by John Hersey
Ahead the trees were thinning out and the underbrush—bayberry and blueberry and humps of gleaming cat brier—was becoming more profuse, and Hester could see that they would come out soon onto a partly overgrown meadow. They were still walking forward at a very easy pace, and all across the hollow could be heard the sounds, unnatural for human beings, of the sluggish pursuit. Hester felt increasingly apprehensive, as with part of her mind she listened to the Selectman’s words about Mrs. Tuller, and with another part she imagined a herd of wild boars bearing down upon the line between her and the helpless dancing master, and with yet another part she thought how almost fearfully beautiful this early morning had become.
“Mrs. Tuller said some awful things about the Avereds,” she managed to remark.
“All the time she acted as if she were praising us, didn’t she?”
“Oh yes, she called you a saint.”
“That I am not, girl,” he said, and all at once he had floated off in that deep daydream of his; staring, staring.
“Do you think we could go all day without seeing any woodchucks?” she asked, wanting to draw him back.
He did not answer for a long time, then he turned his face to hers and said, “I’m sorry, girl, I was off in the next county when you said that last. Would you care to say it again?”
“No,” Hester said. “It wasn’t important.”
Just before they reached the edge of the abandoned meadow, a new order to halt the line came down from the left, and the Selectman, saying he wanted to walk up to see if anything was the matter, left Hester alone.
* * *
—
An order to move again came quite soon. Knowing now what she was supposed to do and how to do it, Hester was less fearful of ridicule than she had been, but she was still afraid of being tattered by enamel chisels; she felt like a primitive, like a woman from the troglodytic era—afraid of being eaten alive. She realized only now how comforting the presence of the Selectman had been. She missed him actively, wished he would return; but he did not come.
The field into which Hester now advanced was a new terrain to her. It was ragged, half way between cultivated, which once it had been, and wild, which again it would soon be—somehow forlorn-making: it reminded Hester that sometimes men try to do more than they are able, then they grow weary and give up and don’t care. There were still large patches of strong, tall, en-clumped timothy grass in the enclosure, but among them had sprung up new growth—numerous tall lone-standing cedars, saplings of wild cherry and pignut, and seedlings of maple and birch and oak; as well as aggressive pigmy forests, closing in on the good grass, of milkweed, cat brier, and poison ivy, which she skirted. There were, besides, four tall swamp maples in the field, one near each of its corners; these were so regularly spaced that she guessed they must have been transplanted there, when the field had been used for field crops, to give grazing animals shade.
Hester’s slow course across the field took her toward one of these maples, and when she was about thirty feet away from it, she suddenly gasped, she froze, her skin tingled all over, her heart tried to run away from its cavity. She saw a woodchuck under the tree, just to the right of the trunk.
The animal was standing up on its hind legs, in profile to her, facing the sun, measuring the full length of its spine against the maple bark. Its head was tilted arear; its mouth seemed drawn back in a kind of grin, a grimace of complacency. Its eyes were three-quarters closed. Its forepaws were spread apart and limply hanging. The sunlight, slanting in under the branches of the tree at this early hour, lay full on the animal’s round belly, and the direct light, together with the modulation in the color of the woodchuck’s fur, from a dark rusty brown on the stomach to near-black against the tree, made it seem prosperously rounded, a comfortable pillow of a thing. The figure was one of utter well-being; it was a caricature of guiltless human indolence. Hester realized that the animal was taking a morning sunbath. It must have been driven with the others from its home, it was in mortal danger; yet here it leaned, a sleek hedonist, almost unbearably comfortable, to judge by those pulled-back lips, its danger far, far out of mind.
Hester lost her tenseness. The bear-mouse monk! What an amiable enemy!
For a moment Hester wished she could change places with this bliss-ridden beast. She, too, was a sun-lover; she never got enough sun. When the summer sun warmed her body, prone on a sandy place, it seemed that her nerves were melted into common flesh, her brain was fused into a soothing, soft, idea-less juice; she enjoyed a warm liquefaction of all anxiety. She became something simple when the sun was on her. She understood that this sun-soaked simpleton on a beach was a contemptible creature, and all the centuries of man’s patient climbing had not been suffered, Gethsemane, Chartres, King Lear, The Magic Flute had not been experienced, in order that human life might culminate in the repose of a girl’s figure on the sand under the sun—a figure of languor, sexuality, irresponsibility, and brimming fullness of self. Yet what heavenly retrogression! She thought it was perfectly expressed in the pulled-back lips of the sunbathing woodchuck, showing the near-hurt of true pleasure.
She thought of the month of March in the city; how running across a sleet-sloppy street, with the filthy slush splashing up on her iron-cold stockings, she had to hug herself, as it were, in her own tense arms for only comfort; her hands and feet were in perpetual pain all through the chilly time; she frowned constantly—and dreamed of the summer sun. Now she felt wholly identified with the woodchuck before her. If only she could, as he, crawl into a burrow lined with leaves and straw and sleep the winter away! She dimly knew that her wishes did not mean precisely what they seemed: she supposed she wanted to be an infant on the warm breast of the beach, and she would even gladly be a foetus in the wintertime. How often she had heard the ideas of the modern psychologists spent in city chitchat like shiny, tinkling quarters, dimes, and nickels, by people who, like her, had never even read the essential books. Backward and downward from the arts! Man the beaches! To the womb!
She mocked her desires, and felt them still.
The woodchuck stirred. Its right paw went up and scratched its ear. It yawned, and then tilted its head a little to the left. The eyes still drooped. Above the slouching belly the animal’s chest swelled up and then seemed to burst in a deep, deep sigh of contentment.
Hester could help herself no longer. She laughed out loud.
Instantly the animal was erect and alert. Its small black eyes looked at Hester with a glittering defiance and hatred. The mouth was still drawn back, but now the agony was not of pleasure but of antagonism. Seeing the animal full-face, Hester was for the first time confronted by the enormous teeth. Her amusement was driven scurrying, her flesh crawled, glands prepared her for a battle to death. The woodchuck held its inimical pose for a few instants, then seemed to collapse into swift retreat. Its black back rippled across the field for perhaps twenty feet. Then the animal stopped, rose erect again on its haunches and looked around at Hester, as if it wanted to make sure that the monster it had seen had not been a fantasy. Hester imagined she saw a look of derision on the bear-mouse face, and she grew a little angry.
“Get on, you bastard!” she shouted, her back thrilling to another charge of adrenal fluid, and she stamped her foot on the ground.
The woodchuck ran skimper-scamper away. Hester moved forward with new confidence in herself.
* * *
—
After the caucus Eben had been peevish, Hester remembered. He had led her to the car, where they had waited in the front seat for his father to join them, and though Eben had held her hand, as he always did in dark places, he had not seemed to be conscious of touching her; his voltage had seemed very low. His hand was limp and moist.
“It’ll take him an hour to get here,” Eben said, she recalled. “He’ll have to argue the whole thing over two or three times before he can tear himself away. I know him.”
>
“I could have choked that Sessions person,” Hester said.
“He was the only one in the whole bunch who made any sense.”
“You’re trying some kind of joke on me.”
“No, it’s true. What this hick town needs is a few people with hard heads. Everybody’s got mattress stuffing in the skull around here—including the famous Selectman.”
“Eben! Your father was terrific.”
“Just because he kept his temper? Do you think that makes somebody terrific? Think of the nonsense he was talking! Why, this whole woodchuck drive is child’s play: it’s a Boy Scout outing. Tunxis needs a woodchuck hunt about as much as Central Park needs a squirrel shoot.”
“Why don’t you try to get along better with your father?”
“Because he’s elected to live in another century from ours. And I don’t think that solves this century. I just can’t get along with a man from the last century, and what’s more, I won’t. I think it’s for him to make the effort to catch up, not for me to slide backwards.”
“Are you saying that you’re better than he is?”
“No, I’m saying that I talk a different language. He’s a foreigner here. He’s got to accommodate himself.”
“A foreigner! You have a few prejudices of your own from the last century, Eben. Besides, you may be wrong about your father. He may be more up-to-date than you and I are. How do we know what’s really modern?”
“I know that we’re watching the world fall apart, and he moseys through life as though we were on the threshold of a golden age. Oh, for God’s sake,” Eben burst out. “I’m tired of listening to him and thinking about him.”
The Selectman did not take an hour to get back to the car; he appeared in less than ten minutes, while there were still quite a few other cars to be driven away. “Hello, love birds,” he said with a remarkable casualness as he opened the door to the driver’s seat. He took off his walnut-colored coat, threw it in the back seat, loosened his necktie, and slid behind the wheel.
“Congratulations,” Hester said. “You were wonderful.”
“I don’t want to talk about the meeting,” the Selectman said with more anger than he had shown during the whole evening. All three were silent as they drove home. When they reached the house, Eben’s father was abruptly rather cheerful, and he said, “Let’s sit on the screen porch awhile and talk. I need a potion. Miss Hester, it’ll do you good to sit in a rocker on a porch while Eben and I blow the soot out of your ears with some Tunxis gossip.” But gossip, as it turned out, was not to be the fare. The Selectman went inside the house and switched on the parlor lights, and on the porch Hester and Eben settled themselves in a metal glider. The Selectman returned soon with three tumblers, each partly full of dark liquor.
“Isn’t there any ice in the house?” Eben asked irritably.
“Ice in the icebox, where it always was,” the Selectman said, “if it’s your notion to spoil good West Indy rum.”
“Rum!” Eben exclaimed contemptuously.
“Rum-a-tum-tum,
The farmer drinked some,
Rum-a-tum-tum,
The farmer’s strick dumb,”
the Selectman said singsong, and took a sip from his glass. “I wouldn’t give whisky hell-room, and I advise you to follow the example of your venerable father.”
Eben stamped angrily into the house after some ice. As soon as the screen door slammed behind him, the Selectman moved onto the porch swing where Eben had been sitting with Hester and said, “Let’s send Hamlet to bed and talk awhile. There’s so much to discuss!”
“If you mean Eben,” Hester said, “you’d better take it up with him. He may take it into his head to send the King of Denmark to sleep.”
“The King of Denmark?” the Selectman asked, off guard; then quickly he cried, “Oh!”, and after another moment’s thinking he said, sounding quite startled, “Listen, girl, don’t talk that way.”
When Eben had come back and had eased himself without audible complaint into the chair his father had occupied, the Selectman said, “We ought to have some apples; rum and apples go together like cement and sea sand. Old Ira Leaming—he was John Leaming, Senior’s father, he was found frozen to death near the fire tower up on Beggar’s Mountain standing up leaning against a tree with his gun tucked under his arm—anyway, when I was a boy Ira Leaming had an apple orchard clear down to where Sodom Street cuts through the town now, where he raised McIntosh apples that give farmers so much trouble nowadays with the blight, sweet as maple syrup. They were the best stealing apples anywhere around. Son, did you ever have gumption enough to steal an apple?”
Eben did not answer.
“Stolen apples are better tasting than store apples,” the Selectman said. “Son,” he then said, “it seems to me you’re kind of stand-offish toward your venerable father. What’s the matter, boy?”
Hester answered, “Eben says the matter is that you live way off in a different century from him.”
There was a silence, during which the Selectman’s face, being turned away from the parlor light, showed nothing; finally he said, “A different world, anyway, I guess. I live in the world of what I consider values; he lives in the world of what he considers realities. He thinks my values are obsolete, I think his realities aren’t any more real or true to life than those Gorgon sisters that had snakes for hair.”
For a moment Hester thought she saw what the cleavage was—the father living in the world of stern education, personal reticence, love of nature; of respect for property, idiosyncrasy, privacy, and poetry; of literal horsepower and the slow walk; of rigid family life; of frugality and thrift, of the Classics and the Bible, of charades and early-to-bed—the son living in a prosy, urgent, intrusive world, a world of “realities”: of revolution everywhere, of war or military preparings and posturings, of fear for the future; of cities and science, of jets, reactors, and ultra-high-frequencies; of cool rationality and nervous breakdowns; of the shifty images of TV; of ads, giveaways, strained budgets, gadgets bought on the installment plan; of speeding tickets and drunken picnics and sexual frolicsomeness in the small hours. The opposition was clear in Hester’s mind for only a flash, then she began to see that her idea was too simple: there were qualifications and shadings and loopholes, for in the father’s world there had also been seething repressions and horrible social injustices, there had been rationalizations and pretenses and fake decencies smothered with heavy decor, while in the son’s world there were miracles of progress…and now she heard Eben, too, exploring the same doubts.
“Stolen apples taste good,” he said, “so where do your values fit in with the Ten Commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ ”
“Stealing apples wasn’t stealing, that was just exercising boyhood rights and prerogatives under New England common law.”
“Does New England common law make provision for all the other sins, too?” Eben asked.
Hester noticed that the Selectman paused again and then did not answer the question. “If you’re asking me where I got my values, son, I don’t know whether I can tell you right out. The Congregational Church drove a lot into me, then before he went mad and they put him in his wooden cage, Parson Churnstick drove a lot out again, by going too far with his nonsense. This man, Hester, was a fanatical Sabbatarian. You weren’t supposed to walk fast leaving the meetinghouse, even in the rain, and once he denounced Belle Booge, who’s Belle Sessions now, from the pulpit for running a comb through her hair on the street on Sunday, as if she’d been a common slut about to have a come-by-chance child. That was enough to cool us young ones off on a certain brand of religion…. Your grandmother gave me a lot of my values, son—she called ’em just plain horse sense. I got some in school from the best teacher a boy ever had, Jared Andrus. I’ve learned a lot from Anak Welch, stubborn as stone though he be. I’ve learned from doing wrong.” He paused.
“In fact, it seems that the only real specific for evil-poisoning is evil itself.” The Selectman stopped and sat there in Puritan rigidity.
“I keep coming back to the Ten Commandments,” Eben insisted a trifle shrilly, pressing his father during his strange moment of discomfiture. “It’s all there in condensed form. If you don’t live by a code like that…”
“You people in the city live on capsules,” the Selectman said, suddenly cool. “You have too simple a view of the Bible, son. The Ten Commandments are in Exodus, twenty. The very next chapter, Exodus twenty-one, tells us believers how to organize polygamy and slavery, and that’s where it says, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’ Oh, I know that book, boy. There are some harsh home truths about human nature in that book, son; it would pay you to read it, instead of talking so slick and glib like some gowk who’s just taken a vitamin pill and read a condensed article and thinks he contains all the world’s victuals and all her knowledge. Don’t forget the serpent of brass and Lot’s daughters and the mess of pottage and Mordecai and the thirty pieces of silver and how there wasn’t a man jack in the crowd who dared cast a stone at the adulterous woman and how the multitude shouted to Pilate for blood—all those things are in there alongside your beloved capsule.”
