Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “Buddy’s already attended to it,” said Virginia dryly.

  “Oh, well, then. Good. I’ll be on my way.”

  “Don’t forget your bag,” said John quickly, picking up the small black suitcase.

  “Bag?” said the doctor. “That’s not my bag.” Nodding his head gravely, he opened the door. Then he looked back over his shoulder. “See here, Barbara, I wish you’d come back to Emerson Hospital and work on my floor. Seriously. We’re shorthanded up there. And even if we weren’t, a good nurse like you would be a blessing. How about it? What did you stop working for anyway?”

  Barbara shook her head at him, unable to speak. The doctor left.

  Buddy picked up the bag. “It’s mine,” he said. “I went back home and picked up a pair of pajamas. I mean, I’m staying here tonight. I just think you people should have a man in the house. Okay, Virginia? Okay, Barbara? I’ll just be here tonight in case you need me.”

  Barbara and Virginia looked at each other with red eyes and said nothing. John felt resentful. A man in the house, as if he, John, weren’t man enough to take care of things. But he looked at the red splotches on Buddy’s bare arms and spoke up amiably. “Boy, you really got zapped by those yellow jackets. What happened anyway? What kind of nest was it?”

  Buddy held up his arms and looked at them too. “Oh, you know, it was one of those — you know the kind, a big paper one. It was right there in a tree. You know, sort of a big bush, I guess, with this nest in it, a great big round —” Buddy made a shape in the air.

  “In a bush? But that’s not —” John stopped, and held his tongue. Later on he would go down there and take a look for himself. Yellow jackets didn’t build paper nests in bushes. They’d have one in a hole in the ground, or under a rock someplace. But Buddy wouldn’t know that. It was only the white-faced hornets, Vespula maculata, that made those big paper nests in bushes and trees. If Buddy had seen a big one, it would have been left over from last year. And there wouldn’t have been any live hornets in it to sting him. John opened his mouth to ask more questions, but Virginia was speaking to Buddy, her eyes dangerously bright.

  “Listen, Buddy, you don’t need to stay here. Really. After all, we’ve got somebody else. John’s going to be here from now on.”

  “Oh, well, John.” Buddy laughed. “Good old John. John’s just a baby. What you girls need is an old greyhead like me. I’ll just stay here tonight to make you girls feel safe and sound.”

  Once again John flinched. Old greyhead. Buddy wasn’t old and grey any more than he, John, was too young to be any help. But John kept still. Virginia had stuck up for him, and that was enough. His chest filled with an excited push of breath. Of course it was sad, really sad and terrible, that Mr. Heron was dead, but there was something thrilling about it at the same time.

  “I’ll just take the guest room,” said Buddy, waving his suitcase, then letting it sag on the floor. “I think I’ll go upstairs right now, if you kids don’t mind, and lie down for a minute. Okay with you?” For a moment the red face with its curly brown beard looked sallow under the sunburn. Buddy’s shoulders were drooping with exhaustion.

  Relenting, Barbara stood aside and said nothing as Buddy left the room. Virginia merely turned away and looked out the window.

  “Look,” she said, “the wind is rising.”

  John looked out, too, at the landscape spread wide beyond the window. The racing clouds had closed in, eliminating the patches of sunshine. Over the house there was a squealing rush of starlings. The branches of a big oak tree were lunging up and down. Then, with a crack, one dropped and fell slowly through the tree, striking the ground with an audible thump and bounding down the hill.

  It was a queer kind of wind, thought John. Unnatural, the way it was picking up those little twigs and leaves and whirling them high in the air. Too much force exerted in an unexpected direction. Then John was reminded of something else. Closing his eyes he saw a thick red neck, swollen with yellow jacket stings, bent for an instant over the stump of the honeysuckle bush, and then the arms and shoulders rearing up as Buddy hurled the bristling stump far away — too far, impossibly far — into the thicket. John opened his eyes and shook his head. Nobody could throw that far, not even those guys with sixteen-pound iron balls at track meets. He must have been mistaken.

  Six

  THE WIND GREW STRONGER. IN CONCORD A MINIATURE TORNADO whistled across the summer fields, tearing shingles from the roof of John Hand’s house on Barretts Mill Road, picking up a plastic trash bin from the backyard, scattering its contents all over the orchard behind the house.

  Mary and Homer Kelly heard the roar of the wind, and the bump and clatter. They ran outside and began dashing after fluttering pieces of bread wrapper and wadded fragments of Kleenex, while five-year-old Benny, John’s little brother, brought out another wastebasket just for fun and let its contents blow away too.

  Homer rushed Benny indoors again, and spanked him out of sight of the neighbors. But Benny’s howling was worse than his naughtiness, and his recovery was worse than his howling, because he promptly began reciting the capital cities of South America at the top of his lungs. When the telephone rang, it was the last straw. The shrill ring mounted above the piercing whine of Benny’s recitation and catapulted Homer out of his chair. He lunged at the telephone, intending to snatch it up and crash it down. But Mary got there first.

  “Oh, John, dear,” she said into the phone, smiling broadly at Homer, “we were just beginning to worry about you.”

  “Montevideo, Uruguay!” bawled Benny.

  “I’ve got a letter for you from your mother,” said Mary. “How did it go today, dear? Did Mr. Warren give you your job back? He didn’t? Oh, hush, Benny, dear, I can’t hear.”

  “Caracas, Venezuela! Lima, Peru!”

  “You’ve got another job instead? Oh, good for you, John. What? Oh, no, how terrible. Mr. Heron? Oh, that’s just terrible. I mean, I used to know his family when I was in school with Barbara. Benny, dear, please.”

  “Santiago, Chile!”

  Homer hurled himself at Benny and wrestled him to the floor. Benny screamed with joy. Frantic with rage, Homer clapped his hands over Benny’s mouth and hung on.

  It was no joke. A whole week in the company of his remarkable five-year-old nephew was wearing Homer down. He was sick and tired of the high-pitched precocity of Benny’s perpetual chatter, exhausted by Benny’s fantastic feats of memory. The bright sparkle in the boy’s baby eyes made Homer feel over the hill. His stomach was sagging; his brain was decayed. Every day he was losing thirty thousand brain cells to old age, or was it thirty million? Whatever it was, it was certainly a fact that he was growing stupider with every passing day. What if his students should discover the passing of his genius, those young men and women who had signed up in such numbers for the Thoreau seminar he was teaching with Mary at the local college on Walden Street? What if they began whispering among themselves that one of their professors was losing his grip, that he was turning prematurely senile, that he couldn’t remember a single utterance of the great man of Walden Pond?

  Benny bit him, and rolled over with shrieks of laughter.

  “Ouch!” yelped Homer. Shaking his wounded fingers he turned to his wife as she put down the phone, and whimpered, “What was that all about? Didn’t John get the job?”

  “Oh, Homer, something awful happened,” said Mary. But then, detecting in herself a morbid pleasure in disaster, she flattened her voice and related calmly the news of Edward Heron’s death.

  “Good God,” said Homer. “The poor bastard. You say our John’s going to be working for his daughters?”

  “La Paz, Bolivia!” shrieked Benny, and then, having rounded off the South American continent, he began on the large cities of the Japanese archipelago. “Tokyo! Osaka! Kobe! Yokohama!”

  Oh, God, it was hopeless. Groaning aloud, Homer picked up his tiny nephew and hoisted him to his shoulder. “You know, Mary,” he shouted, “I wondered why Gwen and
Tom took Freddy and Miranda along to that summer conference on the culture of fruit trees in New Delhi, and left poor little Benny behind with John. Of course, John had to be here to earn money for school, but Benny? Why didn’t they take Benny? Did you notice the way they nipped out of the house with all their luggage the minute we came in the door? They were afraid we’d change our minds.”

  Mary laughed. “Well, thank heaven, he still needs a nap every day. Gwen told me his daily naptime was all that kept her sane.” Mary reached up for Benny and took him in her arms. “Come on, dear. Time for bed.”

  Instantly Benny’s eyelids drooped. Leaning his head on Mary’s shoulder he stuck his thumb in his mouth and allowed himself to be carried upstairs.

  Left alone in the pulsing silence, Homer breathed a sigh of relief. Taking a can of beer out of the refrigerator, he settled down gratefully at the kitchen table with his card file. As Mary came downstairs again he shook his head at her mournfully. “Three whole months of this. I don’t know if I can take it. When I married you, I didn’t know you were going to give birth to a frightful little nephew like Benny. Say, listen, do you think we could leak some kind of brain-damaging gas through the keyhole of his nursery? Just to lower his IQ a hundred points or so, and make him human like other people? And now, my God, we’re going to be stuck here without John. I’m really going to miss that boy. He was kind of a buffer between us and Benny, and he was going to babysit for us once in a while. Now it’s just us and the infant monster, all by ourselves.”

  “Well, I’m glad for John, all the same,” said Mary. “He’s all excited. And he’s promised to take his spider collection with him. We can be grateful for that. I wonder what it’s like at the Herons’ now. You know, Homer, I used to know Barbara Heron in college. That was when they lived in the big house, with all the gardens.”

  “The big house?”

  “There in Lincoln. Near Walden Pond. Right across the Concord town line. It was a big hunting estate in the old days. Alexander Higginson built it. One of the Boston Higginsons. Of course, that was before big income taxes and the collapse of the stock market. There was a kennel and a stable and a piggery and a huge imitation-Tudor house at the top of the hill, with a great hall and a vast fireplace and a lot of stuffed moose heads hanging from the balcony. Barbara’s grandfather bought it from Higginson in the nineteen-thirties. But by the time I knew the Herons, the whole place was going to seed.”

  “Where did old grandfather Heron get his money?” said Homer.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. Copper mines or something. There wasn’t much left by the time Edward came along. And he didn’t do much to help the family fortune. He was an amateur horticulturalist, playing around in the greenhouse, breeding black peonies and green roses and things like that, and clipping his sprawling bushes into fancy shapes.” Mary gazed dreamily at Homer, seeing instead the mossy path around the dark secret pond, the forest of pines and hemlocks, the ponies grazing on the open field. “We used to pick snails off the peonies, and in the winter we slid down the front yard on hideous plated tea trays. I’m sorry the Herons aren’t in the big house any more. Barbara’s father sold it a while back to old Mr. Whipple, and they divided the land up between them, and the Herons went down the driveway to live in the old farmhouse, where their help had lived before.” Mary began poking in the refrigerator. “Homer, you pig, did you take the last can of beer?”

  “Whoops, sorry.” Regretfully Homer turned his empty can upside down.

  Mary picked up the kettle to make coffee, then paused with the kettle in her hand. “Mrs. Whipple died — everybody said it was an excess of good works — and then Mr. Whipple fell ill with some nasty kind of cancer, and Barbara Heron went back up the hill and nursed him until he died. So now there’s only Buddy left.” Mary gazed dreamily at the faucet as she filled the kettle. “Virginia Heron — I wonder what she’s doing now? The fabled Virginia. I mean, Barbara’s the one I used to know. Virginia was just a little girl then.”

  “Fabled?” said Homer. “Why? Is she some sort of goddess, beautiful as the dawn?”

  “Oh, no, not really.” Mary thought it over. “I mean, she’s not like a movie star. Not that kind of beautiful. But beautiful as the dawn? That’s more what she’s like. Yes, that’s just about right.”

  “Oh, come on,” scoffed Homer. “Beautiful as the dawn. When one woman says another woman is beautiful, you know she’s overlooking a flat chest, a cross-eyed squint, and a nose like a brussels sprout. But of course,” — Homer looked pious and rolled his eyes at the ceiling — “she has this spiritual expression. She’s just so terribly nice.”

  “Well, all right, Homer, you wait. Why don’t you come with me to her father’s memorial service and see for yourself? It’s going to be on Saturday, John says.” Mary leaned across Homer and turned on the television set. “Time for the news. I wonder if they’ll say anything about Mr. Heron’s death.”

  “And the weather,” said Homer. “Maybe they’ll say something about that freak wind.”

  “… freak wind at Logan Airport,” said the newsman, talking rapidly, obviously excited, “has resulted in the crash on take-off of a chartered turbojet and the death of the governor of Massachusetts with a party of seven.”

  “My God,” said Homer.

  “Lieutenant Governor Michael J. Brumble is at this moment taking the oath of office in the west wing of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill. From now on, Lieutenant Governor Mike Brumble will be performing the duties of the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” The newsman’s voice darkened, as he slipped easily from simple reporting to the pronouncement of his own political opinions. “It has already been rumored that the state Democratic leadership will insist on a party caucus in the fall to determine whether or not Brumble will in fact become the Democratic candidate for the gubernatorial election in November. Sources predict that this appalling tragedy will provide a golden opportunity for the political comeback of Democratic ex-Governor Howard Croney, whose twelve years in office resulted in the construction of two thousand miles of highway connecting every village, hamlet, and crossroads in the state of Massachusetts. Thus do the political fortunes of —”

  “Oh, shut up, you son of a bitch.” Homer switched off the TV savagely. “Damned vulture. What a ghastly turn of events. Poor old Brumble. He hasn’t got a chance of winning the nomination next fall, not with that bastard Croney piling in against him with all his cement mixers grinding and his blacktop boiling and glopping down over every green meadow in Massachusetts. Not a chance in holy hell.”

  Seven

  HOWARD CRONEY HAD BEEN DRIVING HIS WIFE CRAZY FOR FOUR years, ever since his defeat in the last election. After his twelve-year occupation of the State House had come to an end, he had done nothing but lean back in his rocking lounge chair and watch television — baseball games, football games, hockey games, basketball games, soap operas, game shows, and situation comedies. But now, staring in rapture at the burning wreckage of his successor’s chartered plane, he sprang to his feet, slopping his vodka and tonic on the floor, spraying potato chips all over the rug, and shouted the happy news to his wife, who was passing through the living room with a basket of laundry.

  “Oh, the poor soul,” said Madeline Croney, dropping the basket in dismay.

  “Pour soul?” cried the ex-govemor. “Poor soul? Madeline, don’t you understand? Don’t you see what this means?”

  The phone rang, and Croney was soon in excited conversation with a colleague from days gone by. Phone call followed eager phone call. “Contractors,” reported Croney happily, rushing to the kitchen for a refill, rattling the ice cubes out of the tray. “You’d think every building contractor in the state and the president of every highway construction firm was urging me to run for office, and trying to pour money into my campaign.”

  “Well, naturally,” said Madeline Croney testily, “your well-known propensity for building eight-lane loop-the-loops through every cow pasture in Massa
chusetts might have something to do with that.” The ex-governor’s wife was a sensible woman with a sharp tongue, who was occasionally able to control her husband’s excesses and farfetched vainglories, and keep him loosely within the bounds of legality. “What about Lieutenant Governor Bramble? Don’t you think he might get a lot of votes in the party caucus? I mean, now he’ll have two or three months in office to show people what he can do.”

  “Who, old Brumblepuss?” Howard Croney whooped with derisive laughter. “Look, Madeline, the man can’t even campaign outside the city of Boston. He’s scared of cows. He won’t even look out the window of the State House at the green grass on Boston Common. How do you think he’s going to get votes in Fitchburg? Springfield? Great Barrington? Honestly, my pet, you can’t really believe the man would have a chance, running for the nomination against a person of my experience, a man of my —”

  “Well, I don’t know. You never can tell. I always kind of liked the man myself.”

  “Good Christ, woman, whose side are you on?”

  “You know, I sometimes wonder,” said Madeline Croney with some asperity, snatching up the bottle of vodka and slamming it back in the cupboard.

  The phone rang again, and immediately Howard Croney’s frown of irritation was transformed. He chatted gaily for a while, and chuckled, and listened, then said good-bye. “Delighted to hear from a new supporter. Welcome aboard!”

  “Who was that?” said Madeline. “Another gravel-pit baron, I’ll bet.”

  “No, indeed,” said Croney huffily. “It was a young man out there in one of those snobbish suburbs. He simply wanted to wish me well. Says he’d like to help out in any way he possibly can. I’ve got his name here. Clarence Whipple. Sounds like one of those old Yankee families that came over on the Mayflower. Real class. Harvard or Yale man, I shouldn’t wonder. Princeton, maybe. Nice upstanding sort of chap, not like some of the trash that’s growing up nowadays. You know, real friendly. Wants me to call him Buddy. That’s his nickname, Buddy.”