by John Hersey
“Uncle Anak must be famished,” Eben said.
“We ought to tell people to keep down off that skyline,” Coit said, apparently brooding now more about the fact that no one was listening to him than about the hazard of careless cover. “That’s the first thing any rook learns, keep off the lousy skyline.” He was quite angry; he was Hester’s idea of a sergeant.
Mrs. Tuller leaned over and murmured to Hester, as Coit began to argue his sudden obsession with two or three drivers on his side of the picnic circle, “Roswell’s giant brain don’t accommodate itself to projects that are the least bit casual, like this. Fact is, the boy ain’t as bright as he might be. I believe he owes money on his I.Q.”
But, Hester thought, he was the first to think of me when I was caught in the vines.
“And every spring, along about May,” Pliny Forward said, still drilling Eben with his attention, “the faithful lovers produce a litter of four or five babies. As regular as clockwork. Would you like to hear how they do it?”
“I’m going to take Uncle Anak’s place,” Eben said, standing up with an awful effort, as if he had a bag of cement on his shoulders. He turned his flushed face for a moment toward Hester, and said to her, “See you later.”
“Every single spring in May,” Forward said to the reddened back of Eben’s neck as Eben stumbled out of the picnic glade.
Hester said to the Selectman, “Eben called the giant ‘Uncle Anak.’ Is he a relation of yours?”
“No,” the Selectman said, “he’s nothing to us but friend. All the younger generation round here call him ‘Uncle’; I guess it’s out of awe of his great size—or maybe to acknowledge there’s some kind of enormity in every family in Tunxis. But ‘Uncle’ Anak is part of what’s behind your dre’ful Eben, as much as if he was a relation. Do you know how stubborn Eben is? Well, Uncle Anak’s the stubbornest man I know; otherwise he’s the salt of this quarter of the earth. Stubborn? One day when I passed his place I saw him out turning the hay in a meadow—kicking it up with a fork to get some dampness out of it; when a squall hermed up and it began to rain. Well, I stood there by a pair of bars in the fence and watched him go right on and turn the whole rest of the field in the downpour. Afterwards he walked over to me and said, ‘Guess you’ll put me down for addled, Matthew, turning hay in the rain, but I told myself I’d turn this whole field this very afternoon, and vummed if I didn’t do it.’ Our Anak has a temperament like cornmeal mush: he’s always having to let himself cool off, but he’s really soft through and through. He’s so sentimental you could stick a cat’s tail plumb through him and not ruffle it. He’s not soft physically, though, not as far as courage goes. There’s many a strong wild colt he’s caught and shod in other days round here, many a wild steer he’s yoked, and many a time he used to tie up his neighbor, Parson Churnstick, a devout man but powerful even in his late years and sometimes crazy. I believe Uncle Anak stands six feet seven in his cotton socks. He can do anything with his hands—build a coop, a cart, a plow, a keg: anything made of wood and iron. He seems to run into a heap of accidents, I must say—built a triphammer shop once, to do some of his metal work, and lost his thumb because he was so bound and determined to see his machine work that he tried to hold the bed-piece under the hammer before the bed-piece had been secured. The hammer worked satisfactory—a couple of knuckles’ worth too well. His conscience, by the bye, is ten feet tall. One night several years ago when he kept cows, he forgot and left the barn doors open; it was midwinter. He punished himself the next night for his lack of consideration for the creatures by opening the doors again and sitting all night in a straight chair in the blast of a January nor’wester. Of course the doors were open on the cows again that night, and I guess some of the poor creatures got the sneezes and worse; but not Anak—his conscience was too clear for him to catch anything. I guess you’d have to say he’s somewhat restive as a townsman. Seems to keep juggling a few lawsuits with his neighbors all the time, sort of testing their agility. Yet no one is more listened to in town meeting. As I guess you saw last night, he’s reverend-looking with those big ears outspread like a benediction, and he’s slow and careful of speech, and what he says is solid. His views are unpopular, but his influence is great. He’s a Democrat in a rock-Republican town, and he wouldn’t change his principles if you offered him a ten-room house made out of mother-of-pearl with ruby window lights. Stubborn! He was driving down to the capital once in June, way in the next valley, three hours to drive in those days, and I’d asked him to carry a letter by hand to a doctor friend of mine in the city. Of course Anak forgot, till he was home after dark and just turning in his driveway. Well, he wheeled around and went all the way back to town and banged the man out of bed at close to midnight and put the letter in his hand the way he’d said he would and got back here in awful small hours. That’s how set he is. Just as set as a cement pavement. Shush! Here he comes.”
The huge man came close, sat down with a groan, and, protesting that he’d lately lost his appetite, ate enough sandwiches to picnic a large and wholesome Sunday-school class.
Soon it was time to resume the search, and the drivers were asked to go forward to the picket line and take up their stations again. Hester managed things so that she walked up to the line with the Selectman, about whom she had been thinking during the morning, and with Roswell Coit, who had, it seemed, been thinking about her. She carefully carried the bezoar in her hand.
“Did you hear about Dorcas Thrall?” Coit asked the Selectman.
“What’s she been up to?” the Selectman asked. “She’s coming to our house tonight.”
“D’you mean you didn’t hear about Grandma Thrall and the chicken hawk yesterday?”
“I’ve been busy getting up this drive.”
“I thought you’d be one of the first to hear,” Coit said.
“Well, you know how sometimes you don’t have a chance to swat the flies on your own back stoop for a week at a time,” the Selectman said.
“That’s funny,” Coit said, “with you people bein’ so close to her.”
“I’ve been busy,” the Selectman said.
“You must’ve been busy, not to hear.”
“Oh yes, I’ve fair chased myself around a tree this last few days.”
“I thought you’d have heard.”
“Well, you know how ’tis.”
“Yeah, I know, but still.”
“Sometimes I don’t hear what I’ve been doing till about a month after I do it.”
“Well, you’re a busy man, Mr. Avered, you sure flog yourself with work.”
“Oh, I get by.”
“No criticism meant. You get by, sure you get by. I just thought you’d have heard.”
“You thought wrong, my boy.”
“All I can say is, it’s God digged strange.”
“I can’t help that. A fact’s a fact.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“So you said. I heard you.”
“Don’t think I enjoyed chasing myself around the tree.”
“Who said you did?”
Then for some time the men walked along flanking Hester and saying nothing. It seemed to Hester that the two were preposterously angry with each other and that the subject of Dorcas Thrall was now closed, as well, perhaps, as many other subjects; she had a queer feeling that these two New Englanders might never be able to reach each other again—perhaps they never had. She felt sad about it. She liked them both!—the Selectman because he was the sort of man she enjoyed thinking about, the Coit because it was already clear that she was the sort of woman he enjoyed thinking about; they were her East and West who could meet perhaps only through such as she.
“This Dorcas Thrall,” Coit said to her at last, evidently having decided to cut the Selectman out of further conversation, “she’s ninety-one years old, they sa
y she’s ninety-one—old as rape and thievery, anyway; and always been scared of birds.”
“This girl knows all about her,” the Selectman curtly said.
“Yes, I know a little about her,” Hester said in a friendly way to Coit.
“In that case—” Coit said, and clamped his mouth shut as if he had slammed down the engine hood of a car.
“But I haven’t heard about yesterday,” Hester said.
“I suppose you’ve been busy, too,” Coit bitterly said.
Just then the three of them broke from the thin woods they had been negotiating into a clearing, and in the center of the clearing they saw Eben locked in mutual terror with a woodchuck.
The animal was crouching on the ground and Eben was standing over it, and both figures were ambiguously posed—either menacing or craven, it was hard to say which; or both were both at once, maybe. Each seemed to be trying to bluff the other and to bolster the self. The woodchuck was pressed flat to the ground, but its legs seemed under a spring-like tension, ready at once to pounce or bolt. Its head was raised, and its teeth were chattering in the hideous way of nature, both human and at large, that threatens when it fears and fears when it threatens. This was a direful rattling sound the scared beast made. As for Eben, he stood hunched forward, his elbows bowed and his fingers tensely outstretched, his knees visibly trembling, towering over the animal, Hester thought, like a figure in a nightmare she had often had as a child, of a terrifying-terrified djinn that could do her great evil but might at any moment be driven into its home, a dark-glassed bottle, by a rub on a ring that was somewhere, somewhere. Eben was as pale as autumn smoke. He seemed unaware of the approach of the three—or dared not break his hypnotic relationship with this animal that made its vicious teeth so audible.
Hester glanced at her companions. She expected the bully Coit to be laughing, but, on the contrary, he himself had blanched, as if awed and even a little frightened by this uneasy poise of flesh and flesh. The Selectman was evidently stricken with a father’s shame; he stood for a few moments blushing and shaking his head.
No sooner had Hester looked back at Eben than, from beside her, the Selectman rushed forward and with a downswooping motion picked up the woodchuck by the scruff of the neck, lifted it in the air (it was much smaller, Hester saw, than the one she had watched sunning itself against the tree), and threw it forward into the edge of the further woods. At the moment of its landing, as if the wind was being biffed out of a thrown rubber toy, the woodchuck emitted a high-pitched brief whistle-like scream, and then could be heard scuttling away at a nice pace.
“You great gorming lummox!” the Selectman said harshly to Eben—more to vent his embarrassment, Hester thought, than to curse his own flesh and blood. “Let’s get up into line.”
Now Hester found herself walking out of the clearing and through thin woods alone with Roswell Coit.
“Your boyfriend was nervous,” Coit said.
“Eben lives in the city. He’s a city man,” Hester said as proudly as she could.
“I remember a joker at the Volturno—that was about the dirtiest fightin’ we had, at the Volturno, unless maybe Salerno—anyway one time the colonel told this joker, this Sanchez, he told him to go down by the river to a place there and do a little cleanup snipin’, all by his lonesome. Sanchez stood around on one foot and other foot, and begun to sweat and he got the trembles. The colonel didn’t tolerate no chicken-do, and he said to Sanchez, said, ‘What the whoozis a matter with you? You Chrissakes scared, Sanchez?’ So Sanchez, this wonderful spic from Jersey, he says, ‘No sir, Colonel, I ain’t scared—just shakin’ with patriotism.’ Sometimes it’s hard to tell what makes folks look nervous.”
“Eben used to hate you,” Hester deliberately said.
“I don’t hold him a grudge. We used to go fishin’ quite a lot, down at Catspaw Pond, me and him and young Quinlan Leaming. They had pretty good striped dace and calico bass there, and a slew of sunnies. Quinlan and me used to think Eb was awful fussy, namby-pamby. He had to have his angleworm tidy on the hook. He wasn’t sissy—he was regular, but small and hated trouble, and Quinlan and me, we loved it. Hallowe’en night—you should’ve seen the candle tallow on the big store windows and mailboxes down all over town! Eb didn’t like to amplify around that way, and in school he was always farse to make the teacher take notice of him: he was too damn bright and full of sweet-gas for us common folks. And listen—his handwritin’ on the blackboard!—nothin’ but curlicues and arpicues. So you can see we used to get after him whenever we could; usually he’d run or hide on us, but if he had to, he’d fight like a judgment…. But look how wrong we were, look at us now: Quinlan you don’t hardly hear from, he’s got a terrible streak of lack in his character, and me—well, I’m just a puke of misery besides Eben.”
Hester looked hastily at Coit’s face and saw an enigma. He had spoken his last words in a flat voice, and she could not tell whether he meant what he said, or was playing for sympathy, or was being sarcastic.
“What do you work at?” she asked.
“Outdoors work. I have to be outdoors. Since the service I can’t abide to be cooped up.”
“You ought to be a policeman,” Hester maliciously said.
“I thought of that,” Coit said, with a sadistic twinkle coming into his eyes. “That’d be good work. I thought of that, only I had some bad trouble, a bad run-in, with the M.P.s in the service, and the Legion fellows all know about it, so I wouldn’t hardly get past the muster. I thought about that, though.”
“What’s your complaint against Eben—that he’s too hoity-toity, or what?”
“I don’t like these brainy coots, they make me feel squawmish. They don’t shake hands hard.”
“In other words you’re afraid they may be better than you.”
“I used to like Eben Avered,” Coit said, and Hester saw that now he was serious, almost pathetically serious. “He could stand up to anybody. We had a game with our sleds—we used to coast down two ways, either there was scoochers, that was squattin’ on the sled, or there was bellyguts, that was lyin’ down frontways, and we’d get a line of us on either side the runway with sticks in our hand to hold acrost the runway on a slant, and the thing was to try to get under the scoocher’s or the bellygutter’s sled-runners like with a crowbar as he passed and offset him in the snow. There never was a time we could knock Eb off, never. He was nimble! I’m in mind of another game”—and slowly the muscular bully was melting away before Hester’s eyes into a rather fat boy, too big for his age, everlastingly proving himself—“that we called haily-over. We picked up teams and got on opposite sides of a barn and threw a ball over top of it and hollered out a number on the other team and if the number didn’t catch it, he had to come round to our side, till everybody’d been captured that way. I remember one day we were playing it, Eb wasn’t with us. The ball was coming overhead, my number was called, I was just about to snag the thing, then what do I see but Eben Avered coming out of Booge’s pasture in his overhauls with a bouquet of piss-abeds—I guess you’d call ’em daisies—in his arms? I never did catch the ball, it could’ve clapped me on the head. He said they were for his mother, so I sassed him for a mother-lover, and he dropped the piss-abeds and come after me, boy oh boy oh boy. He can take care of himself when he has to. I don’t think those flowers were for his mother at all; he was just covering up in my opinion.”
“What do you think of his father?”
“There’s a man I don’t trust. This woodchuck round-up!”
“Why don’t you trust him?”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“Why don’t you trust him?”
“He just ain’t trusted in this neighborhood.”
“Why?”
“All right, then. There’s an item of a little slip he made once; or rather, he got found out that he’d made it.”
“What kind of
a slip? What do you mean?”
“If Eben ain’t told you about his own old man, it stands me in hand to talk about the weather, or double-yolked eggs, or something or other. You ask your boyfriend—when he stops shakin’. And when you ask him, he’ll start again, like as not.”
They had come to Hester’s station in the line, and had been standing there talking awhile. Now the commotion of the drive began once more up to the left, and Coit hurried off to his neighboring post. The line began to move.
* * *
—
Hester thought as she walked of games she had early played: city games, games of loneliness. You all lined up on opposite sides of a room, a big room, as spacious as sleep, and there was going to be some kind of rush, and piano music starting and stopping, and after the rush and the chords you found yourself clutching the hand of a boy—which one?—and they told you he was your true, your only love; but you hardly knew him. You hid alone in a coat-closet under some shelves, crouching among the galoshes trembling with hope that the door would crack and light would flood you and you would be found. You fled on a playground to the count of one hundred. The games always made you feel alone, and you didn’t want to be alone; all you wanted was to be known and felt, to be close to the others.
That was not Eben’s worry, it seemed. Eben, in his haily-over and sled-gantlet and all his open-air play, must have struggled to hide his talents, must have cherished mediocrity, must have groaned in his bed at night wishing he were dull as the others. How terrible to be what all wished to be! Hated for nimbleness, hated for intellect. Hester remembered what one of her friends had said about Eben shortly after Hester had met him: “He’s unbearable! So busy trying to keep from being a genius.” That girl had been talking about a pretentiousness she had seen in Eben, but on another layer there was this other horror that Eben suffered from: the horror of becoming what everyone wants to be and tries so hard to be.
