by John Hersey
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.
BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY
BLUES
THE CALL
THE WALNUT DOOR
THE PRESIDENT
MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE
THE WRITER’S CRAFT
THE CONSPIRACY
LETTER TO THE ALUMNI
THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT
UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM
TOO FAR TO WALK
WHITE LOTUS
HERE TO STAY
THE CHILD BUYER
THE WAR LOVER
A SINGLE PEBBLE
THE MARMOT DRIVE
THE WALL
A BELL FOR ADANO
INTO THE VALLEY
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1953 by John Hersey
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1953, and simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Limited.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ebook ISBN 9780593080818
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Books by John Hersey
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
ONE
ONE FOG-LIDDED DAWN in summertime a city girl, whose name was Hester, stood near the whipping post on the Tunxis village green with half a hundred strangers waiting to round up woodchucks. It was but five o’clock in the morning, and though Hester was of the sort that is always looking for something new and for someone other than who is at hand, nevertheless this early start was something almost too novel for even such as she. Self-conscious in brand-new rough clothes, she knew she was standing gracelessly, for her whole body was gelid with damp summer-cold and sleepiness and embarrassment; she was obliged to be glad that the mist hid her urban awkwardness from the villagers around her. Most of the volunteers had convened here in front of the Grange Hall. Her friend Eben had been called off on some errand and had left her alone in the crowd of murmuring strangers, his townspeople of Tunxis, in whose early morning commonplaces she could hear truculence, humor, and half-wakened malice.
“Goin’ to rain?”
“Nope. This’ll burn off.”
“Positive?”
“Ayeh.”
“Never knew yourself to be wrong yet, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Never in your born days fired into the wrong flock, did you?”
“Nope.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“My knuckle joints.”
“Praise God from whom all blessin’s flow!”
“This’ll burn off.”
A huge form, the shape of a gigantic man, loomed and went shivering past Hester, drawing eddies of fog behind it.
Hester pulled back, startled, but then she remembered the enormous citizen with the woodwind voice at the caucus the night before, and she almost laughed out loud. What a confusion that meeting had been!—these outwardly dry Connecticut people standing up, in turn and out, stirring the ancient dust on the rafters of the Grange Hall with their angry shouts and sudden laughs, their protests, cheers, and challenges; townspeople arguing about a local woodchuck drive as if it were going to be as memorable in Tunxis history as the Revolutionary skirmish on Johnnycake Meadow that Eben was always talking about. Eben’s famous battle! With what funny, vainglorious ruefulness had Eben, who was at any rate a sorry antiquarian, often spoken to her in the city about that small old action! There had been trifling bravery spent in it, he had confessed; there had been only one casualty; a single embattled farmer had been given a musket ball in one of the hassocks of his seat, which he had put before the enemy during an impulsive resignation from the lists of human freedom. Yet the episode had been purified and formalized in the annals of the town, and every year during Eben’s boyhood on Training Day the townspeople had re-enacted the Engagement on the Meadow, he had told her, simulating the ill-clad Tunxismen in noble ambush of the hated, dandy Lobsterbacks, and oh, the memory of those Training Days seemed to figure grandly in Eben’s view of happiness: happiness to him still seemed to be a kind of grab barrel full of gingerbread, costumes, Chinee firecrackers, dedications, maple sugar chunks, flags, blank cartridges, and callithumpian orgies on the Legion drum.
Then, with a vividness that caught her by surprise, Hester saw again in recollection the figure of the Selectman the night before, moderating and controlling the wild palaver of the caucus, quiet, dignified, firm, yet strangely a target of much hard feeling—the Selectman, Eben’s father, who might become her father-in-law, or might not. Thinking of the Selectman’s easy presidency of the caucus, Hester remembered, without knowing why she did, that once Eben had said to her, “Father would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.”
Why did Eben say such things? When would Eben come back from his errand? When would these people get started?
Hester could barely see, to her right, the outline of the white Grange Hall, whose miniature Palladian façade, with its blistered and off-curling paint, Eben had called to her attention before the caucus the previous evening, for her to laugh at. She had obliged; she had laughed—the Hall was comically pretentious against its simple setting of elms and maples on the new-mown triangle of the town common, as out of place, she had thought, as a cameo pinned on the flank of a moo-cow.
Near her, now, on her left at the highwayside, a boy seemed to be climbing and gymnasticating on the platform before the town notice board. This bulletin board was bolted, the Selectman had told her while they had waited for the caucus, to a perdurable cypress log that had been brought from the Carolinas by Captain Thankful Pitkin, Puritan ancestor to the present Town Counsel, and had been used “until later than one would think,” Eben’s father had said, as a whipping post. The boy on the whipping platform was whistling, off key, Onward, Christian Soldiers. Hester merely sensed the whipping post and platform and the notice board, for she could not clearly see them in the fog; having seen them at sundown the day before, she fabricated them now from the sibilant phantom on her left. She shivered. A few more volunteers were straggling onto the common. She guessed there were by this time three score or more of groundhog hunters on the edge of the green between the post and the Hall.
A young fellow in the crowd suddenly cackled over some joke with indecent hilarity, like a concupiscent rooster who feels his loins stir as the earth rolls to morning.
Hester was embarrassed. She had not realized that Eben was bringing her ou
t from the city for this weekend with such formal intent—to show his family his serious girl, as doubtless he thought of her, and as his blunt father had made her see herself during the drive home from the railway station the day before. Besides, she had not known, nor had Eben, that the woodchuck drive was to be held this weekend; and now, in her new blue jeans and white shirt, she worried because she wouldn’t know how to behave, she wouldn’t know how to walk like a native in the woods. She felt childishly shy, and again something like a chill shook her.
Someone bumped into her in the darkness.
“Who’s this? Belle?” a man’s voice asked, and she saw a head float through the vapor toward hers, apparently peering, but in the murk it had no face; it was like a coin worn out by a million thumbs. She supposed she was blank, too, and this made her a little bold.
“You don’t know me,” she said. “I’m visting the Avereds.”
“Oh,” the voice said. “Ayeh. We heard Eben was betwattled after a girl from where he moved to. They say”—the voice seemed emboldened, too; it was as if Hester and this man had had a chance encounter on an ocean voyage and were not inhibited by a fixed and reminding landscape—“they say you’re ripe enough to rattle.” Then, hastily, a decorous withdrawal: “Thought you were Belle Sessions.”
“Are we going to start soon?”
“Just waitin’ for the Selectman to blow his nose, I guess. Well, young lady, what do you think of all this to-do?”
“I don’t know when I’ve gotten up so early,” Hester cautiously answered.
“Groundhogs are up and about with the sun, they don’t keep city hours, I guess you know that.” Then the voice was unctuous, evidently in atonement for the mild rebuke: “Whose division you in, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“The captain’s a woman. I’ve forgotten her name.”
“You in Mrs. Tuller’s division? She drives to kill, that old girl, she’ll keep you rustlin’. She teaches school, I had her in school some while back. I was always late in the tide—on the hind end of nothin’, you might say, as far as arithmetic went, and b-r-r-r, I can still feel her ferule on my hand.”
“Her which on your hand?”
“She uses one to this day, you know, it’s a little slapper thing.” The voice had a pleading tone. “She don’t believe in all this new mollycoddlin’. She says Connecticut’s made of ledge and glacier stones and hardpan, she can’t see the sense of bringing in a lot of slush at this late date.”
Then suddenly, without Godspeed, the head and the voice were gone. Hester wished she had asked the man for his name; his voice had been perhaps a little too ingratiating. She considered for a moment the contemptuous phrase it had uttered: “…waiting for the Selectman to blow his nose.” A qualm stirred in her as she thought of the ugly scene at the caucus the night before, when such ill will and spite toward Eben’s father had been shown by the townspeople. Perhaps the Selectman’s intelligence made them want to destroy him, she thought, perhaps they resented his always seeming to be talking “afore folks,” with citified grammar, or perhaps his apparent goodness made them feel inwardly sick, perhaps they envied or feared him, or perhaps there was something she had not been able to discern in him that his neighbors and his son had found out. Surely their bitterness toward him was hard to understand.
* * *
—
The train had stopped with a squeal and a shudder as the dry brakes had seized.
“Tunxis!” the conductor, standing at the open door, cried, “Tunxis!”, pronouncing the name each time as if the n might become lodged in his nose forever.
Eben was all alight. Walking along the aisle of the car stooped forward, peering out the windows to find his mother and father, he bumped the suitcases against the seat arms again and again. Hester felt her face flush and wondered whether she had too much make-up on. At last she clattered down the car steps, and happy Eben came down after her, ungainly as the Jabberwock.
Hester saw a dull little station of gray clapboard, hooded by magnificent elms, and across the way she got a glimpse of a row of half a dozen store backs, cheaply built structures crowded together with a squalid, tenemental look far out of key with the clean landscapes of tilled valleys and traprock cliffs through which the train had come for the second of the two hours the trip from the city had taken; out of key, too, with the image of Tunxis that Eben had induced in her mind, of white houses and a white church breasting a quiet common. The center of Tunxis, she thought with disappointment, was to be after all just another montage of soft-drink signs, tar-paper shingles, gas-station pennants, and grinning billboards; somewhere beyond the stores she supposed she would find a rank growth of television masts, new bulrushes in a dark swamp.
Here came Eben’s father walking along the platform. It was clearly Eben’s father—the nose bigger than the son’s, the jaw set a little more aggressively, the brown eyes brimming with the same warmth; Eben’s father, no mistaking. There was a mole on the side of his chin, a small black badge as impossible to hide or forget as grief. He was wearing gray flannel trousers badly in need of a pressing and a walnut-colored coat garnished with buttons that were surely pewter. His hair was black and gray, and not fussily brushed; and he said to Eben, “Mother’s in the car. So this is our Hester.” Eben’s mother was sitting in an old green Pontiac, a woman with a face that seemed to be compounded of skim milk and strained virtue—round, barriered with rimless glasses, not the least like Eben’s in looks. She was noncommittal in her greetings, even to her own son. Hester saw in the first instant that Eben’s city pretensions, his manners and “style,” were, like those of so many young people they knew, erected on plain footings. On the train Eben had tolerantly analyzed his parents.
Eben got into the front seat with his father, Hester with Mrs. Avered in the back.
“Well, boy,” Eben’s father said, “how’s the great marketplace?”
“O.K.,” Eben said impatiently, and Hester imagined that his father must always ask about the city with some such ironical formula, always presumably knowing as he asked that the city was still the city, immutable.
All four were silent for a few moments. The car swung around onto a macadam road past the fronts of the stores Hester had seen from the platform; from the street they looked clean and charmingly awkward, good country stores with gambrel roofs and a brick-veneered post office. The faces of these buildings showed a fine character indigenous to their place, while the parts that were supposed to be hidden were cheap and foul in the universal way. The whole tone of the town was a pleasant surprise from this side of the tracks. The car took a right fork, moved around a curve, and rolled past the town green.
“This is Tunxis for you, Hester,” Eben’s father said. “We hope you’re going to like it—and we hope we’re going to like you.”
So, with a bluntness Eben had not inherited, his father had faced the fact, as she and Eben had openly not, that she had been brought to Tunxis for inspection.
Hester’s response to this frankness was delayed, because, as Eben’s father spoke, she was looking at the lovely village common, which was all that Eben had helped her to picture and more. She had not conceived the sense of community such a plot of ground, necklaced with inward-facing central-hall houses, could give. The homes were built with deference to neighbors; the church and the Grange, she could see, were for the use of all, the prosperous and the hard-pressed, the educated and the benighted, the wise and the foolish, who could walk with an illusion of equality on the common grass. Then, having quickly pondered this Tunxis, Hester understood, with a lurch of feeling, what Eben’s father had said and meant. She wanted to blurt out that she didn’t know whether she loved Eben and certainly hadn’t decided to marry him and that it was unfair to treat her like an extravagant purchase being brought home for a few days on approval; but instead she said, weakly, of the village, “It’s better than Eben described it.”
“He never was much at describing,” Mr. Avered said. “I recollect once when Eben was just a little spicket, he came home with a gash on his forehead that needed a seamstress to fix, not a doctor, and we asked him what had happened. He said Roswell Coit had done it, and that’s all he’d say. Had Roswell pitched a rock? No, Ros just did it; according to Eben. Well, had Ros tunked open his head with a tomahawk? Unh-unh, just did it. It took us a week o’ Sundays to find out what Eben’s ‘just did it’ was, but we found out. This Coit boy—he’s still around here, you’ll see him tomorrow—he’d asked Eben on a Saturday if he wanted to have some fun with the teeter board in the school yard, and he sat Eben on one end while he rolled over a barrel from the Booges’ place, other side the road, and upended it opposite the free end of the teeter board, and climbed up—talking a blue streak the whole time like a sleight-of-hand artist keeping his audience fuddled—and then took a flying leap off the barrel onto the stick-up end of the teeter board, and Eben, who was a lot smaller anyway, shot up into the heavens like the frog of Calaveras County, and of course landed kerflummox on his head. Do you think ‘just did it’ covers that case?”
Hester hardly knew how to answer; at last she said, “So that’s what the scar’s from.”
“It’s a blessing he didn’t have a concussion,” Mrs. Avered serenely said.
“Rubber head,” Eben said, and Hester saw that he was trying to make the best of something he had not liked.
“Son,” the Selectman said, not bothering to pick up loose ends, “we’re finally going to clean the woodchucks out of Thighbone Hollow.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Volunteers from the town.”
“Is this another of your crackpot ideas?” Eben asked with sudden, overblown, resigned weariness.
“This young runnygade,” Mr. Avered said over his shoulder to Hester in quick, strong mimicry of New England accents, “considers everythin’ out-a-line that ain’t done his way.” Then, in his own tones: “Mite arrogant, don’t you think? Matter of fact, he’s just ignorant. What he doesn’t know is that in the old days around here, when there was need or danger, we all did our jag of work together. We had house raisings, fence mendings, church daubings, bush stubbings on the roads, and all of that. We didn’t like the work or each other very much, but we got a lot done. As you know, Mr. Eben,” the father said mock-formally and rather severely to his son, “we’re long overdue to clean out Thighbone Hollow. Those creatures are about ready to move into our front parlors, they’re so full of gall.”
