by John Hersey
“Let’s go in and see,” he said.
“I’d like to see the inside,” Hester said, masking with casualness the excitement behind her feigned curiosity.
On the front steps and on the low porch before the now doorless entrance, the Selectman took Hester’s hand in precaution, for the beams beneath were obviously infirm; the porch danced under them in a dangerously cheerful way. Hester was willing to consider the Selectman’s grip significant, something more on his part than an instinct for insurance against liability, and she pressed his fingers meaningfully in return, but he said in a flat, nasal, indifferent way:
“Last summer I came in here one time and there was a chuckie going up the center aisle. He wasn’t singing hymns, understand, just nosing around, yet I tell you it was spooky; I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by a groundhog, but that gave me a nasty turn—it was one of the things that made me want to go ahead with this drive as soon as folks would co-operate. Church is no place for a woodchuck. I could just picture one of them up in the old tub of a pulpit giving forth on morality and damnation. Whoof!”
Still holding hands, the Selectman and Hester stepped through the doorway. Hester drew in her breath, for she had never seen such a harsh, austere place of worship. The room was surprisingly small. Four high, rectangular, paneless windows gaped in each side wall. The pews were not long benches but square boxes with little gates, each enclosure having room for about eight people; some worshippers must have sat with their backs to the preacher. The pulpit, dominating the congregation, was, indeed, a kind of iron-banded tub, chest high, perhaps six feet in diameter, set upon a single pillar with heavy spiral hand-hacked fluting on it; the whole structure, like a grotesque goblet, stood nearly twice as tall as Hester. Narrow stairs with carved railings rose from each end of the altar to landings level with the tops of the pews, then turned toward each other and met up behind the tub. Several feet above the pulpit a large square wooden slab, the size of half a door, hung on a lean-to slant from a slender iron rod that ran all the way up to a roof beam. A narrow, precarious-looking gallery, evidently with room for only one bench on it, clung to three walls above the window holes and was reached by a straight stair near where Hester stood against the Selectman. The interior had apparently never been painted, except for the pulpit, the face of the gallery, and the rails at the tops of the walls of the pews, all of which were a drab, grayish blue.
Outside, not far away, the sounds of the line starting up again could be heard, strange human shrills and bayings. Indoors, the floor creaked underfoot.
“It is cool in here,” Hester said. “It couldn’t have been any cooler under the big pine tree they made it of.” He’ll never give an inch to that sort of thing, Hester said to herself; I must be cool.
“Well, there’re no panes in the windows,” the Selectman said. “It used to be hot enough in here, there used to be twenty-four squares of glass in each one of those windows. Oh, it could suffocate a Hottentot in here…. The drive has started up again. Hear ’em?”
“Look at all the birds’ nests on the rafters,” Hester exclaimed, face upturned, with a put-on pleasure that would show herself to the Selectman as observant, simple, impressionable, a lover of natural things. Would he give an inch to that?
“ ‘Yea, the sparrow hath found an house,’ ” the Selectman said, withdrawing his hand purposefully from Hester’s tender grasp, “ ‘and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts.’ ”
“You’re a curious man,” Hester said, ever so slightly angry.
“His mother and I never gave Eben much religious training,” the Selectman said gravely to Hester. “We used to send him to Sunday school some, because everybody did it, but the pageants they gave at Christmas and Easter, with poems written by Sue Pitkin—she’s a desperate old maid, cousin of Judge Pitkin’s, that lives over on the knee of Beggar’s Mountain—her poems put me off the thing, they were Satan’s work, those poems, they’d turn the stomach of a billy-goat, so we stopped making Eben go, he hated it anyway.” The Selectman paused. “I don’t know,” he finally said, “there’s been a failure somewhere.”
Hester, who was feeling wanton in the hot morning-tide and did not relish being moralized at, thought how different things would be with Coit as her present guide; but, being a resourceful girl, and generally unhurried, she decided to accept things as they were for the moment. “I’ve never seen square pews like these before,” she observed with a charming enthusiasm.
“They had a committee to assign them,” the Selectman said. “I remember when I was a boy, the first idea I ever had of the vicious way people insist on lining themselves up in ranks—So-and-so’s better than Such-and-such, and Such-and-such is better than Whatshername—was one time when the pew seatings for the next year were announced; you see, the seatings were by wealth and social position because the Society kept up the building by a tax on the pews. They had this committee that assigned the pews—they called it ‘dignifying the pews,’ though it was the most undignified, heathen rite you ever saw, well, it was about as humane as child labor—and old Ira Leaming was the head of it and he hated Father, so the Avered family was demoted, we were put below the Cherevoys that Mother considered just a lot of savages, though they’d been rising socially as fast as bread-emptyings ever since they’d taken over a spoke works we used to have here in Tunxis. Mother kept on going to church all the same, but you’d’ve thought she was a-mourning. Us kids, we called these square pews sheep pens, and that’s what they were!”
“People up here are so hard on each other,” Hester said with a little feminine pout at which the Selectman failed to look.
“They are, they are. I remember one time hearing how Parson Churnstick, not long after he accepted our call, visited to preach over in Treehampstead and he gave them one of his poignant goose-pimple talks, and after the service one of the deacons over there went up to the parson and asked him if he dared preach like that at home. ‘Yes, sir,’ the Parson said. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘this sermon you just heard was nothing but a hazel switch; when I’m home I use a sled-stake on ’em.’ ”
“Mother used to say, ‘God is love,’ ” Hester said, her arm rubbing as if accidentally against the Selectman’s.
“Old Churnstick’s God was anger. Anger gradually ate him up. The first sign he was going in the head was a trap door he cut in the floor outside his bedroom for nighttimes, so any intruder would drop into the cellar, and the way we found out about it was one morning when Mrs. Churnstick forgot and dropped into the cellar and earned a game hip out of it. Finally Anak Welch—Anak lived next door—built him a big wooden pen off his parlor, and when the Parson felt some craziness coming he used to go voluntarily into the cage and be locked in. Anak and the Parson’s wife used to read him his own sermons and talk to him about how much his mother’d loved him, and that usually calmed him. Sometimes Anak had to wrestle him to put him away, and they say during those wrestling matches old Churnstick used to think he was Jacob at Penuel, only there was a slight difference, being that this angel—Anak, in other words—had no trouble pinning and trussing this particular Jacob in short order, and the only blessings Anak gave him were Scotch blessings.”
“Truly,” Hester said, in earnest and out in the open, “when I told you that Mother used to say, ‘God is love,’ I meant to say that I hardly know where to turn. I guess I’m too young to understand what love really is, but I guess I’m learning; I’ve had a feeling lately that all the ideas I used to have about love weren’t worth anything, weren’t nearly big enough, and that’s given me a feeling that the whole thing with Eben was falling apart—though maybe it’s just really beginning. I don’t know, I’m mixed up, right now I feel as if you mean more to me than Eben. What can I believe? I want to know what love is, I have an appetite for it, sometimes I have hopes that Eben does, too, if we could just understand more about it, but it�
�s so hard these days….”
“Dear girl,” the Selectman said with what seemed to Hester an acute and painful tenderness, “I wish I could help you, but I’m no particular authority on the subject. What happened to Parson Churnstick and to this building—they bother me all the time, because I think they’re a part of the breakdown of ordinary, everyday love that we see all around us. This church—this House of Love—is simply abandoned. I couldn’t teach Eben this. I guess you and Eben’ll just have to struggle along on whatever leftover ethics you can scrape up for a while till you figure things out for yourselves. Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about—about love, I guess, in Nature and in people. You remember yesterday I was telling about the mother woodchuck that shoved her babies out of her burrow that day to protect herself—that was horrible! Yet on the other hand the woodchucks are apparently very strict and moral when it comes to ‘being in love’; they’re rigidly faithful, you won’t find ary philanderer among ’em, at least that’s what Pliny Forward tells us—you remember he was rubbing it in with Eben yesterday to tease him. I can’t believe, though, that love is just what’s convenient for survival; it’s got to be something to live for, because we don’t live very long, do we, Hester? I just haven’t exactly found it in my born days—love, that is; oh, I’ve been ‘in love,’ but I mean the bigger thing you mentioned; otherwise, dear girl, I’d be glad to try to advise you.”
He was smiling down at her with a sensitive, tortured expression, and Hester was just about to give in to an unruly impulse, when he said, “We’d better get out there and catch up to the line.”
“I guess we’d better,” Hester said, turning quickly toward the door.
Outside, as they hurried forward, the Selectman casually said, “A person could say that I’d had a narrow escape.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have to be told what I mean. You know as well as the next one.”
Hester laughed in a shamefaced way.
* * *
—
The heat became appalling. As she climbed the uphill terrain, Hester felt herself become sticky and irritable. Then, in an unexpected moment of compassion, she felt suddenly terribly sorry for the woodchucks scampering ahead—all dressed in fur, they were, in this cooking temperature, and in nearly black fur, at that, which under the down-pressing sunlight must absorb a frightful temperature. Hester imagined herself in a fur coat—didn’t they sell something called “sheared marmot” in the stores?—and the very thought made her feel faint. Why didn’t the woodchucks die or go mad in their senseless, sun-struck flight? Hester paused in shade wherever she could. The hot, humid air was hard to breathe; it was oxygenated soup.
Three woodchucks were seen breaking through the line below Anak Welch, and for a few minutes, fearful always of encountering one, Hester was called upon to run here and there in a vain effort to recapture them, and afterwards sweat poured off her face and her shirt adhered to her back.
At last, in a suffocating glade, the branches of whose trees seemed to hold the noon air in a kind of death grip, the drivers of Division Four paused for lunch. Tempers crackled. Mumbling their sandwiches the leaders of the division exchanged recriminations over the three animals that had got away, and volunteers blamed the higher-ups. Hester saw the Selectman visit part of the argument; he left soon looking gray and offended.
Reluctantly the drivers began to go forward again.
At this end of the hollow, the mounded, rock-ridged land was largely wooded in descendant stands of the original native forest—feathery hemlocks, for the most part, and under them masses of wild mountain laurel clutching on branch ends dried relics of what must have been, a few weeks before, a glorious pink and white salute to the solstice. The generations of hemlock were all crowded together there: half-fallen giants still partly rooted and sustaining bedraggled crowns, heroic adults with straight trunks two feet thick, young leggy trees jostling each other and reaching for sky and for life, and delicate fans of seedlings outspread uncared-for underfoot—a fecund, optimistic society. The glossy leaves of laurel nodded limply in the heat. This was the finest part of Thighbone Hollow—everyone had said that at lunch; but it was not cool at all.
By slow stages the line reached the approaches to the funnel at the Lantern Flue.
During a halt Coit came down to Hester. “Seems like it’s hermin’ up for a storm,” he said. “Did you hear that rumble yonder?”
“I did, I thought I heard thunder,” Hester said.
“Look at the devil’s darnin’ needles!” Coit said, pointing at two flirting dragonflies. “When those things behave that way, you can be sure there’s thunder comin’. It seems to tickle their diddlybumps.”
“What’ll we do if there’s a downpour?”
“Get wet, I calculate,” Coit said callously, and callously he added, “I imagine the groundhogs’ll be nervy and kind of undone, ’cause they can usually go to ground when the cracklin’ and boomin’ begins, but this time, with no hidin’ place at all, I imagine they’ll twit and fling and kick and stram and carry on like glory-be. ‘Oh, there’ll be dancin’ in the dingle, Suzy-pie!’ ”
“I don’t like it,” Hester said. “I hate thunder.”
“Now that’s just like a woman,” Coit said. “Hates thunder when lightnin’s the only thing to be scar’t of. Lightnin’s very partial to hemlock trees, I’ve heard that many’s a time.”
“You’re a nasty person,” Hester said with a heat matching the day’s.
Already to the west, up beyond the lace of the evergreens, could be seen awesome ranges of glory-capped cumulus. A gusty wind had sprung up, and the fragrant hemlocks gossiped.
“That’s the funny wind,” Coit said, “the wind before a storm. See how it’s blowin’ toward the thunderheads. Twenty minutes from now it’ll be squallin’ the other way. Just like a woman,” he added with a smirk.
Still wearing a twisted faint smile, Coit stepped to Hester and without apology put his arms around her and confidently laid his cheek against hers. Hester, swiftly overcome by a silly, agonizing desire somehow to punish the Selectman for his resistance to her, and relying on an impression that she and this man who had the fragrance of leather were chambered by close-grown trees, slid her hands up Coit’s shirt-back. Coit promptly kissed her; she closed her eyes and floated on her sensations in a void, where for some time she experienced this and that and the other thing, until at last she was convinced that a man’s palm was on her skin between her shoulder blades, that her shirt was unbuttoned from collar to apron, and that steady fingers, which had found and had tobogganed down the zipper at the right side of the waist of her slacks, were now bargaining with the button of the waistband; and she decided she had chastised the Selectman more than enough and it was high time to open her eyes, and she did. A puff of the contra-wind just then lifted a whirl of humus dust off the forest floor and, with a whisk and a lift, threw a speck of it into one of Hester’s newly unveiled eyes. The particle smarted sharply there.
As if struck by the heel of a hand, Hester’s head flew back. She got her fists onto Coit’s chest and began to push and rap. “Stop it!” she said in fierce undertones. “What’re you thinking of, anyway?”
“Same thing you’ve been,” Coit thickly said, releasing her, though not without having held her long and close enough to have made her realize he had sufficient strength to do anything he wanted.
Both Hester’s eyes had turned on their faucets to flush out the hurt from one; she could feel the courses on her cheeks.
“Cry-baby!” Coit said.
“I have something in my eye,” Hester said, “if you want to know.”
“Oh, so that’s why you wanted to stop,” Coit said triumphantly.
“You ought to have your face slapped,” Hester said, winking and fluttering her eyelids. “Ow, ow, ow,” she said in pain and shame.
“Grab
aholt of the lid and pull it down and count fifty,” Coit said.
A distant thunderbolt rolled down the rough alley of the western sky.
“Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing. Sounds like we’re goin’ to have a socdolager of a shower before we know it,” Coit said happily while Hester tugged at her eyelid and wept.
Without having succeeded in clearing her eye, she buttoned up and tucked herself away. “You’re a mean, nasty person,” she said blinking as he stood watching with a grin on his face.
“No, not me. You’ve got the wrong pig by the tail…. Did you get the grit out of your eye?” he asked with exaggerated gentleness, as if to dispose of her unsavory charge.
Even as he was asking the question, a man’s voice began calling Coit’s name from up the line. Both he and Hester then heard the shouts, and he turned and ran.
Hester found in a few moments that by looking sidewise, with her pupils rolled to the right, she could keep her eye from hurting, except when she blinked. While she stood tensely glaring in this sidelong way, Coit came back into her glen, and swiveling her oblique stare toward him, she groaned, “Oh, God, here he comes again.”
“They say to stay right here till the storm passes,” Coit said, wholly impersonal now, bossy and pragmatical. “The main thing is not to let the woodchucks panic back through us. If you see a single one of ’em, holler out, ‘Groundhog! Groundhog!’, so the people on either side of you can close in and help hold the line, and if you hear your neighbor shout, move over toward him and begin to make a racket. Get the picture?”
“I get it, sugarlump,” Hester said in what she hoped was a scornful tone, looking at Coit queerly out of the corners of her eyes.
Coit turned his face then and reciprocated clownishly with a stare that was just as twisted as hers. “I’ve got to go tell the others,” he said, and slowly closed one of his eyelids over half his cater-cornered look; then he left her.
