All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  Perhaps it was for Debby’s sake, perhaps for other reasons, that I scraped out the treehouse with a flap of cardboard, and kicked together the worst of the refuse on and around the tent platform, and tore the motto and the crooked shelf from the oak, and set the pile afire and waited nearly an hour while it burned out. The culvert at the edge of the brush hummed like Fran LoPresti’s welded woman when I knocked it with my fist. I thought of rolling it down into the creek, just to get it out of the way and prevent someone’s thinking I had stolen it, since it was on my land; but in the end I left it there.

  On the other side I disconnected the hidden wire from above my meter box. I was finding the chores rather pleasant, like tidying up after friends’ children have been playing around the place. Though I contemplated unhooking the water line as well, I decided to leave it, thinking that Debby, more or less in the spirit of the former inhabitants, might want to make mudpies. For a moment, forgetting, I even revived a previous notion that Ruth and I might build a teahouse there on Peck’s flat, with a high arching Japanese bridge, and I had a brief vision of the Allstons and the Catlins having tea there together on damp winter afternoons, while the creek went secretly past below us, entangled in its blackberry and poison oak. Brief, a moment only. Then I remembered why the Catlins were in Carmel, and the prospects we all had before us.

  After a week, when Peck’s outfit did not return for it, I removed their mailbox, completing the cleanup except for the shed with its miscellany of odd junk. But I could not feel good about closing up the University of the Free Mind. For one thing, I had done it in anger, not after reflection. For another, I knew that Marian would regret their going. She had a mystical confidence that by trying many things they might eventually learn something that we who tried little would never learn. I had agreed with her more than once, but insisted that they also forgot more, and wasted more, than we who weren’t revolutionary would ever forget or waste. Still, I regretted having to explain why the ashram had left so abruptly, and though the flat beyond the creek was now open territory, I found myself avoiding it. I didn’t even like crossing the dry creek bed below it at the end of a walk. It seemed to me that the culvert up there, hollow and resonant, Peck’s perfect monument, troubled the air at intervals with a faint, swarming hum when the wind blew through it.

  3

  My promptness in dealing with Peck had not reinstated me with Fran. In place of the old neighborly unction, she now treated me on our infrequent meetings with distant politeness. All kinds of connections seemed to be broken. Dave Weld I hardly ever saw any more: it turned out that he had located the ashram in its new place up on the skyline, and being mobile in his Mercury, he spent all his spare time up there. Once or twice I saw Julie with him in the car; more often I encountered her at the Catlin cottage or on the trail or lane, riding with Debby. If I met her in the house, she left the room. If she saw me coming on the road, she turned her gelding into the brush.

  Lovable old Joe Allston, everybody’s friend. Was it my fault? A lot of people thought so—even, I was afraid, Marian. She thought I took Peck too personally, as if he were my moral responsibility. And she was quite right, I did. But we did not spend much time discussing him, except when he got his name in the papers. Most of the time, Marian had her ear tuned inward, not outward. All the tumult among the careless and the rebellious must have seemed like the meaningless traffic noise outside a sickroom. For through late July and August she was learning how to get ready to die, and because she had that other preparation too, that baby to whom I thought she too readily gave up, she felt that she had to stay in good health for her dying.

  Fascinated and miserable, we watched her coddle herself, not giving up her routine duties, but resting often, going to bed early, forcing down those health-food mixtures, tiger’s milk and such, that she thought gave her the most calories per mouthful. When I saw her during one of her rest periods, stretched on the old redwood lounge in the grove, abstracted, lightly frowning, I imagined she was focusing her will on her body, willing the growth in her womb to speed up and the deadly growth in pancreas and liver to slow down.

  Watching was about all we found to do. It was no use talking to John. More than once, in the beginning, I came at him with suggestions—male hormones, why not? They were said to be effective in some cases. What if they did produce masculine characteristics? Wouldn’t he rather see Marian with a beard like Jim Peck’s than ... submit ... fade? But they had talked it all out on that trip to Carmel. They had a secret, impregnable solidarity that excluded us from their decisions while we were still welcomed to their company and their affection.

  Having made her choice, she left none to us. Forced to attend helplessly, I watched her with the apprehensive alertness of a young man in love. If I missed seeing her for a day I grew anxious. Some days I walked the hill three or four times just on the chance that I would see her and have an excuse to stop. The more I saw them drawing together the more I hated my own intrusions and the less I was able to keep from intruding, especially after they sent Debby off for three weeks to the Canaday ranch camp and there were chances of catching Marian alone. Increasingly, I found myself searching for revelations in her face. It remained the face of Marian Catlin, it paid us its usual compliment of eager interest, total attention, warmth, love. It remained addicted to laughter.

  Too addicted to laughter? Hysterical? Afraid? But I would no sooner begin to wonder than I would catch her eyes on me so tenderly, so reassuringly, that I put my anxiety down as obscene. She deserved better of us than this morbid watchfulness.

  But we noted changes. As she began to expose herself less to the sun, her summer tan paled to a sort of translucent gold, the kind of skin you sometimes see on beautiful Eurasian girls. In repose she appeared utterly serene, purged of every impurity, and she went about her work quietly, without strain.

  Once we watched her and John walking toward us where we stood by the boxes waiting for the delayed mailman. They came slowly, holding hands, watching the ground but absorbed in each other, confidential and intimate and intent. Ruth’s eyes flew from them to me, to see if I had seen what she saw. Tears massed in them all at once. Biting her lip, she turned away, and was barely able to greet them when they looked up and saw us.

  Marian let John limit himself to a half day at the lab, but she did not exempt herself from the duties that can make even dying seem a troublesome interruption of more important things. I suppose there was a degree of support in familiar routines, though it grieved us to see her occupied with shopping, laundry, meals, house-work, and when Debby was at home, the incessant taxiing to swimming pool or park or piano lesson or the house of some friend. We hated the obligations she undertook to entertain visiting professors and faculty wives, and when we saw strange cars in the drive we avoided the cottage, feeling excluded and aggrieved.

  Yet as I think about it, it seems that we did see her often alone, as if she often got John and Debby out of the house in order to be private with her two inward guests. Especially about noon, when I made my walk to the mailbox, and especially when Debby was away at camp, I used to see her resting in the grove, eyes closed, hands folded on her podded abdomen, her body otherwise thin and straight like an effigy on a tomb, and her face burning upward, a waiting lamp in the dry shade. The moment she heard my step her face would turn, her eyes open, her smile flash out, the rheostat of her spirit turn up ready for company. I never caught her with the lamp turned clear down. Perhaps that was why I never lost hope. I couldn’t believe she was really waiting for what she was waiting for.

  Once, when I had stopped like that, I asked her if she had any pain. “No, thank God,” she said. “I worry about it. I don’t know if I could stand the kind of pain there is sometimes.”

  “It seems to me you can stand anything.”

  “The bones are the worst, apparently,” she said. “Nobody can stand it in the bones. But I don’t have it there.” Turning on me that unforced radiant smile, she knocked lightly on the wooden fr
ame of the lounge.

  “I wish you’d agree to some sort of treatments,” I said hopelessly.

  But she put me down with an admonitory lifted hand and a humorous breathy sigh. “Joe, please, it wouldn’t be any Use. I don’t want to be fooled, or soothed, or kept expensively alive as a morphine vegetable. All I want—no, of course I want more, but I’ll settle for time to have the baby. When the other gets close, I hope I have the nerve to let it come. I hope I’m conscious enough to help it along, not slow it down for no purpose. That’s why I worry about the pain. I’m afraid it’ll be bad and I’ll miss it.”

  “Miss it?”

  “Miss the experience. It must be one of the greatest, and it’s certainly the last.”

  “Oh, Marian!”

  “Oh, Joe!” she said, mocking me, and banged her reddened palm on the frame of the lounge. “We all wear such tough hides! We cover ourselves up so! You can’t blame me for thinking about it a lot. I swear we never know half what life means, not even what it feels like. Birth and death are the greatest experiences we ever know, and we smother them in drugs and twilight sleep.”

  “The hard pleasures,” I said. “You’ll tell me next you had Debby behind a bush.” If I had not made a joke I would have had to leave her.

  She shook her head with a reminiscent half-smile. “I wasn’t good enough. I wanted to do it without anesthetic, but the doctor wouldn’t let me; he thought I might have a bad time, I’m so narrow. So I got him to set up a mirror I could watch in, and when the pain got too bad I raised a little flag and the anesthetist put the cone over my face till I could feel myself going, and then I raised the flag again and he took it off I experienced part of it, but I wasn’t good enough to get it all.”

  I had to look away from her bright serious face, down into the tangle of blackberry and poison oak and maidenhair that hid the creek channel. It was a warm, still midday, everything stuck on dead center. The heat and smog of the valley were being pushed up into the folds of the hills, and the brown shade smothered me.

  “Joe,” she said, and put her cool hand on the back of mine. “Don’t feel bad. I’m glad you love me, but I hope you and Ruth won’t grieve. It’s right there should be death in the world, it’s as natural as being born. We’re all part of a big life pool, and we owe the world the space we fill and the chemicals we’re made of. Once we admit it’s not an abstraction, but something we do personally owe, it shouldn’t be hard.”

  “But you love everything about your life,” I said. “You’re more alive than anybody I ...” It was more than I could do, I couldn’t sit there calmly discussing her obliteration. I said, “If you were my age, maybe I could stand it.”

  For a good while she said nothing. When I could look at her again she smiled coaxingly, inviting me to join her on that plateau of impossible tranquillity she had somehow reached. “Isn’t it complicated to be human, though?” she said. “Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally. Even when it’s violent it seems natural. They mature, and reproduce themselves, and a lot of the young are taken but a few survive, and the phylum is safe so the old ones can die in the stream like salmon, or get pulled down by wolves like old caribou, and it’s right, it’s what they expect and what nature needs.”

  I made some inarticulate sign—assent, dissent, nolo contendere, something.

  “And after all,” Marian said, “I’ve done it. I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn’t make any real difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance.”

  From the grove I was looking up at the golden glare of Weld’s hill on the other side of the lane. A buzzard was cruising around the top, tilting, fingering the air delicately. I could see his head crane as he looked down, and then he banked and was out of sight behind the trees.

  “The one thing,” Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, “the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won’t ever see her grow up. She’ll have to do it without whatever I could have given her.”

  I saw her bite down on her lower lip, her eyes fled mine and turned up into the roof of leaves. In her throat the pulse fluttered, tethered and frantic. But only for a second. When she spoke again her voice was back to the controlled, modulated, musical, rather high tone of normal conversation.

  “Time, too,” she said, looking upward. “Time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It’s so important to us because we see it so close. We’re individuals, we’re full of ourselves, and so we’re bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of a sudden there’s so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we’d always been and always intended to be. John is always saying ontogeny repeats phylogeny. Do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there’s so much to feel, and I’m greedy?”

  I could not answer. Around us, as we sat, the silence revealed itself to be not silence at all, but a deep vibrant hum, the distant roar of the hot acquisitive society that we both half repudiated, and under it the small reassuring noises of the natural world. A jet came over from the south, already letting down for San Francisco, and blotted everything out. Then, as it faded northward, the little noises came back. Among the oak leaves, dry and horny as the cast shells of little crabs, a lizard made a sudden stir. The birds, I realized just then, were starting to sing again after the long preoccupation with nests and young. From the hill a meadow lark piped sweet and piercing, and apparently a long way off, deep in the ravine, I heard the three plaintive dropping notes of a wren. It seemed too much life for anyone soberly to consider leaving behind.

  “Do you know how magnificent you are?” I said shakily. “Do you know how many people in your situation grab for every petty selfish indulgence? How many really are greedy? How many go into blind panic, or turn their backs and pretend they haven’t got what they’ve got? And you sit thinking how little time there is to be loving and generous.”

  “To my daughter,” she said. “To my husband. To my friends, a few like you and Ruth. They’re my pleasure, after all. If I managed to be what I’d like to be, I would be indulging myself.”

  I stood up, because I couldn’t bear for another second to have her smile so at me, and bent blindly to kiss her, and went away. But afterward, those few minutes were between us, a secret, and I realized she had come out of herself and admitted me to her confidence because she wanted to comfort and reassure me. I am certain she made the same effort for each of the people she cared about, and that each of them kept it as something private and precious, and talked about it no more than I did. When we came to see her, we were the ones who were comforted. She made us all confederates in her preparations, and I know that Ruth and I, at least, picked up strength from her. She had so much she could give it away. Her biological confidence was so serene that she could accept even the blind coffin worm as an essential part of the biota.

  4

  Changes, symptoms, stigmata—we watched for them, unable to help ourselves, and slowly, a trace at a time, they appeared.

  “Have you noticed how indifferent Marian is getting to Debby?” Ruth said one day, one of those blurred indistinguishable days while summer droned on and she burned toward her end. “It’s as if she’s so intent on having the new baby she’s forgetting the one she has.”

  I said I hadn’t noticed any such thing. If she seemed indifferent, it was because she was tired all the time, and who could blame her?

  “I wasn’t blaming her. I’ve just been noticing. It started all of a sudden. It’s more than tiredness.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Marian. She adores that child.”

  “Adored,” Ruth said. “She’s changed. You watch. John’s the one who’s attached to Debby now.”

  “Naturally, he’s saving Marian all he ca
n.”

  “That wouldn’t make her act so cold. It’s like a repudiation.”

  “If I were in her place I’d probably think of nobody but myself,” I said. “I can’t think it’s any more than that. What are they going to do when John has to go back to teaching?”

  “I thought you knew. He’s taking the quarter off.”

  I brooded about that, trying to imagine how it would feel to conduct your life as if you were driving soberly, carefully, well within the speed limit and in accordance with all the traffic laws, toward an intersection already in sight, where you knew a crazy drunk out of control was going to hit you head on. It is no good to say we all conduct our lives that way: most of us can’t see the intersection, and so can pretend it isn’t there.

  Bitterly I said, “They figure three months will take care of it, is that it? It’s almost obscene, they’re like conspirators. Are they going to have signals, you suppose, so when she’s at her last breath she can lower her little flag and John can tell the doctors, ‘O.K., boys, rip away, get that babe’?”

  “Joe!”

  “Christ,” I said, “it gives me the horrors.”

  “What should they do, pretend?”

  No, not pretend. Pretending was what a lot of people did, and changed nothing. Only undoing would serve. I thought I would trade my possible ten more years of life to be God for ten minutes, to undream their nightmare for them and unravel all their careful preparations.

  What is more, I didn’t understand all their preparations. Some, like the heartbreaking little gifts she brought us, things that were like the gifts a serious and affectionate little girl might leave her friends when she went home from a summer at the shore or in the mountains, were plain enough, however painful. But why would she let John suspend his work for a quarter? It would have been more her style to make him go down to that lab every morning until the very day she had to be taken to the hospital. His career was at least as important to her as to him, and she would want life served, not death. And now this rejection of Debby, right when I would have expected her to be hungrily protective and possessive to the last frayed end of her strength. What about her wish to be generous and loving? Was she already so far gone that she was letting go the strongest claim on her life?