Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “… only we’re not very good at making it ourselves,” said Virginia, admiring the jar.

  “Well, I didn’t think I was either,” said Mary. “But there they were, last fall, all along the shore of the river, those big black grapes. I picked a lot of them and brought them home, but they weren’t really fit to eat, so I tried making the jelly. And it wasn’t hard after all.”

  “It wasn’t?” said Virginia. “I thought it would be just too —” She gestured helplessly at Mary. Her face was drawn and tired, but she smiled, and Mary was encouraged. The jar of jelly was comfortable to talk about. It was an object you could hold in your hand and look at.

  “No, no, it’s easy. You just boil them down and mash them through a strainer and put in some sugar, and that’s it. It’s funny, this year the river grapes don’t seem to be bearing, I don’t know why.”

  “We’ve got some wild grapes of our own,” said Virginia, pointing through the kitchen window, “down there in the old orchard. It’s all overgrown with briers, but there are grapevines climbing up into the trees. Would you like to pick some?” The strain in Virginia’s face vanished. Her eyes brightened. “We could go down there right now.”

  “Oh, yes, I’d like to. And then, if you want, I could show you how to do them up.”

  “You’re not wearing your best clothes, are you?” said Virginia. “Good. Everything grabs and tears at you down there.”

  Mary lifted her feet high, trying to free herself at every step from the looping strands of bramble that went romping over the ground, rooting themselves, then arching up again in thorny snarls. “How old is the apple orchard?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Do you think it could have been planted a hundred years ago? Maybe only fifty or sixty? Maybe the farmer put down his shovel and went off to a speakeasy and danced the Charleston. Anyway, he put in a lot of different kinds. It’s fun to taste them, and try to imagine him planting a Baldwin here and a Roxbury Russet there.”

  “You mean, the trees are still bearing?”

  “Oh, no, not very well. But sometimes we get enough wormy apples to make applesauce.” Virginia covered her face with her arm and pushed through the twiggy outer branches of one of the trees. Mary ducked after her, and stood up under the high umbrella of scabby twisted limbs. She was just in time to see Virginia tip sideways and fall to her knees.

  “Good heavens, are you all right?” Stumbling forward, Mary helped Virginia to her feet.

  “I’m fine. I just fell into a hole. Look at it. Did you ever see such a hole? Rabbits, I guess. A colossal rabbit hole. A palatial country estate for the king of all the rabbits in Middlesex County.”

  “The county commissioner, you mean,” said Mary. “By divine right, of course. Or do you think it’s a woodchuck hole?”

  Virginia stooped and peered into it. “Hey, in there,” she said. “Any of you folks at home?” Then she gasped and dropped once more to her hands and knees. Reaching into the hole, she drew something out and sat back on her heels to look at it. Then she began to laugh.

  “What is it?” said Mary.

  But Virginia couldn’t speak. She was leaning over, hugging something to her breast, laughing a silent laugh that was more like dry sobbing.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, what was it?” said Homer, staring at his wife. And then he knew. “The allergy medicine. The syringe, the adrenalin, the antihistamine. The little red box. Was it all there?”

  “Yes, but the syringe was empty. The pills were gone. Buddy must have emptied them out in sheer spite. Listen, Homer, Virginia told me Buddy said he saw Barbara take the box from her father that morning.”

  “Take it? Barbara?”

  “That’s what Buddy told Virginia. He said he was just approaching the house around ten o’clock that morning, the morning Edward Heron died — he was just coming up the stone steps into the courtyard there, when he heard them arguing. He could hear Barbara shouting at her father, and her father yelling back. And so he stopped on the top step, Buddy said, because he didn’t want to embarrass them, coming along in the middle of an argument. He could see them through that big window in the kitchen. Edward was wheezing and coughing, and then Buddy saw Barbara reach out and snatch something out of his hands — a little red box of some kind — and then Edward cursed her and ran out the door. Buddy had to move fast, he said, to get away before Edward saw him. But Edward was so angry and he was coughing so hard and moving so fast, Buddy said he wasn’t looking left or right anyway. He was running down the hill in the direction of the apple orchard. And that was the last anybody saw of him, until Buddy came back later on to ask for that job and the room in their house, and discovered Edward’s body.”

  “Buddy told her that?” said Homer. “Virginia told you Buddy said that?”

  “And Barbara herself made it worse. She was always muttering to Virginia, ‘It’s all my fault,’ or words to that effect. So Virginia thought Buddy was right.”

  “Well, then, that explains what Buddy had on Barbara.” Homer shook his head. “I still don’t see why it would have given him such a handle on Virginia. You could hardly even call it manslaughter. Well, at any rate, now she knows the truth. It must have been Buddy who stuffed it in that hole. What did Virginia say to that?”

  “Nothing else. She seemed to catch herself, and stop talking. I could feel a wall going up between us. But there was a glitter in her eye, a kind of angry glee.”

  “A wall went up between you? You mean, she just stopped talking to you?”

  “Oh, no. We went on looking for grapes, and we found some, and then I showed her how to make jelly, and then I came home. But she didn’t say anything more about the little red box, and I wasn’t about to ask her.”

  “You wouldn’t.” Homer watched Mary dump the big black grapes on the counter and reach into a cupboard for her sister’s preserving kettle. “Damn the man. We still can’t call it murder. And how could we connect Buddy with a little box in a rabbit hole? The defense would call in some big asthmatic bunny rabbit.”

  Mary laughed. “Listen, Homer, what about that black widow spider? Did you get in touch with that place in Georgia? You know, that address Benny knew by heart?”

  “Oh, sure. They had sent a black widow to Concord, Massachusetts, all right. But they didn’t have a check with a signature on it, just cash and a box number to mail it to. And when I asked the postmaster in the Concord post office about the box number, he said it was arranged by mail too, anonymously, and paid for in cash.” Homer plucked a grape, popped it in his mouth, winced, and spat it out in the sink. “So there he is, Buddy Whipple, planning his goddamn road, moving a stone wall, burning down Mrs. Bewley’s house, and he as good as murdered Edward Heron, and I suspect he’s still putting the screws on Virginia. We know all that, or we think we do, but there’s no way of really proving anything. Nothing to stop him with. You know what I think? The only thing that will stop that huge driving mass of beefy muscle is an act of nature. An earthquake. Some stupendous natural force. Let the sea roar and disembowel itself.”

  Then Homer remembered the great trees that had been uprooted in the hurricane a dozen years back, a violent natural upheaval that had almost cost Mary’s life, and he flinched, and put his arm around her. “Or maybe we could get all the wood-chucks in Massachusetts to attack him.” Homer stood dreamily beside his wife at the sink, watching her pick over the grapes, thinking about Henry Thoreau’s encounter with a woodchuck. Henry had kept it mesmerized for half an hour. Somehow he had been able to make a kind of primitive communication from man to beast, from tame to wild, to that kingdom unknown and undiscoverable, that immense inaccessible majority of living things. But Homer doubted whether even Henry Thoreau could have aroused the woodchuck population of Massachusetts to do battle.

  The phone rang. Mary dumped her colander of grapes into the kettle, and reached for the telephone on the wall. Then she smiled at Homer. “It’s William Warren. He says how would you like a helicopter ride?”

&n
bsp; As Homer took the phone, his nephew Benny ran into the kitchen and tugged at his sleeve. “Come on back, Uncle Homer. You’ve got to come out of jail on this throw of the dice, and guess what? I’ve got hotels all the way around the board!”

  “You bet I’d like a ride,” said Homer to William. “I owe fifty thousand dollars to a pint-sized loan shark and I’ve got to get out of town. I’ll be right over.”

  Fifty-One

  THE HELICOPTER WAS WAITING FOR THEM ON THE TARMAC AT Hanscom Air Force Base. The pilot helped Homer step up into the sun-drenched bubble. “What if the blades stop turning?” said Homer nervously. “What if the engine stalls? Do the blades stop going around and around?”

  “They better not,” said the pilot. Climbing in on the other side, he put a new disk of paper in the meter.

  Homer sank down beside William Warren and looked up at the smear of whitewash over his head. Anxiously he studied the black column of instruments, then shrank back as William reached across him with the seat belt. “Here, this goes over both of us,” said William.

  “Clear,” shouted the pilot. The rotor blades began to whine, making a flickering shadow in the quivering light-filled interior, then speeding up until they were an invisible tremendous throbbing. Homer clenched his teeth and stiffened his back as the helicopter lifted, tipping uneasily backward and sideways. His stomach lurched. What if he threw up his lunch and made a fool of himself? He turned to William and whispered, “I’m scared.”

  “What?” shouted William.

  “I’M SCARED,” roared Homer.

  William only grinned and patted his knee.

  They were leveling off, churning slowly over the green landscape. William pointed forward. “Look, there’s Cook’s stand. See all that red stuff out in front?”

  “Tomatoes,” cried Homer. “Baskets of tomatoes.” He was delighted. He felt fine. In fact he had never felt better in his life. He stopped cowering and began pointing and exclaiming. “The dump! Hey, William, look at the dump. Wow, what’s all that sparkle? Look at it glitter in the sun.”

  “Recycled bottles, I think,” said William.

  “Oh, is that it? Hey, William, look at the air base. All those houses. Like anthills. That’s what we are, William, ants. Just billions of ants, crawling on the face of the earth.”

  “What?” shouted William.

  The dry bright air was going to Homer’s head. “So damn many of us,” he cried, gesturing at the rows of houses as they wheeled beneath him and fell away. “And you and I, we’re just a couple of crawling insects creeping over the ground — no offense, old man — while overhead,” — Homer flourished his hand at the sky — “the heavens stretch their impassive blue to the indifferent sun and the unfeeling stars to the farthest reaches of eternity.”

  “Is that so?” said William politely. Then he joggled Homer’s arm. “Look, there’s Buddy’s house. See it down there? All those big rooftops?”

  “My God, right you are. What a huge place it is. Hey, William, what’s going on down there? Somebody’s chasing a girl on the front lawn. My God, it looks like Croney to me. You see? What did I tell you? The planet is just one heaving mass of crawling organic life. Behold the mating instinct, raw sex on the hoof. Say, listen, do you think the girl needs help?”

  “Not her.” William grinned at Homer and shook his head. “She can call on God any old time. Kid from the church.”

  “Well, actually, I feel like God up here, don’t you? All-knowing, all-powerful, omniscient, mighty in wisdom, in the far-reaching sweep of my gigantic arm — whoops! Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to knock you off course. Ouch, stop it, William. What are you poking me in the ribs for now?”

  “It’s what I wanted to show you,” bawled William. “See there at the bottom of the hill? That’s the Herons’ house.”

  “Oh, I see. So it is. Needs a new roof, right?” shouted Homer.

  “Look down there below the house at that green field. See there, that crop of winter wheat? Buddy planted it. See anything funny about it?”

  “Funny?” Homer leaned forward and craned his neck while the pilot obligingly circled the field. But Homer could see nothing strange about the green rectangle below him except that it was the only orderly piece of geometry in the homely landscape of empty meadow and tangled orchard.

  “Don’t you see that straight line?” said William. “Not far from the orchard?”

  “Oh, now I see what you mean. Sort of a yellow line in the grass?”

  “That’s it. Look, it runs right through the whole crop. A straight line lighter than the rest.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” shouted Homer, turning to William. “Ground not as fertile there?”

  “Right.” William glared at Homer. “But why not? That’s the question.”

  Fifty-Two

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG, JOHN WAS STANDING IN THE LAUNDRY, looking at the stairway that rose steeply to his bedroom.

  He felt uneasy about the stairway. Last night he had been padding down the steps with his flashlight, and he had nearly caught someone there. He had heard a stumbling rush and then the soft click of the latch on the door between the laundry and the house.

  He had been looking for his spider. She had been missing ever since the big storm. The best time to find her was in the small hours of the night. It was when she would be most active, building or rebuilding a new web. But John’s flashlight roving on the front of the house had turned up nothing.

  Now with the afternoon sunlight shining through the small window in the laundry, John thought about the presence on the stairs, and wondered who it had been, and why somebody had come there in the night. There was no lock or bar on the door upstairs. How could he keep anybody out?

  The phone was ringing in the house. John made a dash for it.

  His Uncle Homer was excited. “We’ll pick you up. We’re on our way to the town hall to look at William’s nine-by-nines.”

  “His what?”

  “His aerial photographs. Wait till we see. We’ll be right there.”

  *

  “Wow,” said John, crouching over the dark picture on William’s light-table. “I see what you mean. That’s great. A straight line right across Buddy’s field.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Homer. “It’s darker, that line. Only it was lighter than the rest of the green stuff when we saw it from the air just now.”

  “This is a negative,” explained William. “Dark is light, light is dark.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Homer, groaning to himself. “What a stupid jerk.”

  “It means the soil is poorer,” said John. “So that strip of growing wheat isn’t as dark green and healthy as the rest.”

  “Right,” said William. “The soil was crushed under that stone wall for a couple of hundred years, so it was impacted, deep down.” William made impacting motions with his hands.

  “And bits of stone would have leached down into the soil,” said John. “You know, tiny particles would have washed down, changing the chemical makeup of the dirt, so it was more in need of lime or something. So the crop growing there would be a little deprived, and come up stunted and pale.”

  The three of them stared at the negative, gazing at the dim dark line across the patch of lighter grey.

  Homer shook his head with wonder. “He moved those stones one by one. What a colossal job. It must have taken him weeks. I suppose he used a whatchamacallit. You know.”

  “A stoneboat,” said William. Then he pounced with his finger at the negative again. “Look where the stone wall is now, here in the orchard. What’s a stone wall doing in the middle of an orchard? See? Most of the trees are on this side of it, but there’s one row of trees on the other side. Nobody would have planted an orchard like that, would they?”

  “And here’s something else,” said John. Carefully his finger traced a circle. “You can just see the old cart track that used to run around the orchard, so they could bring in a horse and wagon. There’s one just like that arou
nd Pop’s orchard, where his tractor goes around with the spraying equipment, and the truck, when he’s got people in there picking. See that faint line, curving around the corner trees of the orchard? See how the stone wall cuts right through it?” John looked up and beamed. “That really proves it, doesn’t it? That stone wall couldn’t have been there before.”

  “Good for you, John,” said William, patting him on the shoulder.

  On the way home in the Volvo, Homer related Buddy’s story about Barbara and her father, and told John about the grape jelly and the rabbit hole.

  John was interested at once. “Buddy said he saw Barbara and her father through the kitchen window? He was standing on the top step there where you come in off the driveway?”

  “That’s what he told Virginia.”

  “What time did he say it was?”

  “Well, what he said was, around ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “Then Buddy couldn’t have seen anything through the window,” said John triumphantly. “If he was standing where you said, and if it was during the daytime, then he couldn’t have seen in that window at all. The light would have bounced off the glass right into his eyes. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. I learned that in physics class last year.”

  Homer looked reverently at his nephew. “The angle of incidence — by God, boy, that’s right. At the angle where he was looking in, most of the light would have been reflected off the glass. Hardly any of it would have been refracted through it.”

  “I know. I’ve tried,” said John earnestly. “I’m always trying to read the kitchen clock through the window, and at that time of day you have to get right up next to the glass and shade your eyes to see in.”

  “Oh, what a glorious thing is the brain of an intelligent boy,” cried Homer. “What’s Benny got that you haven’t got? Benny’s all recitation by rote and worthless dry bones of meaningless memory, whereas you, my boy, have the gift of rational thought, reason, blessed reason, that godlike power that distinguishes man from the beasts! Ratiocination, that heav’nborn —”