The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  Katy Norell, on the verandah, was questioning Taub’s story with a troubled face. Cynthia recounted what had happened to her, and Katy listened incredulously; Eleanor Macdermott came out from the kitchen to lend a semi-official ear. “They couldn’t have heard you, Cynthia,” Katy declared with positiveness. “No one would behave that way.” Cynthia tossed her curled head and made a moue of annoyance. “Go up and look for yourself.” “Better wait for the men,” counseled Eleanor Macdermott, and, as if to dismiss the matter, she moved to the door with a shrug. Katy put out a hand to detain her. “Eleanor,” she begged, thoroughly perturbed, “hadn’t we better do something?” Eleanor shrugged again. “Go up and look if you want to,” she threw out curtly, evading Katy’s hand. “Does it really make so much difference to you?” she added, half in curiosity, half in rebuke. Katy flushed. As a matter of fact, she had been mentally counting the strawberries that could be picked while the group on the porch delayed; her imperious love of pleasure had attached itself to the day’s outing, and the invaders in the meadow seemed to her to have been sent by some malign destiny expressly to cross her will. Recovering from her confusion, she saw the Taubs examining her with a certain morose satisfaction, as though to say, Now it has happened and you see where Utopian ideas get you. This complacent scrutiny put her at once on her mettle. The challenge of the pickers would have to be met and answered. And though she longed for her husband or Haines or Macdougal to come and meet it for her, her very isolation, the unfriendliness of her three companions became, as she inwardly debated, a greater incentive to action. Nervous and shy with strangers, fearful of disapproval, unsure of her own motives, she was driven by these qualities to assume an attitude of confidence that would put the others to shame. “I’m going up and speak to them,” she announced, just as she had decided that it was wiser not to do so—confronted with any difficult problem, Katy always made two decisions; the second remedying the moral weakness that was disclosed to her by the first. No one tried to deter her, and she set off alone up the hill, hoping to hear behind her the voice of a friendly colonist and assuring herself that the unbroken stillness meant that the pickers were gone.

  In all her fears of what was about to happen (the fear of being screamed at, of being abused, of having coarse language used to her, of being impudently flouted), the fear of physical violence did not figure: nor did she imagine that the trespassers would ignore her, for she was accustomed to a great deal of attention. She came into the meadow, therefore, and walked quite decisively to a point almost in the middle. The pickers appeared to be of the very poorest farmer class. “How do you do?” she said, looking at none of them in particular. “We don’t mind your picking, but would you leave some of the strawberries for us?” She smiled timidly and went on. “I suppose you’ve been coming here for years and nobody ever bothered you before, but unfortunately we’ve bought the place and we’re going to be picking ourselves here in about half an hour.” The man muttered something and they all stopped picking for a moment, with surly but tentative expressions as though waiting for what she would say next. What they were expecting of course, was for her to pronounce the words, “Get out,” or to implement in some manner the declaration of ownership she had just made. And she herself felt that something more was called for, but the pronunciation of those words was simply impossible to her, why, she could not afterwards be sure, whether from the fear of being disobeyed once she had irrevocably given an order, or from some natural democratic feeling which prohibited the brusquerie of such a speech. That anyone would refuse to leave a property on which he was poaching, when the situation was put to him equably, was something so foreign to the stiff pride and self-consciousness of her nature that she could hardly compass what was happening, and stood for a moment rooted to the spot while they watched her, not yet commencing to pick again but making no motion to go. “Won’t you leave some for us, please?” she repeated. At this the man snorted, emboldened, it seemed, by her nervousness, and raised his hand abruptly in a rude and half-menacing gesture. To threaten to call the police (the first recourse of the bourgeois mentality) struck her as foolish and futile; imagining that these people read her mind, she dismissed the thought hastily, for she did not wish them to divine how unprotected she was, how unable both morally and physically (would they guess that she had no telephone?) to make an appeal to the law. Mustering all her forces, she turned and walked firmly away from them, as though her mission were completed, and did not quicken her step until just as she gained the road she heard the woman’s shrill voice behind her shouting obscene imprecations. Half-dazed and unable to think connectedly, turning her ankles, Katy stumbled homeward, mechanically constructing arguments which she might have used to put the colony’s title to the strawberries in terms that would win anyone’s sympathy—the rights of legal possession she was ashamed to invoke again. We need them, she heard herself pleading. Remembering the hampers of chicken, the young lettuces, and the freezer of ice-cream waiting on the verandah, she felt sure that this exquisite picnic constituted an inalienable right to the delicacy around which it had been planned. Those brutal people up above were incapable of appreciating the strawberries; they would simply cram them down their throats or take them to the market and sell them. This argument, with its aesthetic claim, its appeal, as it were, to the strawberry (By whom would you rather be eaten?) convinced Katy herself; yet the impossibility of using it to them as an instrument of gentle persuasion induced in her all at once a feeling of intellectual helplessness, to which force appeared the only answer. “We have got to get them out of there,” she exclaimed desperately, running up the porch stairs. “Preston!” she cried, as her husband rose from a lounge chair. “You go up and get rid of them!”

  Preston’s slender back had already stiffened. During Katy’s absence, most of the younger colonists had drifted up to the porch, and a quarrel was in progress between them and the older realists as to whether she had done rightly or wrongly in tackling the poachers herself. All the latent hostilities of the past six weeks had sprung into the open, though, as often happens, the disputants had lined up in what would have seemed to be the reverse of their normal positions. The young people, perhaps from loyalty to Preston, were defending Katy’s action, while the older members were furiously condemning her for individualistic conduct. No principles were being invoked: Macdermott, Haines, and many of the others had not returned yet; and Francis, the young divine, stood apart with Eleanor Macdermott, following the struggle dispassionately, arms folded, judicious, as though watching a Christmas pantomime or refereeing a game of soccer in the parish yard. Preston, silent and angry, glared steadily at Cynthia Taub; he lost his head quickly in argument, like a young boy in liquor. A zealot of the personal, he did not care who was right. He had always detested the Taubs, and the fact that they were now daring to criticize Katy in his hearing was a piece of effrontery that took his breath away. Katy’s suppliant cry went straight to his boyish vanity. Indifferent to the strawberries, not bothering to give or hear reasons, acting principally from defiance, a prime mover with him, he leapt showily over the porch rail and struck off directly up through the fringe of pine forests, disdaining the curved road. The young veteran, who after nearly two months in the colony was still afraid to voice an opinion, now felt encouraged by Preston to do what impulse had been dictating, and without saying anything to anyone, he hurried to Joe’s bedroom, took his rifle down, slipped out the back door with it and followed Preston over the hill. Katy saw him go, but a stupid fatalism held her silent and she did not express her alarm and misgiving until he was out of sight.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” Taub demanded roughly, seizing her by the arm and shaking her. An uncontrollable fear and hatred of violence gave him a baleful aspect; the watery whites of his eyes grew bloodshot and he bared his teeth in a rasp of fury. “I don’t know,” cried Katy. “A-a-a-h,” cried Taub, dropping her arm, and mimicking her sarcastically, “You don’t know,” and pacing up and down the porch, he rep
eated the phrase over and over with varying inflections of disbelief. Katy bowed her head. Francis touched her shoulder, absolving. “It seems improbable that he will use it,” he said. “Of course not,” said Irene, coming up and taking Katy’s hand soothingly; but no one else spoke. This young veteran was an unknown quantity to nearly all of them; he and Irene kept themselves a little withdrawn from the older people; presumably, they were in love. “Trigger-happy,” muttered Taub abruptly, having located this term in his portfolio, and as if in answer to his thought there came the sound of a shot and then another and another. Katy screamed and rushed to the edge of the porch; she was certain her husband had been murdered. “You fool,” said Taub, grasping at her. “Do you want to be killed too?” Eleanor Macdermott, who had been standing with compressed lips, gestured to Taub to release her. “The children are out there,” she acidly reminded him, and Katy, with a new cry of horror, collapsed weeping on the steps. Joe and Mac appeared from the woods with their pails. “What’s going on?” Mac demanded. At this moment, Preston and Bill, the veteran, emerged from the direction of the high meadow, talking with great animation and clearly in the most carefree spirits.

  “Aw, we just took a pot-shot or two,” the veteran called out blithely. “I imagine they’ll be going along,” remarked Preston in his murmurous voice, coming up to the verandah rail and patting Katy’s hand. “Roger,” answered Bill. “Mission executed.” Both factions on the porch exchanged uncomfortable glances. “But you might have killed someone,” exclaimed Harold Sidney plaintively. “Blanks,” explained Bill, laughing. “Merely a show of force.” “You shot at them?” asked Macdermott. “Oh, no,” said Preston. “We just passed the time of day and then went off to do some target-practice.” Joe’s gray face had turned yellowish. Unable to credit his ears, he put a horrified question to Taub, who, arms crossed, sat on the railing, nodding, his lips pursed in Rhadamanthine disapproval. Taub flicked a thumb toward Katy, to indicate the source of the trouble, but Joe ignored the gesture. “You’ve done a terrible thing,” he said solemnly, going up to the two young men and putting a hand on the shoulder of each. “You’ve driven a man and his family off this property with a gun.” “But they were picking our berries; we asked them to leave politely,” put in one of the women. “Who did that?” cried Joe, wheeling swiftly around and confronting the others. Katy indicated herself, and Joe dropped backward a step. “I never thought this could happen here,” he declared, meting out his words slowly, as if unwillingly, and shaking his hawk head. “Have they gone?” he asked, after a moment of silence. As he turned back to question the young men, his nearsighted eyes for the first time focused on the gun. He had been taking it for granted that it belonged to the veteran, but now, as he came nearer and peered at it, frowning, the unthinkable became a certainty. With a short, violent gesture, he seized it from Bill’s shoulder and shoved him to one side roughly as he spun around to the verandah, his jaw tightening. “Who gave him authority to go to my room?” he demanded. There was no answer. “Good,” he declared, and without another word turned and marched off to the tool shed, while the colonists waited uneasily. In a few moments, he was back. Striding to the middle of the lawn, where Preston and Bill were still standing, he held something aloft and signaled for attention.

  “Here,” he announced. “I want you all to see this.” He opened his raised hand and disclosed a hinge and a padlock. He passed it slowly before them, pausing for an extra moment to urge it on the veteran’s gaze. “Enough said,” he declared tersely. “This is going on the door of my room.” He took a screwdriver out of his pocket and turned on his heel. There was an awestruck silence. Macdermott scratched his beard and sent a questioning look at the minister. Francis nodded. Mac stepped to the edge of the verandah.

  “Wait a minute now, Joe,” he called out authoritatively. “That’s a side issue. Let’s decide now what we’re going to do about the pickers.” He moved down to the lawn and a group of the others followed him. Margaret, the minister’s wife, obeying a quick glance from her husband, went up gaily to Joe and twining her arm in his began to pace the lawn with him; in a few minutes, she had relieved him of the padlock. “Let’s get rid of this nasty thing,” she cajoled, as if speaking to a child, and before he could resist her, she had tossed it off into the underbrush. “Sure,” said Macdermott, joining them, and taking Joe’s other arm. “Take it easy,” he remonstrated, with a cautionary glance at the verandah, where charge and countercharge were continuing. “Property is theft, you know, ha, ha!” he added, laughing more effusively than he had intended. The business-man’s eyes protruded. “Say that again,” he demanded. Macdermott repeated the quotation, more lamely, as he became conscious of a gulf between him and the manufacturer that he had never really noticed before. Joe swung around and looked him searchingly in the eyes. “Do you really believe that?” he asked. Macdermott nodded. Joe turned to the minister’s wife. “You too?” he pleaded. “Of course not,” said Margaret kindly. “Come now, we must all be good.”

  With a querulous movement of the shoulders, Macdermott shook off her arm. “Count me out,” he advised, his voice sharpening with anger. “We don’t stand for the same things, apparently.” The last word had a sarcastic bitterness, which he emphasized by a short, cynical laugh. He was nettled by Margaret’s tone and the blandness of her desertion, and was setting out, quite deliberately, to localize the irritation he felt with himself, her, Joe, the intruders up above, Bill and Preston, strawberries, the anomalous, change, by working himself up into a shouting rage, going at it with increasing certainty as his own remarks convinced him that he had something to be angry about. “You pretend to believe in the Gospels!” he burst out, suddenly fierce and vociferous, leveling a forefinger at her as though it contained ammunition. “Francis ‘pretends,’ ” corrected Margaret, with a smile. Macdermott pulled up short in amazement. “Aren’t you his wife?” he demanded, losing his sense of grievance in an immediate feeling of intense curiosity—the idea that a husband and wife could hold separate theories of life was as foreign to his comradely practice as the idea of separate bedrooms. “Let’s not get personal,” said Joe, interrupting him with impatience. “There’s a problem up there to be solved.” Macdermott, who had not forgotten the intruders, frowningly bit his lips. Remembering that he had entered the scene in the role of mediator, he would, in some way, still have liked to make common cause with the business man, whose hospitable attitude toward the strangers had struck him at first as refreshingly human in comparison with the behavior of his friends. But, as he examined his feelings, somewhat to his surprise he found himself siding more and more with Bill and Preston, and regarding Joe’s stern and unrelenting profile with a sharp disfavor. The young men had violated a convention of the commercial world, where the handshake and the banner of welcome were axioms of intercourse—this, Macdermott suddenly divined, was what had shocked the older man and made him now zealous to undo the damage, like the proprietor of a store where a clerk has offended a customer. The idea that the colony’s goodwill existed in Joe’s mind as a perfectly tangible asset now became shocking in its turn to Macdermott’s bohemianism. He did not justify the young men for resorting to fire-arms, but the fact that the pickers had turned nasty when addressed peaceably by a woman presented, as he further considered it, more and more of a poser.

  Faced with the old stickler of what he would do if a foreign soldier were raping Eleanor, he had always taken (jesting) refuge in the story told of an English man of letters—“I should endeavor, sir, to get between them.” But to tell the truth, as he ruefully admitted, in international affairs he felt himself on firmer ground. Had he been present on the verandah, he would probably, like Katy, have gone up and tried to persuade the pickers to content themselves with a modest share. A surly and obdurate refusal was something his mind was not equipped to cope with; morals to him were a chess problem in which the opening gambit elicited a set response, and the errors of modern society he laid simply to failure to use the unconventio
nal opening advocated in his magazine’s pages. “Suppose,” offered Margaret demurely, “we ask them to join our picnic.” Macdermott halted, impressed—the gentle strategies of the vicarage were something new to his experience. “Sure we’ll invite them to join us—if we find them there, which I question.” And suddenly he began to chuckle. “You’ve found the non-violent answer,” he declared, clapping her fondly on the back. “It’s the surest way of getting rid of them.”

  “We haven’t seen the end of this,” Taub was prophesying grimly, when the group finally gathered on the porch; his analogical intellect had reverted to the insurrectionary period which he had witnessed as a boy, in his homeland, and he imagined the hotel set on fire, the wells poisoned, the henhouses raided, the bicycle tires punctured by an aroused and vindictive peasantry, set on by the three in the meadow. How quickly he and Cynthia could remove to a place of safety was the principal question in his mind.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Taub,” exclaimed Macdougal. “You’re not in feudal Europe.” He recalled a statement of Gandhi’s that to refuse to fight is best, but that to fight is better than to run—the soldier is superior to the coward; and with the assurance of authority behind him, he advanced into the fray. “Let’s show them the power of our numbers,” and he picked up a hamper and swung it up on his shoulder.