All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  “You still think it’s easy?” Ruth said.

  Peck rocked, and once again was sitting between his legs. “Pelvic posture,” Ruth said to Marian. “That’s a basic one.” For a time he sat immovable, unless somewhere inside him some secret muscle was clenching and relaxing. At last he stood up and stooped into the tent, to come out again with a glass which he tilted up for a long mouthful. Leaning out over the edge of the deck, he brought his head and shoulders into a streak of sun, and in an instant his whole hairy top was haloed in spray. With a little more careful staging he might have made a rainbow.

  “Elephant mudra,” Ruth said. “You blow water through your nose. It’s one of the cleansings. This is as good as a twenty-dollar lesson.”

  Peck took a handkerchief, towel, rag of some sort, off the back of the batwing chair, and pulling his tongue far out of his mouth, he massaged around in his throat. He spat over the edge, he tossed the rag into the chair, he sat down again and pulled first one foot, then the other into his lap. “Can you see?” Ruth was whispering excitedly. “That’s the lotus posture. That’s hard! It’s the best one for meditation because your lower limbs are all locked and you’ve got a firm base.”

  “You think he’s meditating?” I said. But when their heads turned-Marian’s inquiring, Ruth’s cocked like the head of someone turning to shush a talker behind her at a play—I didn’t go ahead and say what was in my mind: that Peck was a long way from true meditation, that he couldn’t have been more conscious of being watched, that down below there, wink! was going his little old anal sphincter, the window of his soul. Wink! Wink ! Rubber, you squares.

  I drained my can of beer and set it down, not softly. “How about finishing that fence?” I said. “If I watch this any longer I’ll begin to twitch.”

  Peck sat immovable upon his locked posterior. The Catlins were both laughing. “Joseph Allston, you have a closed mind,” Marian said.

  “Closed to phonies and show-offs.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Ruth said. “When Murthi was writing his book you were more interested than I was.”

  John and Marian looked inquiring. Who’s Murthi?

  “Murthi was a friend of mine, a client,” I said. “He wrote a couple of books interpreting Indian philosophy for Westerners. Sure I was interested. He had a good mind, he was neither a phony nor a show-off. He didn’t convert me, but I listened. When this kid comes out into the view of the crass materialist world to exercise his spiritual rectum, I’m not interested. I want to barf.”

  Ruth’s eyes definitely disapprove of me, Marian’s are merry and speculative and squinting as she tries to figure out whether I mean this or am mainly kidding. John stands up laughing. “I hope you never get mad at me,” he says. He looks sideward at Peck, immobile and immutable on his pedestal. “Well, the show seems to be over. Shall we go work off your rage?”

  “I never get mad,” I said. “I only hold grudges. Ask Ruth.”

  It was casual and funny. And yet I really did think Peck had put on his show out of a trivial juvenile desire to show off, and I really couldn’t laugh, as I should have, and feel indulgent. I was definitely grumpy as we went down into the sun where Dave Weld had begun industriously to grind away at another posthole. And it didn’t do my state of mind a great deal of good when I looked over—just once, I couldn’t resist—and saw Jim Peck, cleansed and purified, still blissfully unaware of our presence fifty yards away. He had a book in his hand, up on the deck of his treehouse, but it seemed to me that he was not reading; he was slyly watching us sweat down there in the sun. His right forearm made short, regular jerking motions that meant he was throwing salted peanuts or raisins into the pulsating vacuole in his beard.

  About five o’clock all the posts were in. We left Dave Weld nailing on two-by-four rails and went around into the grove, where it was cooler, for a drink. Julie had led Debby off up the horse trail across the creek, but just as we were putting the tools away they came back and tied the horses inside the incomplete corral and went to work on them with currycomb and brush. I had an impression, which considering they were both fifteen or sixteen was natural enough, that Julie was inordinately aware of Dave’s walnut torso working its muscles a little way beyond her, and that he in turn was elaborately oblivious to the presence of anyone else in the world. He set and drove spikes with great blows. His muscles contracted so, under his sweaty skin, that he reminded me of Julie’s mutt dog, now asleep under an oak. Yapping, he contracted his body in just that convulsive way. You could see his bark in his anus. And guess what that brought to mind. Wink!

  Maybe I was beginning to twitch. There were too many people around there exercising their muscles before audiences which they did not deign to notice. I was glad to get around the house and get a cold glass in my hand and lie back in a canvas chair and listen to John, who paid the most scrupulous and smiling attention to every member of his audience, tell us about the social habits of sea elephants.

  After a while I became aware that the hammering down in the ring had stopped, and I momentarily expected to see Dave Weld come past the house on his way home in the old Mercury with the red primer on the molded fenders and noise blasting from the twin pipes. But no sign of him, and no sign of Julie and Debby either. Then in a pause we heard the sounds of a guitar being tuned. Marian stood up and called. “Debby? Deb ... by!”

  “I’ll take a look,” I said, and went around the back of the house to the patio. The stage of Peck’s tent was more crowded this time. They were all there in a cluster. Movie hero with his six gun, horsy girl with bareback seat, six-year-old with solemn glasses, they sat entranced around their hairy guru, under the bo tree.

  3

  So Peck never did exactly join us; he ran a rival shop. Telling myself that he was only a temporary squatter who could be evicted when I chose, I saw him spread like a wild-cucumber vine. He had his split-level pad beyond the defended moat which I could cross neither physically nor spiritually, nor wanted to. His Honda was housed in the unauthorized shed by the trail gate. Sometime in May, shortly after John returned to Guadalupe, and again without asking permission, Peck nailed a secondhand mailbox next to mine and daubed his name on it with a finger dipped in black: J. PECK.

  The longer he stayed, the less time he spent in meditation or in solitude. Either his intentions matured during the months while he was getting his tree in order, or he had discovered students whom he could influence. He began, clearly, to think of himself as a guru, and his attractiveness was obviously enhanced by the improvements he had made in my poison-oak patch.

  If the Catlins had been bothered, I might have run him out—or would I? Would I? I don’t know. When I wasn’t being excessively irritated by his willingness to stretch into an ell every inch I gave him, I was willing to admit that he was simply a kid, maybe a bright kid, with most of his generation’s idealistic fantasies and a pretty good sense of theater. And yet I never lost my sense that we were adversaries, and that he knew it as well as I, but that Marian and John, who looked upon him and his crowd as anthropologists might have looked upon a village of picturesque head-hunters, had no comprehension of the emotional antagonisms that lay in us like surly dogs at the end of a chain, ready to leap up and growl at a step. If I had eradicated Peck’s nest to simplify my life, I would have been guilty of subtracting from the pleasure the Catlins took in their new life, and I probably would have hated myself to boot. Nevertheless I could not keep my mouth shut.

  “Do you think Julie should be taking Debby over there all the time?” I asked Marian one day. had dropped in after picking up the mail, and found her in the patio hulling strawberries. The air was rich with the smell of boiling jam. I saw the black gelding in the corral with the piebald. From across the creek came the sound of the guitar. As her stained fingers pulled blossoms from the berries and dropped blossoms in one pan, berries in another, Marian looked at me in the scented shade in the amused-serious way she had, as if giving a ridiculous remark every chance to make sens
e before she laughed at it. She shook her head.

  “He and his bunch are all right. In a way, they really are sort of saintly.”

  “Saintly! My God.”

  “They’re kind,” she said. “They don’t push anybody around. They treat children like people. Debby adores them.”

  “Naturally. They’re all about her age.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe all that about little children and the Kingdom of Heaven? Here.” Reaching, she stuck a great strawberry between my lips, but as soon as my mouth was clear of the succulent pulp I said, “One of the dangers of grown-up little children is that they have a child’s judgment and an adult’s capacity to do harm.”

  “What harm could they do Debby?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Give her beer?”

  “John does that.”

  “Pot, then. They all swear it’s so harmless, and they’re so kind.”

  About to answer, she heard or smelled something in the kitchen, laid her pans aside, and rushed in. A minute later she came out, and reassembling her work in her lap she said seriously, “Maybe they do smoke pot, I suppose they do, everybody their age seems to. But I’m sure they don’t give her any.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can’t, I guess. I just trust them not to.”

  “What about Julie?”

  Marian had continued to spend much of her time cultivating health. Her arms and hands and legs were deeply tanned, she had gained more weight, her eyes were a clear blue and white flash in her brown face. She frowned. “Yah,” she said as if disgusted. “That has bothered me a little. They treat both her and Dave like mascots or apprentices or something. They might think it was a joke to initiate them. But if it’s harmless, and John thinks it is, more or less, then it’s no worse than if a couple of fifteen-year-olds had a few drinks, is it?”

  “The police would think it was a little worse.”

  “Well, what would you do? I can hardly forbid her to go over.”

  “Her mother could.”

  “I wonder,” Marian said. “That’s such a fierce girl, sometimes. She’s so full of rebellion, what her mother tells her not to do is exactly what she has to do.”

  “Does Fran know she goes over there all the time?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose she thinks she’s here baby-sitting.” She moved her hands irritably in the pan of berries and scowled at me uncertainly. “If I didn’t have her as a sitter, she’d be over anyway. Maybe it’s better if she has Debby to keep an eye on.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess she’s her parents’ problem, and she’s probably insoluble: ”

  “Ah,” Marian said, smiling, “she’ll get over it. Given a chance, we all grow up. Julie wants to be taken as an equal, not as a child. That’s why she finds Peck’s crowd so much more interesting than her mother. They aren’t really hoodlums, Joe. All they do is sit around and talk about the good life, the ideal life. That shouldn’t corrupt the young, should it?”

  “It depends on how they define the good life.”

  “They define it as freedom. Absolute freedom.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Anything goes, is that it?”

  “That doesn’t seem to be it—well, technically it might be, but mainly they seem to believe in the natural virtue of primitive man. They’re romantics, I suppose. Man is naturally good, but he’s corrupted by society.” She giggled suddenly, eying me as if she thought I might explode. “Did I tell you they’ve painted a motto on a board and nailed it to the tree? BE YOURSELF. GOOD IS THE SELF SPEAKING FREELY, EVIL IS WHAT PUTS THE SELF DOWN.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty!” I said. “Did Peck write that?”

  “I guess so. Maybe he borrowed it. Why, don’t you believe in freedom?”

  “Not to any great extent,” I said. “What’s Peck doing when he sits down to his yoga? Speaking freely?”

  Looking at me doubtfully, she pulled the blossoms from three or four berries. She waved a wasp away from the pan. “But yoga is self-discipline,” she said. “Is that what you mean? That he’s contradicting himself? They aren’t opposed to self-discipline, only to the traditional and conventional kinds that they think are antilife.”

  “He’s improvising his exercises, is he?”

  Studying me with a frown, she said, “What are you getting at, you debater?”

  “No debater,” I said. “I just want to keep this conversation on the track. Yoga is a system of very strict rules, none of them invented by Jim Peck. Absolute freedom, my foot. You can’t open your mouth or move your hand without living by rules, generally somebody else’s, and that goes for those birdbrains across the creek, too. It’s the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it’s persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any. But if you say they’re harmless, they’re harmless. I only brought them up because I hoped they were a nuisance to you.”

  Smiling, torn between hearing me out and dealing with a renewed emergency in the kitchen, she was sidling toward the door, and at the last word she bolted in. After a time she came out with a pot of jam in one hand and a great spoon in the other, lifting red spoonfuls into the air and letting them drop back, testing.

  “Oh, damn!” she said, and knocked the spoon clean and fished for the wasp that had dived in. Carefully, she lifted him out and carried him to the hose bib. The water flooded him out onto the ground, and she rinsed the spoon and scooped him up again, slimed with jam and stickily crawling, too encumbered even to buzz, and washed him a second time, gently, and set him on the window sill to dry off.

  4

  So I went on picking up my daily beer cans along the lane where the freedom force threw them, and every day or so I built a little bonfire on the asphalt road by the mailboxes to get rid of the throwaway newspapers, box-holder letters, free samples, and other junk mail that began finding its way to Peck, as to other mortals, the hour he announced himself in residence. He never opened any of this, or carried it away, but pawed it out contemptuously onto the ground, where it lay or blew until I gathered and burned it.

  As if they were ordinary people, and not fantastic adolescent freaks, I gave good day to the unkempt young men and apache girls who came in and out, most of them in the Illinois Volkswagen bus that had now reappeared, apparently to stay. I used to see them filing around Debby’s ring toward the bridge, bearing sacks of groceries and six-packs of beer. Invariably they wore a look of excitement as if headed for an audience with the Most High. The Most High Himself moved among them with a new, pantherine dignity, smiling his ambush smile and gleaming with his hypnotic eyes, benevolently dispensing sanction and welcoming all to the uses and premises of absolute liberty.

  But newcomers, Julie told Marian, who told me, were not necessarily admitted to the Presence. Sometimes they spent a whole afternoon and evening there and never saw the holy one, who stayed up in the treehouse with favored disciples. This reservation of the sacred person was so fantastic that I slapped my naked head when I heard of it. I asked Marian what had happened to the absolute-freedom rule. Why didn’t the neophyte, speaking freely and not letting anything put the self down, simply climb up the ladder and barge in?

  Self-restraint, she said, baiting me.

  Yes, I said, taking the hook. Taking it? Gulping it, plunging for it. Yes, self-restraint enforced by a rule, or by a taboo, which was worse. Holy holy holy. Was it death to eat out of his rice bowl or touch his coveralls?

  She only laughed at me. She thought of them as kids playing Utopia.

  Which, if I could forget the harm they were capable of, I might admit they were. By few and many I observed them sitting or lying around Peck’s untidy flat beyond the web of ropes and cables and the crooked loop of the bridge—safe from intrusion, escaped from Babylon and the parental university, absolutely free to submit their minds to Peck’s charisma. I saw the favored ones sitting with him on the treehouse porch,
throwing their beer cans down into the brush. Put away your nets and follow me.

  Once their college closed in June, the group settled down to six or eight regulars, including the Volkswagen crowd. They were as fully in residence as Peck himself. The Honda had been removed from its winter quarters in the shed, and stood under canvas by the bay tree. The shed was filled with mattresses, folding chairs, card tables, cartons of books, wastebaskets filled with junk, the sort of shabby indispensable paraphernalia that passes from student to student or from student to secondhand dealer and back to student, and into storage and out again, providing at intervals the sitting and sleeping needs of generations of the penniless young. Maybe this stuff was being kept for someone during the summer, maybe it was being stored against some planned enlargement of the establishment. I saw it, as I passed back and forth, with uneasiness and nostalgia. To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

  Many nights we saw them sitting around a fire and heard them singing. (No fires, remember? But that was a rule imposed from without.) The first time I saw the fire I was furious all over again at Peck’s calculated challenging of every restriction I had laid down. But even in my anger I don’t believe I ever contemplated going over and making him douse it. I told myself that by now his flat was trampled so bare there was little hazard; that the creek, after all, made a firebreak; that the horses had picked the bottom land down to the adobe so that nothing could spread; that anyway Peck had all , the water in my well to fight fires with. The fact was, I wanted no confrontation with Jim Peck; and I avoided it not because it would bother him, but because it would bother me.

  It was a permanent gypsy camp. Mornings, sleeping bags lay like khaki cocoons around the tent. Mealtimes, smoke arose and girls in jeans moved around the fire: either Peck had given up his vegetarianism or he did not insist on it for his followers, for I often smelled hamburgers broiling. Afternoons, a lot of bare feet and sandals might be propped against the lower corral rail and a lot of eyes might watch through altogether too much hair while Julie gave Debby lessons in seat and hands around the ring. Apache girls exposed a lot of leg, climbing on the old piebald for a turn. Unkempt boys leaped aboard the startled old thing and kicked him into a canter up the lane, showing off as if they had been normal adolescents, while Julie sat firmly aboard her gelding to prevent anyone from trying to ride it, and Peck looked down indulgently, lounging in the treehouse door. Play away, my children. Anything goes, even fun.