Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  Slowly he made his way along the wall from one end to the other, peering into crevices, bending down to look under projecting stones. At the far end of the wall he found the torn nest of yellow jackets once again. But there were no spiders. That was odd. John walked back along the wall to the beginning. This time he found a single linyphiid hiding deep within a cranny behind her horizontal veil. There were a lot of other sheet-web veils here and there, but most of them were only broken strands, as if earlier habitations had been destroyed.

  Just as the wasp nest had been destroyed.

  Standing up with his linyphiid safely in a pillbox, John stared at the long length of stone wall running off into the green jungle. It was almost as if there had been some catastrophe, as if all the organic life in the stone wall had packed up and left home. Idly he picked up a stone and turned it over, looking for something alive on the under side. But there was nothing. Only a set of yellow chalk marks. TOP, said the chalk marks, 17. John picked up the next stone. That one too said TOP, but the number was 32.

  For an instant John was reminded of his own playful love letters to Virginia. But these hieroglyphs were of another kind entirely. Staring at the two upended stones, John remembered a story about some man who had bought a Scottish castle and taken it apart, and numbered every stone, so that the castle could be reassembled in Arizona or some place, like a giant puzzle.

  The stone wall too had been moved. The numbers had been chalked on the stones so that the wall could be taken apart and then put back together again in the same order, with the weathered sides of the stones facing out, the lichen-covered upper boulders still on top, every stone edge-to-edge with its brothers, in the same pattern in which they had been carelessly dropped into place by the farmer who had cleared the fields a century or two ago.

  Even the vegetation proved it. Tall weeds had been crushed flat by the new wall. Their dead stalks were sticking out under the lowest stones. Lopped honeysuckle bushes on either side were sending up green shoots.

  The whole wall had been moved. What a colossal job! How long would it have taken? John imagined himself moving the wall, piling the round boulders into a wheelbarrow, then pushing the wheelbarrow here from someplace else and dumping it out and going back for more. How many days would it take? A week? Maybe one man could move two hundred yards of stone wall in a week, if he really worked at it.

  John looked left and right at the great bristling heads of the old apple trees. What had Edward Heron been doing down here, the day he died? It had been that real-estate scheme of his — he had been working on that. Maybe he had wanted a bigger territory to sell to the developer. Maybe he had moved the boundary of his property to give himself more land. Well then, where had he moved the wall from? Slowly John pushed off into the orchard, beating his way through the undergrowth, looking for traces of an ancient stone wall. Surely there would be a long bare line in the vegetation, a rectilinear emptiness where stones had lain for a century or more, and then vanished — where some of them still lay, perhaps, buried too deep for a hasty transferal.

  It would be a hard thing to hide, the line of an old stone wall. But on the other hand, John reminded himself, nature abhorred a vacuum. New growth would close in fast. How long ago had the stones been moved? The chalk marks on them were a little smeared by dampness, but they were still legible. It must have been this year.

  In the orchard there was no sign of a vacuum, no yard-wide absence of undergrowth in a long straight line.

  John gave up. He took his wolf spider and his linyphiid and the stone marked TOP 17 back to his room. It was funny. Funny-peculiar, as his mother was always saying. Really weird.

  Thirty-Nine

  VIRGINIA WAS PEERING INTO ONE OF JOHN’S SPIDER CAGES, HER head close to his. She showed no fear. “Are any of them poisonous?” she said.

  “Oh, no. There aren’t any poisonous spiders around here. Oh, there’s the black widow spider. But it’s pretty rare. I haven’t got any. I mean, it isn’t something you worry about in Massachusetts, getting bitten by a poisonous spider. Would you like to hold this little lady in your hand?”

  “Why not?” said Virginia bravely.

  John lifted the screen from his aquarium, reached under a veil of silk and dumped a spider in Virginia’s cupped hands. Virginia closed her fingers over it, then shuddered, without meaning to.

  “It’s all right,” said John encouragingly, turning away to get another spider for himself. “It will just sit there. It isn’t going to run all over and get in your hair or anything. Isn’t it a nice one?”

  “What did you say it is?” said Virginia, opening her fingers.

  “Amaurobius ferox. I don’t even know how to pronounce it.”

  “It’s handsome,” said Virginia. “So black and shiny.”

  “Shiny?” John looked up. “I wouldn’t call it —” With a sudden exclamation and a sweep of his hand he knocked the spider to the floor. “My God,” he said, “my God, how did that get in here?” John picked up Virginia’s hands and gazed at them. Then he snatched up a collecting cup and fell to his knees. The spider was moving slowly across the floor. John clapped the cup over it and stood up.

  Virginia’s blood was rushing into her head. She looked at her hands and wiped them on her jeans. “It’s all right,” she said. “It didn’t bite me.”

  “But how did it happen?” John was almost crying. “It couldn’t have got in there without my — I mean, I know an Amaurobius ferox when I see one.” He shook his head despairingly. “But it was. It was. And I put it in your hand without really looking at it. Oh, my God, how could I do a thing like that?”

  “But what was it?” said Virginia, trying to laugh, to seem unconcerned.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, it was a black widow. Now don’t worry. They’re so sluggish they hardly ever bite. You didn’t feel it bite you, did you?”

  “No.” Virginia looked at the palms of her hands again. John looked at them too.

  “That was terrible,” he said. “Just terrible.”

  “Do they ever really bite people?” said Virginia. “Or is it just a sort of old wives’ tale, that people get killed by black widow spiders?”

  “Oh, yes, they sometimes bite people. Usually just in parts of the country where there are outdoor privies. The spider makes a web under the seat. It must be pretty ghastly. People get bitten in, you know, really vulnerable places. And it’s very painful, and I guess some of them die.”

  “Well, I feel fine,” said Virginia. She wiggled her fingers to show their good health and put them in her pockets and watched as John slid a file card under the cup on the floor and gathered up card, cup and spider, and dumped the spider into an empty jar. Then he capped the jar with a screened lid and turned the jar over and over in his hands to show Virginia the red marking on the spider’s belly. And then they examined the other spiders in John’s collection, his huge batches of infant house spiders and Nuctenea scloperarias, his pair of cellar spiders, his trapdoor spider, his tarantula named Fred. The jars shook in John’s hands as he picked them up. His fingers were still trembling.

  Virginia smiled around at John’s room. “I like it here,” she said, and went away.

  Left alone, John picked up the jar containing the black widow spider and stared at it again. How could he have collected a black widow without knowing about it? Either he had found it in the wild, and identified it carelessly as an Amaarobias ferox, or else somebody had put it into his aquarium with the intention of doing him harm.

  In his mind’s eye John could see the Amaurobius feiox perfectly, nestled in a loose web under a stone in the wall beside the mailbox. The spider had been roughly the same size and shape as a black widow, but he could remember seeing the brown pattern on her back perfectly clearly.

  There was one way to find out for sure. Lifting the dry twigs out of the aquarium, John examined every corner. He found only the silk-wrapped carcasses of the mosquitoes and flies and mealworms he had fed it. But one of the carcasses looked
too big to be a fly or a mealworm. John poked it with a pencil. Surely it was bigger than anything he had put into the aquarium for spider food? Picking up the bundle, he spent five patient minutes pulling away the silk with a pair of tweezers. Then he looked at the remains with his hand lens, and sat back satisfied. It was his Amaurobius ferox in person, stone dead, sucked dry by the interloper in its house, the imposter, the black widow spider that had been dropped into its cage on the sly.

  Well, thought John, at least his own honor as a spider collector and amateur arachnologist had been restored. The black widow was entirely somebody else’s doing.

  At the supper table that evening he passed the jar around for the others to see. He said nothing about the peculiarity of its presence in his collection. Neither did Virginia. Barbara was interested, and asked questions. Buddy was disgusted, and left the room.

  And after that, for the rest of the summer, John made sure that the black widow was still securely contained in her jar before he went to bed. And he shook out his quilt and his sheets and looked under his pillow too. Every night. Just in case.

  Forty

  IN THE TELEVISION STUDIO AT CHANNEL 4 THE METEOROLOGIST waved his hand at the perpetually stalled Bermuda high on his satellite picture and apologized gamely for yesterday’s optimistic forecast. The siege of hot and humid weather was not going to end after all. In a hundred thousand kitchens people swore at the TV screen, as though the heat wave were the weatherman’s fault. They glowered at their soggy toast and slammed their salt shakers on the table to loosen the damp crystals. Refrigerators and air conditioners rattled and shuddered, working overtime. Everything seemed grubby to the touch, glittering with splotches of grease. Paint mildewed on north-facing porches. Babies were querulous. Employees quit their jobs in sudden explosions of bottled-up resentment. Thunder rumbled. There were sinister flashes of light. Four-letter words steamed up, savage and thick, from the city of Boston, collecting in a peevish low-hanging cloud of concentrated spite.

  On the second-hottest night since the year 1882, the murdering TV repairman from Waltham cut a swath through the suburb of Belmont, killing a schoolteacher and wounding a policeman.

  The hot weather didn’t bother Buddy Whipple. Nothing bothered Buddy. Buddy was busy on a dozen fronts at once, moving forward, bringing one project after another to fruition. His hands were tingling with the vibration of the wires and strings gathered together under his control.

  Leaning back in his tilting office chair, Buddy smiled up at the distant ceiling of the great dark hall and imagined the place as it must have been in the old days, with the men and women of the Middlesex Foxhounds drinking stirrup cups beside the immense fireplace and dashing their glasses against the stony hearth. Then he put aside his romantic dreams of yesteryear and glanced at the headline in the morning Globe, MURDERING REPAIRMAN STRIKES AGAIN. Was there anything on the front page about Croney’s TV debate last night? It had been a great moment, a real attention-getter, a triumph. Howie had never been in better form, and poor old Brumble had made a fool of himself. But there was nothing about it on the front page, only a little item with the editorials, a couple of paragraphs showing an obvious sympathy for the governor. Brumble was described as “underdog Brumble.” Croney was “dapper, glib and sleek.” The damn newspaper would probably come out for Brumble sooner or later. Well, the hell with it. Buddy put down the Globe and tried to come to grips with the shape of the day to come.

  What was on the official political schedule? Well, there was his private conference at ten o’clock with a certain amiable justice of the state supreme court. And a clambake in Revere at two in the afternoon. And then there was the ad to be placed in the local paper for a new secretary-receptionist, because the last one had been banished in a hurry, assigned to manage the distribution of ten thousand campaign leaflets in the city of Fitchburg. And, goddamnit, what was the other thing? Mrs. Bewley, that was it. Buddy had promised to help Dolores Leech get Mrs. Bewley out of her house and into Ferndale Manor. Dolores was afraid she might need muscular assistance. Mrs. Bewley was being obstinate about the whole thing, and she was a tough, wiry old girl, a fact Buddy had reason to remember very well. And, oh, God, he should call the doctor. What the hell was the name of that stuff he was supposed to be picking up at the drug store? The goddamn prescription had turned up missing.

  And then there was something else to be taken care of in the long, ongoing silent war with that snotty little kid, John Hand. John had been sending cute little letters to Virginia on leaves and flowers. The kid was a menace. Well, two could play at that game.

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” said Barbara, running across the lawn.

  Buddy looked around at Barbara, and at Virginia and John, who were getting out of Barbara’s car. In a moment all three of them were standing around him, staring at him in horror.

  “Just making a little romantic statement on this here tree,” said Buddy comically, waving his jackknife.

  In livid white on the great trunk of the maple tree that towered in front of the house was a crude heart, with the message BW + VH.

  Virginia turned away, not trusting herself to speak. Barbara spluttered indignantly at Buddy. John touched Virginia’s arm and pointed skyward. Geese were flying over the house in a long ragged plowshare, uttering their hoarse cry.

  “V,” said John softly.

  The geese vanished over the treetops.

  “Oh, shit,” said Buddy, throwing down his knife.

  The Concord bank was open till four. Buddy rushed away from the clambake in Revere just in time to get to the Harvard Trust ten minutes before it closed. In the fluorescent light of the little room in the basement, he opened his safe deposit box.

  His mother’s ruby ring shone as red as ever.

  Red is for my valentine, thought Buddy sentimentally, walling off Virginia from all the other chambers of his mind, from the complexities of the business apparatus he was carrying forward, from the multiplicity of his feverish schemes, separating her even from her own stubbornness, her anger, her silence, her furious passionate tears. Putting the ring in his pocket, Buddy poked through the papers in the box until he found the one he wanted, his will. It would have to be changed. Then he tucked that, too, in the inside breast pocket of his light summer jacket.

  When the ring appeared on Virginia’s finger the next day, Buddy had his revenge.

  John took it hard. He couldn’t believe it. He turned, appalled, to Barbara.

  But Barbara had been forewarned. She glared at Virginia. “When is it going to be?”

  Virginia gazed out the window. She was airy and calm. “Oh, some time in December. Maybe next year.”

  “November,” said Buddy. “Just as soon as we get Howie elected. Plenty of time for a big church wedding then. Right, Virginia?”

  To John in his despair there was something both wheedling and threatening in Buddy’s loud voice, in the wrenching turn of his big shoulders as he swung around to look at Virginia. John looked at her too, his face white. His stomach was reacting violently. He felt sick and feeble. His knees were ready to give way.

  Virginia merely studied the ring on her finger and said nothing.

  Buddy was in his element. He waved a bottle over his head. “Now listen here, you people, this calls for a celebration. Look what I’ve got here, champagne. And wait till you see this.” He picked up a rumpled paper bag from the floor and dumped it on the table. “Grouse. I bagged me some grouse with my little shotgun.”

  “Grouse?” Barbara was suspicious. “Where’d you get grouse? Is this the right season for hunting grouse? I’ve never heard of anybody eating grouse.”

  “Out Littleton way,” said Buddy. “They haven’t got any foolish regulations against firearms in Littleton. And, yes, of course it’s the hunting season for grouse. You can hunt any old thing you want to at this time of the year.”

  Barbara looked at the skinny little plucked carcasses dangling from Buddy’s hand. “
Well, it just seems a shame,” she said. “I’ll bet they were nice little birds. Who’s going to cook them? Not me.”

  “I am, Barbara. You just stand back. Proper engagement celebration.” Buddy slapped the grouse down on the counter, picked up his bottle of champagne and jammed it into the refrigerator. Then, as John watched in sickened revulsion, Buddy reached for Virginia, threw his arms around her, and sank his face into her throat.

  Forty-One

  “SHE SHUDDERED, UNCLE HOMER, AND JUMPED AWAY,” SAID JOHN. “I saw it. She really did.” John’s voice was strangled. “She doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, not really. I swear. He’s got her in his clutches somehow. She’s trapped.”

  Homer stroked his chin and looked at his nephew. The boy was obviously entangled himself. Jealous. You couldn’t trust a jealous man. You couldn’t even trust a jealous kid like poor old John, with a crush on an older woman. “Hmmmm. Well, who knows the ways of women in love? Virginia’s at least twenty-one, isn’t she? She can do what she wants. Now, listen, what are the other things? You said there were three things. What are you doing with that rock?”

  “It’s from a stone wall, down in the old orchard. Buddy moved it, the whole stone wall, because it’s a property bound.” John displayed the chalked numbers on his granite boulder, and explained his discovery to Homer. “At first I thought Mr. Heron had done it. I thought he moved the stone wall because he wanted to enlarge the development he was going to put in down there with that other guy — remember that developer who turned up at the funeral? I thought I could find the place where the stone wall used to be, back in the orchard that was really Mr. Heron’s property. You know, you’d think there would be a line where nothing was growing, because the wall had been on top of it for a couple of hundred years. But I couldn’t find any place like that, and I was really puzzled.

  “But then I thought about the person who owned the land on the other side of the boundary. You know, Buddy Whipple. What if it was Buddy moving the boundary the other way, so he’d be the one to get more land? Listen, Uncle Homer, he got in there very soon — it was the very day after the funeral — with the big rotary mower from the town barn. And he chopped up all the brush on his side of the line, and then he plowed it up, all on the same day. The same day. And then he planted it with alfalfa, and he’s already got one crop off it and planted winter wheat. So if there was a long bare strip there any place, there where the stone wall used to be, he had it all covered up right away, do you see?” John’s face was flushed with excited color. “And I’ll bet I know how Mr. Heron really died. He came along just as Buddy was nearly finished with the stone wall, and he said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ And Buddy picked up a stone from the wall and threw it at him. And that brought on an asthma attack. And it explains how he got that bump on his forehead. So it was Buddy’s fault. That’s what really happened.”