester and the Selectman could hear an order to move forward being passed down the line, then Coit shouted it, and Hester volleyed it on to the dancing teacher; and they stepped into the woods. Gradually the honeysuckle thinned away, and she and the father of her suitor walked through bare-floored green gothic chapels. Off to their left Coit, instead of whistling, was singing now at the top of his voice:
“Oh, I’m a hayseed,
A hairy seaweed,
And my ears are made of leather
And they flop in stormy weather;
Gosh all hemlock,
I’m tougher’n a pine knot…”
“And that one,” the Selectman said, “is a beech—you could put your girl-hand around its trunk now, but it’ll grow to be enormous. It’ll beat out all these taller pignut trees around it, they’ll gradually be overshadowed and weakened and then some fall equinox they’ll plop over in a big wind, and when I’m dead, and Eben’s dead, and Eben’s son is dead, and the son’s son is an old man, this tree’ll stand up here over everything and cock its snook at the world—the paltry world. Whenever I feel pleased with myself, to the point where I can see I’m boring my neighbors, all I have to do is take a look at one of these beeches and I get humble pretty quick, humble and a little bit scared, because time is one thing to a beech tree and another thing to me. I put so many things off! Do you procrastinate?”
“Oh, I do!”
Hester felt a sudden, unexpected touch of the kind of poignancy which she had regarded, all through her adolescent years, as the earliest throe of romantic love, but which she recognized, now that she was more experienced, as being no more than the painful thrill of discovery, the pang of new acquaintance—with sometimes a fillip of desire thrown in. Any hazard there may have been in this incipient feeling was abated, and even made slightly ridiculous, by Coit’s lewd whistling and singing to the left and the dancing master’s musical halloos to the right, as well as by an occasional startling bellow from the Selectman right beside her and, afterwards, a dutiful, responsive shriek from her own throat. She understood that the emotion she directed toward this man was partly admiration and partly pity. Eben had told her more than once that versatility was his father’s curse: that while he was not quite broad enough or brilliant enough to be the kind of universal man New England had once produced in its out-of-the-way villages, he was, still and all, an extraordinary jack-of-all-hobbies, versed in various country lores, professionally inconstant—now an insurance salesman, now middleman for truck farmers, briefly a smalltime speculative building contractor, once town librarian, often a summer-month real-estate agent, and now, because so available, a public servant; never successful in Eben’s terms, yet never improvident, either. Hester savored the word “goneness,” which the Selectman had said his wife used about him. She was grazed again by that sweet sensation of incipience—whereupon, dispelling it altogether and shocking her uninsulated sensibilities, the Selectman suddenly imitated the clamor of a crow with horrible fidelity.
“When am I going to see a woodchuck?” Hester asked, inwardly a-tremble.
“Let’s see. Division Two ought to be going through Romeo Bacon’s old meadows, where the burrows are, pretty directly now. Anytime after that. Pretty soon, I’d calculate.”
“I told you,” she said, “that I was afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth. Now I’m scared of something else.”
“What’s that, girl?”
“Mrs. Tuller.”
The Selectman gave out a single descending arpeggio of laughter, as if Hester’s idea were utterly ridiculous; then abruptly he was serious and thoughtful. “As a matter of fact, I think I see what you mean,” he said. “Mrs. Tuller must have half a bushel of brains in that head of hers, but I guess her heart’s no bigger than a French pea. It’s a funny thing: no one in Tunxis is more self-sacrificing than she is; she’s famous for her labors of mercy. She’s a teacher, to begin with—she lives her life for other people’s children; couldn’t have any of her own, or her ballet dancer couldn’t give her any, one or the other. She’s a devoted teacher—but ouch! Strict! She’s strong as an orang-outang, as any pupil she’s ever had’ll tell you. During the war there was a time when every one of the town’s doctors was off in the services, so what did she do? She appointed herself a medico, degrees and laws be damned. She has a motorcycle; you should’ve seen her in those years flying to sickbeds, with the saddlebags on the back busting with junk from the drugstore and her white smock flapping in the wind and her thighs shaking like laughing blimps. She didn’t kill a single patient, but it was pretty well understood that so long as she was in charge, a sick person had to get worse, and I mean miserably worse, before he got better; she had a way of seeing to that; she favored mustard plasters and emetics; she was a firm believer that New England folks could only be cured with counter-irritants. She’s always been a flower-sender and a train-meeter, and whenever someone passes on under a certified doctor’s hands, she’s the first to inflict condolences on the bereaved—and she knows how to make ’em felt, too. She was a Cherevoy; that family was of Acadian descent, her ancestors were shipped down here from Nova Scotia with the Acadians that were dumped in Connecticut twenty years before the Revolution. Maybe she’s never forgiven the Anglo-Saxons for that outrage. Maybe she’s furious at the world for giving her Friedrich Tuller. Maybe she hates herself because her head’s so big. You’re right, girl, watch out for her, don’t let her take your skin off on the pretext you need your back scratched. Her kindliness has a murderous edge to it. Yet I can’t help saying she’s a wonderful woman; Tunxis would be dull and wishy-washy without her. I’ll do anything for Mrs. Tuller—as long as I can keep my distance from her.”
Ahead the trees were thinning out and the underbrush—bayberry and blueberry and humps of gleaming cat brier—was becoming more profuse, and Hester could see that they would come out soon onto a partly overgrown meadow. They were still walking forward at a very easy pace, and all across the hollow could be heard the sounds, unnatural for human beings, of the sluggish pursuit. Hester felt increasingly apprehensive, as with part of her mind she listened to the Selectman’s words about Mrs. Tuller, and with another part she imagined a herd of wild boars bearing down upon the line between her and the helpless dancing master, and with yet another part she thought how almost fearfully beautiful this early morning had become.
“Mrs. Tuller said some awful things about the Avereds,” she managed to remark.
“All the time she acted as if she were praising us, didn’t she?”
“Oh yes, she called you a saint.”
“That I am not, girl,” he said, and all at once he had floated off in that deep daydream of his; staring, staring.
“Do you think we could go all day without seeing any woodchucks?” she asked, wanting to draw him back.
He did not answer for a long time, then he turned his face to hers and said, “I’m sorry, girl, I was off in the next county when you said that last. Would you care to say it again?”
“No,” Hester said. “It wasn’t important.”
Just before they reached the edge of the abandoned meadow, a new order to halt the line came down from the left, and the Selectman, saying he wanted to walk up to see if anything was the matter, left Hester alone.
An order to move again came quite soon. Knowing now what she was supposed to do and how to do it, Hester was less fearful of ridicule than she had been, but she was still afraid of being tattered by enamel chisels; she felt like a primitive, like a woman from the troglodytic era—afraid of being eaten alive. She realized only now how comforting the presence of the Selectman had been. She missed him actively, wished he would return; but he did not come.
The field into which Hester now advanced was a new terrain to her. It was ragged, half way between cultivated, which once it had been, and wild, which again it would soon be—somehow forlorn-making: it reminded Hester that sometimes men try to do more than they are able, then they grow weary and give up and don’t care. There were still large patches of strong, tall, en-clumped timothy grass in the enclosure, but among them had sprung up new growth—numerous tall lone-standing cedars, saplings of wild cherry and pignut, and seedlings of maple and birch and oak; as well as aggressive pigmy forests, closing in on the good grass, of milkweed, cat brier, and poison ivy, which she skirted. There were, besides, four tall swamp maples in the field, one near each of its corners; these were so regularly spaced that she guessed they must have been transplanted there, when the field had been used for field crops, to give grazing animals shade.
Hester’s slow course across the field took her toward one of these maples, and when she was about thirty feet away from it, she suddenly gasped, she froze, her skin tingled all over, her heart tried to run away from its cavity. She saw a woodchuck under the tree, just to the right of the trunk.
The animal was standing up on its hind legs, in profile to her, facing the sun, measuring the full length of its spine against the maple bark. Its head was tilted arear; its mouth seemed drawn back in a kind of grin, a grimace of complacency. Its eyes were three-quarters closed. Its forepaws were spread apart and limply hanging. The sunlight, slanting in under the branches of the tree at this early hour, lay full on the animal’s round belly, and the direct light, together with the modulation in the color of the woodchuck’s fur, from a dark rusty brown on the stomach to near-black against the tree, made it seem prosperously rounded, a comfortable pillow of a thing. The figure was one of utter well-being; it was a caricature of guiltless human indolence. Hester realized that the animal was taking a morning sunbath. It must have been driven with the others from its home, it was in mortal danger; yet here it leaned, a sleek hedonist, almost unbearably comfortable, to judge by those pulled-back lips, its danger far, far out of mind.
Hester lost her tenseness. The bear-mouse monk! What an amiable enemy!
For a moment Hester wished she could change places with this bliss-ridden beast. She, too, was a sun-lover; she never got enough sun. When the summer sun warmed her body, prone on a sandy place, it seemed that her nerves were melted into common flesh, her brain was fused into a soothing, soft, idea-less juice; she enjoyed a warm liquefaction of all anxiety. She became something simple when the sun was on her. She understood that this sun-soaked simpleton on a beach was a contemptible creature, and all the centuries of man’s patient climbing had not been suffered, Gethsemane, Chartres, King Lear, The Magic Flute had not been experienced, in order that human life might culminate in the repose of a girl’s figure on the sand under the sun—a figure of languor, sexuality, irresponsibility, and brimming fullness of self. Yet what heavenly retrogression! She thought it was perfectly expressed in the pulled-back lips of the sunbathing woodchuck, showing the near-hurt of true pleasure.
She thought of the month of March in the city; how running across a sleet-sloppy street, with the filthy slush splashing up on her iron-cold stockings, she had to hug herself, as it were, in her own tense arms for only comfort; her hands and feet were in perpetual pain all through the chilly time; she frowned constantly—and dreamed of the summer sun. Now she felt wholly identified with the woodchuck before her. If only she could, as he, crawl into a burrow lined with leaves and straw and sleep the winter away! She dimly knew that her wishes did not mean precisely what they seemed: she supposed she wanted to be an infant on the warm breast of the beach, and she would even gladly be a foetus in the wintertime. How often she had heard the ideas of the modern psychologists spent in city chitchat like shiny, tinkling quarters, dimes, and nickels, by people who, like her, had never even read the essential books. Backward and downward from the arts! Man the beaches! To the womb!
She mocked her desires, and felt them still.
The woodchuck stirred. Its right paw went up and scratched its ear. It yawned, and then tilted its head a little to the left. The eyes still drooped. Above the slouching belly the animal’s chest swelled up and then seemed to burst in a deep, deep sigh of contentment.
Hester could help herself no longer. She laughed out loud.
Instantly the animal was erect and alert. Its small black eyes looked at Hester with a glittering defiance and hatred. The mouth was still drawn back, but now the agony was not of pleasure but of antagonism. Seeing the animal full-face, Hester was for the first time confronted by the enormous teeth. Her amusement was driven scurrying, her flesh crawled, glands prepared her for a battle to death. The woodchuck held its inimical pose for a few instants, then seemed to collapse into swift retreat. Its black back rippled across the field for perhaps twenty feet. Then the animal stopped, rose erect again on its haunches and looked around at Hester, as if it wanted to make sure that the monster it had seen had not been a fantasy. Hester imagined she saw a look of derision on the bear-mouse face, and she grew a little angry.
“Get on, you bastard!” she shouted, her back thrilling to another charge of adrenal fluid, and she stamped her foot on the ground.
The woodchuck ran skimper-scamper away. Hester moved forward with new confidence in herself.
After the caucus Eben had been peevish, Hester remembered. He had led her to the car, where they had waited in the front seat for his father to join them, and though Eben had held her hand, as he always did in dark places, he had not seemed to be conscious of touching her; his voltage had seemed very low. His hand was limp and moist.
“It’ll take him an hour to get here,” Eben said, she recalled. “He’ll have to argue the whole thing over two or three times before he can tear himself away. I know him.”
“I could have choked that Sessions person,” Hester said.
“He was the only one in the whole bunch who made any sense.”
“You’re trying some kind of joke on me.”
“No, it’s true. What this hick town needs is a few people with hard heads. Everybody’s got mattress stuffing in the skull around here—including the famous Selectman.”
“Eben! Your father was terrific.”
“Just because he kept his temper? Do you think that makes somebody terrific? Think of the nonsense he was talking! Why, this whole woodchuck drive is child’s play: it’s a Boy Scout outing. Tunxis needs a woodchuck hunt about as much as Central Park needs a squirrel shoot.”
“Why don’t you try to get along better with your father?”
“Because he’s elected to live in another century from ours. And I don’t think that solves this century. I just can’t get along with a man from the last century, and what’s more, I won’t. I think it’s for him to make the effort to catch up, not for me to slide backwards.”
“Are you saying that you’re better than he is?”
“No, I’m saying that I talk a different language. He’s a foreigner here. He’s got to accommodate himself.”
“A foreigner! You have a few prejudices of your own from the last century, Eben. Besides, you may be wrong about your father. He may be more up-to-date than you and I are. How do we know what’s really modern?”
“I know that we’re watching the world fall apart, and he moseys through life as though we were on the threshold of a golden age. Oh, for God’s sake,” Eben burst out. “I’m tired of listening to him and thinking about him.”
The Selectman did not take an hour to get back to the car; he appeared in less than ten minutes, while there were still quite a few other cars to be driven away. “Hello, love birds,” he said with a remarkable casualness as he opened the door to the driver’s seat. He took off his walnut-colored coat, threw it in the back seat, loosened his necktie, and slid behind the wheel.
“Congratulations,” Hester said. “You were wonderful.”
“I don’t want to talk about the meeting,” the Selectman said with more anger than he had shown during the whole evening. All three were silent as they drove home. When they reached the house, Eben’s father was abruptly rather cheerful, and he said, “Let’s sit on the screen porch awhile and talk. I need a potion. Miss Hester, it’ll do you good to sit in a rocker on a porch while Eben and I blow the soot out of your ears with some Tunxis gossip.” But gossip, as it turned out, was not to be the fare. The Selectman went inside the house and switched on the parlor lights, and on the porch Hester and Eben settled themselves in a metal glider. The Selectman returned soon with three tumblers, each partly full of dark liquor.
“Isn’t there any ice in the house?” Eben asked irritably.
“Ice in the icebox, where it always was,” the Selectman said, “if it’s your notion to spoil good West Indy rum.”
“Rum!” Eben exclaimed contemptuously.
“Rum-a-tum-tum,
The farmer drinked some,
Rum-a-tum-tum,
The farmer’s strick dumb,”
the Selectman said singsong, and took a sip from his glass. “I wouldn’t give whisky hell-room, and I advise you to follow the example of your venerable father.”
Eben stamped angrily into the house after some ice. As soon as the screen door slammed behind him, the Selectman moved onto the porch swing where Eben had been sitting with Hester and said, “Let’s send Hamlet to bed and talk awhile. There’s so much to discuss!”
“If you mean Eben,” Hester said, “you’d better take it up with him. He may take it into his head to send the King of Denmark to sleep.”
“The King of Denmark?” the Selectman asked, off guard; then quickly he cried, “Oh!”, and after another moment’s thinking he said, sounding quite startled, “Listen, girl, don’t talk that way.”
When Eben had come back and had eased himself without audible complaint into the chair his father had occupied, the Selectman said, “We ought to have some apples; rum and apples go together like cement and sea sand. Old Ira Leaming—he was John Leaming, Senior’s father, he was found frozen to death near the fire tower up on Beggar’s Mountain standing up leaning against a tree with his gun tucked under his arm—anyway, when I was a boy Ira Leaming had an apple orchard clear down to where Sodom Street cuts through the town now, where he raised McIntosh apples that give farmers so much trouble nowadays with the blight, sweet as maple syrup. They were the best stealing apples anywhere around. Son, did you ever have gumption enough to steal an apple?”
Eben did not answer.
“Stolen apples are better tasting than store apples,” the Selectman said. “Son,” he then said, “it seems to me you’re kind of stand-offish toward your venerable father. What’s the matter, boy?”
Hester answered, “Eben says the matter is that you live way off in a different century from him.”
There was a silence, during which the Selectman’s face, being turned away from the parlor light, showed nothing; finally he said, “A different world, anyway, I guess. I live in the world of what I consider values; he lives in the world of what he considers realities. He thinks my values are obsolete, I think his realities aren’t any more real or true to life than those Gorgon sisters that had snakes for hair.”
For a moment Hester thought she saw what the cleavage was—the father living in the world of stern education, personal reticence, love of nature; of respect for property, idiosyncrasy, privacy, and poetry; of literal horsepower and the slow walk; of rigid family life; of frugality and thrift, of the Classics and the Bible, of charades and early-to-bed—the son living in a prosy, urgent, intrusive world, a world of “realities”: of revolution everywhere, of war or military preparings and posturings, of fear for the future; of cities and science, of jets, reactors, and ultra-high-frequencies; of cool rationality and nervous breakdowns; of the shifty images of TV; of ads, giveaways, strained budgets, gadgets bought on the installment plan; of speeding tickets and drunken picnics and sexual frolicsomeness in the small hours. The opposition was clear in Hester’s mind for only a flash, then she began to see that her idea was too simple: there were qualifications and shadings and loopholes, for in the father’s world there had also been seething repressions and horrible social injustices, there had been rationalizations and pretenses and fake decencies smothered with heavy decor, while in the son’s world there were miracles of progress…and now she heard Eben, too, exploring the same doubts.
“Stolen apples taste good,” he said, “so where do your values fit in with the Ten Commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ ”
“Stealing apples wasn’t stealing, that was just exercising boyhood rights and prerogatives under New England common law.”
“Does New England common law make provision for all the other sins, too?” Eben asked.
Hester noticed that the Selectman paused again and then did not answer the question. “If you’re asking me where I got my values, son, I don’t know whether I can tell you right out. The Congregational Church drove a lot into me, then before he went mad and they put him in his wooden cage, Parson Churnstick drove a lot out again, by going too far with his nonsense. This man, Hester, was a fanatical Sabbatarian. You weren’t supposed to walk fast leaving the meetinghouse, even in the rain, and once he denounced Belle Booge, who’s Belle Sessions now, from the pulpit for running a comb through her hair on the street on Sunday, as if she’d been a common slut about to have a come-by-chance child. That was enough to cool us young ones off on a certain brand of religion…. Your grandmother gave me a lot of my values, son—she called ’em just plain horse sense. I got some in school from the best teacher a boy ever had, Jared Andrus. I’ve learned a lot from Anak Welch, stubborn as stone though he be. I’ve learned from doing wrong.” He paused. “In fact, it seems that the only real specific for evil-poisoning is evil itself.” The Selectman stopped and sat there in Puritan rigidity.
“I keep coming back to the Ten Commandments,” Eben insisted a trifle shrilly, pressing his father during his strange moment of discomfiture. “It’s all there in condensed form. If you don’t live by a code like that…”
“You people in the city live on capsules,” the Selectman said, suddenly cool. “You have too simple a view of the Bible, son. The Ten Commandments are in Exodus, twenty. The very next chapter, Exodus twenty-one, tells us believers how to organize polygamy and slavery, and that’s where it says, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’ Oh, I know that book, boy. There are some harsh home truths about human nature in that book, son; it would pay you to read it, instead of talking so slick and glib like some gowk who’s just taken a vitamin pill and read a condensed article and thinks he contains all the world’s victuals and all her knowledge. Don’t forget the serpent of brass and Lot’s daughters and the mess of pottage and Mordecai and the thirty pieces of silver and how there wasn’t a man jack in the crowd who dared cast a stone at the adulterous woman and how the multitude shouted to Pilate for blood—all those things are in there alongside your beloved capsule.”
Hester felt the tension between the two men, and she understood that the elder had been somehow stung, but what underlay the strain she could not know. It struck her that the assigned rôles were reversed—that Eben was arguing for a specific set of values, while his father seemed to be urging deeper realities on him. It disturbed her to feel, as she did, that the contest was being waged at least partly for her benefit, and she wanted it ended. “Weren’t you two going to tell me some local gossip?” she said.
The Selectman, too, had apparently had enough, for he said, “Aren’t you weary, son? Why don’t you march off to bed? I’ve some questions to ask your young lady.”
“And leave Hes alone with Selectman Avered?” Eben said. “Fat chance.”
“Then I guess it’s me,” Eben’s father said, accepting defeat with an agility that Hester could not consider flattering. He arose, said his goodnights, and retired.
Eben, who moved to the swing, seemed moody and disinclined to talk. Hester, knowing that his feelings had many currents and eddies, decided to let him drift. Finally he said, “I guess I ought to warn you, Father’s rather famous, or used to be, for girl-chasing.”
“ ‘Warn’ me? I can take care of myself, dear Eben.”
“I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Mother.”
“What did he do to her?”
“He squeezed all the vitality out of her, somehow, with his goings-on. Even I can remember when she used to be a regular vixen.”
Impatiently Hester changed the subject, and in due course, after they had talked awhile, Eben embraced her and kissed her. She felt a sudden access of desire, stronger even than usual. Eben was tender; he denied her as always, but not before working his way through her defenses until, far beyond surrender, she clamored for utmost captivity. In his denial, murmuring that that was for marriage, he seemed strong, utterly male and unmanageable, and, Hester realized when she had gone frustrated to bed, surprisingly like his neo-Puritan father.
Across a tumbled wall of glacier-rounded stones, beyond the field with the four maples where Hester had seen the woodchuck, the landscape again grew more fretted and entangled, the second-growth became thicker and taller. The terrain still sloped forward, but more gradually now, toward the base of the hollow. Repeated calls had come down from the left to move more slowly, and yet more slowly, and yet more slowly. In the dark thicket, with her private woodchuck somewhere ahead, Hester became anxious again, and her heart leaped when she heard, then saw, the Selectman coming down the line. He was grinning; he was a welcome sight.
“I saw a woodchuck!” she called to him, as if she had seen an eclipse, or a whale, or a unicorn in a garden.
“We have the whole caboodle running along up there,” the Selectman said, pointing backwards over his shoulder with his thumb. “So Beauty has seen the Beast? How was he?”
“Oh, he was so comical—sunning himself against a tree.”
“All over being afraid, then?” the Selectman asked, falling into step beside Hester.
“Well—”
“That’s good, girl. Don’t stop being leery of them.” The Selectman seemed intensely serious, not trifling now; she remembered how he had teased her about being afraid, before, with his story of the old woman, Dorcas Thrall, and her fear of birds. “They’re horrible!” he said. “Once I was walking in a field up here with a stick in my hand, and I saw a mother woodchuck with four fat little ones. I went after ’em with my staff. Well, the mother herded her babies to the mouth of their burrow in the wink of an eye, and she jumped in, and then she turned and pushed the babies back out into the field, so I’d get them, not her…. Don’t stop being leery of ’em.”
“Thanks, I won’t,” Hester said, not without conviction. She thought for a moment of the Forward-Avered word, “wicked.” Infanticides; wicked, wicked. “So you organized this drive out of hatred of the evil things,” she said.
“Oh Lordy, no,” the Selectman said. “You mustn’t think that I’m some kind of Captain Ahab. No, no! I only look for good and bad in people. This drive’s just a practical measure.”
“But I have an idea that ‘values’ were involved in your mind when you set about planning it. Weren’t they?”
“Values are involved in everything we do.” Suddenly he took one of his leaps in thought—and later she wondered what his train of mind at this moment had been. “Are you a virgin?” he asked.
“No.”
“My son Eben?”
“No.”
“You mean he wasn’t the first?”
“I mean he wasn’t, period.”
“Ahem,” the Selectman said, as if to rebuke, or at least intercept, an impulse he had had to laugh. “How many?”
“You asked me a simple question and I gave you a simple answer. Do you have to hound me?”
“We live in a world of realities,” the Selectman ironically said. “Does Eben know?”
“He’s never asked.”
“I’ll have to have a short talk with that boy—not about you, Miss Hester. I just think his curiosity ought to have a whetstone applied to it.”
“I think he has a very lively curiosity,” Hester said, “about important things.”
“I worry about that boy’s curiosity,” the Selectman said, moving cautiously out of the mood of impudent intimacy into which he had plunged—warned away, perhaps, by the cool lack of emphasis in her last phrase. “His curiosity’s too mechanical. I remember once when he was just going from baby to boy, just between grass and hay, his mother was trying to teach him to say prayers on his way to bed, and he wouldn’t stop bouncing around, so she said, ‘Ebenezer, you have to keep still and speak clearly when you say your prayers, so God’ll hear you up in the sky; He lives up in the sky, you know.’ The boy, instead of asking who or what or whether God is, instead of a big, central question, just asked, ‘Will an airplane hit him in the ear?’ That’s what I mean. He’s always been that way. Side issues.”
Hester said, “I think that was a pretty central question—the conflict of science with faith, after all. You don’t give your son credit.”
“I hope Eben marries you,” the father said, walking close beside Hester as they moved out into a clearing, where a sudden, cheerful light fell on the strolling pair.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you give a feeling of confidence; you seem to know where you are. And”—he gave her a comically voracious ogle—“because you’re an eyeful.”
Hester was puzzled, because for some minutes she had felt an ambiguity in all that her companion had said and done; perhaps because of Eben’s “warning” the night before, she had now either detected or imagined a flirtatious note in his words and acts. She could not tell whether he had been turning over in his mind the possibility of some harmless woodland toying, or meant what he said and truly and selflessly wanted her for a son he loved and had set a canopy over his feelings in the Yankee way; and because the ambiguity tortured her, she felt maladroit, wordless, shy.
“Hey! You hogs! Hey! Hey!” the Selectman startled her by roaring to the woodchuck world. Then mildly he pointed up toward a stretch of Thighbone Ledge that had come into view in the clearing, at a great, deep scar in the dark brown traprock. “Look at the quarry,” he said. “They worked it for about twenty years and got the best basalt out of the ledge to use for roadbed on the county highways and then abandoned it. That’s New England for you—we’ve uprooted its meager wealth, and all that’s left is a lot of water-filled pits and empty mine shafts and worked-out fields that weren’t worth working in the first place—and folks, of course.” He seemed wholly taken up with this thought, for his expression was sober and deep, and Hester was annoyed now, not only with him but also with herself, because she could not deny that she was disappointed; her vanity had been let down with a bump. (And later she was annoyed with herself, or at least troubled, because in these moments she had not given Eben a single important thought.) She hated not knowing whether she had been flirted with; if she had been, she resented this sudden little lecture on the conservation of the earth’s resources.
“Folks!” she thought. “Fossils, you mean.”
For some time Hester had been threading her way through scattered patches of cat brier, and now directly ahead of her in the next field she saw a widespread expanse of it, a sea of glaucous leaves, glistening vines humping in choppy waves over bushes and boulders, only here and there an islet of grass or underbrush not yet engulfed by the vicious tide. She remembered the brier vines that Andrew had showed her the day before, with golden-green spikes like copper carpet tacks all along the sinuous stems; and she remembered Mrs. Tuller’s warning: “Do not plunge too valorously….” On her left and right, Coit and the dancing master were working inexorably forward, making their eccentric woodchuck-repellent noises, and occasionally, as well, she could hear Anak Welch exercising his bovine throat with tragic-sounding baritone lowings. She was alone again; a message had come down the line asking the advance men to report to Division Two, where there was some tactical problem, and the Selectman had run off with a boyish whoop. She had walked forward in a kind of daze, puzzling over what had just happened to her, or rather what had not happened to her, and thinking about Eben and the future, and about the Selectman and the present; and about ambiguities and uncertainties in others and in herself; and all the time she felt somehow bad-tempered and displeased with the way life was treating her.
As she crossed over into the new field and came close to the cat brier, she saw that the growth, at least on its outer edges, did not appear to be closely interwoven, and that by threading back and forth, skirting between the many hummocks and knots of vine that made up the whole obstacle, it would be easy to move through it; from a distance it had seemed much more compact. She started in, and made her way for some minutes without so much as being brushed by a waxy leaf, remembering to warn the woodchucks of her coming with a shout from time to time. Then all at once the mounds of vine grew taller and closed in; she came up against a tight and extensive entanglement.
There was nothing to do but go around; she would go Coit’s way, she thought, around the left—and at the thought of the bully she experienced a strange stab of curiosity and pleasure. With many a twist and turn, in a sort of waltzing detour, she progressed, somewhat forward of sideways, along the near edge of the impenetrability. She had only gone a few yards, however, when she saw a well-beaten path, clearly one of the woodchuck trails the Selectman had talked about at the caucus, and had urged the hunters to use, that led into a kind of funnel running deep into close-knit brier towering over her head. She assumed that this much-used animal trail must go all the way through the cat brier patch, so she turned and followed it. The funnel became a high-walled soft lane, winding, she imagined for a moment, like an eighteenth-century informal garden path to some out-of-the-way Fragonardish playroom of shade, where girls with their legs frilled in lace swooped high on swings pumped by desire-flushed swains. Cheerfully she tooted and yapped at the woodchucks, and heard, from the calls of her companions, that she was still fairly well in line.
After a bit the vines opened up somewhat again, into another area of clustered and mounded islets of brier. The path underfoot seemed less trafficked, then Hester saw there were several paths here wending and winding among the dangerous heaps, and she began to feel mazed. Still, oriented by the noises her friends kept venting, she moved, as she thought, forward. Gradually the vines thickened once more, the spaces between the clumps narrowed.
Hester thought for a moment that she ought to turn back again and escape and circle the whole troublesome field, but then she imagined she must be nearly through to the far side, and she was suddenly afraid of getting lost if she tried to retreat and of falling far behind the picket line.
She came up against a tight barricade; turned and met another; reversed herself and met another. She was encircled, bewildered. She found a place, toward the direction of the drive, it seemed, where the vines were at least shallow, and she decided to get a leg up and over and try to wade forward. The vines plucked at her jeans and pricked her legs. Still, she made some progress, and once she had a glimpse ahead to open meadow and saw that she had not too far to go. She felt encouraged and wallowed onward, ignoring many scratches, and for a moment came to a tiny open place where grass grew and through which, she fancied, a trace of a woodchuck path ran. Then she plunged, she realized, too valorously forward into the growth beyond, and soon was thoroughly caught. The vines embraced over her head. She pulled at them and tried to lift her knees and move her feet. Her heart raced. She felt stung and bitten and angry. She was able somehow to wriggle and stagger a few feet forward.
Then she fell and could go no further. She seemed tied down. She felt distended and enormous; she felt like a Gulliver lashed down by fabulous miniature powers.
Terror shook her. She tried to rise and back away. Her arms seemed bound, she could not move. She put her forehead down on a forearm and sobbed on her couch of thorns. Then, as she heard the dancing master, Coit, and Anak Welch calling, whistling, calling, she knew she had been left behind and she raised her head, thinking of trying to shout to them.
She lowered her eyes. Directly ahead of her on the ground among the vines, not two feet from her face, she saw the dry, whited skeleton of a woodchuck. She screamed, but knew at once that her cry would be thought merely part of the hunt, part of the day’s play.
The blanched skull before her was turned to one side on the dry vertebrae, as if the animal had, at last, simply gone to sleep.
On the wall of the beach terrace, carefully posed among some delicate shells and fronds of coral, on a doily of seagrape leaves, was the skull of a sea turtle, as big as a cow’s skull. It was whiter than the sand of the beach, white as the spindrift on the wave tops. Picking up the skull, their hostess, who was tan as a mulatto, so that the dry bone left a pale calx on the glossy skin of her forearm, told the others how a sea turtle begets its young: When the huge creature comes up to lay its eggs, she said, it labors up the beach leaving a trail like a bulldozer’s; the mother makes a mussy nest, a hill of sand, with twigs and seaweed on it—but that is only a decoy-place, for she moves away then and prepares another crater and lays her eggs (they hurt her so much, or parturition makes her so sad, that she cries immense tears) and leaves that place as tidy as she can and goes back down to the water. “The eggs are rubbery,” Mrs. Mandeson said, re-posing the skull; “they’ll bounce on the terrace here.” While the eggs hatch under the heat of the sun, the mother waits offshore, she said, and when they have emerged from their eggs the blind baby turtles turn around two or three times and then home, as if by a kind of radar, straight for the sea. The mother is waiting there offshore to keep the barracuda away.
“How do turtles make love, Professor?” George Mandeson asked his wife.
“The usual way,” she said, “I guess.”
“Is it usual to be wearing a tight-fitting house when you make love?”
Hester lay on a mat of woven rushes, half-hearing and aware that she glistened, for she was bearing some of the weight of the Florida sun, and the effort made her perspire; she was oiled, too.
“Listen to the rut of the waves,” Eben said. He was in a good mood—living for sensations on this vacation trip that he and Hester had arranged to share by purposeful coincidence; for all sensations, that is, save one, for he was a Puritan boy and proving himself splendidly in his physical restraint toward Hester.
“Boy!” George Mandeson said. “There’s power in them thar waves.”
“How many tons do you guess a wave weighs?” Eben asked speculatively. “I mean from here to the end of the spit, one wave hitting the sand?”
“If only you could hitch a power take-off to a wave!” George said.
Hester noticed that George talked frequently about strength, and that he was big and firm himself. His body had a terrible rippling grace; when he moved, it was as if someone dropped a stone in the middle of him, making irresistible undulations spread outward all over him. His brain was his underdeveloped muscle. The Mandesons were older than Eben and herself, and away overhead economically. They were thirtying, ten years married and ten years childless, and they had a small house on this island on the West Coast, and they argued quite a lot, especially after drinks, of which they intook quite a lot. How lonely, Hester thought, they must be! She and Eben had gone unwarned one night into a night-place called the Golden Olive, where the tariff was far too steep for them; and this lonely tarnished pair at a nearby table had invited them over and, hearing of their unmarried, hitchhiking, motel-housed adventure, had asked them urgently forthwith to spend some days at their cottage. George had a powered skiff and had inspected the power plant at Fort Myers and could tell you all about the power play series developed by the Philadelphia Eagles; he was obsessed with vital forces. He and Ruth were from outside Philadelphia, from what they called the wrong side of the Main Line, which Hester, having heard George’s talk, thought of as a power line. Ruth was of the kind whom men fearfully love and women openly hate: beautiful and brilliant. There were tiny cracks around her eyes and on the upper curves of her cheeks, like those that appear in lacquer long kept in a too-hot room. She knew most things and would blandly talk about the other things that she didn’t know, and Eben’s eyes sparkled like stupid little firefly traps whenever he was around her.
“I’ve got to dunk myself,” Hester said disgustedly, standing up. “Who’s with me?”
“I’m ahead of you,” George Mandeson cried, and he exploded from where he lay into a sudden full gallop down the beach, crashing his dolphin shoulders at last against the very stomach of an overfolding wave, in contempt of the water’s might. He swam several yards under the surface, came up spewing air, and turned treading his legs to wait for Hester. She walked down the beach moving her hips warily and with her arms lifted and elbows back taking more time than she needed to put on her bathing cap; she had a queer feeling of submissiveness approaching the brute in the water—and she decided (“anyhow” was at the edge of her mind) that she was peeved with Eben for being such a lap-dog at the beck of their hostess; all through this trip she had felt a growing resentment of his Puritanism. Hester squealed and jumped as the waves hit her thighs, and she swam breast-stroke to George, who made sea-mammal noises at her, slappings and wet snorts, and she splashed him, and he said, “What’re you two doing tonight?”—for the Mandesons had generously set freedom of action as a condition of the young pair’s stay.
“I don’t know what Eben’s got in mind. I expect he’ll decide to be tired tonight.”
“Why don’t we all go down to the Golden Olive and have some drinks and a bite to eat?”
“Too expensive.”
“This is on me.”
“You’re doing too much for us, George.”
“I don’t do anything at my expense that isn’t fun for me.”
“An altruist,” Hester sarcastically said.
“Hey, take it easy,” George said with leaden suspicion, for he did not like to be teased, and the unknown (a vast realm to him, it appeared) seemed to terrify him.
“You know, just below soprano in the choir,” Hester maliciously tried on him; she had by now a deep-seated faith in his stupidity.
“Hey! What the hell!” George protested, his sense of manhood abused; he splashed Hester. To admit the truth, she thought, his voice was a little squeaky for such a ram.
“I’d love to go,” Hester said, “but you’ll have to persuade Eben.”
“Ruth can do that.”
“That’s a good idea,” Hester said, laughing inwardly now at Eben and swimming away from George.
And that was the way it was done.
In a moment of clarity, while she was dressing alone in the tiny guestroom at the end of the house in the sedge by the sand, Hester saw George Mandeson for what he was. It would have been possible to think of him as the American ideal, a kind of manly Cinderella, up from nowhere in a hurry, up from being an ingenious mechanic, alias greaser, to being, at thirty or so, a man who wore leather sandals and linen pants and Hawaiian shirts in the palmiferous regions for two months every winter. Hester was sure that he had come up by a straight path—by hard work and by recognizing Opportunity when she stared him so close in the face that he could smell her foul breath; there was something about a patent on a gadget that would go into every cigaret lighter in every car in the land. He was what, according to the native myth, every clever girl who worked at a clerical job, every Hester and every Ruth Mandeson, dreamt of catching and dangling from her wrist: rich, healthy, dull, as patient and good-tempered as a little plated charm. But now Hester saw that he was nothing more than one of the pretty coquina shells on the beach, housing a small rotted tenant within—that get-fairly-rich-quick had as its complement more-more-more, and that George had seen the shape of the spiral above his head and it terrified and disgusted him because he was not equal to it; that he was stupid, stupid, stupid; that he had hidden from himself, without knowing it, in a busy pleasure hunt;—in short, that he was well on his way to becoming not the American dream but the American nightmare: a lush, a lecher, and a loafer. There was some putrescence in him. He was bad. He was startlingly attractive.
They sat at a table in the Golden Olive. A section of the roof had been rolled back so the customers could see a black velvet pincushion of night overhead. The orchestra was mercifully soft and persuasive. George had ordered gin and Schweppes Tonic Water, and when it came, Hester, a merest novitiate in the sisterhood of gin-drinkers, sipped some of it.
“It tastes terrible,” she said, making a citrus face.
“You’ll have to educate yourself to this tonic water,” George said with apparently unconscious grandeur. “It’s an acquired taste.”
“I can’t help it,” Hester said. “It tastes awful to me.”
“It’s British. For the tropics. It has something like quinine in it—keeps the fevers down.”
“I can’t help it,” Hester said again. “Anyhow, this isn’t the tropics; this is the intemperate zone.”
Hester saw that George didn’t even duck as that one sped close over his head. “The temperate zone,” he said, gently correcting her.
“Yes, George,” Hester said, feeling that awful submissiveness again, “the temperate zone.”
Late that night, out on the sand, thanks partly to certain fevers that gin raised and sustained in easy opposition to the tonic from overseas, but thanks as well to a restlessness that was deep in her, deep in her, after a preliminary minuet of deception that had been eased by Eben’s constant yawning at the nightclub and by an ache that pounced fortuitously on Ruth Mandeson’s head, and also by the fact that Eben and Hester, being unmarried guests, were housed in separate quarters, she in the main house and he in the guest house, Hester, under the light of a sickle moon, terminated her virginity. Her disappointing collaborator in this ending was the stupid bull, George Mandeson. As she went to sleep in the pale blue guestroom later, with the bed-lamp turned on to steady the room on its axis, Hester kept thinking how much, how very much, she loved her sweet Yankee character, Eben Avered. She would marry him and they wouldn’t get rich and stupid, not very rich, anyhow.
Thus Hester, entangled in the cat brier near the small bleached skeleton, lay in the presence of death and thought of lasciviousness under a hot sun and of the act of generation under a new moon, of golden olives and suntan oil and turtle eggs and squeezed limes and cheating kisses and more than kisses; in the presence of the bones in the brier. “I’m getting morbid,” she said out loud, then started at hearing herself talk in a place where no one else could hear her. “Next thing,” she continued, still audibly, “I’ll be talking out loud to myself.”
She decided (in order, perhaps, to keep fear down) that she was not very afraid. They’ll come for me, she thought, they’re bound to come back for me. When they stop for rest or for lunch, Eben’ll look for me and they’ll miss me and they’ll come back for me. They know where I was in the line, it’ll be a lead-pipe cinch to find me. No, she decided, I’m not particularly afraid, and she wondered what her abdomen was independently shaking about. Maybe it was laughing about the boneheaded stud, George Mandeson. Why was it laughing? She wasn’t.
She tried again to work herself free. I was excited before, she thought, I’ll go about it more carefully this time. She began to make cautious motions with her wrists and hands, but the labor was discouraging. Just to give her forearms mobility, she would have to exert a kind of patience she simply did not have, the steadiness of a knitter, the unhurriedness of a thrifty woman clearing a snarled wad of twine without snipping it. Damn it, she was just the wrong kind of girl to get herself out of a mess.
The little skeleton was right in front of her all the time. “Chuckie,” Hester said, but not out loud this time, “were you like me? Didn’t you stop to think? Did you thrash around till the toils had you?” Not out loud, not in a whisper, not even silently did Hester explicitly ask the woodchuck’s relics what it had been like to die in the vines.
But we are different, Hester thought. We men and women think about each other. They’ll be back for me.
Ha! she let herself complain. When do we think of each other? When we’re afraid, when we need company, when we’re afraid of losing something, when we’re afraid of death—then we’re selfless enough. All the rest of the time: bellies, genitals, if possible a heel on somebody else’s neck.
And then Hester was thinking how pleasant it would be to be embraced by Eben’s father. Here in the woods. He was experienced, compassionate, and troubled by daydreams; he would be a hundred times better than the Mandeson, the only one she’d had. It would be wonderful, she openly thought. Not here in the snarled vines, of course, but in the soft-floored forest.
She could hear the drivers calling and whistling in the distance. Their backs were to her and they were going farther and farther away. Eben’s father was up there in that noise—and so, she thought with a little prick of annoyance, was Eben.
From here she heard the drivers’ calls as a definite line of noise. If I were a woodchuck, she thought, I’d move away from such a racket—if only I could move. Then for a while she had a weird idea that maybe woodchucks think about each other, too; and she pictured a posse of them coming solicitously, with long memories, to find their ossified sister chuckie caught in the brier, but finding her, Hester, instead, and…Hester felt the tremor in her abdomen again.
The calling of the hunters seemed to die out, and Thighbone Hollow was silent but for the delicious fricative whistling of a city of crickets. Had the line moved so far as to be out of hearing? Or had it paused? Who would think of her first?
Now Hester saw something curious. Under the cage of the skeleton’s ribs, lying nested in vine leaves, there was a beautiful, queer globe of some kind, the size of a small orange, a vari-textured ball whose surface was of an iridescent light grayish color crisscrossed with delicate dark lines; it looked mysterious, semi-precious, a monstrous jewel among the remains. She had a fanciful notion that this woodchuck might have had a heart of stone, but then she decided that this glistening thing was too perfectly spherical to have been even an accidental symbol of the seat of love. She determined that she must have it, whatever it was, and she began carefully to plan how to reach out her left hand the two feet it would have to extend in order to grasp the lovely globe. If she could hunch her body around so that her left shoulder would be thrust forward, like a pugilist’s, then if she could clear a way with her left hand to poke her arm forward…. And soon she was working harder to capture that eerie prize than she had worked twice before to save herself from captivity.
Slowly, inch by inch by scratchy inch, she urged her small hand forward. Now it was a foot away from the pearly ball, now half a miserable mile-like foot, now closer, now—ouch!—closer.
There! It was hard, smooth, heavy.
She began to draw her arm back, knowing that the return would be even more tiresome than the reach had been, for her loaded hand was bigger than it had been empty, her fingers were tied down to their burden. Slowly, slowly.
“Hester! Hester! Oh, Hester!” Far away.
Pooh, it was somewhere Eben. He sounded like a scared chicken.
Knowing now for sure that she was safe, Hester decided to let Eben make the most of his great errand of mercy; let it last awhile; she just wouldn’t answer for a few minutes. She concentrated on retrieving the woodchuck’s treasure, while her brave but nervous Eben kept on bothering the welkin with her name off there.
At last her hand was back where it had started, and in it was this curious, pocked, resin-streaked, delicately lined gray globe, hers now; it had belonged to a woodchuck and now it was hers. It was a singular ball, very strange and fascinating.
Now Hester heard other voices calling her, with Eben’s, and they were all much closer and would reach her soon enough. She listened for one particular hail, lay tense over her scratched left hand waiting to hear it.
Then she did. There it was, not far away at all. Eben’s father’s voice.
“Here I am!” she shouted delightedly. “Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!”
They found her a scant eight or ten feet from the outer edge of the brier patch. The search party—Eben, his father, Coit, Friedrich Tuller, and Mr. Challenge-told her through the spiny screen as they worked to free her that the whole line of the drive had stopped for lunch and that Coit had been the first to miss her. They had a couple of machetes, which some of the advance men had been carrying, and Coit and the Selectman hacked at the vines.
Hester was cheerful and talked to her rescuers about the path she had followed and about how she had become caught and about the skeleton lying there near her. She said nothing about what was in her hand.
Eben chafed and asked if she was hurt and whether she had been afraid; Eben’s father was silent but worked hard to give her liberty. Coit teased her for a stupid city girl (evidently, being a talented bully, he had sensed the very point on which she felt most vulnerable); and the Selectman shushed Coit firmly. “Stop cruelizing the girl, Roswell,” he said.
Soon Hester was free and could jump up and walk out onto open meadow. The searchers exclaimed over her scratches and her torn shirt, and Mr. Challenge said she looked like the tail end of a hurricane. She went straight to the Selectman and held out the odd thing in her hand and asked, “What’s this?”
Taking it and scanning it, he said, “Where’d you find that?”
“It was inside the woodchuck, inside the skeleton of the woodchuck.”
The Selectman tossed the ball up and caught it several times. “Never saw the like of it in my life,” he said. “It’s a spooky thing—fairly gives you a grue. We’ll have to ask Pliny Forward what it is.”
They did that. When they reached the shady grove where the line had halted—only about four hundred yards from where Hester had been caught—they searched among the long-strewn clumps of people sitting and waiting to picnic, for the young biologist, until they found him. The Selectman put the ball in his hand, and Forward asked where it had come from, and Hester told how she had found it.
“You must be a lucky one,” Forward said, revolving the orb in his hand. “Are you lucky by habit?”
“Well,” Hester said, “as a matter of fact, no, I wouldn’t say so, I’d say that by and large I work for everything I get; after all, I’m a woman, no, I’m not very lucky.”
“You will be from now on,” Pliny Forward said; but there was a light-heartedness in his voice, a mocking note. “This is a bezoar stone, and uncommon big for a woodchuck’s. I saw a small one once, just a pint o’ cider alongside this one. This is a dandy. It’s nothing but a concretion of hairs and pebbles and indigestibles that the woodchuck ate by accident and coated with some kind of gum of his and built on up in layers—but it has magic properties. You must wear it as an amulet, because it’ll ward off everything from bugaboos in your nose to the yellow creeping paralysis. At least that’s what our ancestors, our old seedfolks as my mother called them, used to think. Don’t know exactly what to think myself.”
“Give it to me,” Hester said a little sharply, and she took the bezoar from Pliny Forward. “Will it get you what you want?” she asked. “Is it like a wishbone or the first star of evening?”
“You can look on it that way if you want to,” Forward said.
“Let’s eat!” the Selectman said. “I’m as hungry as a graven image.”
“I agree,” said Mrs. Tuller. “ ‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground.’ Is your acquaintance with Shakespeare sufficient to tell me what play that’s from, Miss Hester?”
“Seems to me I recognize the line,” Hester said abstractedly, while inwardly she addressed a vague wish, that had to do with herself and an older man who was troubled with daydreams, to the bezoar; she fervently pressed the round stone in her hand.
“Do you think you can eat, after what you’ve been through?” Eben asked her with a silly tenderness.
“Lead me to the trough!” Hester exclaimed.
“Richard the Second,” Mrs. Tuller said, settling heavily to earth.
“Oh, of course,” Hester said, as if annoyed with herself for forgetting, though in truth the only warrant for annoyance was that she had pretended to let slip from her mind something that had never been in it.
They sat in a circle and ate thick sandwiches that had been brought to the other side of the canal by Rulof Pitkin in his truck, had been ferried across in a skiff, and had been carried up the line and distributed, along with pitchers of milk and lemonade, and paper cups, by gentle busybody ladies of the village of Tunxis. While the hunters ate in clumps, a thin picket line of watchers stood out toward the woodchucks to give the alarm if any of the animals tried to go back toward their burrows. Anak Welch was the outguardsman nearest where Hester and the others sat.
“Did you see those damn fools showing themselves on the skyline up there on Thighbone Ledge?” Roswell Coit asked the chewing circle. “Don’t our people know the first thing about cover?”
“I doubt if groundhogs can see that far, Ros,” the Selectman said.
“Oh, they can see all right,” Pliny Forward said. “A woodchuck can see a single clover leaf from a hundred yards away.”
“Maybe I could train one to help me hunt for four-leaf clovers,” the dancing master said. “He ought to be able to see a four-leaf clover from four hundred yards away, right?”
“Those kernel-heads wouldn’t get up there on the skyline like that if the woodchucks had a few rifles,” Coit sullenly said.
“We were talking before you came,” Pliny Forward said abruptly to Eben, as if something about Eben had reminded him of the topic, “about the marmots’ love life.”
With Hester so close by, this affirmation seemed to make Eben fidget, as though he had just discovered he was sitting on an anthill. “Hadn’t somebody better relieve Uncle Anak?” he said. “He’ll want some lunch, his stomach’s as big as a cheese vat. I better go take his place.”
“Monogamous,” Forward said, fixedly eyeing Eben, holding him pinned on his haunches with the intensity of the gaze he shot out through his green-rimmed glasses. “Oh, yes. They start going steady with a member of the opposite sex at the age of one year. And they’re very faithful beings: the incidence of separation and divorce is very low among woodchucks, very low.”
“Uncle Anak must be famished,” Eben said.
“We ought to tell people to keep down off that skyline,” Coit said, apparently brooding now more about the fact that no one was listening to him than about the hazard of careless cover. “That’s the first thing any rook learns, keep off the lousy skyline.” He was quite angry; he was Hester’s idea of a sergeant.
Mrs. Tuller leaned over and murmured to Hester, as Coit began to argue his sudden obsession with two or three drivers on his side of the picnic circle, “Roswell’s giant brain don’t accommodate itself to projects that are the least bit casual, like this. Fact is, the boy ain’t as bright as he might be. I believe he owes money on his I.Q.”
But, Hester thought, he was the first to think of me when I was caught in the vines.
“And every spring, along about May,” Pliny Forward said, still drilling Eben with his attention, “the faithful lovers produce a litter of four or five babies. As regular as clockwork. Would you like to hear how they do it?”
“I’m going to take Uncle Anak’s place,” Eben said, standing up with an awful effort, as if he had a bag of cement on his shoulders. He turned his flushed face for a moment toward Hester, and said to her, “See you later.”
“Every single spring in May,” Forward said to the reddened back of Eben’s neck as Eben stumbled out of the picnic glade.
Hester said to the Selectman, “Eben called the giant ‘Uncle Anak.’ Is he a relation of yours?”
“No,” the Selectman said, “he’s nothing to us but friend. All the younger generation round here call him ‘Uncle’; I guess it’s out of awe of his great size—or maybe to acknowledge there’s some kind of enormity in every family in Tunxis. But ‘Uncle’ Anak is part of what’s behind your dre’ful Eben, as much as if he was a relation. Do you know how stubborn Eben is? Well, Uncle Anak’s the stubbornest man I know; otherwise he’s the salt of this quarter of the earth. Stubborn? One day when I passed his place I saw him out turning the hay in a meadow—kicking it up with a fork to get some dampness out of it; when a squall hermed up and it began to rain. Well, I stood there by a pair of bars in the fence and watched him go right on and turn the whole rest of the field in the downpour. Afterwards he walked over to me and said, ‘Guess you’ll put me down for addled, Matthew, turning hay in the rain, but I told myself I’d turn this whole field this very afternoon, and vummed if I didn’t do it.’ Our Anak has a temperament like cornmeal mush: he’s always having to let himself cool off, but he’s really soft through and through. He’s so sentimental you could stick a cat’s tail plumb through him and not ruffle it. He’s not soft physically, though, not as far as courage goes. There’s many a strong wild colt he’s caught and shod in other days round here, many a wild steer he’s yoked, and many a time he used to tie up his neighbor, Parson Churnstick, a devout man but powerful even in his late years and sometimes crazy. I believe Uncle Anak stands six feet seven in his cotton socks. He can do anything with his hands—build a coop, a cart, a plow, a keg: anything made of wood and iron. He seems to run into a heap of accidents, I must say—built a triphammer shop once, to do some of his metal work, and lost his thumb because he was so bound and determined to see his machine work that he tried to hold the bed-piece under the hammer before the bed-piece had been secured. The hammer worked satisfactory—a couple of knuckles’ worth too well. His conscience, by the bye, is ten feet tall. One night several years ago when he kept cows, he forgot and left the barn doors open; it was midwinter. He punished himself the next night for his lack of consideration for the creatures by opening the doors again and sitting all night in a straight chair in the blast of a January nor’wester. Of course the doors were open on the cows again that night, and I guess some of the poor creatures got the sneezes and worse; but not Anak—his conscience was too clear for him to catch anything. I guess you’d have to say he’s somewhat restive as a townsman. Seems to keep juggling a few lawsuits with his neighbors all the time, sort of testing their agility. Yet no one is more listened to in town meeting. As I guess you saw last night, he’s reverend-looking with those big ears outspread like a benediction, and he’s slow and careful of speech, and what he says is solid. His views are unpopular, but his influence is great. He’s a Democrat in a rock-Republican town, and he wouldn’t change his principles if you offered him a ten-room house made out of mother-of-pearl with ruby window lights. Stubborn! He was driving down to the capital once in June, way in the next valley, three hours to drive in those days, and I’d asked him to carry a letter by hand to a doctor friend of mine in the city. Of course Anak forgot, till he was home after dark and just turning in his driveway. Well, he wheeled around and went all the way back to town and banged the man out of bed at close to midnight and put the letter in his hand the way he’d said he would and got back here in awful small hours. That’s how set he is. Just as set as a cement pavement. Shush! Here he comes.”
The huge man came close, sat down with a groan, and, protesting that he’d lately lost his appetite, ate enough sandwiches to picnic a large and wholesome Sunday-school class.
Soon it was time to resume the search, and the drivers were asked to go forward to the picket line and take up their stations again. Hester managed things so that she walked up to the line with the Selectman, about whom she had been thinking during the morning, and with Roswell Coit, who had, it seemed, been thinking about her. She carefully carried the bezoar in her hand.
“Did you hear about Dorcas Thrall?” Coit asked the Selectman.
“What’s she been up to?” the Selectman asked. “She’s coming to our house tonight.”
“D’you mean you didn’t hear about Grandma Thrall and the chicken hawk yesterday?”
“I’ve been busy getting up this drive.”
“I thought you’d be one of the first to hear,” Coit said.
“Well, you know how sometimes you don’t have a chance to swat the flies on your own back stoop for a week at a time,” the Selectman said.
“That’s funny,” Coit said, “with you people bein’ so close to her.”
“I’ve been busy,” the Selectman said.
“You must’ve been busy, not to hear.”
“Oh yes, I’ve fair chased myself around a tree this last few days.”
“I thought you’d have heard.”
“Well, you know how ’tis.”
“Yeah, I know, but still.”
“Sometimes I don’t hear what I’ve been doing till about a month after I do it.”
“Well, you’re a busy man, Mr. Avered, you sure flog yourself with work.”
“Oh, I get by.”
“No criticism meant. You get by, sure you get by. I just thought you’d have heard.”
“You thought wrong, my boy.”
“All I can say is, it’s God digged strange.”
“I can’t help that. A fact’s a fact.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“So you said. I heard you.”
“Don’t think I enjoyed chasing myself around the tree.”
“Who said you did?”
Then for some time the men walked along flanking Hester and saying nothing. It seemed to Hester that the two were preposterously angry with each other and that the subject of Dorcas Thrall was now closed, as well, perhaps, as many other subjects; she had a queer feeling that these two New Englanders might never be able to reach each other again—perhaps they never had. She felt sad about it. She liked them both!—the Selectman because he was the sort of man she enjoyed thinking about, the Coit because it was already clear that she was the sort of woman he enjoyed thinking about; they were her East and West who could meet perhaps only through such as she.
“This Dorcas Thrall,” Coit said to her at last, evidently having decided to cut the Selectman out of further conversation, “she’s ninety-one years old, they say she’s ninety-one—old as rape and thievery, anyway; and always been scared of birds.”
“This girl knows all about her,” the Selectman curtly said.
“Yes, I know a little about her,” Hester said in a friendly way to Coit.
“In that case—” Coit said, and clamped his mouth shut as if he had slammed down the engine hood of a car.
“But I haven’t heard about yesterday,” Hester said.
“I suppose you’ve been busy, too,” Coit bitterly said.
Just then the three of them broke from the thin woods they had been negotiating into a clearing, and in the center of the clearing they saw Eben locked in mutual terror with a woodchuck.
The animal was crouching on the ground and Eben was standing over it, and both figures were ambiguously posed—either menacing or craven, it was hard to say which; or both were both at once, maybe. Each seemed to be trying to bluff the other and to bolster the self. The woodchuck was pressed flat to the ground, but its legs seemed under a spring-like tension, ready at once to pounce or bolt. Its head was raised, and its teeth were chattering in the hideous way of nature, both human and at large, that threatens when it fears and fears when it threatens. This was a direful rattling sound the scared beast made. As for Eben, he stood hunched forward, his elbows bowed and his fingers tensely outstretched, his knees visibly trembling, towering over the animal, Hester thought, like a figure in a nightmare she had often had as a child, of a terrifying-terrified djinn that could do her great evil but might at any moment be driven into its home, a dark-glassed bottle, by a rub on a ring that was somewhere, somewhere. Eben was as pale as autumn smoke. He seemed unaware of the approach of the three—or dared not break his hypnotic relationship with this animal that made its vicious teeth so audible.
Hester glanced at her companions. She expected the bully Coit to be laughing, but, on the contrary, he himself had blanched, as if awed and even a little frightened by this uneasy poise of flesh and flesh. The Selectman was evidently stricken with a father’s shame; he stood for a few moments blushing and shaking his head.
No sooner had Hester looked back at Eben than, from beside her, the Selectman rushed forward and with a downswooping motion picked up the woodchuck by the scruff of the neck, lifted it in the air (it was much smaller, Hester saw, than the one she had watched sunning itself against the tree), and threw it forward into the edge of the further woods. At the moment of its landing, as if the wind was being biffed out of a thrown rubber toy, the woodchuck emitted a high-pitched brief whistle-like scream, and then could be heard scuttling away at a nice pace.
“You great gorming lummox!” the Selectman said harshly to Eben—more to vent his embarrassment, Hester thought, than to curse his own flesh and blood. “Let’s get up into line.”
Now Hester found herself walking out of the clearing and through thin woods alone with Roswell Coit.
“Your boyfriend was nervous,” Coit said.
“Eben lives in the city. He’s a city man,” Hester said as proudly as she could.
“I remember a joker at the Volturno—that was about the dirtiest fightin’ we had, at the Volturno, unless maybe Salerno—anyway one time the colonel told this joker, this Sanchez, he told him to go down by the river to a place there and do a little cleanup snipin’, all by his lonesome. Sanchez stood around on one foot and other foot, and begun to sweat and he got the trembles. The colonel didn’t tolerate no chicken-do, and he said to Sanchez, said, ‘What the whoozis a matter with you? You Chrissakes scared, Sanchez?’ So Sanchez, this wonderful spic from Jersey, he says, ‘No sir, Colonel, I ain’t scared—just shakin’ with patriotism.’ Sometimes it’s hard to tell what makes folks look nervous.”
“Eben used to hate you,” Hester deliberately said.
“I don’t hold him a grudge. We used to go fishin’ quite a lot, down at Catspaw Pond, me and him and young Quinlan Leaming. They had pretty good striped dace and calico bass there, and a slew of sunnies. Quinlan and me used to think Eb was awful fussy, namby-pamby. He had to have his angleworm tidy on the hook. He wasn’t sissy—he was regular, but small and hated trouble, and Quinlan and me, we loved it. Hallowe’en night—you should’ve seen the candle tallow on the big store windows and mailboxes down all over town! Eb didn’t like to amplify around that way, and in school he was always farse to make the teacher take notice of him: he was too damn bright and full of sweet-gas for us common folks. And listen—his handwritin’ on the blackboard!—nothin’ but curlicues and arpicues. So you can see we used to get after him whenever we could; usually he’d run or hide on us, but if he had to, he’d fight like a judgment…. But look how wrong we were, look at us now: Quinlan you don’t hardly hear from, he’s got a terrible streak of lack in his character, and me—well, I’m just a puke of misery besides Eben.”
Hester looked hastily at Coit’s face and saw an enigma. He had spoken his last words in a flat voice, and she could not tell whether he meant what he said, or was playing for sympathy, or was being sarcastic.
“What do you work at?” she asked.
“Outdoors work. I have to be outdoors. Since the service I can’t abide to be cooped up.”
“You ought to be a policeman,” Hester maliciously said.
“I thought of that,” Coit said, with a sadistic twinkle coming into his eyes. “That’d be good work. I thought of that, only I had some bad trouble, a bad run-in, with the M.P.s in the service, and the Legion fellows all know about it, so I wouldn’t hardly get past the muster. I thought about that, though.”
“What’s your complaint against Eben—that he’s too hoity-toity, or what?”
“I don’t like these brainy coots, they make me feel squawmish. They don’t shake hands hard.”
“In other words you’re afraid they may be better than you.”
“I used to like Eben Avered,” Coit said, and Hester saw that now he was serious, almost pathetically serious. “He could stand up to anybody. We had a game with our sleds—we used to coast down two ways, either there was scoochers, that was squattin’ on the sled, or there was bellyguts, that was lyin’ down frontways, and we’d get a line of us on either side the runway with sticks in our hand to hold acrost the runway on a slant, and the thing was to try to get under the scoocher’s or the bellygutter’s sled-runners like with a crowbar as he passed and offset him in the snow. There never was a time we could knock Eb off, never. He was nimble! I’m in mind of another game”—and slowly the muscular bully was melting away before Hester’s eyes into a rather fat boy, too big for his age, everlastingly proving himself—“that we called haily-over. We picked up teams and got on opposite sides of a barn and threw a ball over top of it and hollered out a number on the other team and if the number didn’t catch it, he had to come round to our side, till everybody’d been captured that way. I remember one day we were playing it, Eb wasn’t with us. The ball was coming overhead, my number was called, I was just about to snag the thing, then what do I see but Eben Avered coming out of Booge’s pasture in his overhauls with a bouquet of piss-abeds—I guess you’d call ’em daisies—in his arms? I never did catch the ball, it could’ve clapped me on the head. He said they were for his mother, so I sassed him for a mother-lover, and he dropped the piss-abeds and come after me, boy oh boy oh boy. He can take care of himself when he has to. I don’t think those flowers were for his mother at all; he was just covering up in my opinion.”
“What do you think of his father?”
“There’s a man I don’t trust. This woodchuck round-up!”
“Why don’t you trust him?”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“Why don’t you trust him?”
“He just ain’t trusted in this neighborhood.”
“Why?”
“All right, then. There’s an item of a little slip he made once; or rather, he got found out that he’d made it.”
“What kind of a slip? What do you mean?”
“If Eben ain’t told you about his own old man, it stands me in hand to talk about the weather, or double-yolked eggs, or something or other. You ask your boyfriend—when he stops shakin’. And when you ask him, he’ll start again, like as not.”
They had come to Hester’s station in the line, and had been standing there talking awhile. Now the commotion of the drive began once more up to the left, and Coit hurried off to his neighboring post. The line began to move.
Hester thought as she walked of games she had early played: city games, games of loneliness. You all lined up on opposite sides of a room, a big room, as spacious as sleep, and there was going to be some kind of rush, and piano music starting and stopping, and after the rush and the chords you found yourself clutching the hand of a boy—which one?—and they told you he was your true, your only love; but you hardly knew him. You hid alone in a coat-closet under some shelves, crouching among the galoshes trembling with hope that the door would crack and light would flood you and you would be found. You fled on a playground to the count of one hundred. The games always made you feel alone, and you didn’t want to be alone; all you wanted was to be known and felt, to be close to the others.
That was not Eben’s worry, it seemed. Eben, in his haily-over and sled-gantlet and all his open-air play, must have struggled to hide his talents, must have cherished mediocrity, must have groaned in his bed at night wishing he were dull as the others. How terrible to be what all wished to be! Hated for nimbleness, hated for intellect. Hester remembered what one of her friends had said about Eben shortly after Hester had met him: “He’s unbearable! So busy trying to keep from being a genius.” That girl had been talking about a pretentiousness she had seen in Eben, but on another layer there was this other horror that Eben suffered from: the horror of becoming what everyone wants to be and tries so hard to be.
Once in the city she and Eben were going to the movies, riding part way on a bus, and Eben said quite casually, “I got a raise today.”
“Oh, Eben!” Hester said, and slipped her hand under Eben’s arm.
“Five dollars a week,” Eben said, sounding solid.
“Move over, John D. Rockefeller,” Hester said.
But at that Eben took offense. “Let’s not go too fast,” he said.
“Have I said something again that I didn’t understand?”
“Just because I’m a bit more prosperous than I was yesterday, you’re going to start not liking me. I know how your mind works. You’re just like everyone else, like all the ones at the office; they hate me now because of this puny raise. They all would crawl to Mecca on their knees for a five-dollar raise, but let somebody get one, and suddenly he’s an outcast. Before he gets a chance to pay back the money he borrowed last month, he’s already got airs, his britches are too big, they hate him. They hope he gets fired.”
“I guess I am just like everyone else,” Hester dismally said.
“I think you might have the decency to sympathize with me.”
Hester began rather methodically to cry. “You don’t know what you want, so you get mad with me when I agree with you,” she said, sniffling.
“There’s an old lady up in Tunxis,” Eben helplessly said, “who prays every night that none of her sons or grandsons will ever be rich. Mrs. Dearthick. She prays every night for her boys to stay poor, and I think she’s going to have her way just by main force of praying; though I must say they’re co-operating with her, they have no talent for making money stick to their fingers.”
“All I meant was,” Hester said with a saline, moisty affectionateness, “you’ll be a millionaire before you know it; you’re my favorite plutocrat.” She blew her nose.
“Take my father,” Eben said. “He’s a failure. I don’t know what it is, the minute it looks like he’s organized for life, he makes a mistake that sets him back to where he started when he was my age.” But suddenly Eben tumbled from these heights of condescension and was miserable. He shook his head. “It baffles me,” he said. “Father’s so happy.”
Then Eben did something Hester had seen him often do: He went all the way home in his mind. Frequently when he felt a city tension, when he wanted to vacate an argument, when he was mixed up or angry, he did this runaway to Tunxis that seemed to clear his mood. He had already started back when he had thought of Mrs. Dearthick and of his father, and now he said, “Speaking of britches being too big, did I ever tell you about Father’s prank with Uzal Belding’s pants?”
“No, Eben,” Hester said, blowing her nose again. “No, you never did.”
“You see, Uzal’s mother was fat to begin with. One thing the Beldings did was make cheese and sell it, and they economized on a cheese press—never did have to get one—by Mrs. Belding sitting on the driver of the hoop and doing her knitting. I was much younger than Uzal, but I remember I used to go into their house sometimes to get cheese or eggs for mother, and there Mrs. Belding would be up on a new cheese like an ottoman balanced on a teacup. Uzal was fat enough in school. He dropped out at ninth grade: they said he was always cheery, like all roly-polies, still down deep I guess he couldn’t stand the teasing he laughed out loud at with his face. Anyhow, he dropped out of school and took up walking from village to village with a box of magic tricks and a stereopticon and I think he sold cards of gingerbread, too. When he went from house to house, he was something to look at! With his box on his back, he looked like one of the castellated elephants that my father had in his chess set as rooks. He got bigger and bigger, outstripped his mother by a ton—they could have used him as a hydraulic press to bale rags for the paper mill in Treehampstead. By the time he was about twenty-five and I was ten, Ros Coit and I and some other kids used to follow him around and hoot at him. He was a peddler of the old wooden-nutmeg school—drawling, snuffling, haggling away over pennies. Well, this one time someone found out he’d left a pair of pants at Boyds’ to be dry cleaned, and Father, either Father or Anak Welch, got somebody to sneak them out of Boyds’ shop and on Sunday morning, just when church was letting out, Uncle Anak and Father and Judge Pitkin all three got into the pants, their left legs in its left leg and their rights in its right, and they got Frank Cherevoy to play the Legion drum and just as the people were pouring out of church, they marched up and down the green, the drummer in front, rub-a-dub-tup-tup-Joe-Joe-Bunker, and the three gents lock-stepping along in the pants behind. It was a sight. Mother’d had me in church with her, we were on the front steps when they came, and she froze up and nearly broke off my shoulder pinching it because I laughed with everybody else. That wasn’t too good for Father in the town; that particular laughter on the Sabbath backfired some. Uzal became sanctimonious later, gave up his box and began distributing religious pamphlets and begging for candy around the township. Finally they advertised him for an impostor, or something of the sort, and he died a couple of years ago in the corrective institution over near Whigtown. Poor coot!”
“Your father sounds like fun,” Hester said.
“He’s a very serious man,” Eben said, “essentially.”
The sun coasting down the slope past the meridian threw enough heat onto the woodchuck drivers in steamy Thighbone Hollow so that Hester, in her torn shirt and blue jeans stiff with newness, with the bezoar in her hand, perspired, flagged, and wished the afternoon done with. She suffered especially, for perhaps half an hour, as she went through some thick underbrush, where her only entertainment, besides recollection of things past, was provided by some blackberry bushes, nastily brambled and sweetly fruited, from which she picked the enormous, purple-black, ripest berries, and ate them as she struggled. She had never seen or tasted such swollen, ready drupelets. No one came along the line to visit her all afternoon. She felt languid, and though she kept up her share of the noise of the drive, she began to lose her interest in, or at least her apprehension of, the woodchucks. From time to time a halt was called. She sat down whenever she could, for her legs were becoming heavy and dull.
Once, at last, while she sat during a pause, at about four o’clock as she guessed from the sun, she heard someone approaching from her right, from the direction of the canal. It was Mrs. Tuller, with tiny pearls of sweat on her huge forehead as gray as oystershell. “Where’s that Coit boy?” she asked. “How far along is that rascal boy?”
“He’s right up here,” Hester said. “If the line was moving, you’d know. He makes a noise like a monkey-house.”
“He is a cage full of monkeys,” Mrs. Tuller said. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to Coit. He answered promptly and ran through the woods down to her.
Mrs. Tuller told him that the line was approaching Job’s Creek, which was now perhaps a quarter of a mile farther along. She said that there was one plank bridge across the creek to each division, and that Four’s bridge was situated near where this upper end of the division would reach the stream. When an appropriate command would come down the line, she said, and it would probably come at the end of this halt, then, as the picket line would start to move again, the center of each division would lag back, both in pace and in noise, while its two ends would loop forward dinfully toward the creek. Thus four sacs would be formed, and after another halt, giving time to check the soundness of the pockets, they would gradually be tightened toward the bridges, until the woodchucks within were driven across to the other shore.
“As soon as you two on this end of our division get to the creek,” she said, “swing to your right downstream along the bank. You’ll come to an old stone wall after a bit, that runs spang down to the stream. Hide behind it, on the upstream side of it, and wait there. The bridge is just below that wall, so the rest of us’ll work whatever woodchucks we have in our sac up against the wall and along it to the bridge. Your job is to make sure none of ’em try to cross over top the wall. Keep hidden, so the animals’ll come along unabashed. If they have a mind to get over the wall, jump up and make a racket. Don’t chase ’em, just wave and dance around on your side of the fence. You know:
‘Ha! ha! ha!
And sadly sing….’ ”
Hester grew excited at the prospect of facing the pursued at last.
“How’s your arithmetic, dear?” Mrs. Tuller asked her. “D’you think you could count the creatures as they cross the bridge?”
“I can try,” Hester said.
“They might be in clumps and bunches, you might have to do some fast addition.”
“I can try,” Hester said again, nettled at being made to feel like an elementary-grade scholar.
The agile, bigheaded schoolmarm hurried away up the line, her buttocks bobbling and curtseying to each other, as if to swift musical counterpoint, and soon, evidently having conferred to her satisfaction up yonder with the anchor of Division Three, she came bouncing past downwards again, announcing that all was set. “All set,” she said mock-heroically, in tones of Pallas Athene, “to smash the groundhogs’ bridgehead!”
Before long, indeed, the confirming message, to form pockets, came down the line. Coit, going off to his station, said cheerily, “See you by the crick.”
Those at the ends of the divisions who were pulling forward the drawstrings of the pockets hastened now, with renewed eagerness, and the quarter mile remaining to the brook, if the distance was that great, seemed to Hester to be quickly left behind. She found herself with a fast beating heart on the near bank of Job’s Creek, which was only a rill in the woods, perhaps six or eight feet across, but with a vigorous current that had cut a deep, definite, and fairly straight path in the loam of the forest floor; from its banks, here and there, dead root-masses protruded, and the rivulet protested in whispers at the many rounded stones in its mattress.
Coit came along. “You’ve been eatin’ berries,” he said.
“Did you ever find such big ones?” Hester asked.
“I can see the juice on your lips, where it dried.”
Hester drew the back of her hand across her mouth.
“Don’t bother,” Coit said. “It looks O.K.”
They walked downstream together and before long reached the wall Mrs. Tuller had described. Many of its stones were dappled with fine moss and lichens, and here and there honeysuckle hunched across the long pile in hedge-like masses. The ground beyond the wall, once cultivated, had grown up into woods considerably junior to, but no thinner than, those on the upstream side of the barrier. A few feet beyond the wall, the bridge lay across the stream—just three heavy planks tacked side by side to crosspieces.
“Why don’t we set down while we wait?” Coit asked, pointing to a place where honeysuckle offered a dry couch. Hester settled down with her back to the wall, holding the bezoar in her left hand. Coit sat on her right. There was an awkward silence.
“What about the old lady and the chicken hawk?” Hester finally asked.
A flicker of sullenness crossed Coit’s face, but then, at once, cheerfully he said, “That old aunty is tougher’n a boiled owl, I never saw the beat of her. Last Friday night she showed up at the Grange dance, and there she was at next to midnight out on the floor cuttin’ up didos alongside of us young ones—and she’s supposed to be ninety-one.”
“What makes people live so long?” Hester asked.
“It has to be in the family,” Coit said.
“They say it’s in the mind,” Hester said.
“You know all about Aunty Dorcas and birds,” Coit said with still a trace of resentment.
“Mr. Avered told me she’d been scared to death of birds all her life.”
“That’s what made this thing yesterday so rich. She has a slew of cats—I guess she figures they hate anything with feathers onto it just as much as she does—and one of them is a kitten, been weaned about two weeks. Well, old Dorcas was exercisin’ her back bendin’ into her laundry tub in the kitchen yesterday washin’ a sheet when she heard this kitten squallin’ like it was bein’ murdered, out in the yard, so the old Thrall looked out the open door, and it was bein’ murdered, a thunderin’ big chicken hawk was on the back of the thing, bareback ridin’ it to death, and peckin’ and snatchin’ at it. I dad! The way she tells it, it didn’t take her long to skip out there in the yard on light feet, and scared of birds or no scared, she squatted on that big thing—did you ever see a chicken hawk close to?—’cause it looks as savage as a meataxe; I’m scared of the things myself. Anyway, this bird-leery old body landed on the hawk like a thousand of brick and she took aholt of its neck and wrung it like a hen’s till it flapped round and in no time it was ready for the pot, so to speak, though I don’t guess even Aunty Dorcas would have the stomach to eat such a bob-wire creature. But she killed it dead, and she’s tickled as a gimlet. Says she was still scared most of the way off her hooks, though, later in the day, when she saw a sparrow on her sill.”
“I’m sort of afraid of woodchucks myself,” Hester said.
“You’re just like your boyfriend,” Coit sarcastically said. “You’re city people, that’s your trouble. That was your excuse for him, don’t forget.”
“I’m a lot more apprehensive than Eben,” Hester said.
“I wisht I lived in the city,” Coit said, looking longingly at Hester. “Do you like it in the city?”
“I love it—but what’s the matter with Tunxis? I’m beginning to like Tunxis.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with Tunxis. Couple weeks ago, I was standin’ with some of the fellows down by Eells’, that’s the drugstore there on Station Street, and this car drove up, it was an old battered thing, and this joker with a long pursed-up neck like a turkey-gobbler’s stuck his head out the window and asked us where he was and where he was goin’. Young John Leaming was standin’ there, he’s got a mouth like a pickerel, and he looks like the Day of Doom, he’s so sour, but he funs people the whole endurin’ time, so he said to the stranger, as sour as a frost grape he said, ‘You’re in Tunxis and you’re goin’ straight to Hell.’ Well, this old gump smiled as clever and cheerful as you please, then he squizzled up his face and he said to young John, said, ‘Thank ye, bub,’ he said, ‘I thought from the looks of the countryside and the natives round here I couldn’t be any great distance from that place.’ And off he went like he was satisfied. There was more truth than comfort in that comeback, that’s the whole trouble with Tunxis in a nutshell.”
“Hell is wherever a person lives,” Hester said. “Anybody knows that.”
“I like blackberries,” Coit said, looking at Hester’s mouth.
“I never ate such big ones,” Hester said, wondering what sort of stain was on her lips.
“Can I have a taste?” Coit asked, and before Hester understood just what he meant, he had crawled toward her, had put both arms powerfully around her, and had begun to kiss her savoringly on the lips.
Hester set the bezoar down on the ground beside her in case she might find it necessary to put her arms around this active young man. His bold tongue began to inquire for the taste of berries in her mouth. He had a faint smell of leather about him. The thought came into Hester’s mind that with any luck at all, this might have been the Selectman, and at that she squirmed and pulled her face away from Coit’s and said, “Watch out! Mrs. Tuller’s liable to come any minute.”
“I still like blackberries,” Coit said, settling back with a glower.
“The John Leaming you speak of,” Hester said, trying with quick dry talk to make a eunuch of Coit, “isn’t he the owner of the land we’re on?”
“He has title of this land, bramble bushes and all,” Coit said, “and I still like his berries.”
“His father certainly was angry at the caucus last night,” Hester said quickly, drily.
“All the Leamings are famous for their tempers,” Coit said, with a fine aggressive complacency on his face again.
Mrs. Tuller must have had enough of trotting up and down the line, for this time she sent George Challenge as her deputy to test the readiness of the arc of Division Four. When Hester and Coit heard someone coming on the far side of the wall, they got to their feet and saw the weary-looking politician coming tick-tock on his bandy legs, swaying like the arm of a metronome.
“Spread out! Spread out, you two,” he barked. “You’ve got a hundred and fifty feet of stone fence to cover there, till the line tightens up, then Tuller and Anak Welch’ll come over your side the wall. Spread out! We’re trustin’ you two. Young lady, ma’am,” he said to Hester, “you’re to count the creatures as they go by, is that right?”
“I’m going to try,” Hester said.
“Keep down and just peek over top the parapet,” Challenge said. And uttering other official admonitions, he labored off down the line, tick, tock, tick, tock.
Hester and Coit crouched behind the wall nearly a hundred feet apart. Once as they waited Coit turned his face toward Hester and gave her a ridiculous, cheek twisting wink, as if to seal an understanding between them that he would be back for more fruit of her lips.
“Seems like they’re dawdlin’ a longful time down there,” he said in a loud voice after a while.
“Sh-h-h.”
At length the noises of the drive began again, far down the line at first. Later the stalkers of Division Three, not far away at Hester’s back, began to shout and whistle, and once she thought she heard a brave faraway roar from Eben, and that led her to wondering where the Selectman was. The sounds of Division Three were closer and louder-seeming than what came from Mrs. Tuller’s people lower down, and for a time Hester was fearful lest the woodchucks from below might be turned back by the racket upstream.
Apparently Coit had the same idea, for he called mockingly to Hester, “Your Eben’s making quite a hullamaloo up there.”
Hester shushed Coit again.
Eventually, however, the uproar above receded and the one below advanced and swelled, and Hester became excited. In a few moments she would see a dreadful crowd of marmots. She felt afraid, and to her surprise she yawned.
She began to make out Tuller’s blithesome tootling and the cattle moans of Anak Welch, and before long both those men were on her side of the wall, a-crouching silent, and the rest of the line could be heard tightening, closing.
There one was! And others, too!
Hester saw then a whole curve of advance scouts of the woodchuck force. These scouts would run forward liquidly a few feet at a time, then rise on their haunches with their forepaws in prayerful poses and glare awhile, heads steady, each in a single direction, then they would fall and run again, and next time up each look another way.
Hester heard a hiss to her right. It was Herr Tuller, motioning to her and Coit to squeeze down toward the stream. All four above the wall crept along toward the brook, as stealthy as the furry quadrupeds on the other side of the barrier, until they were posted only twenty feet apart. Hester, peeking, saw that others of the line had begun to approach beyond the wall and to the right. Then behind the point of the marmots’ scouts she saw furry, rippling masses. She yawned enormously.
Out in front was a great bull of the species, ranging this way and that in his leadership. Hester saw him look at the stream and look at the wall and listen to the line of drivers, which had halted and was quieter now, to give the animals time to decide to use the bridge. The big one and his band were encircled, and he swayed, like a being behind bars, while back of him his scouts marked time and the ranks all paused. The leader darted straight at the wall, and Hester missed what happened next, because, as Coit and Tuller and huge Anak rose up and bellowed at the poor thing, she ducked and hid from it.
When she was on her knees again blushing, she saw the leader run along the stream away from the wall until he reached the bridge, whose planks he sniffed in a leisurely way. He walked slowly three or four feet out onto them, then turned and in a rush ran downstream on the bank, but Mrs. Tuller shrilled at him from beyond as if he were a naughty boy, and, alarmed, he ran up again toward the wall. This time Hester managed to stay up and chatter at him as her three flankers roared. The leader ran back a few feet. Then he and the scouts and many of the other animals all at once broke in a pack directly away from the stream, but the line of human beings on the right pressed together shouting in awful unison and holding firm; Hester saw George Challenge standing square and solid on his short bowed legs like a Queen Anne lowboy.
The woodchuck wave pulled back, and with a deliberateness and hauteur that seemed insulting to all human life, the leader walked to the bridge and crossed it in stately ease. One, Hester said to herself.
Three scouts followed scuttering over the planks. Two, three, four, Hester counted.
The line of drivers resumed now a murmuring all around, and other woodchucks dared to run across the open wooden bridge. Then a general rushing eagerness to cross set in, and Hester had her head full of figures, and she felt dreadfully sleepy. One woodchuck fell off the planks and drowned. Hester yawned and counted. Several times small groups, unfavorable to the bridge, tried to rush off this way or that, but each time the drivers discouraged their escapades; and the circle tightened continually, and at last all the animals save the one that had drowned were on the other side. The people then walked across the planks congratulating each other, and four men pulled the bridge over after them.
Hester was quite a center of interest. About sixty-five, she reported, give four or five either way. Yes, about sixty-five.
It puzzled her that after all her curiosity, fear, and fellow-feeling toward the woodchucks, after all her complex and disturbing sensations during the drive, her response to the thrill of the noose at the bridge had been drowsiness.
Not until the division had secured the last of its work, and Hester was walking down toward the canal with Coit in the crowd of well-pleased drivers, and it was too late to go back, did she exclaim, “Oh, damnation! I left my bezoar stone up there by the stone wall.” She was inappropriately sad and angry for some reason, and she began to try to beat out the reason from the underbrush of her mind, as if it were a dark wild beast that would go to ground, and all she could find was a sense of the failure of her idea of love, a vague feeling that in some way her idea, and even her love itself, had proved during this day not adequate to her needs. “Oh, well,” she said at last, having had no encouragement from Coit, “maybe I can find it in the morning.”
The members of Division Four, enjoying a pleasant deceleration of heartbeat after the tense last few minutes of the drive, convened at the juncture of Job’s Creek and the canal, where, while some chatted easily in the shade of an enormous sycamore tree, others were ferried across the canal in two large skiffs to the shoulders of the highway beyond. Nearly half the division was across the water before the first drivers of Division Three reached the sycamore, Eben among them.
“Didn’t they give you folks sandwiches?” Mrs. Tuller in bluff tones asked Manly Sessions, the captain of the group. “Never saw a crowd of rapscallions look so down in the mouth.”
The teacher’s friendly barb was not well received. She was informed, with tight lips all round her, that Division Three had not driven a single woodchuck across Job’s Creek; it hadn’t seen ary creature in the last hour of the drive.
This calamity of Division Three increased the good humor of Division Four, which began to pour onto its inept fellow unit a spicy dressing of sarcasm and fun—did so, that is, until drivers of Division Two appeared with glum brows and on their behalf their bitter-eyed captain, John Leaming the younger, reported that his unit had sent only seven woodchucks across its bridge; whereupon the jokes ceased, as cicadas fall quiet under the first of a drizzle.
And then, when the drivers of Division One came down, the Selectman out in front of them, with a face as gray as summer mildew, in a very great hurry to hear the tallies, and when it was learned Division One had rounded up only sixteen woodchucks, and when, taking into consideration the approximateness of Hester’s count (which, sorry as she was for it, she could not mend), the total for the entire day’s drive was set at about eighty-eight—after these dismaying turns, all signs of gaiety vanished. The number was very small.
Where now, Hester thought with a sinking sensation, were the Selectman’s four hundred black-backed fleeing animals? Where, for that matter, were the huge Anak’s quietly affirmed half that many?
Eben, who after the bad summaries of the day’s work had an intimidated look on his face, as if he had been caught very much in the wrong about something, guided Hester by the elbow to one of the trucks parked at the highway’s edge and pressed her to board it, which she did. The truck was soon full of people who were not leaders, unaggressive people who all seemed rather ashamed of themselves and anxious to depart the scene of ignominy as quickly as possible, and its driver, responding to their almost sneaky ways, pulled it away in haste from the knot of captains and self-appointed counselors and congenital pushers who stood shouting at each other between the canal and the highway, arguing about the fiasco, searching explanation but only finding fault.