“WE SHALL RALLY,” Mrs. Tuller had said, “at the chestnut,” as if everyone in the wide world knew that tree.
The drivers had met again on the common in the dark before day, and Hester had stood again beside the whipping post, stiff, half awake, fearless, and dull. She hated doing things a second time; once in a parlor game in which the players had been asked to list on a sheet of paper their likes and dislikes, she had headed her roll of the latter with “Repetition.” Mrs. Tuller’s briefing, Coit’s cavils, the onloading into Pitkin’s truck—all were familiar and boring and a waste of the minutes of a young life. They had been ferried at last to the new day’s workplace on the far side of Job’s Creek.
The sun was upping now. Hester and Mrs. Tuller and Anak Welch walked in the van of the group along the bank of the creek through a saffron thicket, and Mrs. Tuller complained of the humidity of summertime Tunxis. “I finally decided,” she said, “that the only way to keep my ’cello from splittin’ open at the glue was to treat it like a brood of chicks and keep a light bulb goin’ alongside of it.”
“The summers are gettin’ wetter and wetter in the air and drier and drier in the ground,” Anak Welch said sadly, shaking his head, as if the plan of the universe had lately been changed and was now too much for him.
“I can’t understand our Selectman bringin’ us out here today,” Mrs. Tuller said, as if the ways of the Selectman were, like those of the weather, forever unpredictable, fickle, and fit for commonplace talk.
“What did he say when he called you?” Anak Welch asked.
“He said folks who start a thing ought to finish it.”
“That’s plain bullheadedness.”
What about the day, Hester wanted to ask the huge man, but didn’t dare, the day when you turned the hay in the rain?
“I tell you one thing, Anak,” Mrs. Tuller said. “I think a person ought to be civil to another person on the phone. Land’s sakes! The way he ordered me to get the chain of phone calls started, why, he made me feel like the dirt under a bed in a lazy woman’s house.”
“He was tired,” Hester tiredly said.
“Yes, child,” Mrs. Tuller said with a kindliness that made her implicit censure seem all the sharper, “we were all tired right to our marrow.”
They came soon enough to a clearing. “Well, here’s the old chestnut,” Mrs. Tuller said, “God bless it.” She sat down on an enormous stump.
“Do you mean that’s all there is to the chestnut?” Hester asked Anak Welch. “Just a crumbled-up stump on the ground?”
“Law love us, girl,” the big man softly said. “There’s not a chestnut tree alive anywhere around—the blight left our woods in an awful hue, you know. This old tree used to mark one end of the parish in the hollow, that’s why it’s the chestnut, as you call it; you don’t have to scorn the thing.”
“I didn’t mean to sound—to sound that way,” Hester uncomfortably said.
“I don’t know,” Anak Welch said, a reddish, effortful look of worry spreading over his face slowly like a symptom of inner infection, “it seems as if we used to be a little easier about property than we are nowadays. Take this tree as a marker, now. Old Rufus Choate, you know, he talked about the happenstance way our boundaries used to go, how they’d go ‘from a hill to a log’—I remember this ’cause I boned up on it for the open meetin’ when we had our big fight with Treehampstead—‘from a hill to a log, thence to a rock, thence to a hemlock tree, thence to a stump, thence to a savin bush, thence to a hive of bees in swarmin’ time, thence to three hundred foxes with firebrands tied to their tails’—those were the property lines we used to have! Nowadays it’s all accordin’ to survey down to the last endurin’ inch. Squabble, squabble, squabble.”
Hester remembered that the Selectman had told her that this honorable big Anak had a way of starting lawsuits with his neighbors, and she asked, with mischievous curiosity, “Why do people quarrel so much?”
“They can’t stomach the idea of bein’ equal,” Anak Welch said.
Mrs. Tuller had told the drivers in her division to resign themselves to a long wait this morning, because no one knew what difficulties the advance men might have in getting the woodchucks moving. It was assumed that some of the animals would have dug underground overnight, but whether all of them would have burrowed, and whether temporary burrows would have two mouths and therefore easy egress, and what mood the animals would be in, stiff-jointed and grumpy like the drivers, or restless still, no one could know.
Several people were standing around the chestnut stump talking with Mrs. Tuller, and Hester, who wanted to ask the enthroned captain something, edged into the circle.
“That’s saving at the spigot and wasting at the bunghole,” George Challenge was saying in a pleading whine. “He just has no faculty for conserving the town’s money. If you put a barrelful of dollars behind the door of his office, he’d forget where it was. He’s a poor tool for economy, and that’s all there is to it.”
Mrs. Tuller said, in a ponderous good-natured tease, with heavy sarcasm, as if tickling the politician with a crowbar, “You picked him, you pulled him right out of your fedora hat, didn’t you, Mr. Challenge? After all, Mr. Challenge!” Looking around for approval, Mrs. Tuller saw Hester and abruptly she added, “But as I was saying, you can’t expect a school to be built overnight.”
This sudden change in the direction of the wind confirmed Hester in her guess that talk was again of the Selectman, and again carping—almost conspiratorial.
“I was wondering,” Hester said, bending forward to put her face near the teacher’s splendid head and murmuring confidentially, “whether I could get someone to help me cross back over the stream for a minute. I lost something over there by the wall yesterday afternoon.”
“What did you lose, child?” Mrs. Tuller asked in a loud, earnest voice, which blew Hester erect and invited the whole circle into her business.
Hester felt the blood climb her face. “I left—I left that bezoar stone over there,” she said.
“That what?”
“Oh, I guess you didn’t see it,” Hester said. “It’s a thing, a ball, out of the inside of a dead woodchuck.”
“Land of Goshen! A gallstone, dear?”
“Not exactly.” By this time Hester was in a twist of embarrassment, and Mrs. Tuller, though firmly shelved on the chestnut stump, seemed to be advancing steadily against her. “I just wanted it for a souvenir,” Hester stumblingly added.
“Do you think this—this dingus out of a groundhog is worth the risk of settin’ up the bridge again? You know, my dear, we can’t afford to let a single one of our precious wild boars”—Mrs. Tuller jerked her head in supposed direction of the marmot pack—“out of the bag. We’ve got few enough as it is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hester said, shocked by the laughter that ran around after Mrs. Tuller’s sarcastic speech. “I don’t need it.”
“I’ll help her find it,” came a sudden offer in the voice of Roswell Coit. “Come on, Avered’s girl,” he said. “I’ll jump the crick and you can tell me from this side where to look.”
Hester willingly turned away from the council at the stump. Coit took a run and a sturdy jump, but one of his feet fell short and plouted into the muck at the far edge of the stream, whereupon climbing out he swore at women in a generalized way.
“It’s just above the wall,” Hester called to him, and then she couldn’t resist saying in a voice of brass, “I think you ought to know where it is, my dear Mr. Coit.”
Coit turned his head, looking first, to Hester’s perverse gratification, at the group around the stump, evidently to see whether any had noticed her loud remark; satisfied that none had, he glanced at her and said, “Noisier and funnier, please.”
Coit searched and searched but could not or would not find the bezoar.
While Coit hunted, Hester thought gropingly about the Selectman, whose sad eyes, lost in perpetual dream, and whose lips, moving around enigmatic words, had visited some secret closet of her mind during sleep the night before; but she could not find its door now, she had lost all of the dream save an afterglow of pleasure. She had scarcely seen the man this morning, for at four-o’clock breakfast in the kitchen at the homestead, she had been far from wakeful and had tried to keep her surly nose in her coffee cup, and he, brisk yet generously untalkative, had hurried her so he could go along to the Grange Hall and stand firmly there as the volunteers gathered. She had in the kitchen, however, a clear impression of his calmness; apprehensive herself on his behalf, she was surprised at his tranquillity. She was stabbed, thinking of it, by a strange, ruthful thrust, by a pity so keen that it drove into her chest a sweet, hurtful physical sensation which by now was her reflex to thoughts of him.
“Nope!” Coit called. “Nowheres.”
“That’s strange,” Hester said.
Coit, coming back toward the stream, said, “I guess old Pliny Twinkletoes Forward must’ve sneaked out here in dead-o’-night to steal it for his museum.”
“But he didn’t know I’d lost it,” Hester slowheadedly said.
“Well, then I guess the whole thing just didn’t happen at all,” Coit said, shrugging, “I guess you never had the thing at all,” and with a grunt and an “Up she goes!” he leapt across the rivulet.
For Hester the beginning of this day, after its fine sunrise, was paler than that of the previous one, in every way less vivid, perhaps because less strange, less fearsome. Once, looking at the pallid sky through the sallow treetops, she thought she must have been more sensitive the day before, and she thought: Fear is a great friend to beauty; anxiety propped up my eyelids yesterday…. This morning her thighs hurt, she had seen wild woodchucks aplenty, these rustics of Tunxis were not quite such formidable strangers as on the previous day—ergo, the woods seemed not nearly so awesome and magical as they had the day before. Anyway, it was a hot morning, and humid, and a rank smell of ferns and skunk cabbage and cresses along the stream touched the day with a kind of vegetable rottenness; it was scarcely the climate of ecstasy.
This morning Hester was put in the line between Coit and Anak Welch; Coit was the leftmost anchor of the division again. There was much muttering about vigilance. Everyone seemed to be tired and stiff, and many complained openly about having been brought out again, and as the line commenced to move, the drivers’ shouts were rather like groans.
News came that the woodchucks, perhaps dispirited and exhausted by their forced march the previous day, had dug themselves in overnight only superficially, and had now surfaced pliantly enough and seemed willing to pioneer further along the hollow, so long as pressed from behind.
When the line first started, Hester felt a new stirring of queasiness as she reminded herself that the main pack of woodchucks had crossed the bridge before her own summing eyes, the previous afternoon, and must still be directly ahead of Division Four; then, suddenly on the edge of nausea for a moment, she remembered that the Selectman had told her, after supper the night before, that she must be very careful, if she came close to a woodchuck, to examine herself afterward for ticks and fleas. She had a deep horror of crawling insects, and the Selectman’s thorough description of a dead woodchuck, shimmering with vermin, made her feel ill now as she stepped through the undergrowth.
The air of the new day was insipid, still, and irritating.
During one of the early halts, Anak Welch sauntered casually up the line to Hester’s post and, after a long tongue-tied period, during which he often shifted stance and sometimes grunted or carried on transactions of phlegm in his upper caverns, he abruptly, slowly, and mildly asserted, “You’re the one who’s goin’ to marry the Avered boy.”
“Well…,” Hester said doubtfully.
“He’s a fortunate young man.”
“Thank you,” Hester said, supposing herself congratulated.
“Don’t thank me, young lady, I wasn’t tippin’ my hat to you, I don’t even know you. What I meant to convey was, young Eben’s always been fortunate in his choice of parents, they’re a comfort, those two—though I must say his father’s a stubborn man.”
Hester recalled the Selectman’s emphasis on Anak Welch’s own stubbornness (“as set as a concrete pavement,” she remembered his saying), and, since it was not like her to support embarrassment with silence, she flippantly replied, “He thinks you’re stubborn as a stone.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” This young lady seemed to require consideration, and again the enormous man withheld speech during a long period of ballast shifting, which was almost, Hester thought, a beautiful dance—a pantomime of caution.
“I never saw the beat of that man for takin’ down his friends,” he finally said. “The next time you see him, young lady, kindly tell him for me that he can go to bally-hack, and a good trip to him.” On the surface, at least, the big man seemed genial.
“I’ll do that,” Hester said.
“Watch out for Matthew Avered on your wedding day—you’d better not get married in Tunxis. He’s a great one for funnin’ people—or thinks he is. Let me tell you what he done to me.” Hester was perfectly willing to allow the tale, but the big man had some rocking to do first. “I was hitched young,” he then said, “and all of us were full of blood in our veins in those days. It was wintertime, and durin’ the night after the ceremony, when the doin’s were all done, weddin’ breakfast and all such, I drove off with Martha and a two-gallon bottle of rum in a sleigh; we had sheepskin rugs for the cold and it was pitch-black dark—very cold-an’-cosy, you understand; our destination was a certain house I’d taken a loan of near Treehampstead. Well, if you please, three successive places on the way, we found the road fenced right across, and each time we stopped, out came some he-neighbors, and at each place, each and every jackanapes was prepared to kiss either my wife or my bottle two or three times before any road-clearing could be got on with. We didn’t reach Treehampstead till broad day, and my bride was all kissed out, so to speak, and Matthew Avered was behind all that, who calls me stubborn, the scamp. They said he thought up the whole game, it was his idea.”
Word came down the line to move, and the noises of the drive could be heard again. Anak Welch went away through the woods like a moose. As Hester walked forward, over ground that was beginning gently to rise, across the grownover fields of sometime farms, she caught a glimpse, now and again, of the canted steeple of the abandoned Church-in-the-Hollow ahead. She had not yet seen a single woodchuck this morning and, mindful of the disappointing catch of the day before, she was fearful that the animals might now be slipping unseen by ones and twos through the picket lines. With spaniel eyes, and with a frown of concentration, she watched for a few minutes every inch of ground she could scan as she moved; then, with a minor panic flooding her veins, she wondered what she would do if she saw an escaping woodchuck, and she was struck by a clear visual memory of the glistening long teeth of the animal she had seen sunbathing the previous morning, and she decided that noise was her only protector, and she redoubled her shrill alarms.
When the distractions of the landscape had dissipated this little flurry of fear, she began, because of what Anak Welch had said, to think about getting married.
She conducted a kind of parade review of young men she knew. Availability of suitors was no problem to her; she was presentable—“ripe enough to rattle,” Mr. Bandylegs Challenge had said in the foggy, foggy dew the day before—and she was sure that she could set her cap and hitch her blouse for any of ten she knew and win him, and of the ten, at least seven or eight were easier and surer, more prosperous, more respectable, more conforming, more something—less troubling—than Eben. “Everyone’s so mixed up,” Eben had cried in anguish to his father the night before, meaning, she supposed, “I’m so mixed up.” Yet those of her ten who were most certain they were not mixed up—ha! they were, if you looked deep enough, the truest of nastiness-machines. There was one who was not in the slightest measure mixed up politically—and oh, my, what a certainty festered within him! There was one in whom a rigid, inflexible religious orthodoxy ruled out any mix-up on any subject—all he lacked was heavenly grace. One was a know-it-all, one didn’t want to know anything. One was positive that if you ate a portion of wheat-germ meal and drank a cup of hot cow’s milk each night before retiring, nothing could go wrong with your world (but he was a terrible one for moving gastric bubbles out into the peopled world; he was really rotten inside). Eben at least had a certain nervous, mettlesome humility. Hester knew herself well enough to have caught herself in company, over and over, wishing she were with someone else, or at least having flitting daydreams of someone else, and she had to face the fact that more than any other, Eben—irritable, mixed-up Eben—visited her in such restless moments in the city, whenever she was with any but him, especially with one who considered himself at home and at ease in his times.
But that was in the city, and with others, and now, perhaps because she was thinking of Eben and was therefore with him in a way, she began to think of other men—of his father, and even of his grandfather, for all the good that would do her. She decided she was glad she had come for the weekend, because now, at least, she knew a persuasive, if not overwhelming, reason for marrying Eben: Eben had, besides his own humble flexibility, something back of him in his heritage, and therefore probably within him, that she considered the most important quality a man could have—lonely courage. It stuck out all over the strange Selectman; and Aunty Dorcas had said the Selectman’s father, Eben’s grandfather, “didn’t care a continental what people thought of him.” Hester remembered how, for a yestermorning moment, she had had a delicious managerial sentiment toward Eben; she loved him and would run him to her own satisfaction. Now, though, she knew that if he contained, as she thought perhaps he did, this quality his father and grandfather had had before him, this Yankee quality of an independence that could not be intimidated by any means, even by people who considered themselves not at all mixed up, then he would conduct his own business quite well enough, and hers, too, and she could depend on him—and this was an even more satisfying feeling than the other; though the satisfaction was somehow puzzling, especially in view of the fact that the feeling also contained a paradoxical element of pity, and because all at once she had a queer sense that the one who was closest to her heart was not Eben at all. In a moment of silly jealousy, Eben had told her that she had fallen in love with his father, and now she was beginning to believe that something like that might actually be happening, and she faced this possibility, which Eben had put into her head, with equanimity at first and then with a sudden surprising fervency. She could have Coit anytime. She would probably marry Eben.
Well, she thought with some satisfaction, I’m a little mixed up, anyway.
“The Society abandoned the place,” the Selectman said, “directly Parson Churnstick kicked the bucket. We hadn’t been coming to meeting here for about twelve years during the time he was off-and-on crazy; we were kind of waiting for the Lord to take mercy on him. In the meantime, those as wished attended services in the church on the green, where there was some very sane and very stupefying preaching done every Sabbath morning. But not me, I just backslid.”
They stood in the hot sun in front of the unused church. The Selectman had told Anak Welch that he was going to show Hester the church and had asked him to close the gap in the line until her return to it in a few minutes. It was conceivable to Hester that the building might once have been beautiful, out of sheer rightness, but now the tilt of the steeple above the paintless, weather-plated façade made all the lines seem to have been wrenched out of their former rectitude; they seemed out of plumb and plane in their various turns; the impression was of a great stagger.
“All the clapboards and all the twenty thousand roof shingles for the place came out of one pine tree that stood just about where we stand now,” the Selectman said. “Imagine a tree like that! It must’ve been three or four hundred years old. They don’t grow them that old now.”
Hester listened with but half an ear to the substance of what the Selectman said; she listened, with the rest, to his tone, hoping she might hear, and even persuading herself that she did remotely hear, the sympathy and warmth of old-fashioned dishonorable intention. She pinned her hopes on the “soft heart” Aunty Dorcas had casually ascribed to him. She felt ineffably sorry for the man, and did not know why; she wanted to be comforted by him, and did not know why. Trying in the outrageous humid morning to imagine, as he commanded, a tree that had unfolded and clothed a mansion, she could only imagine how cool and grand it would have been to stand under the living tree with this daydream-ridden man on its soft bed of fragrant spills in deep, deep shade. “Do you suppose it’s cool inside?” she asked, a vague design forming in her mind.
“Let’s go in and see,” he said.
“I’d like to see the inside,” Hester said, masking with casualness the excitement behind her feigned curiosity.
On the front steps and on the low porch before the now doorless entrance, the Selectman took Hester’s hand in precaution, for the beams beneath were obviously infirm; the porch danced under them in a dangerously cheerful way. Hester was willing to consider the Selectman’s grip significant, something more on his part than an instinct for insurance against liability, and she pressed his fingers meaningfully in return, but he said in a flat, nasal, indifferent way:
“Last summer I came in here one time and there was a chuckie going up the center aisle. He wasn’t singing hymns, understand, just nosing around, yet I tell you it was spooky; I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by a groundhog, but that gave me a nasty turn—it was one of the things that made me want to go ahead with this drive as soon as folks would co-operate. Church is no place for a woodchuck. I could just picture one of them up in the old tub of a pulpit giving forth on morality and damnation. Whoof!”
Still holding hands, the Selectman and Hester stepped through the doorway. Hester drew in her breath, for she had never seen such a harsh, austere place of worship. The room was surprisingly small. Four high, rectangular, paneless windows gaped in each side wall. The pews were not long benches but square boxes with little gates, each enclosure having room for about eight people; some worshippers must have sat with their backs to the preacher. The pulpit, dominating the congregation, was, indeed, a kind of iron-banded tub, chest high, perhaps six feet in diameter, set upon a single pillar with heavy spiral hand-hacked fluting on it; the whole structure, like a grotesque goblet, stood nearly twice as tall as Hester. Narrow stairs with carved railings rose from each end of the altar to landings level with the tops of the pews, then turned toward each other and met up behind the tub. Several feet above the pulpit a large square wooden slab, the size of half a door, hung on a lean-to slant from a slender iron rod that ran all the way up to a roof beam. A narrow, precarious-looking gallery, evidently with room for only one bench on it, clung to three walls above the window holes and was reached by a straight stair near where Hester stood against the Selectman. The interior had apparently never been painted, except for the pulpit, the face of the gallery, and the rails at the tops of the walls of the pews, all of which were a drab, grayish blue.
Outside, not far away, the sounds of the line starting up again could be heard, strange human shrills and bayings. Indoors, the floor creaked underfoot.
“It is cool in here,” Hester said. “It couldn’t have been any cooler under the big pine tree they made it of.” He’ll never give an inch to that sort of thing, Hester said to herself; I must be cool.
“Well, there’re no panes in the windows,” the Selectman said. “It used to be hot enough in here, there used to be twenty-four squares of glass in each one of those windows. Oh, it could suffocate a Hottentot in here…. The drive has started up again. Hear ’em?”
“Look at all the birds’ nests on the rafters,” Hester exclaimed, face upturned, with a put-on pleasure that would show herself to the Selectman as observant, simple, impressionable, a lover of natural things. Would he give an inch to that?
“ ‘Yea, the sparrow hath found an house,’ ” the Selectman said, withdrawing his hand purposefully from Hester’s tender grasp, “ ‘and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts.’ ”
“You’re a curious man,” Hester said, ever so slightly angry.
“His mother and I never gave Eben much religious training,” the Selectman said gravely to Hester. “We used to send him to Sunday school some, because everybody did it, but the pageants they gave at Christmas and Easter, with poems written by Sue Pitkin—she’s a desperate old maid, cousin of Judge Pitkin’s, that lives over on the knee of Beggar’s Mountain—her poems put me off the thing, they were Satan’s work, those poems, they’d turn the stomach of a billy-goat, so we stopped making Eben go, he hated it anyway.” The Selectman paused. “I don’t know,” he finally said, “there’s been a failure somewhere.”
Hester, who was feeling wanton in the hot morning-tide and did not relish being moralized at, thought how different things would be with Coit as her present guide; but, being a resourceful girl, and generally unhurried, she decided to accept things as they were for the moment. “I’ve never seen square pews like these before,” she observed with a charming enthusiasm.
“They had a committee to assign them,” the Selectman said. “I remember when I was a boy, the first idea I ever had of the vicious way people insist on lining themselves up in ranks—So-and-so’s better than Such-and-such, and Such-and-such is better than Whatshername—was one time when the pew seatings for the next year were announced; you see, the seatings were by wealth and social position because the Society kept up the building by a tax on the pews. They had this committee that assigned the pews—they called it ‘dignifying the pews,’ though it was the most undignified, heathen rite you ever saw, well, it was about as humane as child labor—and old Ira Leaming was the head of it and he hated Father, so the Avered family was demoted, we were put below the Cherevoys that Mother considered just a lot of savages, though they’d been rising socially as fast as bread-emptyings ever since they’d taken over a spoke works we used to have here in Tunxis. Mother kept on going to church all the same, but you’d’ve thought she was a-mourning. Us kids, we called these square pews sheep pens, and that’s what they were!”
“People up here are so hard on each other,” Hester said with a little feminine pout at which the Selectman failed to look.
“They are, they are. I remember one time hearing how Parson Churnstick, not long after he accepted our call, visited to preach over in Treehampstead and he gave them one of his poignant goose-pimple talks, and after the service one of the deacons over there went up to the parson and asked him if he dared preach like that at home. ‘Yes, sir,’ the Parson said. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘this sermon you just heard was nothing but a hazel switch; when I’m home I use a sled-stake on ’em.’ ”
“Mother used to say, ‘God is love,’ ” Hester said, her arm rubbing as if accidentally against the Selectman’s.
“Old Churnstick’s God was anger. Anger gradually ate him up. The first sign he was going in the head was a trap door he cut in the floor outside his bedroom for nighttimes, so any intruder would drop into the cellar, and the way we found out about it was one morning when Mrs. Churnstick forgot and dropped into the cellar and earned a game hip out of it. Finally Anak Welch—Anak lived next door—built him a big wooden pen off his parlor, and when the Parson felt some craziness coming he used to go voluntarily into the cage and be locked in. Anak and the Parson’s wife used to read him his own sermons and talk to him about how much his mother’d loved him, and that usually calmed him. Sometimes Anak had to wrestle him to put him away, and they say during those wrestling matches old Churnstick used to think he was Jacob at Penuel, only there was a slight difference, being that this angel—Anak, in other words—had no trouble pinning and trussing this particular Jacob in short order, and the only blessings Anak gave him were Scotch blessings.”
“Truly,” Hester said, in earnest and out in the open, “when I told you that Mother used to say, ‘God is love,’ I meant to say that I hardly know where to turn. I guess I’m too young to understand what love really is, but I guess I’m learning; I’ve had a feeling lately that all the ideas I used to have about love weren’t worth anything, weren’t nearly big enough, and that’s given me a feeling that the whole thing with Eben was falling apart—though maybe it’s just really beginning. I don’t know, I’m mixed up, right now I feel as if you mean more to me than Eben. What can I believe? I want to know what love is, I have an appetite for it, sometimes I have hopes that Eben does, too, if we could just understand more about it, but it’s so hard these days….”
“Dear girl,” the Selectman said with what seemed to Hester an acute and painful tenderness, “I wish I could help you, but I’m no particular authority on the subject. What happened to Parson Churnstick and to this building—they bother me all the time, because I think they’re a part of the breakdown of ordinary, everyday love that we see all around us. This church—this House of Love—is simply abandoned. I couldn’t teach Eben this. I guess you and Eben’ll just have to struggle along on whatever leftover ethics you can scrape up for a while till you figure things out for yourselves. Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about—about love, I guess, in Nature and in people. You remember yesterday I was telling about the mother woodchuck that shoved her babies out of her burrow that day to protect herself—that was horrible! Yet on the other hand the woodchucks are apparently very strict and moral when it comes to ‘being in love’; they’re rigidly faithful, you won’t find ary philanderer among ’em, at least that’s what Pliny Forward tells us—you remember he was rubbing it in with Eben yesterday to tease him. I can’t believe, though, that love is just what’s convenient for survival; it’s got to be something to live for, because we don’t live very long, do we, Hester? I just haven’t exactly found it in my born days—love, that is; oh, I’ve been ‘in love,’ but I mean the bigger thing you mentioned; otherwise, dear girl, I’d be glad to try to advise you.”
He was smiling down at her with a sensitive, tortured expression, and Hester was just about to give in to an unruly impulse, when he said, “We’d better get out there and catch up to the line.”
“I guess we’d better,” Hester said, turning quickly toward the door.
Outside, as they hurried forward, the Selectman casually said, “A person could say that I’d had a narrow escape.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have to be told what I mean. You know as well as the next one.”
Hester laughed in a shamefaced way.
The heat became appalling. As she climbed the uphill terrain, Hester felt herself become sticky and irritable. Then, in an unexpected moment of compassion, she felt suddenly terribly sorry for the woodchucks scampering ahead—all dressed in fur, they were, in this cooking temperature, and in nearly black fur, at that, which under the down-pressing sunlight must absorb a frightful temperature. Hester imagined herself in a fur coat—didn’t they sell something called “sheared marmot” in the stores?—and the very thought made her feel faint. Why didn’t the woodchucks die or go mad in their senseless, sun-struck flight? Hester paused in shade wherever she could. The hot, humid air was hard to breathe; it was oxygenated soup.
Three woodchucks were seen breaking through the line below Anak Welch, and for a few minutes, fearful always of encountering one, Hester was called upon to run here and there in a vain effort to recapture them, and afterwards sweat poured off her face and her shirt adhered to her back.
At last, in a suffocating glade, the branches of whose trees seemed to hold the noon air in a kind of death grip, the drivers of Division Four paused for lunch. Tempers crackled. Mumbling their sandwiches the leaders of the division exchanged recriminations over the three animals that had got away, and volunteers blamed the higher-ups. Hester saw the Selectman visit part of the argument; he left soon looking gray and offended.
Reluctantly the drivers began to go forward again.
At this end of the hollow, the mounded, rock-ridged land was largely wooded in descendant stands of the original native forest—feathery hemlocks, for the most part, and under them masses of wild mountain laurel clutching on branch ends dried relics of what must have been, a few weeks before, a glorious pink and white salute to the solstice. The generations of hemlock were all crowded together there: half-fallen giants still partly rooted and sustaining bedraggled crowns, heroic adults with straight trunks two feet thick, young leggy trees jostling each other and reaching for sky and for life, and delicate fans of seedlings outspread uncared-for underfoot—a fecund, optimistic society. The glossy leaves of laurel nodded limply in the heat. This was the finest part of Thighbone Hollow—everyone had said that at lunch; but it was not cool at all.
By slow stages the line reached the approaches to the funnel at the Lantern Flue.
During a halt Coit came down to Hester. “Seems like it’s hermin’ up for a storm,” he said. “Did you hear that rumble yonder?”
“I did, I thought I heard thunder,” Hester said.
“Look at the devil’s darnin’ needles!” Coit said, pointing at two flirting dragonflies. “When those things behave that way, you can be sure there’s thunder comin’. It seems to tickle their diddlybumps.”
“What’ll we do if there’s a downpour?”
“Get wet, I calculate,” Coit said callously, and callously he added, “I imagine the groundhogs’ll be nervy and kind of undone, ’cause they can usually go to ground when the cracklin’ and boomin’ begins, but this time, with no hidin’ place at all, I imagine they’ll twit and fling and kick and stram and carry on like glory-be. ‘Oh, there’ll be dancin’ in the dingle, Suzy-pie!’ ”
“I don’t like it,” Hester said. “I hate thunder.”
“Now that’s just like a woman,” Coit said. “Hates thunder when lightnin’s the only thing to be scar’t of. Lightnin’s very partial to hemlock trees, I’ve heard that many’s a time.”
“You’re a nasty person,” Hester said with a heat matching the day’s.
Already to the west, up beyond the lace of the evergreens, could be seen awesome ranges of glory-capped cumulus. A gusty wind had sprung up, and the fragrant hemlocks gossiped.
“That’s the funny wind,” Coit said, “the wind before a storm. See how it’s blowin’ toward the thunderheads. Twenty minutes from now it’ll be squallin’ the other way. Just like a woman,” he added with a smirk.
Still wearing a twisted faint smile, Coit stepped to Hester and without apology put his arms around her and confidently laid his cheek against hers. Hester, swiftly overcome by a silly, agonizing desire somehow to punish the Selectman for his resistance to her, and relying on an impression that she and this man who had the fragrance of leather were chambered by close-grown trees, slid her hands up Coit’s shirt-back. Coit promptly kissed her; she closed her eyes and floated on her sensations in a void, where for some time she experienced this and that and the other thing, until at last she was convinced that a man’s palm was on her skin between her shoulder blades, that her shirt was unbuttoned from collar to apron, and that steady fingers, which had found and had tobogganed down the zipper at the right side of the waist of her slacks, were now bargaining with the button of the waistband; and she decided she had chastised the Selectman more than enough and it was high time to open her eyes, and she did. A puff of the contra-wind just then lifted a whirl of humus dust off the forest floor and, with a whisk and a lift, threw a speck of it into one of Hester’s newly unveiled eyes. The particle smarted sharply there.
As if struck by the heel of a hand, Hester’s head flew back. She got her fists onto Coit’s chest and began to push and rap. “Stop it!” she said in fierce undertones. “What’re you thinking of, anyway?”
“Same thing you’ve been,” Coit thickly said, releasing her, though not without having held her long and close enough to have made her realize he had sufficient strength to do anything he wanted.
Both Hester’s eyes had turned on their faucets to flush out the hurt from one; she could feel the courses on her cheeks.
“Cry-baby!” Coit said.
“I have something in my eye,” Hester said, “if you want to know.”
“Oh, so that’s why you wanted to stop,” Coit said triumphantly.
“You ought to have your face slapped,” Hester said, winking and fluttering her eyelids. “Ow, ow, ow,” she said in pain and shame.
“Grab aholt of the lid and pull it down and count fifty,” Coit said.
A distant thunderbolt rolled down the rough alley of the western sky.
“Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing. Sounds like we’re goin’ to have a socdolager of a shower before we know it,” Coit said happily while Hester tugged at her eyelid and wept.
Without having succeeded in clearing her eye, she buttoned up and tucked herself away. “You’re a mean, nasty person,” she said blinking as he stood watching with a grin on his face.
“No, not me. You’ve got the wrong pig by the tail…. Did you get the grit out of your eye?” he asked with exaggerated gentleness, as if to dispose of her unsavory charge.
Even as he was asking the question, a man’s voice began calling Coit’s name from up the line. Both he and Hester then heard the shouts, and he turned and ran.
Hester found in a few moments that by looking sidewise, with her pupils rolled to the right, she could keep her eye from hurting, except when she blinked. While she stood tensely glaring in this sidelong way, Coit came back into her glen, and swiveling her oblique stare toward him, she groaned, “Oh, God, here he comes again.”
“They say to stay right here till the storm passes,” Coit said, wholly impersonal now, bossy and pragmatical. “The main thing is not to let the woodchucks panic back through us. If you see a single one of ’em, holler out, ‘Groundhog! Groundhog!’, so the people on either side of you can close in and help hold the line, and if you hear your neighbor shout, move over toward him and begin to make a racket. Get the picture?”
“I get it, sugarlump,” Hester said in what she hoped was a scornful tone, looking at Coit queerly out of the corners of her eyes.
Coit turned his face then and reciprocated clownishly with a stare that was just as twisted as hers. “I’ve got to go tell the others,” he said, and slowly closed one of his eyelids over half his cater-cornered look; then he left her.
Something like a terrible weariness settled over the hemlock woods. The air had gone lax, and every needle on every branch was poised, hushed, drowsy as it were. Hester sat down on the ground, stirred and shifted until she had found a nest of needles that was clear of up-jutting kneelets of roots and of prickly, crackling, fallen twigs, and then, like all life nearby her, reposed limp in the heavy, waiting, resinate air. Sitting that way, she could see under the branches of the nearest trees quite far forward into the woodchuck realm. Nothing moved save the great sound in the distance.
She wept slightly still at the irritation in her eye, and still looked askance at the slumberous world and tried to keep from blinking.
Coit went back up the line and passing declaimed,
“Molly had a walleye,
Saw things on a slant.
She sighed fur Seth, and golly,
You sure could hear her pant!”
Hester felt too sorry for herself even to try an answer.
Once in the city, Hester for some reason remembered in a moment (was it anger—fury—that she was inwardly turning over?), Eben had told her that he had never, not once, heard his father argue with his mother. “Aside from her, he’s got a temper,” Eben had said. “Oh, he can slam on the brakes and holler at the customers like an Irish bus driver, but I don’t know, it seems that inside he’s a peacemaker. People who’re fighting send for him from considerable distances to settle their disputes,” Eben had said; “and he manages it, too, I don’t know how. The lawyers up home hate him, the way he does them out of the lucre of gain, why, he diminishes their business something awful. I remember one time Eli Pinney had an awful set-to with his wife, they were on the point of splitting up and getting a bill, and they decided to have Father in—this was long before he was Selectman—and I remember, I was home when Father came back from their house, and Mother asked him, ‘Did you set things to rights, Matthew?’, and he sat down to supper and took a mammoth helping of yellow squash that I can still see and smell to this day—sweet stuff! Lord how I love it!—and I distinctly remember he said, I was too young to understand what he meant, but anyway he said to her, ‘Nothing wrong there, dear, that can’t be fixed by Mr. Pinney giving his helpmeet a cordial servicing once a week or so. He agreed to try. They’re quieted down for the time being. This is a fine Hubbard squash, my dear.’ Mother said in that terrible calm way of hers, ‘Charity begins at home, Matthew dear.’ I sure puzzled over what they meant.” Eben had studiously mimicked his parents, without satire.
Hester remembered how the Selectman had told her the day before that he and Mrs. Avered could no longer be called friends, and she wondered bleakly how much of real life Eben clearly perceived.
Then she thought she had one clue to the resentment the townspeople felt, even his close friends seemed to feel, toward the Selectman. Perhaps, through sympathy, he had come to know too much about them.
There was thunder again, louder but still deep and blunt, muffled, it seemed, by the yellowy, unbleached heaps of cloud that were fast drifting closer. Hester scanned the oncoming line of the storm with her sidelong vision, and began to be afraid.
At the edge of her small clearing, the skirts of laurel started to dance, though as yet Hester could not really feel the new breeze. Then she did receive a puff of it on her damp skin—a cooler air, and hasty. All at once into a gap in the green to the westward rolled the blackish lower edge of the cold front, with horrible rounded swift-whirling sarcomatous growths pushing down from its underside. One moment the hot sunlight slanted through the hemlocks, the next, was gone; riding the shade came a sharp little wind, under the force of which whole branches bent, and behind this cool puff followed sluggish whirlpools and eddies of the day’s hot, stale atmosphere. Now there was an almost constant rumble from the pile of clouds.
Hester got up on her knees, as if that would make her more ready for danger, and she crouched, looking at everything, as Coit’s walleyed Molly did, on a slant. She wished for Coit, for the Selectman, energetically for Eben; she wanted any company she could get.
A new hard flaw of wind hit the hemlock tops, making such a rough sound that for a few moments Hester could hear no thunder. Now she saw with what dreadful speed the squall line was coming on. She thought of the huge mosques of cloud, miles high, that she had seen from a distance, which were founded on nothing but this roiled, skidding base, and she trembled to think of those edifices crashing down on her and on these fragile woods, as they must.
The wind died for a moment. Suddenly Hester, as if taking a hard blow on the head, subjectively suffered a huge external flash and crack—the annunciatory bolt of the storm’s arrival. At once the full force of a new wind squall pounced on the hemlocks. Hester put her hands over her face, but then, hearing a new awfulness, she took them away again to watch warily and crookedly: Down through the woods from Thighbone Ledge walked the rain. It came as a solid advancing heavy hushing sound, a horrible moving wall of wetness.
The wind went from harsh to brutal, and the hemlocks moaned. Then rain fell. The drops seemed as big as jellyfish. In an instant Hester was soaked.
There came a series of blinding licks of lightning and flat quick cracks of thunder, and the gale and cloudburst increased, and Hester looking from side to side wanted to run away—but to what refuge? She stayed rooted, swaying like one of the trees nearby, and gasped for breath as the cold white rain hit her.
Close the windows! Close the windows! Hester thought of her mother rushing from room to room with a panic-twisted face, crying that thunderbolts travel on drafts; and Hester hugged herself in terror in this gale in the woods. The frightful flashes and claps were so near! Hester felt as if the terrible eye of the storm was looking for her, for her alone; then for a tiny moment she had a weird sensation of crouching beside her sopping self and laughing at herself; even if she lived and was not reduced to a charred basket of ribs and odds and ends by one of the tongues of flame, she was shortening her life to nearly nothing by being so afraid of dying—Dorcas Thrall had given the warning the night before. The terror almost made her laugh at herself, beside herself.
In the midst of all this, she could feel the whole time the tiny prick of foreign matter on her eyeball.
Suddenly, in a pause between bolts, she heard a chorus of excited whistling, penetrating the plash of the rain; thunder shut it out; she heard it again.
She was astounded. Was the line starting up at the very climax of the storm?
Then Hester realized that what she heard was straight ahead—the terrified shrieking of woodchucks in the lightning, thunder, and rain. It was worse for them than for her! On her hands and knees she became dutiful and vigilant. Her fear for herself diminished, and she became instead afraid for the Selectman; this new fright was not unpleasant. She watched for runaway groundhogs. For the Selectman’s sake, they must not be allowed to escape in their frenzy. As the storm’s noisy procession moved on, none of the screaming animals showed themselves. Gradually their crying died down. So violence was slowly drained out of the sky, and horror out of Hester.
The spent clouds were fleeing to the east. Up from the floor of the forest came a pungent smell of newness, of washed earth and fresh life. Hester was amazed to see with her biased eyes that after all the murderous impact of the storm the frail new needles of hemlock still lay in order on the leaders and seedlings, as if freshly combed, and the leaves of laurel were unruffled.
All would have been summer peace, except that down to the right Hester could hear a confusion, an urgency of shouting that made her, at last, rise up alert from her kneeling position. She stood, dripped, and listened. People were running about down there and calling to each other and to the animals. Then she heard someone oncoming with clumsy haste, and George Challenge burst with rolling eyes into her little opening in the thicket. “We need help!” he forced out panting. And the drenched politician blurted out a report that some of the groundhogs had “gone plumb crazy”; four of them had attacked drivers down the line; one of them had bit young Ira Pinney, giving him “a nasty dig acrosst the shinbone”; and then the possessed animals had escaped, but might be caught again. Challenge’s wild eyes, appreciatively excursive for a moment, took in Hester’s shirt clinging wet to her flesh. “We need men to help us,” he then gasped, resuming his excitement. “You stay right where you are and don’t let any of the boogers get back through here.” And the short-legged puffing man crashed out of the hemlock circlet and struggled up the line.
Not long afterwards Hester saw a handful of men run crackling down through the woods with desperately earnest faces; she imagined that untried soldiers going into battle to be blooded wore expressions like those, and she thought that for people who had not wanted to come on this second day’s drive at all, these runners were much interested in it—grimmer about it, indeed, than the Selectman himself. The shouting continued. Hester crouched again in order to be able to look forward under the boughs of the surrounding trees.
Across her line of still hurtful, still sidelong vision, some distance from her post, Hester presently saw the Selectman walking without haste down toward the trouble. “Hi!” she called out. “What’s happening?”
The Selectman turned and peered into Hester’s bosk. “That you, Miss Hester? Where’re you hiding?”
“I’m back here,” Hester said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Much ado about four groundhogs,” the Selectman said calmly, walking toward the enclosure. Hester hastily pushed her seaweed-hair back along the crown of her head, and stood up and waited. “It’s not the end of the world, don’t jump out of your skin, just four groundhogs got loose,” the Selectman approaching said. “Did you get all wet and sozzled?” he asked, still hidden from her.
“I’m sopping, I’m a mess,” Hester protestingly said.
The Selectman came through dripping branches into the opening and stood before Hester with glistening eyelashes and a drop of water on the end of his nose. “You’re too young to have read the novels of Rafael Sabatini,” he said. “I used to read ’em, when I had more time for reading, and my goodness, you could count on that same thrilling style in book after book. People have a way of getting over-excited in those books—and my neighbors here in Tunxis are the same way.”
What a queerly various man, Hester thought—Sabatini and Patmore and the Holy Writ and FitzGerald of the Moving Finger! Then suddenly she became concerned over the contrast between the Selectman’s calmness and the strange fanatical look on the faces of the hurrying drivers she had just seen.
“But I thought every single woodchuck was life and death to you,” she said, hoping to rouse him somewhat. “At least I should think it would be, at this point.”
“You look like a mermaid,” he said, ignoring her thrust in a way that could not but give her pleasure; “but why do you glare at me that way?”
“I got some dust in my eye just before the storm. That was the worst storm I’ve ever been in. I thought I was going to be dead and buried any minute.”
“We could’ve buried you in our family plot in the hollow.”
“It’s no joke,” Hester said.
“I meant to show you the graveyard when we stopped at the church,” the Selectman said, as if he had time of day to burn. “That’s where you can see the real Tunxis. You know, in the old days up here, all the women were dead before their fortieth year—you’d’ve been a middle-aged woman right now, one foot in the grave with creeping age even if you hadn’t perished in an electric storm.”
“I am middle-aged. After that storm, I am.”
“That was just a quiet little everyday thunderation. You must have too much shelter in the city.”
“I wanted to see your father’s grave,” Hester said. “Aunty Dorcas told me he carved his own headstone.”
“And footstone. He said his feet hurt in bed if he didn’t have a footboard.”
“What did he write on the stones? Aunty Dorcas couldn’t recall.”
“He put his name on both stones, and then he cut on one, ‘His head was in the clouds,’ and on the other, ‘His feet were on the ground.’ ”
“Aunty Dorcas said he was a tiny man—it was nice he could make himself so tall in the end.”
“I think you’re fond of us Avereds,” the Selectman baldly said.
“It’s just like you to say that, instead of starting out by saying you Avereds like me.”
“I try to be honest. A lot of folks say, ‘I’m fond of you,’ so’s to hear what the retort’ll be; the way most people write letters so’s not to have empty mailboxes.”
“Do you think people are that selfish?” Hester asked.
“Not selfish, just anxious. Seems to me, this is the heyday of the worry-wart. People don’t have to be so nervous about everything, but they are, and I always wonder why. Once I had to fly in an airplane—when Eben was at that camp in Louisiana and they thought he had the infantile, he’s probably told you about the time he was so sick….”
“Yes, he’s told me.”
“When I was in the airport over at the capital, somebody led me up to this little gillhickie like a slot machine, you could put a quarter in and get your life insured just before you took off. My heavens, they’ve even got nervousness mechanized nowadays.”
“Don’t you ever worry?”
“All the time. Sure, I put my quarter in…. Whenever Eben’s around me, I guess I’m supposed to worry about not amounting to anything, but as soon as he goes back to the city it seems as if there’re more important things to fuss about. What’s eating him? Do you know?…” The sounds of shouting still came up from below, and the Selectman, breaking off, turned his head toward them; then, as if those noises, at least, were not worth worrying about, he looked back at Hester. “You look miserable, squinching that way,” he said.
“My eye hurts.”
“Let’s see if we can fix it. Let’s see if we can get the thing out once and for all.”
As the Selectman moved toward her, Hester felt her opportunity. The sun was out to stay; there was a holiday twinkle in the wet hemlocks all around. Hester was exuberant, and grateful for the joyous speck in her eye.
The Selectman stood close to her and said, “Now, let’s see, let’s see.” He lowered his face toward hers, and peered intently in her eye. “My, you’ve got a nice eyeball,” he said softly. “It’s been a dog’s age since I saw such a clear white eyeball. You must be at peace with your Maker, Miss Hester.” Then, putting one hand on her cheek and the other on her forehead, the Selectman pulled the lids of the smarting eye apart, and he craned and searched. His hands were hard, his fingers were mailed with callus; in spite of their tender restraint, Hester realized their enormous unexpressed strength—but she also sensed in them a delicate tremor which she chose to regard as the tiny flutter of some kind of fought-against eagerness. “I’m sorry,” the Selectman said, deeply and quietly, “but I can’t see a doggoned thing.” Hester felt somehow too weak to assure him that the mite of grit was there; really, it was there. “Maybe it’s bedded in the back of the lid,” he said. “Hold on just a sec.” He stepped back a pace, fumbled in a pocket of his soaked trousers, pulled out a limp box of wooden matches, and took one out. “I’d hate to have my life depend on lighting a fire right now,” he said. “I’ll roll the lid up on this. Do you have a hanky?” Hester pulled a dripping handkerchief out of a pocket in her shirt and handed it to him. “When’t comes to snotrags, d’ruther use yourn than mine—on you,” he said in burlesqued Yankee twang, wringing out the delicate cloth with his stubby forefingers and thumbs. “Now!” he said, “let’s have a try,” and he moved to her again. This time he stood dead against her; Hester, lifting up her face to him, drew in her breath and made herself as tall as her spine would allow. With his big clumsy fingers the Selectman tried to grasp the lashes of the upper lid. “Hold still!” the Selectman smiling said. “Did you ever try to catch a moth on the wing?” Near a flame, Hester wanted to say, near a flame, but she felt too weak—and knew it would be too stupid; she tried to stop blinking. At last he caught the fugitive hairs between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He drew the lid down, placed the match on its lower edge, folded the lashes and a little skin back over the match, and held them tight as he began to turn the match. The lid made an inappropriate sucking sound as it was pulled away from the eyeball, and Hester emitted a tiny, protesting, winsome “Ouch!” The Selectman’s face was very close to hers and as it was turned a bit to one side, his lips were opposite hers, and Hester knew that now she was trembling more than he. She insisted to herself that his compassion, felt in the paradoxical delicateness of his rough touch, leaned far toward something else, something else she scarcely dared define. She thought, jarringly, of Eben, who had the same consideration in his fingers, though they were not shelled with the thick skin of handwork; the same touch, given yet held back—unlike the unstinting, smearing paw-touch of a Coit. Hester breathed against the Selectman’s breathing. “Yup,” he said (with suppressed feeling, she assured herself), “there the dang little thing is. Wouldn’t come out because the lid got swelled up all round it.” He spoke very low; she could taste his sweet hickory-nut breath in her own slightly open mouth. “Now,” he said, “you’ll have to help. Take ahold of the match in your right hand and mash down on the side of the lid with your left hand so it won’t slip off.” For a long, long moment, his hands were against hers; then he took his away. He rolled a corner of the handkerchief and lifted it to her eye. Hester felt his left hand cupping the back of her head, and she was brimful of hope and desire. He flicked the lid with the tiny linen tongue and kept up a murmur as he worked: “Out in a jiffy…that’s a good girl…hold on now…”
There was a sudden crackling noise in the hemlocks at the lower edge of the open place. A breath was audibly drawn into a throat. Hester’s free eye saw something that looked like Mrs. Tuller’s black-and-white checked skirt flash between branches, and perhaps something else, too, and then there was a hurrying off.
“We almost had a caller,” Hester said. “Or maybe two.”
“Hold still!” the Selectman impatiently commanded.
“Sorry,” she said.
“There!” he triumphantly said, and drew back. He held up the twist of handkerchief, with a dark trifle on it, for her inspection. “There’s your little friend. Nothing but a little black atom—but I suppose it felt like Plymouth Rock in your eye there.”
Hester was bleak. The intruders had spoilt things—though she could not be sure that things would have been different had there been no intrusion; perhaps that was really why she felt let down.
“Who were they?” the Selectman stiffly asked.
“I didn’t see for sure,” Hester said, “but I think it was Mrs. Tuller, and I don’t know who else.”
“That’s just fine and dandy,” the Selectman sarcastically said. Then he said, “I guess we didn’t hear anything sooner because of the way I was gabbing along about that smidgen in your eye.”
“It feels a lot better,” Hester sadly said. “Thanks a million.”
The drivers moved through the fragrant, glistening, dripping woods toward the beginning of the funnel at the Lantern Flue. The woods, sloping rather steeply from an outcropping of Thighbone Ledge down to the canal, were light and open here, for the land had been cultivated in recent years; a sparse growth of sapling locusts and wild cherries, with a few older cedars, partly shaded the ground, which was bedded with water-bright grass and low thickets of sparkling milkweed. Compressed, as it moved, by the narrowing of the hollow, the line was gradually shortened so that, at last, the drivers were but twenty feet or so apart. A few woodchucks were sighted moving into the mouth of the funnel. A halt was called.
Hester stood dissecting a still-green milkweed pod with her fingernails, and was quite empty of thought, when a delegation came to wait on her: Mrs. Tuller, Anak Welch, George Challenge, Friedrich Tuller, and a woman and a man whom Hester did not know. Mrs. Tuller, whose face was sullen, peremptorily called Roswell Coit from his nearby post. All dripping, mussed, and be-slimed from the rain, these hot-eyed Tunxis people looked to Hester as if they had just crawled up out of some primordial ooze; she didn’t like their looks.
“Now,” the schoolteacher commanded Hester, when Coit had arrived, “tell us exactly what he tried to do to you.”
Hester looked at Coit, whom she supposed to be her fellow-accused, and she blushed, remembering how unbuttoned, how inwardly undone she had let herself become with him, and fleetingly she wondered what prurient, sneaky voyeur had been watching their embrace in the little clearing. She saw Coit grinning at her with his customary swaggerer’s face; apparently, she thought, he expects me to brazen it out. Her eyes traversed the other faces in the circle; they seemed suddenly like so many boulders in an old New England stone wall. She thought of the row of faces on the stage at the caucus two nights before—hard yet yearning. For what did these hard faces yearn? For what? What were they so intent upon now? Why were they so exercised?
“Oh,” she said offhandedly, her eyes turned away from Coit’s, “I guess he was just trying to prove he’s a man.”
“There!” Mrs. Tuller exploded to the others. “Is that enough for you?”
The great Anak shook his head. “I can’t understand it,” he said.
“We saw them plain as day—they thought they were tucked away in the hemlocks!—didn’t we see them plain as day, Roswell?” Mrs. Tuller said.
Half way between realization and incredulity, Hester looked quickly again at Roswell Coit’s face; the complacent grin still resided there—had, if it had changed at all, nourished itself on the recent speeches and grown some.
“What galls me,” George Challenge said in his pleading whine, “is the way he ordered us to round up those four creatures that had got away—I was the one who ran up there to him and you’d’ve thought he was talkin’ to a common garbage collector the way he sent me down—and what did he do while we were breakin’ our legs tryin’ to catch ’em? That’s what galls me!”
But—out of disbelief Hester still kept silent—the Selectman hadn’t done anything; that had been precisely her disappointment.
“It’s really too much,” Mrs. Tuller said with a kind of conclusiveness that sent a chill to Hester’s bowels. “We might’ve re-caught those animals if he could’ve been bothered to come down and help us. Law! With his own son’s girl!…” Mrs. Tuller broke off and stared contemptuously at Hester.
Other drivers, evidently having seen the knot of people, and complacent about the woodchucks in this constricted place, had begun to drift up or down to the circle; Eben was among them, Hester saw. Hester blushed with rage and frustration and bafflement, all of which expelled from her, at last, a violent, stammering utterance. “Wait a minute!” she burst out. “Do you mean—do you mean the Selectman—and me?”
“Too late for innocence,” the schoolteacher said in a kind of jeer. “You’ve already confessed.”
“Confessed to what? I haven’t confessed a thing!”
“What’s this all about?” asked Manly Sessions, the captain of Division Three, who had lately sauntered down.
Mrs. Tuller’s face seemed to turn a deeper shade of mad purple as she said, “We caught the Selectman tryin’ to rape this girl.”
“Oh-oh,” Manly Sessions said. “Not him again.”
“What?” Hester shouted, straining to control her tongue. She was afraid she would burst into tears. For a moment she saw Eben’s face, pale as the flesh of an apple; drained of blood but full of belief. “What? What do you mean, rape?”
“Well,” Mrs. Tuller said, as if yielding a mile of hard-won ground, “I guess it ain’t accurate to speak of rape when both parties are willin’.”
“You people are crazy,” Hester said with conviction and vehemence—though the number of stones now in the wall roundabout made her heart sink. “He was trying to get something out of my eye.”
The stones all split open and laughter came out; the circle laughed loud.
“Back this mornin’,” Coit now offered, “they ducked into the old church. I guess they were in there half an hour, seemed like that much.”
“That’s true,” Anak Welch said, “the Selectman even told me he was goin’ to show the girl the church, asked me to cover her section of the line for her till they caught up again.”
“He did?” the strange woman who had come up with the original posse broke out. She had heavy bangs that, hanging like a valance across her forehead, made her eyes seem tiny, inadequate windows. “Why, we could’ve lost some more of the woodchucks right then and there, thinnin’ out the line that way.”
“Guess he was tryin’ her then,” Coit said with that smirk of his.
Hester turned slowly to Coit. “You know I had something in my eye.”
“How would I know that? Now just how would I know that?” The smirk held firm.
Hester had begun to tremble, because she did not know how to deal with the situation in which she found herself. Something seemed to have been wrenched loose in her world. She was used to living in a quiet world in which truth was abused slightly now and again for the sake of tact and social ease; this was all on too grand a scale. “Do you like blackberries?” she asked Coit.
“Not too much,” Coit said. “They’re liable to turn sour.”
“Wait a minute,” Anak Welch slowly said. “What tune are we playin’ now?”
Coit shrugged. “She asked me did I like blackberries,” he said.
“That’s right!” Hester said, stepping over to Anak Welch and grasping the sleeve of his shirt. “Ask him what that’s about till you get an answer.”
“Well, what is it about?” the huge man gently asked.
He was looking down at Hester; he was asking her. She thought suddenly of what she had wished on the bezoar; she thought of her acquiescence to Coit; she thought of Eben; she realized that it was not her fault that this crazy allegation was not a fact. “Ask him,” she feebly said, knowing that this little hope of hers was spent.
Mrs. Tuller, impatient with all these speeches that she evidently considered irrevelant, broke in, demanding, “Well, what’re we goin’ to do about this?”
“The whole town knows about it now,” George Challenge said with less whine than usual, and he surveyed all the faces in the circle with evident satisfaction.
“I think people should know about it,” Mrs. Tuller, who was obviously one to make such a thing possible, declared. “I think it’s time to make a public example…”
“Holy catfish!” Roswell Coit suddenly shouted, pointing off into the underbrush. “Look down there!”
Down there a whole crescent of woodchuck scouts was, for the moment, erect, a-begging, and all seemed to be staring toward the cluster of Tunxis people, with a comical pious look, as if appealing to them in a dignified way for tax-deductible gifts. Then the animals serially ducked down and could not be seen in the tall grass and undergrowth, but what could be realized and what could be seen were these: that the curve of upright scouts had been oriented toward a gap in the drivers’ line which stretched from the clump of people to a point more than a hundred feet down toward the canal, and that, behind the scouts’ screen, there was a widespread progressive disturbance in the grass tops, quickly moving toward the gap.
The circle around Hester became at once a cavorting, many-throated body, desperate for want of discipline. Everyone started running somewhere and crying something, Many people appointed themselves commanders, and called out orders at cross-purposes—this one, to cut the creatures off; that one, not to rush them; another, to shout but not chase; another, to skirt but be silent—so that all did various errands and were angry and practically useless.
The woodchucks meanwhile were of one mind. They moved in full rout toward the opening.
Hester and two or three others followed the instinctive Coit, who had darted off in the one direction that seemed to make sense—directly back along the hollow; for evidently he thought a wide loop could be thrown around the animal band, which was, one could see, certain to break through the old line. Much as he would shout for other followers, though, his leadership was spurned by drivers with notions of their own. It was for Mrs. Tuller to pursue circumstances from bad to worse and finally make them splendidly worst. In an unthinking fury, as if releasing a pent-up anger at generations of irrepressibly contrary schoolchildren, she rushed, uttering warbling screams, right at the core of the woodchuck pack, and this hysterical headlong charge of hers had the effect, at first, of making the whole herd swerve toward the canal and away from the main concentration of drivers who might have encircled the animals; and then, despite moaning cries of warning from Anak Welch, she bore on with a hurtling, unstoppable rage and soon was right in the midst of the rippling island of fur. That was the disaster. The manageable pack disintegrated. Individual woodchucks ran off in all directions save toward the funnel.
Now the hunted and the hunters were pitted, as it were, one for one. There was no more herd. There was also no more line. Single persons ran looping and winding awhile after single animals, then switched to other individual quarries, for the creatures outnumbered their pursuers. Breathless, Hester ran heavily here and there to no purpose at all. The woodchucks slipped away as easily as sand through twitching fingers; their escape was a perfect demonstration of the occasional value to a group of disunity.
Very soon the creatures were all gone, and the uselessness of an un-co-ordinated chase was clear to every driver.
Gradually the still-wet villagers came together in the young dripping woods; their frustrated anger was immeasurable, and it was directed, with a sweet unanimity such as Tunxis had obviously seldom enjoyed in all its history, at the species Arctomys monax. These people were one in hating woodchucks. Their cheeks were red, their eyes like the ends of sharp sticks just withdrawn from fire. “Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!” cried Coit, and even Mrs. Tuller nodded slightly at the sound of his cursing.
Then Hester, who in this feeling was truly conjoined to Tunxis for the first time, saw and heard a strange thing happen, which all too soon separated her again from Tunxis. The wrath of the drivers turned away from the animals, which were now, as receptacles of temper, far out of range, toward the Selectman, who was more available.
Hester heard George Challenge utter the first suggestion of the switch. “This whole thing’s as rotten as a dozy post,” he said. “Just a lot of damned boondogglin’ nonsense.”
“It’s that God-damned greenhorn lecherous Avered,” Coit said. “What the hell, anybody knows you have to shoot woodchucks.”
“If you’d ask me,” Mrs. Tuller said, her eyes extruded, as if there were not room even in her capacious head for so much anger and eyeballs too, “if you’d ask me, an old-fashioned whippin’d be too good for Matthew Avered.”
The faces in the circle turned with slow speculative interest toward Mrs. Tuller’s scowling countenance, and Hester saw an awful concord flowing into almost all of them. The silence was prolonged; this seemed to be an idea with a slow grip, and even when it had taken hold, there was something about it that needed prolonged ventilation.
“A light public whippin’,” George Challenge finally said in an apologetic whine, on a note almost of charity, “would seem to me to be a very practical solution.”
“I agree a hundred per cent,” Roswell Coit said with ill-hidden jubilance.
“Isn’t this a kind of disgusting kangaroo court?” Friedrich Tuller objected in a high, strained voice. “What right do you people have to pass judgement?”
“I don’t think newcomers and foreigners ought to meddle in Tunxis affairs,” the woman with the bangs said.
“I came here sixteen years ago looking for freedom,” Herr Tuller said. “How long is a newcomer new?”
“Let’s not get shunted onto a siding,” said Mrs. Tuller, who had had ample experience in committee work and knew how to keep things moving.
“We mustn’t be carried away with haste,” Anak Welch said with a fairness that seemed to give him physical pain. “Let’s put on our thinkin’ caps and try and do the right thing. I have to say that I lean toward the opinion that a public example would be good for all of us. I’d suffer for our Selectman if we did this thing that’s been suggested, and I think that sufferin’ would probably be good for me. It’d probably be good for all of us. But we oughtn’t to be hasty.”
“Whippin’d be too good for Matthew Avered,” Mrs. Tuller repeated, quite satisfied with having invented this sentence.
“It’s not as if this wasn’t a sound traditional practice hereabouts, Anak—in the old days anyway,” pronounced Judge Pitkin, the Town Counsel, the Selectman’s close friend.
“Oh, it’s an institution with a great deal of heft behind it,” Anak Welch said in a troubled way. “I’ll grant you that. A very respectable institution. Long honored here in Tunxis—though not anytime lately, that’s the part I’d want to analyze. I just have a feelin’ we ought to think this through pretty careful.”
“Too much thinkin’ gives folks the rheumatism,” the woman with the bangs said. “You’d better make up your mind afore you get a crick in your neck, Mr. Welch.”
The Selectman himself came running now from up above. “How many got away?” he asked with an uninformed coolness that seemed grotesque to Hester.
Hester was surprised, and then afraid, when she heard the slow, sober, cautious, kindly giant, Anak Welch, say sharply, “God damn you, Matthew.”
“Am I to blame?” the Selectman angrily retorted. “From what I hear, some of you people got careless down here.”
“We’ll see about that,” the big man said. “We’ll tend to that in its own time.”
“How many got away?” the Selectman asked.
“We’ll settle up accounts when it comes time to send out the bills,” Uncle Anak said.
“What’re you all standing around this way for?” the Selectman shouted. “Do you want to lose them all? Get back to your positions and let’s at least keep the ones we have!”
The drivers, with a sudden amazing sheepish obedience, resumed their line.
As Hester moved up the funnel, with the line constantly shrinking, so that Coit on the one side and Uncle Anak on the other closed more and more with her, she felt, above everything else, a heavy apprehension, a presentiment of something from which she would surely have to run away. She tried, for a time to attract Coit’s attention without getting Anak Welch’s as well, for she wanted at least to make a reproachful face at Coit, and thereby somehow seem to justify herself; but the thickset, good-looking young man kept his eyes forward in an excess of conscientiousness, as if, by God, no woodchuck would ever get away from an alert young fellow like him.
The drive up the funnel was no work at all, and soon the line grew so tight that people began to drop out of it, and Hester, feeling very weak, was one of the first to resign. Toward the end a dozen men were all who stood pickets, and in due course they reached the gate—only ten feet across—and shut it, and then lifted planks off a ditch that traversed the opening, rolled the gate-wire down into it, and filled it with dirt to complete the deep-fence around the enclosure.
The count was soon reported. There were but thirty-seven woodchucks in the corral.
They were such cheerful-looking, rotund animals!—only thirty-seven in number.
Hester, who had her eyes and ears open, neither observed nor overheard any further consultation among the drivers, but, as if some kind of agreement had been sealed between them in meditation, silence, and shared lunacy, a group of them went straight to the Selectman when the drive was over, and following closely, Hester heard Anak Welch say, “Matthew, I’ve got to tell you that we’re very pent up at you.”
“I don’t blame you,” the Selectman said. “I don’t blame you.”
Then Hester saw the Selectman’s face—dark, weary, defeated, abject he was. Only thirty-seven woodchucks!
An annoyed crowd had gathered around in a moment, and its swaying, its almost breathing together, its palpable unified mob-life showed that a rumor had already run its course.
“We’ve decided we’ve got to take it out on you,” the huge man said, obviously given courage by the many-eyed febrile entity around him.
“I can’t say I blame you,” the Selectman said, head down.
“You were very wrong,” Mrs. Tuller said with a tight mouth and ice-pick eyes.
“Let’s not discuss it right now,” the Selectman said, raising defiant eyes and aiming them at the schoolteacher, whose gaze grew blunt and dropped. “What do you intend to do?” he asked Anak Welch.
Now it was the giant’s turn to be abashed. He cleared his throat with a tiger’s rumble. “We had thought,” he said then with extraordinary mildness, “of a scourging.”
There was an excited indrawing of breath by some of the drivers who had not previously heard this thrilling news. The Selectman was silent awhile; he looked at the ground. Then dully he said, “Does Judge Pitkin know about this?”
“You’re thinking about legality?” Anak Welch asked.
“I just hold the opinion that the Town Counsel should know about it.”
“I’m here,” said Judge Pitkin’s voice at the edge of the crowd, in an unmistakable tone of adherence to the popular opinion.
“Oh, you here, Judge?” the Selectman asked with a calmness that gave Hester a chill.
“We want to be fair, Matthew,” Uncle Anak said with a disgusting, shameful affection in his voice. “We realize there ain’t been a floggin’ in Tunxis for I-don’t-know-how-many seasons. But—but—”
“We’ve taken as much as we’re goin’ to take,” Mrs. Tuller said for the hesitant giant, and for all.
“Let’s get it over and done with,” the Selectman said.
Hester wanted to scream out against the mildness and politeness of this talk. She wanted to cry out that the citizens intended to flagellate this man for one thing while he thought they were to punish him for something entirely else. She wanted to protest against his taking on his shoulders the blame for the outcome of this drive, which he had been thinking about and planning for a decade; and against his silly, vapid invocation of the name of the Town Counsel—what a response for a courageous man! She wanted to proclaim his innocence of the gossips’ crime, his absolute innocence, and Coit’s lack of it; she wanted to announce her own…. She was silent.
Hester wondered whether Tunxis had ever had such an entertainment as this. The Selectman stood on the lawn not far from the notice board—almost exactly at the spot where she herself had waited in the fog that morning so many experiences ago—and he gravely stared into an infinity that seemed nested in a sugar-maple tree across the way; he seemed to be gazing at mysteries, at the deepest paradoxes of life, whilst the townspeople busied themselves with happy, constructive errands of preparation. Rulof Pitkin was sent whirling off in his truck to Leamings’ Service Station to get a big pair of lug wrenches to take the notice board down with. Manly Sessions had gone away in his Chevrolet for a length of rope. Four clustered male elders of the town, exuding the sweet gravity of mortuary attendants, consulted in low voices as to where they might find a suitable instrument of their will. “Say!” exclaimed George Challenge in a subdued proud thin whine that surely carried to the Selectman’s ears, as it did to Hester’s equidistant ones. “Don’t Alenum Rust have the very thing on that buckboard he keeps paintin’ every year? Seems to me the stock is light and the lash good and short.” “That sounds like just the ticket,” Judge Pitkin rumblingly concurred. Hester saw the vast mouth stir in Anak Welch’s troubled face, but she could not hear the words that emerged—if, indeed, any did. Coit was sent off on a motorcycle to get Rust’s whip. Cars, mostly containing womenfolk, kept driving up, and Hester could imagine what a cheery tintinnabulation of phone calls must be hurrying round the town. Soon Hester even saw Aunty Dorcas, given a lift to the common by a kind-hearted friend, moving with her eyes shrewdly narrowed among the whispers that flew on praying-mantis wings from head to head—Aunty Dorcas, oh! so afraid of a sparrow on her sill, but not of this; afraid neither of death nor of this, hardy old lady. Mrs. Tuller, teacher of innocent children, believer in counter-irritants, kept shaking her huge head with what seemed to be regret—regret, was it, of her disastrous hysterical charge among the woodchucks, or of the necessity (pressed by other folks, mind you!) of punishing Matthew Avered for what she had seen with her own naked eyes? George Challenge, no weasel to be napping now, was going around on his parenthetical legs canvassing opinion for future reference in political conclave. Friedrich Tuller of the crystal spangles, after his one brief protest down by the enclosure, had by now busied himself with conformity, and was, at one moment when Hester glimpsed him, standing on the whipping platform sucking a forefinger and making the face of one stricken, for, in helpfully removing thumbtacks from the notices on the bulletin board, he had apparently sprung a fingernail from its quick. Pale Pliny Forward, intent upon science, tried to start a discussion with the Selectman on what had gone wrong with the drive, but the Selectman seemed deaf as a wedge of cheese.
Hester fought her silence all along. She wanted to speak up…but it would do no good, she kept telling herself. The village of Tunxis would simply vent one big unanimous guffaw at such interested testimony as hers would be. There was no chance of changing the course of things. There was something inexorable at work here, something on old iron rails that could not be turned aside; so she told herself. Besides (what a confused and mean comfort!), why was the Selectman so passive? Was he really somehow guilty of something? Why did he stare that way? Why didn’t he fight? Coit had become a kind of hero now. His was the prize errand; he was astride his snorting two-wheeled machine, fetching the whip. He was a strong young man—maybe they would let him swing it, too. No! That would be too much! Hester swore to herself that if Coit were appointed to do the flogging, she would surely cry out.
Eben walked past, apparently moving for the sake of motion. He seemed to have been suddenly set back into a gawky adolescence; his face was even faintly blotched, as if about to succumb to a miserable acne.
“How can you stand by and let them do this?” Hester hissed at him.
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Eben said with a ferocity that was staggering. Hester felt that this must be a day of unburdenings.
“But your father didn’t do a thing to me,” she protested, appalled by Eben’s fierce face. “I swear, Eben, he was just taking a speck out of my eye.”
Eben looked tempted to believe; in need of belief; tempted and awfully torn. “Why didn’t you fix up a better story?” he bitterly asked.
Rulof Pitkin returned, and several men worked at detaching the notice board from the whipping post. They threw each other occasional masculine morsels of advice and congratulation; the work went splendidly. A few drops of penetrating oil, a heave here and a counter-ho there, and soon the job was done. Four men carried the heavy bulletin board—Friedrich Tuller (what was it he’d said he’d come here looking for sixteen years before?) lugged at one corner in what appeared to be an ecstasy of accepted helpfulness, not foreign at all now, a real Tunxisman—and they leaned it carefully against the front wall of the Grange Hall. Then Coit was back, showing the whip to the elders, one by one; each nodded in sober admiration.
Hester’s heart was on the run. She would just wait until Coit climbed up to the platform, then…If she could but survive that long! She could hear the shushing of blood in her ears; her heart hurried toward toward toward toward toward toward…
They were leading the Selectman to the platform; he had that faraway staring look in his eyes. He climbed the steps and stood there waiting. Judge Pitkin, standing on the ground in front of the platform, leaned forward and murmured to him, but the Selectman did not hear, so Judge Pitkin spoke louder; the Selectman leaned forward and Judge Pitkin mouthed something into his ear. The Selectman straightened up, turned facing the post, and removed his shirt. How softly white the skin of his strong back below the copper of his neck!
Anak Welch, holding the small coil of manila that Manly Sessions had brought, climbed the steps and, while the Selectman agreeably held high his hands, the huge man, for whom this was no reach at all, lashed the wrists together and made them fast to the post. Roswell Coit stood at the foot of the stairs tapping the looped-back gad against his calf. Hester decided she was as ready as ever she would be.
Then Anak Welch went down the steps and took the whip out of Coit’s hand and turned round, with an agonized expression on his face, the veins standing inflated on his wide forehead, and climbed back up again.
Anak Welch was going to do the work. Hester felt a surge of sickening relief. How could she protest now?
She looked around her, and saw the eyes of the natives bulging with delight, terror, and foul hope.
She ran.
She hid behind the trunk of a huge New England elm. Over the hushed heads on the green, Anak Welch’s anguished voice came rolling: “I hope this’ll be for the good of all of us, Matthew.”
Hester did not hear any more because of the pressure on her ears of her vomiting.
Afterwards everyone seemed to go out of his way to be nice to the Selectman, who, when he descended from the platform, still wore his faraway look; George Challenge told him he’d taken his castor oil like a man, and Anák Welch threw an arm around his shoulders. Hester, back among the crowd and watching again almost in spite of herself, had a peculiar feeling that these gestures were far from friendly; they seemed to represent some kind of clearing away of loathsome thoughts, some kind of handwashing, and there was even, she thought, a hint of anger in them, as if to indicate that the Selectman should at least have whimpered under the wrath of the community.
“We’d better get down there and do away with the groundhogs before they start a-burrowing,” the Selectman mildly said.
That quiet remark called for a picnic atmosphere among the townsfolk, who rushed to load themselves in the trucks and chattered and laughed and winked at each other. “Come on,” Mrs. Tuller said to Hester, with a jovial, forgiving air, “let’s go down and watch.” Hester let herself be drawn along.
At the enclosure, Hester quickly saw that the thirst of Tunxis had not yet been slaked. Later, thinking back on what happened at the corral after the scourging, she guessed that the Selectman must have displayed an unbearably shaming nobility on the platform by the common, so that by the time the witnesses of that bearing had reached the woodchuck enclosure, they must have felt the choice of demolishing the man once and for all or feeling utterly ruined themselves.
“Who’s going to help me kill these animals?” the Selectman asked, holding out before him and offering to a taker one of a pair of machetes he had brought. “We’ll need about six people for a line,” he said, “to corner ’em.”
No one moved.
The Selectman looked around and evidently began to see what he was up against—but only began, dimly and unclearly, to see, for his locked mind was obviously on the work to be done. Still holding out the knife, pinching it by the blade so that someone could take the free handle, he glanced around at the faces near him and for some time seemed to expect a response, but no one moved, for the figures of the Tunxis people were frozen in a tableau of clenched wills.
At last the Selectman turned, with a slightly puzzled look, shrugging, and said over his shoulder, “If nobody’ll waltz with me, I’ll have to waltz alone.” He dropped one of the brush knives beside the gate and, putting a foot up on one of its cross braces, vaulted into the enclosure, swinging the huge knife he had kept in his hand in a wide blue-flashing arc through the air as he jumped. He walked slowly toward the cluster of woodchucks at the center of the fenced-in square.
Coit was the first to laugh. From the beginning it was clear that the Selectman’s situation was intolerable, and that he should never have let himself into it. He simply did not have the physical equipment to come upon these sly animals and destroy them all by himself. They were too many for him, too agile, and they had too much room to move about in. He seemed dazed and clumsy; they balked him and misled him and escaped him. He would make a stealthy, almost tiptoed approach, then would break into a sudden short rush and chop at—nothing. He became suddenly ludicrously angry, and when, at the end of one of his charges, he brought the machete whirling downward and again missed the scrambling animals and only split some sod, Coit laughed.
Then others did, too. There began to be a quiet little ripple of giggles after each frustrated rush, and then, as in his jerky, petulant dashes the Selectman grew red and wild-eyed, outright haws and roars began to be sprung.
The unhearing Selectman, culminating in his lonely onslaughts ten years of planning for this happy hour, evidently heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing but the need to destroy woodchucks.
Soon some of the Tunxis people had stitches under their ribs, and rocking, they gripped their waists to ease the pain of laughing.
Hester had bad trouble pushing down her own risibility, and once she caught a glimpse of Eben, letting up out of his mouth a little irrepressible laugh every so often; looking at him she was reminded of a pot lid occasionally jumping and releasing vapor and settling back again. Hester was far beyond protesting now, beyond even the sort of anger that engenders protest, as, clutched by some inner paralysis, she trembled on the silent edge of laughter.
The Selectman killed a woodchuck, caught it on the spine and cleft it in a ghastly, powerful, red-soaked whisk.
A few townspeople emitted a quiet “Aah!”, but Coit led others in a laughing cheer; and when the Selectman missed his next stroke, the laughter was redoubled.
Soon the Selectman began to adjust his eye and his arm to the needs of his task, and he managed, not without many failing rushes, to kill another, and another, and others. A regular rhythm of laughter and mocking cheers was established. The Selectman seemed to hear none of that.
Mrs. Tuller, standing beside Hester in the audience outside the enclosure, paused in her laughing, wiped tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, and said, “Mercy me! Sometimes I wonder.”
Coit, on the other side of Hester, gasped between laughs, “This is rich.”
“What a fine person he is! Whenever there’s nasty work to be done in Tunxis,” Mrs. Tuller said, shaking with mirthful delight at her own heavy irony, “you can depend on it, he’ll be the one to do it for us.” She pointed at the Selectman and rode off again on derision.
“Maybe,” Coit said, fighting his bubbling laughter, “maybe his heart’s as warm as ever a flame, ma’am—ho! ho! look!—but right now he’s up to his ass in blood.”
“Roswell!” Mrs. Tuller said, sniggering as she looked round at him. “You have the tongue of a serpent.”
“You should’ve heard me when I was in the service,” he said. “I’m nothin’ but Casper Milquetoast now.” And as the Selectman killed an animal, “ ’Ray! ’Ray!” Coit shouted.
Then in one of his unsuccessful clumsy sallies the Selectman rushed close to the fence behind which the main body of drivers stood in their hilarious condition. In this instance, a sharp burst of laughter greeted the Selectman’s failure, especially as he stumbled slightly, with a little besotted stagger, when he made his futile lunge with the brush knife. Regaining his balance he stood straight, not a dozen feet from the fence, and, in a sudden lapse of his concentration on the animals, he focused his eyes on the crowd, took in the grimaces of his townspeople, heard their pealing, and seemed for the first time to understand something of what was happening to them and to him. Hester saw the awful sting of recognition spread across his face.
For a moment his lips trembled; it seemed as if his face would crumple under the wrench of sudden overwhelming pain. Hester was positive, without having seen, that no such expression had touched his face on the platform in front of the Grange.
In a pathetic voice, a voice denuded of authority and maturity, a voice without even the dignity of penance done or of regret or of apology, he pleaded, “Won’t somebody help me?”
The obdurate crowd was silent but for a few coasting murmurs of laughter, and no one moved; no one made a move to help.
A small pack of woodchucks seemed to be gathering not far from the Selectman, as if to rush at his legs, and someone cackled, “Watch out! Watch out for them groundhogs!”
The Selectman whirled. The pack moved toward him with rattling jaws. At first, instead of driving forward into the ridiculous posse, the Selectman backed away with a jarring timorousness; at last he made a half-hearted dash which scattered the animals.
The Selectman resumed his lorn work, and the townspeople tried again to laugh as merrily as they had before, but the lift had gone out of their effort. Still coursing erratically here and there, the Selectman seemed to have grown terribly tired, and he wore an expression of awful, incipient comprehension. He had destroyed perhaps thirteen or fourteen woodchucks, and now that he had no taste for it, he was learning craft in this unsavory contest and was having enough success so that it could be seen that with the help of half a dozen men to help condense the animals, the destruction would fairly quickly have been done with. He did not look at the crowd again. People began to drift away and go home.
While Eben went upstairs for the suitcases, Hester stood awkwardly with the Selectman and Mrs. Avered in the parlor. The Selectman was sitting in a straight chair, and Mrs. Avered stood protectively beside it. In the presence of his son and of Hester, the Selectman had scrupulously and with hair-raising detachment told his wife everything that had happened to him—making it clear that he understood he had suffered all of it because of the failure of the drive. Hester had not been inclined to elaborate his understanding on that point, and Eben had merely glared at her. Mr. Avered had told the others that Anak Welch had suggested he ought to resign as First Selectman, and as to that, the Selectman had told his family he thought he would wait two or three days, let the tops fall off the waves, but he supposed he would have to go through with it. “You know, when Anak gets his mind set on an idea,” he had said, with the haunting calmness of a man who has made several starts in the world, “you can’t budge him with a team of workhorses. He’s like a damnable stump of oak.”
“We’ll see,” Mrs. Avered had said, evidently prepared to pick up and try to use whatever time might leave on her doorstep, “we’ll see.”
“One thing, though,” the Selectman had said, with a brief and incongruous burst of intrepidity, “I’d awful much like to get some folks to go out there and do that drive over again. We know now how to manage it; we’d have that hollow cleaned out before you could say Jack-Be-Nimble.”
“For God’s sake, Father!” Eben had said with the vehemence that comes from shame. “Don’t you know when you’re licked?”
“I’d hazard a guess,” the Selectman had said, his head tilted to one side, “that if you’d give me some time, give me a couple of years, you know how the years soften things and blur things…”
“No, no, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said, applying a palm to her husband’s forehead and stroking it, as if to soothe an invalid, “leave the woodchucks be. Don’t fret about going back in the hollow just yet. Leave them be awhile.”
Hester felt weak, and there was a lingering bouquet of bile on her palate. Now, while Eben clattered upstairs, she experienced a sudden revulsion, and this revulsion produced in her mind a decision: She would not marry Eben Avered. At first she attributed this strangely comforting conclusion to a contempt she felt for Eben, based upon what she had taken in during the weekend, fruit of an accumulation of glimpses at an Eben she had never clearly seen before. Then slowly, with increasing discomfort, she began to wonder whether that feeling might not have been projected, whether the true target of her scorn might not be her own pitiful self; and fearfully she admitted the possibility that her decision about Eben was a decision to flee from the afternoon she had just experienced, to fly away from what she had learned about herself, to run away from the face of the son of the Selectman, to escape the Selectman’s image, never to see the Selectman’s face again and all its reminders, never to be visited again by the memory of her failure to loose the shouts that had lain beside her tongue ready for utterance that afternoon. And then, as her horror and disgust grew, she was rattled by a shudder very much like those she had suffered in the chill fog of the early morning before all this had happened, when she had been standing in the vague dawn not knowing really where she was; for she knew that even if she did not marry Eben, she would always henceforth be on the run, pursued by the Erinyes of the marmot drive.
“Why, child!” Mrs. Avered said. “You’re white as the driven snow. Matthew! The girl’s tired to death! Wouldn’t you like a wee glass of winkum, my dear, to comfort you on the road?”
“No, thanks,” Hester said. “I’ll be all right in a minute.”
Eben came down. He dropped the bags in the hall and joined the others in the parlor. Hester knew, looking at him, that she loved him as well as she could love anyone, and she felt a stab of compassion and perplexity and regret. She stepped toward the Selectman, who remained seated, and she wanted to say she was sorry if she’d—if she’d…. But what could she say? The Selectman did not know yet what had happened to him, or truly why, and only a few moments ago she had begun to be struck, for the first time, the first surely of many times, by the full force of what had happened to herself during the woodchuck drive. She said a flat goodbye. It had no love in it, and she was sorry. She shook Mrs. Avered’s phlegmatic hand. As she went to the front door she saw that the wooden cogwheels out of the clock were still on the floor in the hall.