Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  Falling, Homer threw out his hand to save himself, and encountered the flashlight. He picked it up and went for Buddy again. “You liar. You goddamned liar. You killed him yourself, you bastard.”

  Buddy seized the flashlight. “Stop making an ass of yourself. Call up Croney, why don’t you? He’ll tell you where I was. I tell you, I just walked in that door a minute ago.”

  Homer was nearly fainting with sorrow and rage and frustration. The bastard would get away with it again. He would weasel out of it again. But not if he were dead first. Blindly Homer threw his arms around Buddy and tried to grapple him to the floor. A lumpy object was grinding into Homer’s chest — his camera, his goddamn camera. And then Homer grunted with shock, as something smashed against the side of his head. Blood began running down his ear as Buddy lifted the flashlight again. With all his strength, Homer seized the arm that held the flashlight and hung on. Jesus! He was in no condition for hand-to-hand combat.

  It was no good. With one jerk Buddy freed himself and pulled away.

  Only then did Homer see what was in the open door. Beyond Buddy’s upraised arm he caught a glimpse of something astonishing, something miraculous. For a moment he stopped breathing, and then before Buddy could bring the flashlight smashing down again, Homer sagged to his knees. The misdirected blow pitched Buddy forward against the wall. As he gasped and backed away and reared up over Homer again, Homer fumbled at his camera and lifted it to his eyes with trembling fingers. Thank God for all that practice. Thank heaven for all those pictures of Benny splashing in his wading pool, Benny sleeping in his cot — would the flash work?

  It worked. In the dazzling momentary glare, Homer caught Buddy’s shocked face against the spiderweb. Behind Buddy the great orb of silk stretched its concentric threads across the entire opening of the door. Upward to the lintel ran the supporting threads, and downward to the wooden sill. The falling temperature of dawn had strung the fragile strands with dew, and they were sharply visible in crystalline perfection. As a work of art, the spiderweb was not delicate and intricate like the webs of early summer. It was irregular and loosely woven, with careless gaps in the pattern, as if the whole thing had been thrown together heedlessly by a drunken craftsman.

  But Homer was enchanted. “What do you mean, you just came in that door? That door isn’t open. That door is locked like the tomb of the pharaoh and sealed with the pharaoh’s seal.” Homer’s voice surprised him — it was loud and hoarse and panting. “You were in this house. You were in here all the time. You were waiting, just waiting. You fired that gun.” Brushing roughly past Buddy, Homer spread his hand against the spiderweb and turned in triumph.

  And then Buddy saw it too. He gaped at the spiderweb and dropped the flashlight. He tossed his arms. “Look, it’s nothing. It’s just — for Christ’s sake, it’s only a spiderweb.”

  “Only a spiderweb?” Homer’s voice broke with his sense of doom fulfilled. “Only a spiderweb! Only a force of nature, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Only a volcano blowing up in your lying face.” Reaching down, Homer snatched up the flashlight. It was slimy with something, and he was mildly surprised to discover that it was wet with his own blood. He lifted it over his head, trying to threaten Buddy with it as Buddy had threatened him, doubting at the same time that he could bring it down hard enough on Buddy’s skull to do any good.

  But Buddy seemed to be giving up. He was backing away, bending down, clawing at the floor. Homer faltered, the flashlight heavy in his hand. But Buddy was only looking for something. He found it. Raising it to his shoulder, he jammed it against Homer’s face. Instinctively Homer brought down the flashlight and swept the muzzle aside as the gun went off. The shot shattered the kitchen window with a tinkling smash of glass. Buddy merely laughed and lifted the shotgun to fire again.

  Homer’s knees seemed to have lost any connection with his body. Stumbling backward, he turned and ducked under the tattered web in the doorway and dodged across the courtyard.

  But he was a clumsy ox. As Buddy lunged after him, Homer tripped on the uneven flagstones and fell headlong. Behind his shuddering back he could sense Buddy taking aim again, and he struggled to his knees.

  But instead of a point-blank explosion, there was only a high furious whine. Fiery needles pierced Homer’s face and arms. Behind his back he heard a shriek, and then the rattling clatter of Buddy’s shotgun as it fell to the ground. Batting feebly at the maddened cloud of flying hornets around his head, getting clumsily to his feet, Homer looked back to see Buddy claw at his face and fall to his knees.

  There was a shout from the driveway. “He’s down, Uncle Homer. They’ve got him. It’s all right now.”

  Homer was completely befuddled. Whimpering with pain, he had only enough presence of mind to reach for Buddy’s shotgun. Then he peered down the stone steps and was staggered to see a monstrous creature with an enormous head poking something into the bushes. The creature had a rake in its hands. It was jabbing the rake into the bushes, poking and twisting and grinding.

  “John,” croaked Homer, “oh, ouch, is that you? Oh, thank God, oh, goddamn. My God, boy, what’s that on your head? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  It was John, all right. Homer’s beloved nephew wasn’t dead after all. He was wearing some kind of big hat with a veil hanging down all around. He was poking the rake into a hornet’s nest. And now John was dropping the rake, running up the steps, flailing at Homer with gloved hands, brushing off hornets, dragging him down the steps and out of harm’s way.

  “Stay here, Uncle Homer,” said John firmly. “Now just don’t move, okay?” And then John ran back up the steps and stood over Buddy. “Hold still,” he said, yanking at Buddy, trying to take hold of his shoulders.

  Buddy couldn’t hold still. He was rolling over and over as if his clothes were on fire, but the flames were a thousand infuriated white-faced hornets, affixed to his throat, his face, his bare arms. With one violent motion John dragged him to his feet. Then, sweeping and slapping at him, he began helping him down the steps. But Buddy was arching his spine, throwing back his head and staring sightless at the sky, and the sound of his agonized struggle for breath was a long-drawn-out grating, like dry pebbles over stone.

  The sun was brimming over the treetops to the east as Homer’s car pulled out of the driveway and plunged down the hill. On the lintel of the kitchen door, the barn spider was unaware of the morning’s carnage. She failed to hear the shrill aimless droning of ten thousand homeless hornets, vengefully circling the wreckage of their gigantic shattered nest. Nor was she interested in the hanging remnants of her own broken web. Her eggs were heavy within her. Wedging her fat belly between the trellis and the clapboards, she settled herself in patient expectation of the moment for which she had been born.

  Fifty-Five

  MARY HEARD ONLY A GARBLED VERSION FROM HOMER ON THE phone. Snatching Benny out of bed, she popped him into his clothes and drove to Emerson Hospital. At the entrance to the emergency ward a policeman was lounging against the wall. Mary left Benny in his astonished charge and ran inside.

  She found Homer and John in one of the curtained partitions. They were sitting side by side on the edge of the high cot. Homer’s face and arms were blotched with welts. A bandage was wrapped around his head. Mary looked at him in horror. “A spider did that to you?” she said.

  “No, no,” said Homer. “Buddy clipped me on the side of the head. The rest of it was hornets. More of John’s little friends. John smashed the nest, you see, just in time, and the hornets came roaring out, mad as hell.”

  “But what happened?”

  “It was simply a case of Androcles and the lion,” explained Homer, beaming at his wife, throwing his arm around his nephew. “John, here, he was Androcles. He nursed that spider along, and then she did him a favor in return. We’ve gone back to the Peacable Kingdom, you see, Mary, when the lion lay down with the lamb. You know, the Golden Age, when human beings lived in blissful harmony with their natural
surroundings. It’s sort of like, you know, the garden of Eden. That’s all there is to it. Go ahead, John, you tell her.”

  John looked at his Aunt Mary and opened his mouth to speak. But then the white curtains parted and a doctor entered the partition. He was shaking his head, uttering words John had heard before.

  “It was Buddy’s own fault. I warned him to be careful. I told him another episode might kill him. Why wasn’t he carrying his medicine? How could he have been so careless?”

  Mary was astounded. “Buddy was supposed to be carrying medicine? You mean Buddy had asthma too?”

  “Asthma?” The doctor looked blankly at Mary. “Not asthma. Allergy to insect bites, wasp stings and so on. Buddy Whipple was an old patient of mine. He’d been in serious trouble a couple of times before.” The doctor shook his head in disbelief. “I told him over and over again he had to carry that stuff with him wherever he went, even in the heart of Boston. I told him about the man who was fatally stung by a bee on the floor of the stock exchange.”

  “How horrible,” breathed Mary.

  “I finally guessed it,” said John. “I mean, I put two and two together at last. Homer said Virginia found the red box of medicine in that rabbit hole, but the epinephrin in the hypodermic needle was all gone. So I thought, what if Buddy had used it on himself? What if he snatched it away from Mr. Heron and took the dose himself? And I remembered the yellow jacket bites on Buddy, and I looked up epinephrin, because Benny said Buddy had a prescription for it, and the dictionary said it was adrenalin.”

  “Adrenalin!” said Mary.

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “Anybody who has a hypersensitivity to insect bites should carry adrenalin.”

  “Did you know that?” said Mary, looking at John with wonder.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure, but I remembered what Buddy was like after Mr. Heron died. He had this really terrific strength. It was the adrenalin, right?”

  “Ah, you noticed it, did you?” said the doctor.

  “You should have seen him. He tossed Mr. Heron up on his shoulder and carried him uphill as if he were, you know, a baby. And Mr. Heron was big. I mean, he must have weighed two hundred pounds.”

  “You pay for it later, of course,” said the doctor. “The super energy lasts for a while, and then you’re super exhausted.” The doctor departed, after asking a grim question or two about the disposal of Buddy’s remains.

  Outside the hospital Benny was wearing the policeman’s hat and entertaining his guardian with grisly tales from the brothers Grimm. “Worst things I ever heard,” said the policeman, looking up with a white face. “Murder, incest, cannibalism. Take him back. He’s all yours. Cute little kid though.”

  Homer was worn out. “A little nap,” he said. “All I want is my nice soft bed.” But when Homer and Mary and Benny drove up to the house on Barretts Mill Road, they found Benny’s mother and father and his sister Miranda and his brother Freddy tumbling out of a taxi in the driveway, fresh from Logan Airport and two days on a jet and three months in the foothills of the Himalayas. There were cries of welcome, embraces, horrified gasps at Homer’s bandages, incoherent explanations. John was summoned. There were presents from the mysterious East and a noisy, alcoholic lunch. It wasn’t until John went home again and the homecoming travelers had dragged themselves upstairs to bed for long afternoon naps, it wasn’t until a yawning Homer had undressed too, and struggled into his pajamas and pulled back the covers and climbed between the cozy inviting sheets, that he remembered the body in John’s bed.

  He was electrified with horror. If he could forget a dead body, he was really over the hill. Rushing downstairs, he snatched up the telephone and shouted at the chief of the Lincoln police department. A moment later he was hurtling down Barretts Mill Road, zooming around the rotary, and barreling along Route 2.

  But the chief’s car was just pulling out of the driveway as Homer bounced to a stop and catapulted out of the driver’s seat. “Hey, wait a minute,” he bellowed, running over to bend down into the window and stare goggle-eyed at the chief. “Whose body was it? Where are you going? What’s the big idea?”

  “Listen, friend,” grinned the police chief, “it was just an old stuffed shirt, that’s all. One stuffed shirt more or less in the world, who cares? Not me. Hey, what do you call that?” The chief snickered and poked a finger at Homer’s striped pajamas. “Some kind of fancy new leisure suit?”

  Homer stared after the chiefs car, scandalized by the display of callousness to human life on the part of the man responsible for law enforcement in the town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. His nephew set him straight. “I’m sorry, Uncle Homer,” said John, leading the way through the house in the direction of his bedroom in the shed. “I forgot to tell you what I did.” At the top of the narrow stairs he stood back to let Homer survey the disemboweled scarecrow that still lay on the bed, and the bits of rag and stuffing scattered all over the floor.

  “I just holed up in my sleeping bag in the closet,” said John. “You could have smelled the difference, if you’d tried. Smell that hay?” John sniffed the air. “It doesn’t smell much like blood and guts, does it, Uncle Homer? Just nice old hay.” John cocked his head and went to the window. “Listen, there’s a car outside.”

  It was Virginia and Barbara, back from New York.

  John hung back and watched through the kitchen window as they got out of the car. They were smiling with surprise at Homer as he came down the stone steps in his pajamas and took their hands. He was telling them about Buddy. Would Virginia be unhappy? She was listening intently. She wasn’t crying. She was taking a breath —

  Virginia felt the air enter her lungs and fill them. It was dry and light. It flowed into deep passages, and there was room for more. Taking another breath, she looked up to see the sky lift and lift until it was remote and blue and infinitely far away, no longer a lowering roof, imprisoning her in a thick haze. The gigantic fly’s eye that had been gazing down at her all summer with its billion flickering lenses withdrew too, and vanished.

  “Well, then,” said Barbara, “that’s over then.” She grinned at Homer and gave a great whooping laugh. “I must say, I like your outfit. I’ve always been partial to purple stripes myself.”

  Virginia went indoors to find John, and together they looked for the spider. They found her easily. She was clinging to her egg sac. It was a nest of yellowish-white gossamer at the top of the kitchen door.

  “I guess she’s made her last web,” said John. “Now she’ll die, and her eggs will hatch next spring.”

  Impulsively he turned to Virginia. There was something important he wanted to tell her before he went off to school, a matter of tremendous consequence, the most crucial thing of all, the thing that had been building up in his chest all summer, only he didn’t know how to put it into words. So he said something absurd, and then Virginia said something preposterous, but together they made themselves understood.

  “I’ll get older as fast as I can,” said John earnestly.

  “I’ll stay just the same,” promised Virginia.

  Fifty-Six

  HOWARD CRONEY’S LAWYER WAS ON THE PHONE. “LOOK, MR. Kelly, all my client wants to know is, can he go on using Buddy Whipple’s house for a campaign headquarters? There’s still a couple of weeks to go before the Democratic caucus, and it would be a real hardship to move out now. Is the place in probate court? Did Whipple leave it to somebody? Has anybody found a last will and testament? Who’s in charge?”

  “Not me,” said Homer testily. But when nobody else came forward, he was left holding the bag. With a court order in hand, he was permitted to see the contents of Buddy’s safe deposit box in the Concord bank. Homer sat with Mary in the basement of the bank and turned the key in the big metal container.

  “Look at that silver-plated tea service,” said Mary. “Black as coal. Imagine trying to clean all those little curlicues.”

  “Not much paper in here,” said Homer. “Just these two things at the bottom. L
ooks like a couple of letters.”

  The first piece of paper had been folded many times. It was nearly worn through at the creases.

  “Oh, look, Homer,” said Mary, “that’s Barbara Heron’s signature at the bottom.” She read it aloud to Homer, pausing once or twice to suck in an astonished breath.

  On the evening of December 10, 1980, I administered a fatal dose of morphine to Mr. George Whipple at his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Mr. Whipple had been ill for many weeks with terminal cancer. I had been acting as his nurse during that time, and living in his house. Mr. Whipple was in intense and continuous pain, nearly uncontrollable by drugs. During the entire period of my care I was under constant pressure from my patient to bring his torment to an end. At last his suffering was so excruciating that I couldn’t bear it anymore. I agreed, in the belief that such an action on my part would be humane, and that I would myself wish it if I were in his position.

  Barbara Heron, RN

  The other piece of paper in the safe deposit box was an envelope addressed in a faltering hand, to Clarence. The letter within was a message of farewell from George Whipple to his son Buddy.

  To Clarence, a loving good-bye and a last request. I am deeply grateful to my kind neighbor and nurse, Barbara Heron, for caring for me in my last illness. I am especially indebted to her for taking the courageous action that will bring my ordeal to an end. She has refused to accept wages. Please make her a gift of ten thousand dollars from what you yourself will receive at my death.

  I know you will carry out my wish faithfully. Your loving father …

  “Look at that scrawled signature,” murmured Mary, and for a moment they gazed at it, imagining the old man dropping the pen, sealing the envelope and holding out his trembling arm for the injection that would relieve his suffering forever.