by John Hersey
Once in the city she and Eben were going to the movies, riding part way on a bus, and Eben said quite casually, “I got a raise today.”
“Oh, Eben!” Hester said, and slipped her hand under Eben’s arm.
“Five dollars a week,” Eben said, sounding solid.
“Move over, John D. Rockefeller,” Hester said.
But at that Eben took offense. “Let’s not go too fast,” he said.
“Have I said something again that I didn’t understand?”
“Just because I’m a bit more prosperous than I was yesterday, you’re going to start not liking me. I know how your mind works. You’re just like everyone else, like all the ones at the office; they hate me now because of this puny raise. They all would crawl to Mecca on their knees for a five-dollar raise, but let somebody get one, and suddenly he’s an outcast. Before he gets a chance to pay back the money he borrowed last month, he’s already got airs, his britches are too big, they hate him. They hope he gets fired.”
“I guess I am just like everyone else,” Hester dismally said.
“I think you might have the decency to sympathize with me.”
Hester began rather methodically to cry. “You don’t know what you want, so you get mad with me when I agree with you,” she said, sniffling.
“There’s an old lady up in Tunxis,” Eben helplessly said, “who prays every night that none of her sons or grandsons will ever be rich. Mrs. Dearthick. She prays every night for her boys to stay poor, and I think she’s going to have her way just by main force of praying; though I must say they’re co-operating with her, they have no talent for making money stick to their fingers.”
“All I meant was,” Hester said with a saline, moisty affectionateness, “you’ll be a millionaire before you know it; you’re my favorite plutocrat.” She blew her nose.
“Take my father,” Eben said. “He’s a failure. I don’t know what it is, the minute it looks like he’s organized for life, he makes a mistake that sets him back to where he started when he was my age.” But suddenly Eben tumbled from these heights of condescension and was miserable. He shook his head. “It baffles me,” he said. “Father’s so happy.”
Then Eben did something Hester had seen him often do: He went all the way home in his mind. Frequently when he felt a city tension, when he wanted to vacate an argument, when he was mixed up or angry, he did this runaway to Tunxis that seemed to clear his mood. He had already started back when he had thought of Mrs. Dearthick and of his father, and now he said, “Speaking of britches being too big, did I ever tell you about Father’s prank with Uzal Belding’s pants?”
“No, Eben,” Hester said, blowing her nose again. “No, you never did.”
“You see, Uzal’s mother was fat to begin with. One thing the Beldings did was make cheese and sell it, and they economized on a cheese press—never did have to get one—by Mrs. Belding sitting on the driver of the hoop and doing her knitting. I was much younger than Uzal, but I remember I used to go into their house sometimes to get cheese or eggs for mother, and there Mrs. Belding would be up on a new cheese like an ottoman balanced on a teacup. Uzal was fat enough in school. He dropped out at ninth grade: they said he was always cheery, like all roly-polies, still down deep I guess he couldn’t stand the teasing he laughed out loud at with his face. Anyhow, he dropped out of school and took up walking from village to village with a box of magic tricks and a stereopticon and I think he sold cards of gingerbread, too. When he went from house to house, he was something to look at! With his box on his back, he looked like one of the castellated elephants that my father had in his chess set as rooks. He got bigger and bigger, outstripped his mother by a ton—they could have used him as a hydraulic press to bale rags for the paper mill in Treehampstead. By the time he was about twenty-five and I was ten, Ros Coit and I and some other kids used to follow him around and hoot at him. He was a peddler of the old wooden-nutmeg school—drawling, snuffling, haggling away over pennies. Well, this one time someone found out he’d left a pair of pants at Boyds’ to be dry cleaned, and Father, either Father or Anak Welch, got somebody to sneak them out of Boyds’ shop and on Sunday morning, just when church was letting out, Uncle Anak and Father and Judge Pitkin all three got into the pants, their left legs in its left leg and their rights in its right, and they got Frank Cherevoy to play the Legion drum and just as the people were pouring out of church, they marched up and down the green, the drummer in front, rub-a-dub-tup-tup-Joe-Joe-Bunker, and the three gents lock-stepping along in the pants behind. It was a sight. Mother’d had me in church with her, we were on the front steps when they came, and she froze up and nearly broke off my shoulder pinching it because I laughed with everybody else. That wasn’t too good for Father in the town; that particular laughter on the Sabbath backfired some. Uzal became sanctimonious later, gave up his box and began distributing religious pamphlets and begging for candy around the township. Finally they advertised him for an impostor, or something of the sort, and he died a couple of years ago in the corrective institution over near Whigtown. Poor coot!”
“Your father sounds like fun,” Hester said.
“He’s a very serious man,” Eben said, “essentially.”
* * *
—
The sun coasting down the slope past the meridian threw enough heat onto the woodchuck drivers in steamy Thighbone Hollow so that Hester, in her torn shirt and blue jeans stiff with newness, with the bezoar in her hand, perspired, flagged, and wished the afternoon done with. She suffered especially, for perhaps half an hour, as she went through some thick underbrush, where her only entertainment, besides recollection of things past, was provided by some blackberry bushes, nastily brambled and sweetly fruited, from which she picked the enormous, purple-black, ripest berries, and ate them as she struggled. She had never seen or tasted such swollen, ready drupelets. No one came along the line to visit her all afternoon. She felt languid, and though she kept up her share of the noise of the drive, she began to lose her interest in, or at least her apprehension of, the woodchucks. From time to time a halt was called. She sat down whenever she could, for her legs were becoming heavy and dull.
Once, at last, while she sat during a pause, at about four o’clock as she guessed from the sun, she heard someone approaching from her right, from the direction of the canal. It was Mrs. Tuller, with tiny pearls of sweat on her huge forehead as gray as oystershell. “Where’s that Coit boy?” she asked. “How far along is that rascal boy?”
“He’s right up here,” Hester said. “If the line was moving, you’d know. He makes a noise like a monkey-house.”
“He is a cage full of monkeys,” Mrs. Tuller said. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to Coit. He answered promptly and ran through the woods down to her.
Mrs. Tuller told him that the line was approaching Job’s Creek, which was now perhaps a quarter of a mile farther along. She said that there was one plank bridge across the creek to each division, and that Four’s bridge was situated near where this upper end of the division would reach the stream. When an appropriate command would come down the line, she said, and it would probably come at the end of this halt, then, as the picket line would start to move again, the center of each division would lag back, both in pace and in noise, while its two ends would loop forward dinfully toward the creek. Thus four sacs would be formed, and after another halt, giving time to check the soundness of the pockets, they would gradually be tightened toward the bridges, until the woodchucks within were driven across to the other shore.
“As soon as you two on this end of our division get to the creek,” she said, “swing to your right downstream along the bank. You’ll come to an old stone wall after a bit, that runs spang down to the stream. Hide behind it, on the upstream side of it, and wait there. The bridge is just below that wall, so the rest of us’ll work whatever woodchucks we have in our sac up against the wall and along it to the bridge
. Your job is to make sure none of ’em try to cross over top the wall. Keep hidden, so the animals’ll come along unabashed. If they have a mind to get over the wall, jump up and make a racket. Don’t chase ’em, just wave and dance around on your side of the fence. You know:
‘Ha! ha! ha!
And sadly sing….’ ”
Hester grew excited at the prospect of facing the pursued at last.
“How’s your arithmetic, dear?” Mrs. Tuller asked her. “D’you think you could count the creatures as they cross the bridge?”
“I can try,” Hester said.
“They might be in clumps and bunches, you might have to do some fast addition.”
“I can try,” Hester said again, nettled at being made to feel like an elementary-grade scholar.
The agile, bigheaded schoolmarm hurried away up the line, her buttocks bobbling and curtseying to each other, as if to swift musical counterpoint, and soon, evidently having conferred to her satisfaction up yonder with the anchor of Division Three, she came bouncing past downwards again, announcing that all was set. “All set,” she said mock-heroically, in tones of Pallas Athene, “to smash the groundhogs’ bridgehead!”
Before long, indeed, the confirming message, to form pockets, came down the line. Coit, going off to his station, said cheerily, “See you by the crick.”
* * *
—
Those at the ends of the divisions who were pulling forward the drawstrings of the pockets hastened now, with renewed eagerness, and the quarter mile remaining to the brook, if the distance was that great, seemed to Hester to be quickly left behind. She found herself with a fast beating heart on the near bank of Job’s Creek, which was only a rill in the woods, perhaps six or eight feet across, but with a vigorous current that had cut a deep, definite, and fairly straight path in the loam of the forest floor; from its banks, here and there, dead root-masses protruded, and the rivulet protested in whispers at the many rounded stones in its mattress.
Coit came along. “You’ve been eatin’ berries,” he said.
“Did you ever find such big ones?” Hester asked.
“I can see the juice on your lips, where it dried.”
Hester drew the back of her hand across her mouth.
“Don’t bother,” Coit said. “It looks O.K.”
They walked downstream together and before long reached the wall Mrs. Tuller had described. Many of its stones were dappled with fine moss and lichens, and here and there honeysuckle hunched across the long pile in hedge-like masses. The ground beyond the wall, once cultivated, had grown up into woods considerably junior to, but no thinner than, those on the upstream side of the barrier. A few feet beyond the wall, the bridge lay across the stream—just three heavy planks tacked side by side to crosspieces.
“Why don’t we set down while we wait?” Coit asked, pointing to a place where honeysuckle offered a dry couch. Hester settled down with her back to the wall, holding the bezoar in her left hand. Coit sat on her right. There was an awkward silence.
“What about the old lady and the chicken hawk?” Hester finally asked.
A flicker of sullenness crossed Coit’s face, but then, at once, cheerfully he said, “That old aunty is tougher’n a boiled owl, I never saw the beat of her. Last Friday night she showed up at the Grange dance, and there she was at next to midnight out on the floor cuttin’ up didos alongside of us young ones—and she’s supposed to be ninety-one.”
“What makes people live so long?” Hester asked.
“It has to be in the family,” Coit said.
“They say it’s in the mind,” Hester said.
“You know all about Aunty Dorcas and birds,” Coit said with still a trace of resentment.
“Mr. Avered told me she’d been scared to death of birds all her life.”
“That’s what made this thing yesterday so rich. She has a slew of cats—I guess she figures they hate anything with feathers onto it just as much as she does—and one of them is a kitten, been weaned about two weeks. Well, old Dorcas was exercisin’ her back bendin’ into her laundry tub in the kitchen yesterday washin’ a sheet when she heard this kitten squallin’ like it was bein’ murdered, out in the yard, so the old Thrall looked out the open door, and it was bein’ murdered, a thunderin’ big chicken hawk was on the back of the thing, bareback ridin’ it to death, and peckin’ and snatchin’ at it. I dad! The way she tells it, it didn’t take her long to skip out there in the yard on light feet, and scared of birds or no scared, she squatted on that big thing—did you ever see a chicken hawk close to?—’cause it looks as savage as a meataxe; I’m scared of the things myself. Anyway, this bird-leery old body landed on the hawk like a thousand of brick and she took aholt of its neck and wrung it like a hen’s till it flapped round and in no time it was ready for the pot, so to speak, though I don’t guess even Aunty Dorcas would have the stomach to eat such a bob-wire creature. But she killed it dead, and she’s tickled as a gimlet. Says she was still scared most of the way off her hooks, though, later in the day, when she saw a sparrow on her sill.”
“I’m sort of afraid of woodchucks myself,” Hester said.
“You’re just like your boyfriend,” Coit sarcastically said. “You’re city people, that’s your trouble. That was your excuse for him, don’t forget.”
“I’m a lot more apprehensive than Eben,” Hester said.
“I wisht I lived in the city,” Coit said, looking longingly at Hester. “Do you like it in the city?”
“I love it—but what’s the matter with Tunxis? I’m beginning to like Tunxis.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with Tunxis. Couple weeks ago, I was standin’ with some of the fellows down by Eells’, that’s the drugstore there on Station Street, and this car drove up, it was an old battered thing, and this joker with a long pursed-up neck like a turkey-gobbler’s stuck his head out the window and asked us where he was and where he was goin’. Young John Leaming was standin’ there, he’s got a mouth like a pickerel, and he looks like the Day of Doom, he’s so sour, but he funs people the whole endurin’ time, so he said to the stranger, as sour as a frost grape he said, ‘You’re in Tunxis and you’re goin’ straight to Hell.’ Well, this old gump smiled as clever and cheerful as you please, then he squizzled up his face and he said to young John, said, ‘Thank ye, bub,’ he said, ‘I thought from the looks of the countryside and the natives round here I couldn’t be any great distance from that place.’ And off he went like he was satisfied. There was more truth than comfort in that comeback, that’s the whole trouble with Tunxis in a nutshell.”
“Hell is wherever a person lives,” Hester said. “Anybody knows that.”
“I like blackberries,” Coit said, looking at Hester’s mouth.
“I never ate such big ones,” Hester said, wondering what sort of stain was on her lips.
“Can I have a taste?” Coit asked, and before Hester understood just what he meant, he had crawled toward her, had put both arms powerfully around her, and had begun to kiss her savoringly on the lips.
Hester set the bezoar down on the ground beside her in case she might find it necessary to put her arms around this active young man. His bold tongue began to inquire for the taste of berries in her mouth. He had a faint smell of leather about him. The thought came into Hester’s mind that with any luck at all, this might have been the Selectman, and at that she squirmed and pulled her face away from Coit’s and said, “Watch out! Mrs. Tuller’s liable to come any minute.”
“I still like blackberries,” Coit said, settling back with a glower.
“The John Leaming you speak of,” Hester said, trying with quick dry talk to make a eunuch of Coit, “isn’t he the owner of the land we’re on?”
“He has title of this land, bramble bushes and all,” Coit said, “and I still like his berries.”
“His father certai
nly was angry at the caucus last night,” Hester said quickly, drily.
“All the Leamings are famous for their tempers,” Coit said, with a fine aggressive complacency on his face again.
* * *
—
Mrs. Tuller must have had enough of trotting up and down the line, for this time she sent George Challenge as her deputy to test the readiness of the arc of Division Four. When Hester and Coit heard someone coming on the far side of the wall, they got to their feet and saw the weary-looking politician coming tick-tock on his bandy legs, swaying like the arm of a metronome.
“Spread out! Spread out, you two,” he barked. “You’ve got a hundred and fifty feet of stone fence to cover there, till the line tightens up, then Tuller and Anak Welch’ll come over your side the wall. Spread out! We’re trustin’ you two. Young lady, ma’am,” he said to Hester, “you’re to count the creatures as they go by, is that right?”
“I’m going to try,” Hester said.
“Keep down and just peek over top the parapet,” Challenge said. And uttering other official admonitions, he labored off down the line, tick, tock, tick, tock.
Hester and Coit crouched behind the wall nearly a hundred feet apart. Once as they waited Coit turned his face toward Hester and gave her a ridiculous, cheek twisting wink, as if to seal an understanding between them that he would be back for more fruit of her lips.
“Seems like they’re dawdlin’ a longful time down there,” he said in a loud voice after a while.
“Sh-h-h.”
At length the noises of the drive began again, far down the line at first. Later the stalkers of Division Three, not far away at Hester’s back, began to shout and whistle, and once she thought she heard a brave faraway roar from Eben, and that led her to wondering where the Selectman was. The sounds of Division Three were closer and louder-seeming than what came from Mrs. Tuller’s people lower down, and for a time Hester was fearful lest the woodchucks from below might be turned back by the racket upstream.
