by John Hersey
* * *
—
While Eben went upstairs for the suitcases, Hester stood awkwardly with the Selectman and Mrs. Avered in the parlor. The Selectman was sitting in a straight chair, and Mrs. Avered stood protectively beside it. In the presence of his son and of Hester, the Selectman had scrupulously and with hair-raising detachment told his wife everything that had happened to him—making it clear that he understood he had suffered all of it because of the failure of the drive. Hester had not been inclined to elaborate his understanding on that point, and Eben had merely glared at her. Mr. Avered had told the others that Anak Welch had suggested he ought to resign as First Selectman, and as to that, the Selectman had told his family he thought he would wait two or three days, let the tops fall off the waves, but he supposed he would have to go through with it. “You know, when Anak gets his mind set on an idea,” he had said, with the haunting calmness of a man who has made several starts in the world, “you can’t budge him with a team of workhorses. He’s like a damnable stump of oak.”
“We’ll see,” Mrs. Avered had said, evidently prepared to pick up and try to use whatever time might leave on her doorstep, “we’ll see.”
“One thing, though,” the Selectman had said, with a brief and incongruous burst of intrepidity, “I’d awful much like to get some folks to go out there and do that drive over again. We know now how to manage it; we’d have that hollow cleaned out before you could say Jack-Be-Nimble.”
“For God’s sake, Father!” Eben had said with the vehemence that comes from shame. “Don’t you know when you’re licked?”
“I’d hazard a guess,” the Selectman had said, his head tilted to one side, “that if you’d give me some time, give me a couple of years, you know how the years soften things and blur things…”
“No, no, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said, applying a palm to her husband’s forehead and stroking it, as if to soothe an invalid, “leave the woodchucks be. Don’t fret about going back in the hollow just yet. Leave them be awhile.”
Hester felt weak, and there was a lingering bouquet of bile on her palate. Now, while Eben clattered upstairs, she experienced a sudden revulsion, and this revulsion produced in her mind a decision: She would not marry Eben Avered. At first she attributed this strangely comforting conclusion to a contempt she felt for Eben, based upon what she had taken in during the weekend, fruit of an accumulation of glimpses at an Eben she had never clearly seen before. Then slowly, with increasing discomfort, she began to wonder whether that feeling might not have been projected, whether the true target of her scorn might not be her own pitiful self; and fearfully she admitted the possibility that her decision about Eben was a decision to flee from the afternoon she had just experienced, to fly away from what she had learned about herself, to run away from the face of the son of the Selectman, to escape the Selectman’s image, never to see the Selectman’s face again and all its reminders, never to be visited again by the memory of her failure to loose the shouts that had lain beside her tongue ready for utterance that afternoon. And then, as her horror and disgust grew, she was rattled by a shudder very much like those she had suffered in the chill fog of the early morning before all this had happened, when she had been standing in the vague dawn not knowing really where she was; for she knew that even if she did not marry Eben, she would always henceforth be on the run, pursued by the Erinyes of the marmot drive.
“Why, child!” Mrs. Avered said. “You’re white as the driven snow. Matthew! The girl’s tired to death! Wouldn’t you like a wee glass of winkum, my dear, to comfort you on the road?”
“No, thanks,” Hester said. “I’ll be all right in a minute.”
Eben came down. He dropped the bags in the hall and joined the others in the parlor. Hester knew, looking at him, that she loved him as well as she could love anyone, and she felt a stab of compassion and perplexity and regret. She stepped toward the Selectman, who remained seated, and she wanted to say she was sorry if she’d—if she’d…. But what could she say? The Selectman did not know yet what had happened to him, or truly why, and only a few moments ago she had begun to be struck, for the first time, the first surely of many times, by the full force of what had happened to herself during the woodchuck drive. She said a flat goodbye. It had no love in it, and she was sorry. She shook Mrs. Avered’s phlegmatic hand. As she went to the front door she saw that the wooden cogwheels out of the clock were still on the floor in the hall.
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