by Jane Langton
“I’m afraid she’s just a skirmish-rider,” said Virginia to John. “She’ll come back. Or rather, she’ll send in big guns next time. Important people. You’ll see. Old friends of my father’s.”
Then the ground opened up in front of Virginia. A long dark box was descending in fits and starts as the ropes jerked through the handles. A thud of dirt struck the top.
Virginia ran ahead of John. He followed her awkwardly into the house, saying nothing, not daring even to touch her sleeve.
Eleven
JOHN WAS SITTING AT HIS PLYWOOD DESK, WRITING IN HIS NATURAL history notebook.
I found a barn spider last night. They’re kind of rare around here. It’s the first one I ever saw. Mostly they’re farther north, like in Maine, like the spider called Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web, because E. B. White lives in Maine. I was outdoors with my flashlight and my butterfly net looking for moths to feed my spiders, when I noticed something in the corner of the shed door. I wouldn’t have seen it at all, if it weren’t for my stereoscopic vision. My eyes could sense an almost invisible plane between me and the door. It was a good-sized orb web, a little lopsided, and the spider was up at the top in a little nest of loose threads, upside down about a quarter of an inch from the top of the door. She’s a female, really pretty. Sort of grey with blue markings, a little bit furry.
I’m going to keep an eye on her and see what she does. Maybe I’ll get an umbrella and sit under it like Fabre by the hour. (And a hat. He had this flat black hat.)
It was Sunday morning, the day after the funeral. John lifted his head from his notebook. What was that noise? He hadn’t paid any attention to the distant drone, but now it had become a faraway clattering, an almost inaudible sort of — what? — a ripping noise. What the heck was it? John closed his notebook and went to the window.
The International diesel tractor was old, but the John Deere apparatus trailing behind it was new, a five-foot rotary mower that would slice through stands of inch-thick brush. Buddy was driving the tractor. He squinted in the morning sun and grinned to himself as he lurched through the head-high jungle of aspen, buckthorn, honeysuckle and firecherry, listening to the tearing snap of a thousand wiry stems, bent and trampled by the tractor, then whipped off at ground level by the great blade of the mower. He couldn’t help laughing. It was really so funny, the quick way his mind worked. Most of the time he wasn’t even conscious of figuring things out. He just knew what to do. One swift action followed another, almost as if his body didn’t need direction from his head. By the time Barbara and Virginia woke up this morning and looked out the window, it would be too late. He’d have the really critical part of the tangled wilderness covered with scattered pieces of mangled brush.
Buddy pictured himself leaning down from the tractor, explaining it to Barbara, all friendly and reasonable: “But, Barbara, you heard what William Warren said yesterday. We’ve got to put our land to agricultural use if we’re going to lower our property taxes. That’s all I’m doing. I mean, look at this. It’s no good the way it is now. Just a jungle of weeds.” And then he would play his trump card …
“… just a jungle of weeds, Barbara.” Buddy put his arm around the roll bar of the tractor and lowered his head to shout at her above the noise of his idling engine. She was standing below him in her bathrobe, her green rubber boots planted on the bed of torn mulch that had been a forest of honeysuckle a moment ago. She was looking up at him angrily. John Hand stood beside her, fully dressed, looking up too with his blank baby face.
Barbara was furious. “Where did you get this damn thing anyway?”
“The town barn. Nobody uses it on Sunday. Harvey Cunningham, you know, the superintendent of public works, he lets me use the machinery on Sundays sometimes. And anyway, Barbara, you seem to forget.” Buddy raised his voice. “It’s my own land I’m working on here.”
“Your own land? What do you mean, your own land? The hell it is. This is ours, right here. You know it’s ours.”
“No, no. I’m sorry, Barbara, you’re wrong. The bound is over that way. The stone wall. You’re all mixed up.”
“The stone wall?” Barbara swung around. “It’s over that way? Are you sure? I could have sworn —”
“Of course I’m sure. Go look. It’s over in that big mess of honeysuckle beyond that line of apple trees. Go ahead. You’ll find it right over there.”
Barbara looked at the apple trees, her mouth open. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, well, the hell with it. Go ahead. Do your worst.” She backed away from the tractor, lifting her bathrobe. The hem was wet from the dew-laden grass, plucked and draggled by the fierce thorny canes of the blackberry patch.
John backed up too, and together they watched Buddy adjust the throttle and put the tractor in gear. Grinning at them, he drove away, swaying gently from side to side on the high seat. Behind him the great invisible blade of the mower gnashed at the low forest of bushes. Ripping and chopping, it threw out in a wide arc a thick cover of ground honeysuckle and firecherry. Where there had once been dappled shade there was now only a raw new surface exposed to the morning sun.
“He makes me so damn mad,” said Barbara.
“I guess he means well,” said John slowly. John didn’t think he had the family standing to say anything critical about Buddy Whipple, although there certainly were a lot of strong feelings he would have enjoyed putting into words.
“Means well!” said Barbara. “In a pig’s eye, he means well.”
John was entranced. He had never heard anybody say “in a pig’s eye” before. And he was glad to know that Barbara didn’t trust Buddy, because it was really awful the way the guy had moved right in on the two of them. Why didn’t they make him leave? Well, Barbara had tried to. Last night after all those people went home, she had hinted around that he should go too. She had practically put her hands on Buddy’s chest and shoved him. But Virginia hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t helped her sister at all. Why not? Walking slowly up the sloping lawn, John gazed at the weedy grass under his feet and wondered what kind of hold Buddy had on Virginia. He was afraid he knew what kind of hold it was. Goddamn him anyway. John drew a deep shaky breath.
“What would you like me to do around here today?” he said to Barbara.
“Oh, John, it’s Sunday. You’re not supposed to work on Sunday. Nor on Saturday, either, only yesterday we certainly couldn’t have done without you. I’m not even sure we said thank-you yesterday, John, we were all so exhausted.” Barbara clumped along more slowly in her rubber boots and turned on John a smile of friendly interest. “Tell me, how are your spiders doing?”
“Oh, they’re fine. They didn’t seem to mind being moved. I’m keeping track of their behavior in a journal. You know, like Jean Henri Fabre. Did you ever hear of Fabre?”
“Fabre? The insect man? Yes, of course.”
John was charmed. “Well, I think he was just great. I’ve got some of his books. Aunt Mary keeps looking for them in second-hand bookstores. The Sacred Beetle, The Hunting Wasps. There are a lot of books like that.”
Barbara stopped and looked at him. “Tell me, John, what were those wasps around my father the other day?”
“Yellow jackets. They’re very ordinary, but they’ve got a terrible sting.”
Barbara began climbing up the hill again. “Well, I just wondered. Listen, would you see if you can find my father’s asthma medicine, back there in the apple orchard? It’s got to be there someplace. A small box, about so big. Bright red. There was a little hypodermic needle in it, and some pills. I’ve looked all over the house for it. I’ve ransacked his things. It just isn’t to be found.”
“Well, okay. Yes, of course I will.” John turned around and began to run down the hill.
“There’s a stone wall down there someplace,” Barbara shouted after him. “The edge of the property. From there it goes all the way to the road. Listen, I shouldn’t be doing this to you. After today you’re not supposed to work until Wednesday. You hea
r me?”
Twelve
THE TRACTOR AND THE ROTARY MOWER WERE STILL RATTLING AND whining far away as John stepped high-footed over the acre of catbrier and honeysuckle that was a kind of front yard to the wilderness of the old apple orchard. The wilderness itself was not a pleasant forest but a nearly impenetrable jungle, thorny with blackberry, itchy with poison ivy, entangled with wild grapevine. Oak stumps sprouted huge watersuckers with ugly enormous leaves. The bark of the firecherry was shiny like cheap purple dress goods. The apple trees were buried deep. Only their cloudy tops were visible.
Above the clash and clatter of Buddy’s tractor, John could hear the shredding snap of small stems and twigs that had once been a brushy cover for all kinds of wildlife. He grimaced at the thought of the small creatures now being destroyed with every dip and wallow of the big machine. Maybe a few of them might escape to this side of the stone wall and survive, at least until Buddy found a way to come after them over here as well.
John had a new feeling of uneasiness about Buddy. In the last day or two Buddy’s body seemed to have grown bigger, huger. Like a spider, he had molted into a larger instar. For a moment John had a picture of Buddy picking up a limp Virginia in his pedipalps and sucking all the life out of her.
Angrily John shook himself. Why was he standing here, staring at a white blob of bird droppings on a leaf? Where was the stone wall? It must be somewhere to the left. If he kept pushing that way he would have to stumble on it sooner or later. And then it would be something solid to get his bearings by.
Yes, there it was, running between two lines of apple trees. Maybe those yellow jackets had made their nest in a low crevice among the stones of the wall. Slowly John made his way beside it, bending double to peer under the lowest boulders and examine chinks under protruding cobblestones. At the very end of the wall he found what he was looking for, the remains of a small nest. Fragments of grey paper were clinging to several of the stones at the lowest level. They seemed to have been torn apart.
Getting down on hands and knees, John studied the ruins. Breaking off a fragment, he saw dried grubs curled in the open cells. They were dead. There was no longer any healthy coming and going of worker females, providing the grubs with food. Something violent had happened to the community just as it was beginning to get its little world organized. Maybe Edward Heron had smashed into it by mistake. Maybe the nasty encounter with the yellow jackets had brought on his asthma attack.
John stood up and backed away, and looked at the stone wall.
It wasn’t the kind that had been built with care. It wasn’t a handsome piece of carefully constructed useful architecture like some of the stone walls he had seen in Concord. No great boulders had been dragged out of the ground by oxen and hauled into line and eased into place with crowbars until they fitted snugly against one another. Nor had the top of this wall been cleverly assembled from flat stones along a stretched piece of string. This old wall was little more than a running rockpile of stones hastily cleared from a field. They had been dug up and dumped on a stoneboat and dragged to the edge of the clearing and dropped in a clumsy row. And yet the careless diligence of that old farmer had achieved this eternal consequence, this casual monument marking the borderline between one man’s land and the next. The wall was a legal property boundary, listed in the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds. “Bounded to the south-east by a stone wall running westerly three-hundred-and-fifty feet to an oak tree.” That was the way the old deeds went.
John looked at the heaped cobblestones and imagined some eighteenth-century farmer’s fingers spread around two of them, left hand and right hand, holding them over the rockpile, then dropping them and going back for more. The wall must have been an ugly accumulation at first, with raw orange boulders and glaring white ones piled together higglety-pigglety. Now time had softened the colors to a uniform grey. The exposed surfaces were green with moss, grey-blue with rings and patches of lichen.
Reverently John stroked one of the uppermost stones, feeling the lichen rough on the palm of his hand. The racketing noise of Buddy’s machinery had stopped. John could hear a crow cawing in the cornfield. A pair of Canada geese flew over his head, then a small flight of starlings. For a moment, with the stone under his hand, John lost himself.
It could be any time. There was nothing man-made here but the stone wall. Maybe it was June, 1775, and the Revolutionary War had only just begun, just last April, down the road in Concord. Farmers and storekeepers, carpenters and wheelrights, old men and young men from Lincoln and Sudbury — they had shouldered their muskets and walked past this very farm on their way to meet the British Regulars. Maybe John Hand was a minuteman himself. Maybe he too had been at the fight on the nineteenth of April.
Or maybe this instant of time was really a moment in the eighteen-fifties, and he was Henry Thoreau, measuring the accuracy of this farmer’s boundaries, standing here beside the stone wall with his surveying instruments over his shoulder, his little telescope and his iron measuring chains. Henry would have liked the Canada geese. The geese were carrying the mail of the seasons, Henry would have said. And he would have been sorry to see the wilderness cleared on the other side of the wall, because wildness, he had said, was the preservation of the world. Wildness — bushy tangles, trackless wastes in Maine, where immense trees toppled over in the virgin forest and there was nobody there to hear them fall, old orchards reclaimed from the farmer’s care by rabbits and snakes, pheasants and woodchucks, field mice and yellow jackets —
The noisy machine began again, faltered, then steadied to a rattling roar. John swept forward one hundred and thirty-five years, took his hand from the stone and moved away from the wall.
“I didn’t find anything,” said John apologetically, spreading his empty hands.
“Well, too bad,” said Barbara. “Where can that damned stuff be? I could have sworn he had that little red box with him. I saw it sticking out of his pocket that morning, I know I did.”
“Have you got some yellow soap?” said John. “There was a lot of poison ivy down there.”
Barbara found him some yellow soap. She stood in the kitchen and watched him scrub his hands and arms. “I’m going to talk to your Uncle Homer,” she said.
“My Uncle Homer? What for?”
Barbara paused. Then she spoke slowly. “Because he appreciates the significance of little things. Like the absence of that little hypodermic syringe of epinephrin. He’ll be interested in that.”
“Oh, you mean, because he was a detective once in the district attorney’s office. That’s right, I keep forgetting about that. Only I don’t see what he can tell you,” said John honestly. “I mean, he’s not really very practical. I don’t see how he solved any of those crimes. I mean, my Aunt Mary is the one who knows what’s wrong with the car and how to put a new plug on a lamp cord.” John remembered an occasion a few years ago that had rankled in his heart, when his Uncle Homer had tried to help him finish a plastic airplane model and had managed to smash the whole thing. Of course Uncle Homer had gone right out and bought him a new one, but John had been forced to begin the whole tricky project all over again.
Barbara was amused. “A prophet without honor among his own nephews, I see,” she said. “Never mind. You wait till you hear what your Uncle Homer says about that missing little red box of medicine.”
Thirteen
JOHN SET ASIDE THE NEXT MORNING TO KEEP AN EYE ON HIS BARN spider and take notes. At first in the glare of sunlight on the shed he couldn’t find her web. And then he was startled by a blue jay, flying out of the neighboring hemlock tree with a rush of wings and a raucous cry. Looking in among the close network of lacy branches, John saw the blue jay’s coarsely built nest. It was high in the tree, way up over his head. He wondered if the eggs had hatched. A nestful of hungry baby birds would be bad news for a tasty spider. This was a dangerous neighborhood. And what if the blue jay had found the spider already? John gazed once again at the top of the shed door, and then the t
issue of silk displayed itself, trembling in a breeze so light that it shook no leaf of the lilac bush beside the porch. There it was, the same orb web. There were holes in it now, battlegrounds, places where the fabric had been destroyed. If he were to stand right here and watch all morning, would he see the spider catch anything?
Dreamily John stood in front of the shed door, staring upward, leaning back with his arms folded, until a meandering gnat, gyrating mindlessly in the air in a cloud of other gnats, dashed itself against the silken threads. Almost before John had registered the fact that something was heaving in one corner of the web, the spider was rushing from her lair at the top of the door frame. She was pulling out silk from her spinnerets with her hind legs, wrapping the gnat up swiftly like a butcher tying a piece of meat.
John was delighted. That was neat, really neat! Patiently he watched the drama to its end, when the spider paused in her wrapping motions, turned herself rightside up, held the package in her palps close to her mouth, and sank her paralyzing fangs into a juicy gnat-portion. Would she carry the package away to gobble later on? No. She had settled down. She had begun to suck.
In the guest room upstairs, Buddy Whipple was writing a letter. Buddy enjoyed writing letters. A letter was different from a conversation. In a face-to-face encounter you couldn’t ever be in total control of the situation, but in a letter you could get down on paper exactly what you wanted to say in the best possible language, and leave out whatever didn’t fit in. It was like addressing a jury without the presence of opposing counsel, in some courtroom where you had a free hand with the judge.
