HESTER STEPPED DOWN the narrow and worn wooden stairs, noticed in passing that Uncle Jonathan in the close hall had lost his face and that some of the clock’s curious wooden cogs were scattered in disorder on the floor beside it, and then, as she turned into the sitting room, saw the Selectman, his face lustrous after a scrub, dressed once more in his flannels and walnut-colored coat, sitting in a rocker with a magazine spread in his lap to catch the dust of his labor, rubbing one of the cogs with a scrap of sandpaper, and humming a tune she’d never heard.
“Come in, my dear,” he said, looking up.
Hester had lolled long in a lukewarm, rust-tinted tubful of water, and she felt refreshed. She had put on a silken dress with little formal flowers strewn across it, her favorite of this summer, and she traveled in a capsule of honest cheap soap smell. Eben, who had had to wait for the tub, was not down yet. She walked self-assured.
“You look kind of tuckered out,” the Selectman said in the teeth of her freshness.
“I feel it in my legs and my back,” Hester said, knowing better, by now, than to be disappointed by anything the Selectman might say, but being so, nonetheless. What a chary man!
The room was a frugal place, this family room, with nothing overstuffed, all backs straight and wood considered good enough to sit upon; and there was nothing sentimental, no appeal to the past, no spinning wheel or cobbler’s bench or other reminder of times when life was simple and crude work was everyone’s. The things in the room were made of wood, metal, and cloth to be used. The rug was hooked in a dull pattern. There were some books in a cabinet with a wire-mesh front. Over the mantel was a reproduction—incongruous here, Eben’s protesting touch of younger years, surely—of an impressionist painting, by Manet or Monet, perhaps, Hester thought; she never could keep those two straight.
There were sounds from the kitchen, and Hester said, “Do you suppose I can help Mrs. Avered?”
“She keeps a lonesome kitchen,” the Selectman said. “I think you’d better stay here and help me.”
“I’d like to show that I can be of some use in the household department,” Hester said. “I can boil water, honest I can.”
“Aunty Dorcas’ll be looking in soon,” Mr. Avered said. “I’m sorry we aren’t having some young people in for you to meet, Tunxis young ones, but Eben’s got himself citified and he’s floated away from the ones that used to be his friends, he hardly knows them now. Aunty Dorcas can tell you anything you want to know about Tunxis and the Avereds, for better or for worse—for worse, no doubt…. Say! I can’t get over that chicken-hawk epic. You don’t think Ros Coit was pulling your leg, do you?”
“I don’t think he could,” Hester said smiling.
“She’s got some spunk,” the Selectman said; then he, too, smiled at what Hester had said.
“You’ve found out the matter with the clock,” she said.
“These consarned black oak cogwheels in Uncle Jonathan get all warped up like potato chips when we begin to catch thunderstorm weather. Don’t know why they didn’t use common-sense cherrywood.”
“Do you have to work every minute day and night?” Hester asked, suddenly irritated, at what she did not know.
“Would you have a rum toddy?” the Selectman calmly asked, putting the cogwheel and sandpaper on the magazine and the magazine on the floor beside his chair. “It’ll limber up your back muscles.”
“That’s absolutely necessary.”
Eben came down while his father was out mixing the drinks. “How pretty you look!” he quickly exclaimed, and he went to her chair and kissed her on the cheek; and she thought of rough Coit.
“How’s he seem?” Eben asked, bobbing his head in the general direction of the back of the house to indicate his father.
“He seems about as usual,” Hester said.
“I doubt if he’ll ever be the same,” Eben said. “He doesn’t relish being wrong.”
“Who does?”
The Selectman came back with three warm rum drinks. “Ice in the icebox,” he said cheerfully to Eben, “if you want to cool off your gizzard.” But Eben took his drink warm and murmured that it was good.
“What did you people decide about the drive?” Eben meekly asked.
“They settled on leaving the final decision up to me whether we’d go ahead tomorrow or not,” the Selectman said. “They told me to digest my ideas on it along side of supper, and then let ’em know by phone.”
“I take it, then,” Eben said, “that they’re not very enthusiastic about going on the rest of the way.”
“Most of ’em are very enthusiastic about not going on the rest of the way.”
“Why don’t you give it up?” Hester asked in a voice whose heavy note of compassion startled her.
“Because,” the Selectman bristling said, “as I told those lazy so-and-sos, a thing that’s worth beginning is worth finishing. I mean to say that a thing that’s worth trying to do at all is worth trying to do well from beginning to end. Else why exist?”
“In other words,” Eben said, sounding more tender toward his father than Hester had ever heard him be, “you’ve already made up your mind.”
“Well, no,” the Selectman said much more mildly, looking here and there around the room, as if for a speck of guidance, “I haven’t decided, really. I’ll just have to think it over…. What puzzles me to beat the band,” he added with great weariness, “is how so many trickled away….” He began then to stare in his way of dreaming. “I wonder, I wonder,” he muttered at one point.
Hester thought of Uncle Anak turning the hay in the rain—he’d said he’d turn the whole field that very day, and “vummed if he didn’t do it”; and now the Selectman had to decide whether to finish what he’d said he would. Yet this choice of the Selectman’s was, in some way, different. There might be purpose in destroying eighty-odd woodchucks, even if they were but a fraction of the colony, but Hester saw that for the Selectman the issue transcended such practicalities; the issue for Eben’s father had by now drawn into it many terrible considerations: of personal confidence, of trust, of sacrifice, of the gift of power, of common responsibility, of interdependent life, of friendship, love, and self-esteem in Tunxis. The choice was far more complex, Hester saw, than it had seemed on the surface just now when she had made her silly, pity-ridden suggestion that he simply quit this drive he had been thinking about for a decade, and she felt, suddenly, a glow of embarrassment for herself and of admiration for him, who was so very troubled but so very deliberate.
At two sharp raps from the front door knocker, Eben and his father both hurried to the hall. Hester, hanging back, heard greetings, heard a small but firm treble against the two deep hellos, and then:
“How’re you feeling?” Hester heard the Selectman ask.
“Poorly,” the voice of Dorcas Thrall said. “My food don’t set well, Matthew, I kind of gullop up a lot of air about two hours after I eat. Otherways, I’m fit as Mrs. Tuller’s bull fiddle.”
“Your appetite’s too good,” the Selectman said. “You shouldn’t gorm into your food the way you do, that’s the why and the wherefore of that air you get, Aunty Dorcas.”
“Flatterer!” Dorcas Thrall said after a little protesting cackle. “You’re the worst one for handing out the taffy I ever saw.”
“Come in, Aunty Dorcas, come in,” Hester heard the Selectman say. “Come in and meet Eben’s girl. Eben’s and my girl.” Hester heard that, and she saw Eben coming in from the hall turn and give his father a quick patricidal look, which the Selectman, with a hand on his son’s shoulder half shoving Eben into the sitting room, did not trouble himself to see.
Dorcas Thrall was slender and short, and Hester, stepping forward with hand outstretched, was struck at once by the thought that the old lady’s face was like a bird’s—though perhaps, she realized, the idea might have been induced by what she knew of Dorcas Thrall’s terror; at any rate, the nose was narrow, sharp, and pointed, the eyes large-pupiled and dark, and the chin nothing to speak of, so that she looked like a nice little birdy. She did not wear all of her age; for although her face seemed somewhat dry and around her eyes there were a few of the small skin-folds of an ancient human being, her lips were scarcely creased and pulled at all, and her cheeks looked soft, and she had no hanging dewlaps.
Mrs. Avered came softly from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, and she kissed the old woman on a cheek, and Mrs. Thrall patted her shoulder and then said to Hester, “You never in your born days saw a girl as pretty as this one”—patting Mrs. Avered—“as pretty as this one when she was ten years old. She looked as tasty as a sherbet. A big sateen ribbon right here,” and Aunty Dorcas reached up and touched the right side of Mrs. Avered’s hair; “always that ribbon!”
“Pshaw, Aunty Dorcas,” Mrs. Avered said.
Hester swallowed despair as she contemplated the decay, the rotting of the heartwood, the falling away into dullness, that Eben’s mother had all too obviously suffered since the hair-ribbon time of life, for in her born days Hester had seen a million women prettier than this one who now stood before her with a splash of spilled gravy on her apron—a million women simply more alive; and Hester was afraid of that decay, wondering uneasily whether the Avered men had had anything to do with it.
When all were seated, Dorcas Thrall said, “Did you hear about my triumph—my triumph—over the forces of Darkness?”
“We heard you mashed a Cooper’s hawk, if that’s what you mean,” the Selectman said.
“I brought something to show you,” the old woman smugly said, reaching into her handbag and drawing out the pair of shanks and fierce talons of the chicken hawk she had assassinated. “He acted as if he felt ashamed of what he’d been doing to that poor kitten, while I was wringing his neck,” Aunty Dorcas said.
She offered the cruel claws for view, holding them up in her delicate-looking hands that were streaked with the tiny blue veins of old age.
Eben’s father, having served the roast all round, got up from the table, went into the kitchen, could be heard descending the cellar stairs, mounted them again, and came back with a galvanized iron pail in his hand, and in the pail, nested in cracked ice, Hester saw the neck of a bottle.
“Bubbles for beautiful ladies!” the Selectman cried, looking at his wife and, Hester egotistically thought, not meaning her. Still standing, he took the bottle from the pail and began to worry the cork with his thumbs.
“Shame on you, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said, in a rebuke that had no real scolding in it. “The extravagance of you!”
“You should have heard Seth Parmely down at the store,” the Selectman said, “when I asked him to sell me this. ‘Champagny!’ he shouts at me. ‘What the hell fur?’ I told him Eben was coming home. ‘So,’ says Seth, ‘the boy’s been to the city to see the elephant, now he’s comin’ home and you’re scared of him,’ that’s what he said. He said he hated to take my money for such nonsense.”
“I’m honored,” Eben said, with an edge of effort to his voice. The cork shot out, hit the ceiling, dropped to the floor, and rolled to a stop under Hester’s chair. When the Selectman had poured helpings to all in jelly glasses and had taken his place again, Eben raised his portion and apparently trying to be gallant said, “To the beautiful ones!” He bowed toward Aunty Dorcas, and the old woman giggled and shook her head, and everybody sipped laughing, and Mrs. Avered, choking on the wry, strange, expanding liquid, coughed above her glass and shed a tear.
Suddenly during the main course the Selectman began to talk like a man hard pressed by pocketwatch and calendar. He fell into a queer, luxuriant, reminiscent mood, and Hester thought he must be fighting through his decision on the woodchuck drive in some oblique way. “I’m contented,” he said. “I want to live forever like you, Aunty Dorcas.” He said that he wanted no end to his senses, for everything he saw or touched seemed magical to him, and he told of having gone to several doctors when he had felt fine, a few months before, to make sure that he was healthy; he had gone all the way to the city to see one of them. He began to talk of his happy boyhood. “Did you ever whip apples?” he asked Hester at one point. “My heavens, that was fun. What we’d do, we’d take some of the sucker shoots from an apple tree, we’d get some tough, supple green saplings by cutting off suckers, and we’d cut them to about this long”—he held his hands about three feet apart—“and whittle a sharp point, like a pencil’s, on one end. This was in August or early September, when the apples were fairly big but still green and hard. We’d stick the sharp point into the apple, so the apple was skewered onto the stick, then we’d rear it back and (this worked like the catapults the old Romans used) we’d whip it forward. It would fly off and follow the most marvelous trajectory. Up! Up! Up! Like a baseball when it’s been properly connected with, Aunty Dorcas, you’ve seen that happen on your television. It used to be an extension to the strength of our arms.” Later he said, again to Hester, “Do you remember that powder you could throw on a fireplace fire, some kind of salts that would give you flames of different colors—blue, green, red, yellow flames? Did you ever have any of that? We used to do it winter nights in the kitchen stove. Brilliant green flames!” His outwardly mellow frame of mind seemed thin and unreal to Hester. “Do you know my favorite form of art of all times?” he asked his tablemates. “The frescoes we used to put on the walls down at the Manross School when we were boys. We used to draw funny-faces of old Jared Andrus and the other teachers with a tallow dip and then we’d bring them into relief and shade them by rubbing hard with different-colored wool skullcaps. The fuzz of the knitting came off on the wax. Do you know who was our best artist, Aunty Dorcas? It was Corydon Jones.”
“Gracious me,” Dorcas Thrall said. “He was a pokerish-lookin’ thing.”
“He was a cripple,” the Selectman told Hester. “Gnarled up like an old crabapple tree.”
Aunty Dorcas said, “I forgave Frank Churnstick a lot of things he’d done in his clear days, after he lost his mind, but one thing I never forgave him was readin’ that hobbled-up Jones boy out of the church.”
“Ha! I’d forgotten that,” the Selectman cried, seeming almost to pounce on Eben. “You and your code! Parson Churnstick…. Wait a minute, wait till I get The Book.” The Selectman pushed back his chair with a clatter and left the room.
“Matthew! Matthew!” Mrs. Avered sadly said. “What a one for looking things up! Forgets to eat his meals half the enduring time.”
The Selectman came back with a Bible in his hand, riffling the pages as he walked. “Let’s see, let’s see,” he said when he had sat down. “Oh, that was shameful: it was long before his trolley hopped the wire, too.”
“Pshaw!” Dorcas Thrall said. “Even in those middle days he was too pious to eat black pepper.”
“Here it is. Listen to this, son, you with your capsules. Parson Churnstick got up in the pulpit one Sunday and out of the blue he pointed a finger as long and thin as a string bean at Corydon Jones—church-meetings were that poor boy’s only entertainment—and he said the cripple couldn’t come to meeting any more, and then he read out of the Bible, he read this: ‘Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is broken-footed, or brokenhanded, or crookbacked, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken.’ Well, Corydon Jones had most of those things wrong with him, except he wasn’t blind and I couldn’t say as to his stones, poor rascal. Parson Churnstick snatched that passage right out of context and threw him out then and there; I guess the parson just couldn’t stand looking at a monster in his pews week after week—maybe he felt as if he was looking at himself in a mirror. Things aren’t as simple as you think, my Eben.”
Eben flushed.
Dorcas Thrall said, “Frank Churnstick was whole-souled as you and me when he was a young man, you’d have thought his head was made of hardbeam or ironwood. The borers sure got into it toward the end, though.”
“Your end of Division Four’ll be going by the abandoned church tomorrow,” the Selectman said to Hester; then he pulled himself up short: “—if we go ahead, that is. I’d like to show you the old church.”
“Some woodchuck drive!” Eben exclaimed with more or less repressed vehemence.
“All I can say,” the Selectman replied coolly, “is, I hope we keep the ones we have, if we go ahead.”
“Here’s to your creatures, Matthew,” Dorcas Thrall said, raising her glass. “Never had any use for ’em.”
“What’s your prescription for a good old age, Aunty Dorcas?” the Selectman asked as they sat over dessert. He looked ashen and had begun to perspire. “You’re going to live an eternity. What’s the secret?”
“The first hundred years are the hardest,” Dorcas Thrall said merrily; evidently that was her standard response to good wishes for her permanence. As she answered, she dropped a gobbet of apple-slump off her spoon into her lap. “Dear me,” she said, shaking her head and scooping it up, “what an old slopdozzle I’m gettin’ to be.” Then she said respectfully to the sweating Selectman, “I calculate the main reason an old pelter like me has run on so long is that I’m not scared of dyin’, not a bit. Bein’ afraid of dyin’ is the most killin’ pastime there is. I remember when my brother Walter died—land of Goshen! that was forty years ago…forty years ago…a good lifetime right there, but I remember it as if it had happened yesterday—I sat beside him nine days, and in the end he just got soggy and wasn’t there any more. I can’t be bothered to shake and shiver about going to sleep like Walter; I’ve done it every night now for plenty of years, and glad to do it. I was just addin’ it up the other day. Countin’ naps and snoozes, I’ve gone to sleep close onto thirty-five thousand separate and distinct times. Why should I be afraid of one last doze?”
Death is nothing to her, Hester thought, but a hummingbird at the lip of a trumpet of honeysuckle would throw her into a panic. She thought of the city-panics Miss Morris was always having. “Some people,” she said, “think they can keep young just by taking care of themselves. I have in mind La Morris,” she said to Eben. “She’s my boss,” she said to the others.
“She’s a bad egg,” Eben gloomily said.
“People don’t set out in life trying to be bad eggs, Eben,” Mrs. Avered said in kindly reproach.
“She’s on the Yoga and yoghurt circuit,” Hester said.
“Carry me out with the tongs!” Aunty Dorcas said. “What’s that?”
“Miss Morris goes to a class and takes these exercises that were invented by Yogi philosophers to help settle their minds. You should hear her tell about the class! Flabby women with little purses and lapels of skin and fat behind their arms and between their thighs—as if she weren’t one of them. They stand on their heads and sit cross-legged and roll their stomachs and dream of being firm young virgins. Oof! Then on the yoghurt end of it: Miss Morris eats like a growing dog most of the time, till all at once she’ll have a fit of dieting and eat nothing but yoghurt, not a blessed thing but yoghurt.”
Suddenly Hester had a perverse impulse to shock the circle of Puritans at the table; it seemed suddenly important to her to shock them, for perhaps she would one day belong to them, and she must try them now, try them, shake them, see if she could stir their settled underpinnings. Especially, for some reason, she was aware that she wanted to shock the Selectman.
“Miss Morris thinks if she keeps hunting long enough, she’ll find the Fountain of Youth,” Hester said. And she told of a day she had gone with Miss Morris to see a hormone doctor. She described the doctor’s splendid office, hung with modern paintings, and the doctor himself, behind a huge carved desk bountiful with dictating contraptions and secretarial buzzery. Hester had gone with Miss Morris because that morning Miss Morris had pleaded nervousness and had asked for company on a round of errands, as she often did. Hester told how the doctor had explained to Miss Morris the effect on a body and mind of hormone deficiencies. “Then he started talking about his injections,” Hester said. “ ‘We have to watch things pretty closely,’ he told her. ‘One danger,’ he said, ‘is that even many years after the menopause, there may be a marked reassertion of the libido.’ Miss Morris didn’t know what that was, so he explained it to her and then he said, ‘This can be a sweet thing,’ he said, ‘or it can lead to tragedy. Now, I don’t want you to think I can make you over into a young woman. Human tissues,’ he said, ‘are resilient and capable of being kept healthy, but rejuvenation of most parts of the body is not to be dreamed about.’ Then—listen to this!—he said, ‘There is, though, one interesting exception. Certain of the hormones bring about a miraculous restoration of the vagina. I had a patient of sixty-five who, after a few months of treatment, had the vagina of a twenty-year-old girl.’ ”
“One of the hens looks to have some mites,” Mrs. Avered promptly said to her husband. “Do you think we ought to dust the chickens?”
“Women are the limit,” the Selectman said pleasantly enough to blushing Hester, who was not sure for a moment whether he was referring to Miss Morris or to what his wife had said. Then he went on: “I try to be a good husband, but I swan, I can’t tell how the wind is liable to blow from one minute to the next—whether it’s chickens or what. Remember that time, dear, last winter?” he said to Mrs. Avered. “It had snowed about twenty inches,” he told the others, “and it was cold enough to freeze two dry rags together, so Mrs. Avered said to me, ‘Matthew,’ she says, ‘don’t you think you ought to shovel the snow off the front path?’ So, I always try to be obliging, I say, ‘Yes, dear, I do.’ ‘Well,’ she says, ‘in that case I suggest you bring up some cordwood from the cellar.’ ”
“Ayeh,” Dorcas Thrall said sarcastically, “and our Selectman—our Selectman, he’s as consistent as Puritan virtue, be’n’t he?”
“I’m getting old, Aunty Dorcas,” the Selectman said with sudden sickly despair. “Last week I was supposed to make voters on a Saturday and I got my days mixed up, I showed up at the courtroom at eight o’clock Friday morning, according to scoodle as I surmised, but of course there just never was ary voter there to register, no matter how I’d wait, it was the wrong day. I’m too young to be old.”
“No harm done, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said. “Everyone gets a lapse here and there.”
“I wasted the better part of a morning,” the Selectman protested. “You can’t call Friday back when Saturday comes. You know what the poet said about the Moving Finger….”
Hester felt a deep and delicious pity for Eben’s father; then she caught Eben looking mysterious swords at her.
“Shall we go in the sitting room?” Mrs. Avered said, picking up her dessert plate and reaching for Eben’s.
When Mrs. Avered joined the others after having washed the dishes (she had dispatched them with remarkable speed, having refused and ridiculed Dorcas Thrall’s suggestion that Eben and Hester wash them), the Selectman fetched a bottle of cider brandy and the jelly glasses he had used for the champagne.
“How about a little winkum, Aunty Dorcas?” he said.
“Just a smile of it at the bottom of the glass, please,” the old lady said. As the Selectman poured helpings around, Aunty Dorcas said to Eben, “Must’ve been a tidy elephant you saw in the city, boy. Your father’s outdoin’ himself for you.”
“It’s not all for me,” Eben heavily said, and Hester thought that was true.
“Shall we play a game?” the Selectman said. “Would your scruples permit you to gamble for some straight pins, Aunty Dorcas?”
“You know me, Matthew, my conscience lets me gamble—I’ll gamble—with anything but my worldly cash,” Dorcas Thrall said. “Why sure, let’s jostle some pins awhile.”
The game was a simple-minded one. At her husband’s request, Mrs. Avered got the Selectman’s felt hat and a card of pins. Eben’s father dealt out pins, ten to a player. Two at a time, pair after pair, the players would place a couple of pins parallel to each other on the brim of the hat. One adversary would tap the side of the crown with his hand, making the pins jump, and the opponent would follow, until one pin fell across the other; the one who crossed the pins won them both. The Selectman had placed himself beside Hester. At first the players all concentrated on the contests, and the tappings were followed by words of advice, groans of despair, cheers, and laughter. But eventually eyes wandered from the circulating hat, and the company began to talk.
“Aunty Dorcas,” the Selectman said, “do you think I’m George Challenge’s poodle? That’s what this young saucer of a girl called me this morning.”
Dorcas Thrall, with the hat in her hand playing against Eben, looked rather sharply at Hester. “Poodle?” she then said, twitting the Selectman. “No! Challenge’s mule, maybe.”
“Is that crook Challenge still running this town?” Eben asked, tapping the hat carefully.
“The Selectman runs the town, son,” Mrs. Avered said, firmly for her.
“Bah!” Eben said.
“He’s not exactly a crook, son,” the Selectman quietly said.
“Well,” Aunty Dorcas said, “he’s not the most sensitive man I ever saw. His nerves—his nerves are very deep, I must say.”
Hester remembered that in the woods that morning the Selectman had said that George Challenge was as crooked as a ram’s horn. But: “He’s not a crook,” the Selectman now said. “He’s just a combination of lazy and shrewd; he can sojer and he can peddle. Hester, this fellow’s so lazy he once broke one of those nail-keg staves he has for legs just walking across his office. That was when he was Tax Collector. He got up and started across the room with nothing in his way and stumbled and broke his leg, and everyone said it was just from the effort of moving his carcass. And what a weeper he is! That’s part of his trade, too. You tell him some sorry yarn about your troubles, and lo, his head is waters and his eyes a fountain of tears. His main source of wherewithal has been setting up petty estates, and I declare, it’s wonderful the way he grows fat as a consequence of bungling the legal process and juggling the Republican town committee.”
“He’s a crook,” Eben said. “In my kind of language, he’s a crook, and he runs this town.”
“It’s hard to catch a weasel asleep, I’ll grant you that, son,” the Selectman said in an even voice. “I was going through the town records some months ago, trying to make head or tail of our Tunxis finances, and I came across an item where George Challenge, when he was Collector, had a two-dollar per diem allowance for the trouble of dunning folks for their dues, and at the end of the year—that must have been six or eight years ago—at the end of the year he filed for three hundred and sixty-nine days of expense money. I said to Mr. Challenge when I ran across the item, I told him, ‘There are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year; how come?’ ‘Oh, you mean working days,’ he said, smooth as margarine; he said he’d worked a few extra days—some holidays and Sundays! I swan, I really believed he’d never studied a calendar.”
“There!” Aunty Dorcas shrilled. “I crossed ’em!”
“This town’ll never amount to a hill of beans,” Eben said, passing the hat to his mother, “so long as you let yourselves be run by a second-rate hack like him.”
“The people here,” the Selectman said, showing annoyance for the first time, “have more sense of responsibility about their town than the residents of some much bigger places that I can think of. Much bigger. And always have.”
“Phooey,” Eben tormentedly said.
“The trouble with you,” the Selectman said, quite angry now, “is that you don’t know enough to knock two pins together on a hat. These people in Tunxis are willing to work for each other. Why, look here.” The Selectman stood up and crossed to a bookshelf and pulled open the mesh door and took out one of a number of ledgers with cracked and curling spines. “We were talking about Corydon Jones at supper. Well, here’s a case, let me find it…. Here’s just one example of how this town learned way back to take care of its own…. Here: ‘Voted,’ here’s what it says in the minutes of a town meeting, I was going over this the other night, ‘Voted, that the Selectman’s office be directed to take charge of Parliament Taylor, and conduct with him as they shall think most for his comfort, and will be least expensive to the town, whilst he remains in his present delirium, either to set him up at vendue to the person who will keep him the cheapest, or dispose of him in any other way which may appear to the Selectman more convenient, and for such time as he may think reasonable, and on the cost of Tunxis town.’ You hear that?”
“What does that prove?” Eben said. “What in hell does that prove? After all, that was a long time ago, that was in another world, and anyhow, what did they propose to do with the town idiot there? They put him up for sale! Oh, God! Everyone’s so mixed up! Nobody knows what we’re coming to—and you sit there reading me eighteenth-century town records.”
“Grow up,” the Selectman said, in a father’s commanding tones.
“Nobody knows what the score is,” Eben said, “least of all this hick town.”
“Grow up,” the father said. “Do you hear me, or do you want me to come over there and put some hearing into you?”
This made Hester feel rebellious; she was on the point of protesting that Eben was no longer a child and should not be treated as one, when:
“If I could offer a suggestion,” Aunty Dorcas said, “why don’t these young ones go across to my house and turn on the television set? The latch is up, and”—she added with nonagenarian innocence—“the settee’s comfy.”
“That suits me,” Eben said in an unenthusiastic voice, standing up. “Come on, Hes, let’s watch a ball game.”
“Aunty Dorcas is the only person I know,” Mrs. Avered said composedly, “who has a television set and still lights her way to bed with candlewood.”
“Don’t stay too long,” the Selectman said, melon-cool. “We may have another hard day tomorrow.”
The pitcher uncoiled, the white ball rode spinning down the bulb-lit alley toward home plate, and the batter leaned on the night air as he pulled the bat around. Then parts of the picture became molten, viscid, elastic; the batter in the act of swinging put forth a horribly distended arm which reached, bat in hand, brutally out over the grass of bunting-land toward the pitcher, who had suddenly shrunk and stood quaking rhythmically on the mound. The weird distortion on the screen seemed to Hester a gesture of retribution, a hitting back at torment on behalf of all those who stand forever having difficulties pitched at them. She laughed.
“What lousy reception!” Eben said disgustedly. “It’s hopeless.” And he got up from the stiff little couch and went to the machine and snapped it off.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” Hester asked in the dim place.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so grumpy.”
“You would be too, if you were me.”
“What’s wrong with being you?”
Eben still stood by the television set in the darkened room. His feet were at the edge of a trapezoid of light that fell onto the parlor floor from the hall lamp. The room where the old lady dwelt smelled faintly of balsam and mold.
“I knew it was going to happen,” Eben dejectedly said.
“ ‘It’?”
“I knew you’d fall for his line.”
“ ‘His’?”
“You know who I’m talking about. You’re in love with him.”
Hester stood up. “Really, Eben,” she said, “you’re beginning to sound like that crazy parson—what was his name?”
“You don’t deny it.”
Hester found herself thinking for a moment about Roswell Coit, about the powerful, vindictive, envious, childlike man who had embraced her under the lee of the stone wall by the brook. “I’ll grant you, your father’s a fascinating man,” she said with a deliberate light-heartedness.
“You’re in love with him!”
“I’m sorry for your father because there were so few woodchucks at the end of the drive today—that’s about where the truth lies.” Then Hester asked with sudden energy, “What is love? What’s it to be in love? I was trying to figure that out in the woods all day today. I’ll bet you can’t tell me the answer. I’ll bet you don’t even ask yourself the question.”
“It seems to me,” Eben said, driven by Hester’s attack into conciliation and pomposity, “that if we’re going to approach marriage with this kind of background—”
“Don’t bother your head about it,” Hester said. “Who’s not going to marry you is me. Don’t even talk to me about it. I wouldn’t think of marrying you. Let’s go back to the house.”
“You don’t give me a chance to say what I mean.”
“After you say what you mean, you try to cover it up with what you wish you’d meant.”
The Selectman seemed glad to have them back. “Well!” he exclaimed. “That was a short nine innings. What was the matter—dull game?”
“No,” Hester said, “no, it was fine. Three to one for the Red Sox in the fifth.”
“Was it wobbling?” Dorcas Thrall asked. “Some nights that screen’s unsteady as thunderation.”
“No, Aunty Dorcas,” Eben lied, cheerful as a bluebird, “it was O.K. Good signal.”
“My gracious,” Aunty Dorcas said, “don’t you children have anything to talk about? When I was your age sparking—sparking—used to take us a longful while. Lands alive! We could sit and droop our heads and just get ready to talk longer than you two’ve been gone all told. I guess there’s no such thing as shyness any more.”
“Of course there is,” Mrs. Avered said. “Eben always was a shy one.”
Now Eben looked as cheerless as a low-lying cloud.
“See here, Matthew,” Dorcas Thrall said, rising by stages to her feet, “can I take this girl in the kitchen and talk to her a piece? Could I talk to her? You asked me to come look her over tonight, and here I’ve done nothing but listen to you gab and gossip. Come along, dear, let’s chitter awhile, I want to look you over.”
Hester, blushing, said, “I’m game,” and followed the old woman.
When they were settled on kitchen chairs, Aunty Dorcas asked, “Now! How do you like Tunxis?”
“People seem so—so—so almost cruel here,” Hester said.
“Ayeh, maybe; maybe,” Aunty Dorcas said reflectively. “We’ve had a long learnin’ in mean rascally behavior round here. The Pequots were the first to give us lessons; they used to cut gashes in a person’s muscles and put live coals inside, and they’d make people eat parts of themselves.”
“Oooh,” Hester said.
“So you’re going to marry little Eben,” Aunty Dorcas said in an unchanged tone of voice, as if she were still talking of Indian tortures.
“I—I guess so,” Hester said.
“Well, child, if you’ve found the pearl you want and are inclined to sell all your worldly goods to buy it, advice is useless, advice is worse than useless. That doesn’t stop people from givin’ it, though, and my advice to you, young lady, is, go ahead and marry this boy and then leave him be; these Avereds have to be let alone, you can’t hobble ’em, they have to be themselves. You’ll be miserable as any housewife, but you might as well marry. Listen! I know these Avereds like the inside of my coat-sleeve that’s frayed. Why, I carried your Eben’s father pooseback all over Tunxis when he was an infant. I had a little sneakin’ hanker for his father, only I wasn’t pretty enough to suit him. He was a man for you! His stature was ridiculous, a small man, he was always the titman in his class in school, a regular runt. But a person! He didn’t care a continental what people thought of him, and bad luck never bothered him, and he had a plenty: Whenever it rained porridge, it seemed his dish was always upside down. He was a great one for learning; he called the outhouse—no plumbin’ in those days, dear—he called it Avered University. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘I guess I’ll go out to the college and study awhile.’ He could do more work on a stretch than any man I ever saw. He had a watermill when he was young, and once when a landslide the other side of Beggar’s Mountain cut off the railroad—they had a landslide over there that cut off the railroad—he ran his mill day and night for the neighborhood a whole week long, and he trained himself so’s he could turn a grist into the hopper, lay down on a bench with an old turnip watch he had hammerin’ alongside of his head, and he’d sleep till the split second when the last kernel dropped out and no more, then up and at it again. He carved his own gravestone, said you couldn’t depend on your survivors to say anything good about you on your headstone, so he’d have one handy of his own composition. I forget right now what he wrote on it. There was a mighty big donnick in a meadow on the Pinney farm that one of the Pinney children was killed sleigh-ridin’ into, and the Pinneys told Reuben Avered he could have the boulder if he’d kindly remove it from their eyesight, so he split it up and made a good profit out of posts, lintels, underpinnin’s, and whatnot—and ’twas out of that donnick that he took out a choice piece for his headstone and memorial, and now he lies under it, dear small creature! I’d give my bond and swear he got to Heaven, though he’d broken with the church when they decided to support the meetin’house by sellin’ the pews instead of rentin’ ’em. He said he didn’t want God on the basis of short-term financin’. He never once went back.”
“Tell me about Eben’s father,” Hester said.
“Oho!” Aunty Dorcas said, “he’s a puzzler. I remember once when he was a boy he come over boastin’ about his father’s house, said it was big, boastin’ how his father was plannin’ to put a mortgage onto it—like addin’ a piazza or a cupolo, I guess he thought.”
“What kind of trouble did he get into? Someone told me he was caught out in some trouble once.”
“Mercy, child,” Aunty Dorcas said, looking at Hester as if assessing her. “Mercy…. Oh, well,” she then said, “I guess you’re old enough to tell milk from cream; to judge by your stories, you can bandy the human anatomy around, right down to the last particular—I didn’t understand half the words I wanted to, when you were talkin’, and didn’t want to understand the ones I did. Anyway, Matthew’s little accident doesn’t take any tellin’ at all. It was just one of those things that happens to soft-hearted people. It was the night of a storm here one fall, oh, ’bout fifteen years back, there was a wind that’d blow all Hell out by the roots, and Matthew said he’d better run up to see how old Aunty Dorcas was makin’ out all alone in her house. Well, he visited me by a hell-fired roundabout route, ’cause the next thing anyone knew Roger Booge, who thought he was just makin’ the rounds of his animals with a flashlight, found his daughter Belle in her shimmy and one Matthew Avered pullin’ on his pants in under a sheep shed out of the wind and rain. No sheep in that shed, it was a cleaned-out one. Matthew, poor soft-hearted individual, he’s got a soft heart, he was just detourin’ to my house to look to my safety—but Roger made a fuss all over the county! That girl of his, Belle, she never was no good. My father was a lawyer, I remember he used to say when a girl would get caught that way, ‘In the court of law,’ he’d say”—Aunty Dorcas put into her voice a juristical pomp—“ ‘they call it flagrante delicto’ (I think that was it) ‘but between us,’ he’d say, ‘between us, I call it “in heat.” ’ ”
Hester felt a surge of outrage at Aunty Dorcas for telling this valuable story in such an offhand way. Then for a tangential moment she thought of Coit by the wall in the woods. I should have slapped him, she decided to herself; yes, I certainly should have slapped him. “I suppose that hurt him in Tunxis,” she said out loud, of the Selectman.
“Hurt him? Well, he’s the Selectman. But people just can’t seem to take him whole the way they used to. Most times we take into account everything a person has done and said when we weigh him for market, but it only takes one little caper like that to make people stop thinkin’ about the rest of a man, even though they may have gone in for some of the same themselves and not got found out at it.”
“Do people trust him?”
“Nobody trusts anybody any more. Nobody trusts anybody.”
The two talked a few minutes longer, and Hester thought the old woman liked her, because it was easy for her to listen to Dorcas Thrall.
When they went back into the parlor, Mrs. Avered was splitting an apple. “Have a taste of apple, Aunty Dorcas?” she said, giving the halves in her hand to her husband and son.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Aunty Dorcas said.
Mrs. Avered cut a second apple in thirds. She gave pieces to Dorcas Thrall and Hester, and kept one herself.
“You’re a thrifty being,” Aunty Dorcas, chewing apple, said to Mrs. Avered, “to cut up your helpin’s accordin’ to the size of the customers.” Delicately she unlocked a slender belch. “See what I mean?” she said to the Selectman. “It was a good supper,” she said to Mrs. Avered.
“Can I walk you home, Aunty Dorcas?” the Selectman said. “I know you’re just raring to stay up, but it’s time for us tired old folks to hit the hay, isn’t it, Miss Hester? We’re stiff in the hams, Aunty Dorcas, and we’ve got a hard day ahead of us.”
“We have?” Eben said. “My God! You don’t give up easily, do you?”
“Of course not, son,” Mrs. Avered proudly said. “You ought to know your father better than that by now.”
“ ’Tis a wise child who knows his own father in this day and age,” the Selectman said, with a trace of a not-very-happy smile on his face. He stood up. “Could you hold on just a minute while I make a telephone call, Aunty Dorcas? I won’t be a minute.”
Hester, glancing at Eben, who had dark circles under his eyes, was oppressed with a sense of lost opportunities. She had suddenly, at the end of this day, a feeling something like one she always had on leaving a holiday place: that she hadn’t done half the things she had meant to do, that she loved the view, that she would have to come back and relive what she had enjoyed and make amends for what she had been too lazy or unknowing or complacent this time to do; yet already understanding that she would never come back again, because there were other places and moods to visit if ever a new chance came. Toward Eben, who looked so tired munching apple in a chair, she had a heavy feeling of unkept promises and unrealized intentions; of choices that could never be revisited.
Before he left the room to go to the telephone, the Selectman stooped to pick up off the floor the magazine with the cogwheel and sandpaper on it, and Hester saw him wince, as if with an imaginary pain that came from heaviness of the heart, as he bent over.