All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  “What’s your name, in case the town comes around complaining?”

  “Peck. Jim Peck.” Still no change of expression, no unbending to a jocular or friendly tone. Softly, Jim Peck. Softly, but as if there were a jeer under the voice. There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours. I regretted giving in to him before we had even turned away.

  When we were halfway up the hill, walking slowly against the steepness and the shortness of our wind, I burst out, “In God’s name why did you let me do that? You wanted me to do it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I knew why.”

  She stopped, leaning uphill with one hand on her knee. Without turning her head she said, “Oh, Joe, you know! You couldn’t miss it. There are so many of them it makes you think it’s something they can’t help. What if Curtis had gone to someone and asked for something like this, would you rather they said yes or rather they refused?”

  “And after they said yes, would they be glad they had, or sorry?”

  “Well,” she said, “I can’t help thinking it’s healthier camping in the woods than sleeping in auditoriums and classrooms.”

  It was the same note she had struck when Curtis took up surfing: Anyway it’s a healthier life than that zoo down in the Village. And look, I almost said to her, how that came out.

  Her face, usually perky and sharp and amused, looked tired, and she went on putting one foot after the other up the hill with her eyes on the toes of her shoes. I knew she thought I had bristled at this Peck boy precisely because he was like Curtis. A chance, she was probably thinking. No matter how crazy they act, they have to be given every chance.

  I wondered if she remembered how many chances Curt had, and how many he muffed. For all I knew—for we hardly talked about him any more—she might have persuaded herself that just one more chance would have saved him, that he was on the way out of his moral paralysis when he drowned. The bitterness, for her, might be that he never had the opportunity to demonstrate that he was saved. Or did she think an indefinite indulgence of one phase after another might have let him outgrow and survive them one by one? And for that lack of indulgence had she always blamed me?

  3

  I had thought I could make Jim Peck up out of the odds and ends of intellectual faddism and emotional anarchy and blind foolishness that have been improving our world for the last ten years, but in one way he surprised me. If all the idiocies of the later twentieth century had collected in his skull like DDT in the livers of birds and fishes, I shortly had to grant that something else had collected in him too.

  For one thing, he was physically tough. He had none of that affectation of ill-health and that contempt for strength and well-being that I was used to among the literary intellectuals. For another, he liked to work with his hands. He was no good at it, he was a fumbling amateur, but he liked it, he was Homo fabricans at heart.

  Driving out the lane a couple of days after our encounter, I saw brown movement through the trees, and stopped where I could see down to the creek. Peck, skinny and hairy in a pair of cut-off Levis, was testing a knot-ended swing rope he had hung in the bay tree on this side. A run, a takeoff, a swish, and he landed in the waist-high poison oak across the creek; a reverse run and takeoff, and he came swishing back. I saw him look my way, I saw him see me there in the stopped car, but he did not wave or nod. Presumably he was afraid I was going to invade his privacy. If he had acknowledged me, I might have gone on down and offered to help him get squared away. He didn’t, and I didn’t. Rather irritably, I drove on.

  We did not see him again for ten days, though I observed that he had done some clearing in the little flat. Then one Saturday we heard the sound of hammering, and when I walked down for the mail I saw two motorcycles parked under the bay tree and Peck and a fellow beard building a platform of some kind across in the cleared space. Next morning a brown tent was pitched on it. A few days later, when we took advantage of the continuing Indian summer to make our loop up through the school land and back along the horse trail, we found that Peck had begun a bridge. Since he was not there to object, we violated his privacy and took a look.

  He had sunk four strong six-by-six posts, two on each side of the creek, and strung two pairs of cables between them, top to top and bottom to bottom. Across the lower two cables he had begun to wire lengths of two-by-four for treads—a tedious job, obviously, not very neatly done and not more than a tenth completed. I set foot on the thing, but it was like trying to walk a horizontal rope ladder.

  From across the creek we inspected Peck’s domestic arrangements. He had built the platform considerably larger than the tent required, leaving himself a front porch seven or eight feet deep and a dozen wide. A green canvas patio chair, one of those bat-shaped things, sat on it beside a length of redwood log that acted as a coffee table. A beer can stood on the log. The tent was ill pitched, its ropes straining the canvas into wrinkles and its sidewalls drooping, but even so the place looked snug. Why the hell didn’t we think of putting a camp down here? I asked Ruth. After Peck moved out we ought to build ourselves a teahouse, with a high arching Japanese bridge, so that in the rainy season we could go down there and brew a pot of tea and listen to the un-Californian sound of running water.

  Saint Simeon Stylites with conveniences, Thoreau with amenities, Peck gave us glimpses of his Coleman lantern shining through the trees, and once or twice he himself moved in our vision, easing a yellow plastic pail of water across his bridge or working around the tent. But then the rains came on heavily so that it was too muddy to walk the horse trail or the bottoms, and we saw him only from a distance, and checked his presence or absence by whether or not the tarp-covered Honda was parked under the bay tree. Once, coming home in a downpour and seeing his tent blooming with light through threshing limbs and sheets of water, I half envied him his mixture of exposure and snugness. I can think of nothing pleasanter than to be close to danger or discomfort, but still to be protected, preferably by one’s own foresight and effort. Civilization began somewhere around that feeling, and I didn’t disagree with Ruth when she suggested that there was hope for any Caliban who displayed, however ineptly, the impulse to build his own shelter.

  Since the day we encountered him in the bottoms, we had not exchanged words, but we were steadily and sometimes intensely aware of him. In a way that sometimes exasperated me, he imposed himself on us as a neighbor. We looked his way, driving in and out; we noted the sound of his motorcycle going and coming; we were aware when he was at home and when away. And sometimes in the evenings when we walked twenty times around the house because that was the only way of getting any exercise without wading in mud, we heard his guitar, so disarming a sound that it seemed no denizen of the hills was more natural and appropriate than Jim Peck. One morning after a big storm I caught myself looking across almost anxiously to see if he had weathered it.

  “It seems so lonely for him,” Ruth said. “He doesn’t seem to have any friends, does he?”

  I looked at her long and hard. “Are you maybe hinting we ought to have him up for a meal?”

  It is not often I can fluster her, but she was flustered. She said defensively, “I wouldn’t think it was completely out of the question.”

  “Thanksgiving, maybe?”

  She flared up. “Well, why not? What would be wrong with that?”

  “It isn’t like you to be sentimental, for God’s sake,” I said. “Are you kidding yourself that he sits down there missing the comforts of home? Were you getting your mouth fixed to taste his touching gratitude for a homemade piece of pie?”

  “He’s young,” she said resentfully. “He’s human.”

  “Young yes, human hardly,” I said. “Are you prepared to serve us up a Zen-diet Thanksgiving?”

  “If I knew how, I wouldn’t mind.”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t sit next to him at table. What’s more, he wouldn’t come.”

  Probably he
wouldn’t have come, and almost certainly we would have had a hell of a time enjoying his company. But I wish now I had let him refuse us, rather than jumping to refuse him in advance.

  Sometime before Christmas Peck’s isolation began to break down. The beardie pal who had helped him build his platform came back, and his motorcycle was parked beside the Honda for several days. Immediately after that there came a Volkswagen bus with Illinois plates that stood for more than a week by the trail gate above the empty Thomas cottage. Every evening we heard the sounds of partying, singing, banjos and guitars. There was one girl with a voice so good I thought sure they must have Joan Baez down there. Then I concluded it must be a folksong troupe, one of those itinerant outfits that bangs around from hootenanny to festival playing troubadour. But about the fourth night of party the thing began to lose its charm for me. “What does he think he’s doing?” I said to Ruth. “We didn’t authorize a hostel.”

  “Oh, what’s the harm? Nobody that age knows when to go to bed. You have to make allowances, Joe. We aren’t really bothered, and there’s nobody to bother at Thomas’s.”

  “What’s to keep a gang like that from breaking into the Thomas place and using it for a pad?”

  “You want to find them guilty before they even give the slightest indication of doing anything wrong.”

  We were walking out our prebed constitutional, around and around the house in the cold night. Every time we rounded the bedroom corner the singing blew up at us out of the dark. I zipped the parka hood over my chilled skull and shut out some of the entertainment, but I couldn’t shut out Ruth, and didn’t really want to. Fifty steps of silence. Then I said, “Wouldn’t you say we’d had experience? Wouldn’t you say we know the type?”

  “I wonder if we know very much about it at all.”

  “Remember the time the Wilsons let Curtis caretake their place in Roxbury?”

  “Yes, but that was ...”

  “To hole up and write through the winter?” I said, walking on her heels. “Splendid isolation, high purposes?”

  In silence she circled the carport and angled across the kitchen patio, me at her heels, gritting my teeth in the cold, hating myself, yapping after her like some feisty terrier. At the next corner the singing rose once more to meet us, and the very sound and style of it, familiar as the beginning clench of a migraine, made me savage.

  “Remember? Remember what the Wilsons found when they went out there in January? Sink full of unwashed dishes, garbage pails overflowing with bottles, beds full of uninvited unwashed guests? You think I like to remember things like that? But you think I can forget them?”

  “You don’t know about Peck,” Ruth said. I had to pull the hood off and turn my head to hear her through the throb and bang of their music. “He’s been living next to the Thomas place for weeks, and no sign he’s touched it. You just assume things.”

  “I assume them from experience,” I said. “These people are so hell-bent to be individuals that they don’t even exist except as gangs. Alone, they’re nothing. Put all of them in one bag and they blow up the place. If Peck was going to open a hostel and have his goony pals sleeping three-deep all around, he should have asked, shouldn’t he?”

  “And had you refuse.”

  “Why not? Is it our obligation to shelter every underage kook that comes by?”

  “Oh, wait and see,” she flung back. “They’re just visiting. They’ll go away.” On the next round she turned in at the bedroom door, and we went to bed in silence. Privately, I granted that my suspicions had no foundation; but I also felt, and I insisted to myself before I fell asleep, that if Peck would turn his camp into a hostel without asking, he would do a lot more. He was a kind of gas that would expand to fill any amount of space.

  The Volkswagen bus disappeared the day after Christmas, perhaps bound for some place where the comforts were less spartan. For a while we saw only Peck. He was an incorrigible fixer. Because in the wet he couldn’t ride his Honda across the bottoms, he cobbled together a wretched little shed beside the trail gate into our lane, an eyesore that offended me every time I passed it. (No permission requested, I pointed out to Ruth.) Observing from the lane, we noted other improvements. One day we saw him running his yellow pail across the creek on an overhead cable. Later we saw that he had rigged some way of pulling the whole far end of his bridge up into one of the oaks.

  “What’s he afraid of?” I said to Ruth. “I’ll bet you he’s got a half acre of marijuana planted over there.”

  “Grump, grump,” Ruth said. “He’s probably afraid of kids breaking in. He can’t lock his tent, after all.”

  “In a hermit’s cell there shouldn’t be anything worth stealing.”

  “If he did live like a sanyasi, you’d be the first to call him crazy.”

  “He irritates me,” I said. “He asks to put up a simple camp, being too poor to afford a room...”

  “He never said that.”

  “All right. Being unable to stand the restraints of a room or apartment. Then he spends more on lumber and gadgets and rope than he’d pay for normal room and board in a year.”

  “Maybe he’s having more fun.”

  “I wonder if he knows how to have fun.”

  “He has parties,” she said. “He tinkers. Whichever he does, you complain. Why? You work on your think-house every afternoon of your life.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “So is he, in a way. Why can’t you let him alone? He’s not hurting anything.”

  He was the least contemplative sanyasi I ever heard of. Every week there was a renewed outbreak of sawing and hammering. The one that began in mid-January went on for a whole morning, stopped, began again the next morning and went on through the day. Just after noon I went down for the mail. I could see the bridge, lowered into place, drooping crookedly across the creek. Beyond it was the front of the tent. I could hear the hammering but see no sign of Peck. What in hell was he putting up now? Steam-heated privy? Pergola? Studio? I told myself that I had better find out before he developed a subdivision over there, and went down through the mud to the bay tree.

  When I was halfway across the bottom, I saw movement in one of the oaks, fifteen feet off the ground. In his orange suit, his John-the-Baptist hair crawling over his collar, Peck was squatting up there with his back to me, nailing away. He had laid joists across two nearly horizontal limbs and was spiking two-by-fours to them for a floor. The lumber was secondhand, and dark, and the live-oak leaves were dense enough so that from certain angles you could hardly see anything up there at all.

  I coughed, and he twisted around. With his tangled mane and beard, he looked like some ridiculous lion out of a bestiary. And he was good and startled, as startled as I had been when we came upon him sitting his stealthy motorcycle under the bay tree. He grabbed a limb and glared, breathing steam.

  “What goes on?” I said.

  Peck rose until he stood crouching, one hand braced against the limb over his head, the other holding the hammer. I half expected him to heave it at me like a tomahawk, but all he did, finally, was make a little deprecatory gesture with it. He smiled. His voice was soft. “Little... treehouse,” he said.

  Looking up at this Tarzan, this fabricator, this retarded adolescent living a Swiss-Family-Robinson fantasy, I was full of conflicting emotions. Was I irritated simply because he had gone ahead and started something else without asking permission? Was it only an authoritarian insistence on being begged, an unpleasant property-owner desire to stoop grandly and confer favors, that made me angry at him? I was pretty sure he would have thought so, and I was ready to admit that there was some of that in my feelings. And yet wasn’t I more exasperated at his refusal to acknowledge his obligation to ask? Manners, if not ordinary openness of motive, might have dictated at least a telephone call. Is it O.K. if? Do I mind if? I accused his type, as much as him personally. They took, they challenged, they acknowledged nothing.

  It struck me, during our half minute of silent starin
g at one another, that I hadn’t the slightest notion of what he might be thinking. What went on behind the beard and the dangling grin? What expression was that in his vigilant, feral eyes? Did I imagine our intractable antagonism, or was I only responding, stiffly and wrongly, to my finished but unresolved quarrel with Curtis? Certainly I could make no real case against the treehouse. The oak would carry it as easily as it would carry a jay-bird’s nest. It would be out of reach, almost out of sight. Why should I care? Why should I feel that stiff censorious knotting in my bowels?

  “What do you need a treehouse for, meditation?”

  The upward eyebrow. He had regained his watchful cool. “Sleep.”

  “Too noisy in the tent?”

  He was not one to respond to the jocular tone—not from me. He didn’t even bother to reply, but stood smiling his fixed smile down at me, the interrupted hammer hanging in his hand, waiting for me to go away. He didn’t say, as almost anyone in his position would have said, “Come on over and take a look.” Why not? Something in him, or something in me? Or something that hardened like cooling glass between us whenever we met? Well, since I was the unwilling landlord, I would go over without an invitation. But when I set my foot on the treads of the bridge and took hold of the cable handrail, the whole think slewed sideways and threw me off balance, and I lay along the cable for a second before I could straighten up and step off. I looked up into Peck’s happy grin. Uh-huh, it said. Walk on over, why not.

  Ruth would have said I asked for it, going down there to spy on what he was doing. But I did not think I was going to abdicate control of my own property just because Peck made himself difficult to reach. Furthermore, he had not grubbed out the poison oak from any part of the bottoms except the flat where he had chosen to build. Scraping my shoes clean against his bridge post, using the diversion to take hold of my temper, I said I had come down to ask when he was going to get at the poison oak. It should be grubbed out in the winter, so that the new sproutings could be sprayed in the spring.