by John Hersey
* * *
—
Something like a terrible weariness settled over the hemlock woods. The air had gone lax, and every needle on every branch was poised, hushed, drowsy as it were. Hester sat down on the ground, stirred and shifted until she had found a nest of needles that was clear of up-jutting kneelets of roots and of prickly, crackling, fallen twigs, and then, like all life nearby her, reposed limp in the heavy, waiting, resinate air. Sitting that way, she could see under the branches of the nearest trees quite far forward into the woodchuck realm. Nothing moved save the great sound in the distance.
She wept slightly still at the irritation in her eye, and still looked askance at the slumberous world and tried to keep from blinking.
Coit went back up the line and passing declaimed,
“Molly had a walleye,
Saw things on a slant.
She sighed fur Seth, and golly,
You sure could hear her pant!”
Hester felt too sorry for herself even to try an answer.
Once in the city, Hester for some reason remembered in a moment (was it anger—fury—that she was inwardly turning over?), Eben had told her that he had never, not once, heard his father argue with his mother. “Aside from her, he’s got a temper,” Eben had said. “Oh, he can slam on the brakes and holler at the customers like an Irish bus driver, but I don’t know, it seems that inside he’s a peacemaker. People who’re fighting send for him from considerable distances to settle their disputes,” Eben had said; “and he manages it, too, I don’t know how. The lawyers up home hate him, the way he does them out of the lucre of gain, why, he diminishes their business something awful. I remember one time Eli Pinney had an awful set-to with his wife, they were on the point of splitting up and getting a bill, and they decided to have Father in—this was long before he was Selectman—and I remember, I was home when Father came back from their house, and Mother asked him, ‘Did you set things to rights, Matthew?’, and he sat down to supper and took a mammoth helping of yellow squash that I can still see and smell to this day—sweet stuff! Lord how I love it!—and I distinctly remember he said, I was too young to understand what he meant, but anyway he said to her, ‘Nothing wrong there, dear, that can’t be fixed by Mr. Pinney giving his helpmeet a cordial servicing once a week or so. He agreed to try. They’re quieted down for the time being. This is a fine Hubbard squash, my dear.’ Mother said in that terrible calm way of hers, ‘Charity begins at home, Matthew dear.’ I sure puzzled over what they meant.” Eben had studiously mimicked his parents, without satire.
Hester remembered how the Selectman had told her the day before that he and Mrs. Avered could no longer be called friends, and she wondered bleakly how much of real life Eben clearly perceived.
Then she thought she had one clue to the resentment the townspeople felt, even his close friends seemed to feel, toward the Selectman. Perhaps, through sympathy, he had come to know too much about them.
There was thunder again, louder but still deep and blunt, muffled, it seemed, by the yellowy, unbleached heaps of cloud that were fast drifting closer. Hester scanned the oncoming line of the storm with her sidelong vision, and began to be afraid.
At the edge of her small clearing, the skirts of laurel started to dance, though as yet Hester could not really feel the new breeze. Then she did receive a puff of it on her damp skin—a cooler air, and hasty. All at once into a gap in the green to the westward rolled the blackish lower edge of the cold front, with horrible rounded swift-whirling sarcomatous growths pushing down from its underside. One moment the hot sunlight slanted through the hemlocks, the next, was gone; riding the shade came a sharp little wind, under the force of which whole branches bent, and behind this cool puff followed sluggish whirlpools and eddies of the day’s hot, stale atmosphere. Now there was an almost constant rumble from the pile of clouds.
Hester got up on her knees, as if that would make her more ready for danger, and she crouched, looking at everything, as Coit’s walleyed Molly did, on a slant. She wished for Coit, for the Selectman, energetically for Eben; she wanted any company she could get.
A new hard flaw of wind hit the hemlock tops, making such a rough sound that for a few moments Hester could hear no thunder. Now she saw with what dreadful speed the squall line was coming on. She thought of the huge mosques of cloud, miles high, that she had seen from a distance, which were founded on nothing but this roiled, skidding base, and she trembled to think of those edifices crashing down on her and on these fragile woods, as they must.
The wind died for a moment. Suddenly Hester, as if taking a hard blow on the head, subjectively suffered a huge external flash and crack—the annunciatory bolt of the storm’s arrival. At once the full force of a new wind squall pounced on the hemlocks. Hester put her hands over her face, but then, hearing a new awfulness, she took them away again to watch warily and crookedly: Down through the woods from Thighbone Ledge walked the rain. It came as a solid advancing heavy hushing sound, a horrible moving wall of wetness.
The wind went from harsh to brutal, and the hemlocks moaned. Then rain fell. The drops seemed as big as jellyfish. In an instant Hester was soaked.
There came a series of blinding licks of lightning and flat quick cracks of thunder, and the gale and cloudburst increased, and Hester looking from side to side wanted to run away—but to what refuge? She stayed rooted, swaying like one of the trees nearby, and gasped for breath as the cold white rain hit her.
Close the windows! Close the windows! Hester thought of her mother rushing from room to room with a panic-twisted face, crying that thunderbolts travel on drafts; and Hester hugged herself in terror in this gale in the woods. The frightful flashes and claps were so near! Hester felt as if the terrible eye of the storm was looking for her, for her alone; then for a tiny moment she had a weird sensation of crouching beside her sopping self and laughing at herself; even if she lived and was not reduced to a charred basket of ribs and odds and ends by one of the tongues of flame, she was shortening her life to nearly nothing by being so afraid of dying—Dorcas Thrall had given the warning the night before. The terror almost made her laugh at herself, beside herself.
In the midst of all this, she could feel the whole time the tiny prick of foreign matter on her eyeball.
Suddenly, in a pause between bolts, she heard a chorus of excited whistling, penetrating the plash of the rain; thunder shut it out; she heard it again.
She was astounded. Was the line starting up at the very climax of the storm?
Then Hester realized that what she heard was straight ahead—the terrified shrieking of woodchucks in the lightning, thunder, and rain. It was worse for them than for her! On her hands and knees she became dutiful and vigilant. Her fear for herself diminished, and she became instead afraid for the Selectman; this new fright was not unpleasant. She watched for runaway groundhogs. For the Selectman’s sake, they must not be allowed to escape in their frenzy. As the storm’s noisy procession moved on, none of the screaming animals showed themselves. Gradually their crying died down. So violence was slowly drained out of the sky, and horror out of Hester.
* * *
—
The spent clouds were fleeing to the east. Up from the floor of the forest came a pungent smell of newness, of washed earth and fresh life. Hester was amazed to see with her biased eyes that after all the murderous impact of the storm the frail new needles of hemlock still lay in order on the leaders and seedlings, as if freshly combed, and the leaves of laurel were unruffled.
All would have been summer peace, except that down to the right Hester could hear a confusion, an urgency of shouting that made her, at last, rise up alert from her kneeling position. She stood, dripped, and listened. People were running about down there and calling to each other and to the animals. Then she heard someone oncoming with clumsy haste, and George Challenge burst with rolling eyes into her little opening in the thicke
t. “We need help!” he forced out panting. And the drenched politician blurted out a report that some of the groundhogs had “gone plumb crazy”; four of them had attacked drivers down the line; one of them had bit young Ira Pinney, giving him “a nasty dig acrosst the shinbone”; and then the possessed animals had escaped, but might be caught again. Challenge’s wild eyes, appreciatively excursive for a moment, took in Hester’s shirt clinging wet to her flesh. “We need men to help us,” he then gasped, resuming his excitement. “You stay right where you are and don’t let any of the boogers get back through here.” And the short-legged puffing man crashed out of the hemlock circlet and struggled up the line.
Not long afterwards Hester saw a handful of men run crackling down through the woods with desperately earnest faces; she imagined that untried soldiers going into battle to be blooded wore expressions like those, and she thought that for people who had not wanted to come on this second day’s drive at all, these runners were much interested in it—grimmer about it, indeed, than the Selectman himself. The shouting continued. Hester crouched again in order to be able to look forward under the boughs of the surrounding trees.
Across her line of still hurtful, still sidelong vision, some distance from her post, Hester presently saw the Selectman walking without haste down toward the trouble. “Hi!” she called out. “What’s happening?”
The Selectman turned and peered into Hester’s bosk. “That you, Miss Hester? Where’re you hiding?”
“I’m back here,” Hester said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Much ado about four groundhogs,” the Selectman said calmly, walking toward the enclosure. Hester hastily pushed her seaweed-hair back along the crown of her head, and stood up and waited. “It’s not the end of the world, don’t jump out of your skin, just four groundhogs got loose,” the Selectman approaching said. “Did you get all wet and sozzled?” he asked, still hidden from her.
“I’m sopping, I’m a mess,” Hester protestingly said.
The Selectman came through dripping branches into the opening and stood before Hester with glistening eyelashes and a drop of water on the end of his nose. “You’re too young to have read the novels of Rafael Sabatini,” he said. “I used to read ’em, when I had more time for reading, and my goodness, you could count on that same thrilling style in book after book. People have a way of getting over-excited in those books—and my neighbors here in Tunxis are the same way.”
What a queerly various man, Hester thought—Sabatini and Patmore and the Holy Writ and FitzGerald of the Moving Finger! Then suddenly she became concerned over the contrast between the Selectman’s calmness and the strange fanatical look on the faces of the hurrying drivers she had just seen.
“But I thought every single woodchuck was life and death to you,” she said, hoping to rouse him somewhat. “At least I should think it would be, at this point.”
“You look like a mermaid,” he said, ignoring her thrust in a way that could not but give her pleasure; “but why do you glare at me that way?”
“I got some dust in my eye just before the storm. That was the worst storm I’ve ever been in. I thought I was going to be dead and buried any minute.”
“We could’ve buried you in our family plot in the hollow.”
“It’s no joke,” Hester said.
“I meant to show you the graveyard when we stopped at the church,” the Selectman said, as if he had time of day to burn. “That’s where you can see the real Tunxis. You know, in the old days up here, all the women were dead before their fortieth year—you’d’ve been a middle-aged woman right now, one foot in the grave with creeping age even if you hadn’t perished in an electric storm.”
“I am middle-aged. After that storm, I am.”
“That was just a quiet little everyday thunderation. You must have too much shelter in the city.”
“I wanted to see your father’s grave,” Hester said. “Aunty Dorcas told me he carved his own headstone.”
“And footstone. He said his feet hurt in bed if he didn’t have a footboard.”
“What did he write on the stones? Aunty Dorcas couldn’t recall.”
“He put his name on both stones, and then he cut on one, ‘His head was in the clouds,’ and on the other, ‘His feet were on the ground.’ ”
“Aunty Dorcas said he was a tiny man—it was nice he could make himself so tall in the end.”
“I think you’re fond of us Avereds,” the Selectman baldly said.
“It’s just like you to say that, instead of starting out by saying you Avereds like me.”
“I try to be honest. A lot of folks say, ‘I’m fond of you,’ so’s to hear what the retort’ll be; the way most people write letters so’s not to have empty mailboxes.”
“Do you think people are that selfish?” Hester asked.
“Not selfish, just anxious. Seems to me, this is the heyday of the worry-wart. People don’t have to be so nervous about everything, but they are, and I always wonder why. Once I had to fly in an airplane—when Eben was at that camp in Louisiana and they thought he had the infantile, he’s probably told you about the time he was so sick….”
“Yes, he’s told me.”
“When I was in the airport over at the capital, somebody led me up to this little gillhickie like a slot machine, you could put a quarter in and get your life insured just before you took off. My heavens, they’ve even got nervousness mechanized nowadays.”
“Don’t you ever worry?”
“All the time. Sure, I put my quarter in…. Whenever Eben’s around me, I guess I’m supposed to worry about not amounting to anything, but as soon as he goes back to the city it seems as if there’re more important things to fuss about. What’s eating him? Do you know?…” The sounds of shouting still came up from below, and the Selectman, breaking off, turned his head toward them; then, as if those noises, at least, were not worth worrying about, he looked back at Hester. “You look miserable, squinching that way,” he said.
“My eye hurts.”
“Let’s see if we can fix it. Let’s see if we can get the thing out once and for all.”
As the Selectman moved toward her, Hester felt her opportunity. The sun was out to stay; there was a holiday twinkle in the wet hemlocks all around. Hester was exuberant, and grateful for the joyous speck in her eye.
The Selectman stood close to her and said, “Now, let’s see, let’s see.” He lowered his face toward hers, and peered intently in her eye. “My, you’ve got a nice eyeball,” he said softly. “It’s been a dog’s age since I saw such a clear white eyeball. You must be at peace with your Maker, Miss Hester.” Then, putting one hand on her cheek and the other on her forehead, the Selectman pulled the lids of the smarting eye apart, and he craned and searched. His hands were hard, his fingers were mailed with callus; in spite of their tender restraint, Hester realized their enormous unexpressed strength—but she also sensed in them a delicate tremor which she chose to regard as the tiny flutter of some kind of fought-against eagerness. “I’m sorry,” the Selectman said, deeply and quietly, “but I can’t see a doggoned thing.” Hester felt somehow too weak to assure him that the mite of grit was there; really, it was there. “Maybe it’s bedded in the back of the lid,” he said. “Hold on just a sec.” He stepped back a pace, fumbled in a pocket of his soaked trousers, pulled out a limp box of wooden matches, and took one out. “I’d hate to have my life depend on lighting a fire right now,” he said. “I’ll roll the lid up on this. Do you have a hanky?” Hester pulled a dripping handkerchief out of a pocket in her shirt and handed it to him. “When’t comes to snotrags, d’ruther use yourn than mine—on you,” he said in burlesqued Yankee twang, wringing out the delicate cloth with his stubby forefingers and thumbs. “Now!” he said, “let’s have a try,” and he moved to her again. This time he stood dead against her; Hester, lifting up her face to him, drew in her breath and made
herself as tall as her spine would allow. With his big clumsy fingers the Selectman tried to grasp the lashes of the upper lid. “Hold still!” the Selectman smiling said. “Did you ever try to catch a moth on the wing?” Near a flame, Hester wanted to say, near a flame, but she felt too weak—and knew it would be too stupid; she tried to stop blinking. At last he caught the fugitive hairs between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He drew the lid down, placed the match on its lower edge, folded the lashes and a little skin back over the match, and held them tight as he began to turn the match. The lid made an inappropriate sucking sound as it was pulled away from the eyeball, and Hester emitted a tiny, protesting, winsome “Ouch!” The Selectman’s face was very close to hers and as it was turned a bit to one side, his lips were opposite hers, and Hester knew that now she was trembling more than he. She insisted to herself that his compassion, felt in the paradoxical delicateness of his rough touch, leaned far toward something else, something else she scarcely dared define. She thought, jarringly, of Eben, who had the same consideration in his fingers, though they were not shelled with the thick skin of handwork; the same touch, given yet held back—unlike the unstinting, smearing paw-touch of a Coit. Hester breathed against the Selectman’s breathing. “Yup,” he said (with suppressed feeling, she assured herself), “there the dang little thing is. Wouldn’t come out because the lid got swelled up all round it.” He spoke very low; she could taste his sweet hickory-nut breath in her own slightly open mouth. “Now,” he said, “you’ll have to help. Take ahold of the match in your right hand and mash down on the side of the lid with your left hand so it won’t slip off.” For a long, long moment, his hands were against hers; then he took his away. He rolled a corner of the handkerchief and lifted it to her eye. Hester felt his left hand cupping the back of her head, and she was brimful of hope and desire. He flicked the lid with the tiny linen tongue and kept up a murmur as he worked: “Out in a jiffy…that’s a good girl…hold on now…”
