by John Hersey
“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 crosse
d 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, anyw
ay.
* * *
—
“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.
