All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  For as soon as Ruth put me to watching, I saw that she was right. Marian was systematically rejecting her daughter. And something more: John abetted her, it was some agreement between them.

  In place of the two pony tails we had got used to in the station wagon, bouncing out across the bridge to piano lesson or school, now it was crewcut and small pony tail. In place of the thin bright figure that used to lean on the corral watching Debby ride, it was now John. In the early morning when sounds rose clearly from the bottom land I heard child and father talking as they dipped rolled barley out of the bin or shook out a slab or two from a bale of hay. Marian’s voice was not there any more; she was inside, in bed, in the kitchen, down in the grove reading. And on weekends and afternoons when Debby would ordinarily have been around the place, with or without playmates, John frequently took her with him into the hills while he salvaged firewood out of down trees. He didn’t need all that wood, he had two or three cords of it already. But he went, and he took Debby with him.

  When the child skinned her knee or walked into a blackberry vine or had her foot stepped on by the horse, it was John who answered her crying and took her into the bathroom for ceremonial Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid. If she tried to climb into Marian’s lap, Marian held her away until John could take her, not always without an argument, onto his own knee. We heard her call, sometimes, yelling for her mother to come and see some skink or ring-necked snake or brick-colored salamander in the frog pond, and though Marian had spent hours and days teaching her to take an interest in country creatures and had built that frog pond herself, we observed that now she paid no attention. If John was not there to take over, the summons went unanswered.

  Indications multiplied. We stopped once to pick up Marian for shopping, and here came Debby running, squawling to go too. Marian shut the car door in her face. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to stay home with Daddy.” She gave me a sign, and we drove off. In the mirror I saw Debby in a brief shower of tears at the roadside, and out the door John coming, alert to provide his substitute comfort.

  Or they were up at our place one Sunday afternoon for a drink. The fog had rolled over the skyline, and the wind was chilly, so that we sat on the patio side, in the lee. Debby had stripped to the hide to wade in the pool and push around a plastic boat that John—not Marian—produced for her. She gabbled to herself as she played, an innocent obbligato to our talk, which was uristrained and quiet, briefly oblivious of the mad-man on the intersecting road. The sheltered sun was warm, the mockingbird was singing again from the terrace, where he had sung for us the first day they ever visited us.

  This was what we had come here for, this peace. We had cultivated it as strenuously as Marian cultivated aliveness. Whenever it settled upon us in its purity I was likely to think that if this was what Peck and the boys got on a sugar cube I might be tempted to join them. It lay on us that afternoon like a fine dust of gold, and especially on the child, slim and tender, a peeled willow stick, bending in the pool. She was absorbed, entirely unself-conscious. Her body was brown except for the white pants of skin that had been protected from the sun by swimming trunks. Turning, bending, shoving the plastic boat, she was the most graceful of creatures, perfect and smooth, smoothly cleft, round-limbed.

  Then I took my eyes off her and found Marian watching her with so hungry an expression that it obviously embarrassed her to be caught in it. “Ah!” she exclaimed, and stretched out her legs luxuriously. “This is nice!” She reached down and picked up limp Catarrh, arching past her chair. A little flush stained the satiny skin across her cheekbone. She knew what her face had given away, and it was neither weariness nor rejection, it was devouring love.

  “Hey!” Debby said suddenly, with her face bent nearsightedly close to the water. “There are fish in here! Little tiny fish! Mummy, come look!”

  “Mosquito fish,” I said. “I had the county mosquito abatement bring some the other day: we were getting a lot of wigglers.”

  Stroking Catarrh with so firm a hand that it slanted his blinking eyes, Marian looked toward me as if begging some conversation. The pink in her cheekbone deepened. She said nothing. John stood up.

  “Mummy!” Debby cried. “There are millions of them!”

  Her father squatted beside her with one hand on her narrow back. Touching her—I had noticed how much he touched her lately, his hand was always on her head, his arm around her—he said heartily, “Those little fish are as fierce as sharks. Here, let’s catch a fly, I’ll show you.

  It was smoothly done. He waited, squatting, until one of our summer flies alighted on his knee. A swoop of the hand and he had it. He pinched and rolled his fingers, opened them, and dropped the injured fly on the water. From where I sat I could see the water swirl with miniature savagery as they tore it apart.

  “Wow!” Debby said. She stepped out to stand, September Morn, reaching an uncertain toe back toward the water.

  “You’d better get out,” John said. “Those things would gnaw you off at the knees.” His hand patted her white bottom, but she was already gone, pulling at Marian’s arm. Catarrh hopped down and slid away. “Mummy, come and look. They just gobble.”

  Sitting straighter, Marian brushed away the drops of drink that Debby had spilled on her. “Now you’ve slopped me.”

  “Come look!”

  “I’ve seen them, hon.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  “Others like them.”

  “Why won’t you come?” Debby said angrily. “I want you to come and see!”

  Marian withdrew herself. “If we’re losing our manners we’ll have to be taken home.”

  “But just come see!”

  “You’re acting very badly,” Marian said. “Mummy may not want to come and see. Mummy may be tired. You go watch them all you want.”

  Ruth and I sat and listened as to the demonstration of a problem we had not heard stated. Now John came into it again. He picked up the naked child and held her, smiling down into her angry face. “Come on, kid,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea. You get your pants on so we don’t shock the neighbors and you and I will go over in the field and see if John Rabbit is around.”

  He held her between his knees and slid on her panties. Then he hoisted her onto his shoulders. “Excuse us,” he said. “I’ve been promising to show her where a jack-rabbit friend of ours lives.”

  Marian was exposed to two looks, her daughter’s reproachful glare and her husband’s still, questioning glance. She closed her eyes, and they went away. When they were fifty steps out on the drive, and turning up toward the stile in the pasture fence, she moved her head back and forth slightly against the chair. “I’m sorry,” she said, still with her eyes shut.

  “Is she too much for you, Marian?” Ruth said. “Why doesn’t she stay with us? We’d love having her. She’d see you every day, but you wouldn’t have the care of her, or John either.”

  With her thumb on her cheekbone, her fingertips braced against her forehead, Marian sat looking down. Through her fingers she lifted a brief, wry smile. “It’s sweet of you, but that wouldn’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Oh, it’s the hardest thing, of all!” Marian said. Her fingertips rubbed at the crease between her eyes. “We don’t want her unhappy, she shouldn’t feel repudiated, but she has to be detached from me. She’s always been too dependent. John’s been away so much, and I’ve spoiled her.”

  “So you’re now doing what?” I said, more sharply than I intended. “Breaking down her affection?”

  “Not her affection, Joe. Her dependence. I don’t want her to feel lost and shattered without a mother. I’d like her to miss me, but I know it’s better she shouldn’t, too much. So we’re trying to phase me out and John in. But oh, it’s hard! I have to turn myself into a stone!”

  I said to Ruth, “Well, there’s your explanation.” I felt like clutching my head. How often that girl outraged me, trying to live by a theory instead of by her own sound feelings o
r by common sense. Or die by one. I couldn’t help saying, “Does John think she should be deprived of the memory of a loving mother?”

  “He agrees with me. He hates it, but he agrees.”

  “I hate it too,” I said, “and I don’t think, I do agree. Good God, Marian, it’s impossible for Debby, and miserable for you! Let her miss you. She’ll be richer all her life for that sorrow.”

  She gave me her clear blue thoughtful glance, looking sidelong through the fingers still pressed against her forehead. Evidently she saw the redness of her palm, for with a grimace she laid it flat on her thigh. “Both my parents were killed when I was just about her age,” she said. “I don’t want her lost like that.”

  “You survived it,” I said. “Not too badly.”

  “Joe, I had nightmares for years. I was always dreaming I was lost in some forest, or in a great bleak place like a tundra.”

  “And survived the nightmares too,” I said. “This isn’t the way you usually talk. You’re always saying face up to it, experience it. Anyway, what about what Debby wants? Doesn’t that matter?”

  “She wants love,” Marian said. “She’s learning to go to John for it. He’s the gentlest man in the world, she’s got to discover that. Before long, she’ll be calling on him, not me. Then it’ll be easier for both of them when I go.”

  Preparations, plans as if for a sabbatical year. They set my teeth on edge. Her explanation left me shaky and undone, as always when I caught her trying to assert her will against inevitability. Sometimes I almost resented her assumption that she could control the circumstances of her death; I wondered if she could be called selfish for presuming to steer the lives of those who would survive her. And inconsistent: if all experience, including pain, was good for her, it ought to be good for Debby too. And finally presumptuous. Good God, presumptuous was too mild a word.

  Bothered by her presumption, I vaguely resented John’s submission to it. Perhaps he resented me, too, for I could not keep still. Sometime in September I begged him to make her abort the wretched fetus that was shortening her life.

  The answer that he gave me was probably the only possible answer, and he gave it to me with the emotional control, the rocklike composure, that had put me off when I met him at the airport. This active, strong, clean, easy-smiling, well-educated young American, this man whose face you could have used on posters, this mens sana in corpore sano, no beater of the breast or dabbler in his own insides, but a doer, a hunter of new knowledge and a believer in the future—this man you could trust to look after a child or chair a committee or conduct an impartial investigation, who could conceive an important problem and devise the system of research that might solve it, this scientist whose science was life, and who was as tender and intense about life as anybody I knew except his wife—this man so fortunate in every way but the most important looked at me somberly and said, “She’s entitled to do it her way. It’s her death.”

  So it was, so it was. And closer every morning.

  5

  Waiting is one of the forms of boredom, as it can be one of the shapes of fear. The thing you wait for compels you time after time toward the same images, the same feelings, which become only further repetitive elements in the sameness of the days. Here, even the weather enforces monotony. The mornings curve over, one like another, for a week, two weeks, three weeks, unchanging in temperature, light, color, humidity, or if changing, changing by predictable small gradations that amount to no changes at all. Never a tempest, thunderstorm, high wind; never a cumulus cloud, not at this season. Hardly a symptom to tell you summer is passing into autumn, unless it is the dense green of the tarweed that late in summer, against all the dry probabilities, appears in patches on the baked hills. Its odor and its unseasonable green become manifest together, until the smell covers a whole district, lifts on the slightest wind, fills the head, perfumes shoes and trousers and cats that have passed through it, and closets where shoes and trousers have been stored, and hands that have stroked the cat’s fur.

  In recollection, those weeks of waiting telescope for me as all dull time does. They were interminable while passing, but looked back upon they seem only an accelerating hour, scented, with tarweed. When August had blurred into September, and school had begun, and John had begun taxiing Debby mornings and afternoons as Marian had used to do, the smell of tarweed was in every breath we drew.

  Most of the time we were as isolated with the Catlins’ trouble as if we had been adrift with them on a raft. Other neighbors, other concerns, passed largely un-hailed, outside the latitude of our obsession. Tom Weld rattled in and out in his pickup, and walked the hill with surveyors. White stakes sprouted, and we saw by the paper that a subdivision plan was before the planning commission. Ordinarily it would have desolated us; in our preoccupation with Marian we noticed it only as one more betrayal of what we had come for, and hardly felt anger. Mrs. Weld blossomed into September in a yellow Impala, evidently a down payment on prosperity. Lou LoPresti, encountered on a walk, wore a pucker in his forehead and a shamed air as if he had been forbidden to speak to us. Maybe he had. Fran we practically never saw, nor Julie; when we did see Julie, she was not on her horse but in Dave Weld’s Mercury, and generally headed for the skyline. Once I met Peck on the county road, buzzing along on his Honda, a messenger from nirvana with the wind like a fire hose in his beard. He did not greet me.

  Wraiths, shadows of dissolving cloud, meaningless apparitions. They meant no more to us than the latest Tokyo student riot or yesterday’s military coup in Syria.

  Holding ourselves available for the Catlins’ need, we accepted no invitations and issued none. And because they had no immediate family to call on, and had been so briefly in California that their acquaintance was small, they let us help. I like to believe that their resolution was not as rocklike as it seemed, and that they felt a little less desperate because of us. Pity was part of it, too: we took Marian’s condition so hard that they both felt sorry for us.

  Ruth cooked and cleaned and laundered, I played driver and yardman; occasionally we were able to take Debby off their hands. Regularly, when John was at the lab in the mornings, we stopped in to do what we could. By taking over little household jobs, Ruth released Marian to other, more troubling tasks. She put Debby’s clothes completely in order. She went through her desk and storage cupboards and bundled together photographs, sorted letters, burned some, sent others back to their writers. She wrote to people she had valued and left behind in her thirty years. Slowly, saving herself and thinking about what she was doing, and resting frequently, she cleaned up the small debris of her life. From day to day we saw little change in her. Yet whenever our telephone rang we hurried to answer it with adrenalin pumping into our blood, for fear this, now, here, was the moment.

  One evening in mid-September it rang while we were eating supper in the patio. I hurried in and got it in the middle of the third ring. “Hello?” I said.

  Fran’s voice, not glutinous but tense and tight, full of hatred and venom. Oh, she could have poisoned me through the porches of my ear. “I just wanted you to know what your beatniks have been up to.”

  “Fran,” I said, “they’re not my beatniks, I’m as unhappy about them as you are, and I did run them ...”

  “No you’re not,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly be. Dirty, filthy, hairy animals! Do you know what they’ve done to that miserable child of mine?”

  I was afraid I did, but I said I didn’t.

  “They’ve got her pregnant!” Fran said. Her voice swelled so that I held the receiver away from my ear; it went on shouting at me. “Pregnant! Not sixteen yet, and pregnant! And not ashamed of it one bit, my God! Throws it in my face! Runs away to live with them in that ... coop ...pigpen....”

  “Fran, Fran,” I said. “I am sorry, believe me. When did you find this out?”

  “Yesterday. Last night. Today she’s gone, but I know exactly where. I had Lou trail that Weld boy one day. He’s as bad as she is, poisoned, sim
ply poisoned by those ...”

  “Did she say who was responsible?”

  Her hard, unpleasant laugh made me move the receiver out again. “Why, don’t you know about modem youth?” she said. “They don’t have fathers any more, there’s nothing so old-fashioned as an affair. You know what she told me? My God, you know what she said? She said it might have been any of a half dozen. To my face.”

  “Oh Lord.”

  “Yes, oh Lord. I wanted you to know, I thought you’d be interested.”

  “Fran, honestly ...”

  “Well,” she said, “there won’t be any more of this, I can promise you that. I know right where that little bitch is, in their old summer cottage up there on the ridge, and I’m going up there with the police and I’m going to clean that nest out. You hear me?” I heard her all right, and I heard the strangled sound of crying underneath her furious words. “I wanted you to know,” she said. “That gang should never have been allowed to form.”

  “I regret my part in it,” I said. “I regret it very much. But Fran, if you’ll forgive my speaking up, are you sure you want to go up there with the police? Wouldn’t it be easier on you and on Julie if you and Lou just went by yourselves?”

  “I’m going up there,” said her hoarsening voice, “and I’m going to see that they’re all thrown in jail! I’ll have them up for using drugs, tampering with a minor, rape. I’ll throw the book at the filthy things.”

  “But from what Julie told you, it wasn’t rape.”