All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  “No.”

  “And we won’t get any dust over here.”

  “No.”

  I breathed in deeply, wanting as much as she did to take pleasure in the calm night and the peaceful patio and the oil-black pool with the splintered star in it. But aromatic tarweed flooded my nose, mouth, head, and heart, and away off in the hills, miles away it seemed, but clear as a bugle, we heard the frenzied, cracking voices of hunting hounds.

  7

  Our visit to Marian next day was brief, no more than ten minutes. The nurse did not want us there at all. Every move she made as she checked the jar on its stand, or the taped arm, or as she stood, a thick white disapproval, in the doorway, told us that. Marian tried. She asked about Catarrh, who had got clawed up in a fight with a wild tom. But her attempt at a smile would hold no more firmly than her attempt at interest; her eyes full of affectionate tenderness would cloud, her body would stir with insistent pain, her whole presence would retreat across an uncrossable gap. It seemed that she had shrunk in the bed, all but her mounded abdomen. Her skin was yellow, and when we kissed her she was clammy to our lips.

  Our cheerful noises died in our mouths. Twice we watched her attention twist inward in spite of her attempt to hold it on us. But at the end, when we took her hands and kissed them and tiptoed to the door with a furtive sickroom guiltiness, she summoned her full smile. It blazed at us, burning through pain and everything else. “Bless you,” she said. “Bless you both. I like to think you’re my father and mother sent back to me.” The nurse closed the door.

  In the living room John had just hung up the telephone. Weakly we said, “Isn’t it time? Shouldn’t she be taken in? If the doctor was here, wouldn’t he insist on a hypo?”

  “We’re waiting for Debby to get home,” John said. “She won’t go while Debby’s away.”

  “Couldn’t I go and get her out early?”

  The look he gave me was almost ugly. A man so robust as John has really no way of showing anxiety. Where another man might sag or stumble, grow haggard under the eyes, appear with mussed hair or wrinkled clothes, he simply couldn’t help his coordination and his muscular health. His tan was intact, his virile crewcut bristled. But still his look had an ugly, fleering quality, and he said, “That would make it special. It mustn’t be special. It’s got to be as casual as Tuesday afternoon.”

  It was I who stumbled and stammered, overcome by the fear that neither he nor anyone else had made any preparations. “But she is going in today? What about a room—is there a chance she couldn’t get one? Shouldn’t we ... ?”

  “The doctor’s holding a room,” John said. “The nurse has orders to give her a hypo if it gets too bad. We’re only waiting for Debby.”

  “John,” I said, “we don’t want to be in the road, God knows. But you know how we feel about her. Can we do anything? Drive you in?”

  With his arms around us both he moved us to the door. “Of course,” he said. “Yes, that would be a help. I’ll call you.”

  A smile, a pressure on the shoulders, and we were outside, simultaneously accepted for service and shut away from the intimate trouble that had room only for the family and the nurse.

  As we went up the hill, we saw through the fringe of trees that Tom Weld had put his son to work on the bulldozer. The noise of the engine, big and rough and then easing back and then big again, was like the hoarse breathing of a man heaving his weight against great stones or tree trunks. A fume of dust hung over the ravine, and there were howls and scrapings as the blade gouged rock.

  The noise and dust drove us over onto the patio side, where we sat through lunch time, not really expecting the telephone to ring until after three-thirty, but listening anyway until the strain put a hum like quinine in my ears.

  About two it rang, and I sprang for it. And who was it? Jim Peck, inquiring in his soft love-everything voice if he could come and get the stuff he had left behind. Because I was relieved that his call was not the one I feared, I was probably heartier than I otherwise might have been. I said certainly, sure, come ahead. Thank you, he said. There was a pause, but no click. “How’s it going?” I said. “Going?” “Your case. I read that the Grand Jury is getting it.” There was another pause, then the soft polite voice said, “You should know.” “No,” I said, with the old angry constriction in the solar plexus. “No, I don’t know.” “Oh,” said Peck, “I thought you would.” Click.

  All right, you son of a bitch, think what you please, I said to the dead instrument, and went back to the patio. To Ruth’s questioning eyebrows I said, “Peck. Wants to come after his stuff. At least this is the last of him.”

  In a little while we both went in and lay down for a nap. If waiting is a shape of boredom, habit is the best way I know to deal with it. We each went into a darkened room, and I am ashamed to say I dozed. And woke at three, and still no call. Ruth read a magazine. I repaired a sagging shelf in her closet. If we met each other’s eyes, we looked away, embarrassed and gloomy.

  Three-thirty, and still no call. Should we go down? But we might only be in the way. Telephone? We would only bother them. We waited.

  The ring was explosive, something toward which fire had come on a long fuse. I was into the kitchen before the second burr of the bell. “Yes? Yes?”

  John’s voice, flat and steady. “I guess it’s time. Could you come down?”

  VII

  AT THE DOOR we ran into a blazing afternoon. Inside our insulated and curtained house, we had not realized how hot it was, nearly as hot as a midsummer heat wave. The bulldozer growled and rumbled across the gully, and turning the buttonhook, we could see Dave Weld’s walnut back and reddish head, still un-shorn, as he suspended roar and motion briefly, peering ahead of the blade, and then jammed at the gears and dug in again. The hill peeled away from the steel, clods rolled, the sluggish dust lifted, and then we lost it as I whirled the car down to the left behind the screen of trees.

  “Not so fast,” Ruth said. Her feet were pushing hard against the floor boards, there was a pinched, hard look around her mouth.

  Ahead, on the steepest part of the hill, I saw a tarantula coming. Ordinarily subterranean and nocturnal, they come out on fall afternoons and walk in bald daylight, high on their hairy legs. Maybe young Weld had rooted this one out of his hole and sent him wandering. Under most circumstances, I would have run over him, or tried to—they can jump like crickets—and squashed him into an evil smear. Now, for some reason I jerked the wheel and straddled him, and glancing back in the mirror I saw him intact, an impervious, ominous ink-blot crawling uphill bent upon carrying to us the message we had already received.

  Ruth’s lips were drawn back from her teeth. I knew exactly how she felt: as if the thing had crawled on her exposed heart.

  I had barely cut the motor beside the Catlins’ station wagon when John was in the doorway, pulling the door carefully shut behind him. A stranger would have thought him a pleasant-faced young man stepping outside to greet guests. There was no impairment of his color or his air of health, and he had himself so completely under control that he did not even seem stiff. Perhaps he was feeling a sort of relief. But there was a moment when I thought him too hatefully calm. My own breathing was constricted, and I could feel my heart.

  Ruth put out her hands in an impulsive, pitying gesture, rare in her. He took them, and looking up at her from under his brows, he kissed the ends of the fingers. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, and his arms were brown and heavily muscled.

  “Bad?” Ruth said.

  “Bad enough.”

  “You said the nurse had orders for a hypo....”

  “She gave her one an hour ago,” John said. “Wouldn’t you know, it doesn’t work on her. I suppose she’s unconsciously resisting it.”

  “Ah, but if she can do that! Isn’t that a good sign? I mean, maybe it isn’t ...”

  Into his square face came a moment’s darkness, a flicker almost savage. “Isn’t really bad yet?” he said. “Isn’t time? She
says it is.”

  Ruth was silent, rebuked. Accept, accept, these Catlins kept insisting. When it is unmistakable, then no blinders, no fictions. Marian was getting exactly what she had hoped to avoid: pain and dope, either of which meant the overwhelming of feeling and intelligence and will. She would not be given the chance to face it to an open-eyed ending; she would end as a guttering-out of numbed flesh. Nevertheless, no fictions, not for, her, not for him.

  Between ourselves, we had speculated on how John would react when the crisis came, whether he would be up to it and to her. But we would have done better to be anxious about our own responses, for now we burst out together, “What can we ... ?” and both stopped. After waiting three months for the inevitable, we were totally unprepared. We had no plan for how we might help them. Instead of taking charge, we had to ask, we had to improvise as if in the face of an accident.

  Which meant that we had never believed it was inevitable. In spite of Marian’s preparations and all she had said to us singly or together, in spite of the visible symptoms of her fading life, we had not accepted as she accepted. I was ashamed for us, and relieved. when Ruth said, watching him with puckered eyes, “The nurse will go with you, won’t she? You’ll need help with Debby.”

  “Could you?” John said. “It probably wouldn’t be for long. I can get Marian settled and be back before dinner, if ...”

  “There’s no need at all. I haven’t got a thing else to do. I’ll get her dinner. Where is she now?”

  “With Marian.”

  “Don’t you worry about her,” Ruth said. “Stay with Marian. I can bring Debby down to see her tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever she’d like.”

  John was frowning at her as if he didn’t quite recognize her face or hadn’t quite heard what she said. His cheeks looked oddly crumpled, brown and suddenly withered. He linked the fingers of his hands and bent them backward, looking over Ruth’s head. “I guess I wasn’t very clear,” he said. “She’s saying goodbye in there now. Goodbye, you understand?”

  “Oh, why?” Ruth burst out. “John, why? She’s not that far-gone!”

  “No frightening memories,” John said, looking over her head. “No painful scenes. No recollections of her doped or in pain. Just-one day she said goodbye as if she were going downtown, and went away.”

  From the side, I saw the shine of tears in his eyes, but I did not see any fall. By some impossible act of control he sucked them back, dried them up, looked over Ruth’s head until they were absorbed. Up on the hill, the bulldozer stopped. The abrupt ending of the noise left us standing sick and uneasy in the shade. On both sides of us the big oaks writhed up past the eaves, the yard sloping down toward the grove was brown and splashed with sun. Just at the juncture of sun and shade, a cloud of flies danced and jiggled, in incessant movement but held together, a galaxy of tiny sparks of life. From a crack in the weathered boarding behind John, wasps crawled out and flew, meeting a traffic of other wasps that landed and crawled in, hot with industry. I watched one alight on a post holding up the overhang and curl his yellow and black abdomen down as if anchoring himself with his stinger, and I distinctly heard the sound of his tiny mandibles gnawing on the wood.

  I thought it could have been the wasp to which Marian had given back his life when he fell in her pot of jam.

  From outside the circle of commitment and responsibility, neither husband nor father nor woman capable of presiding over birth or death or the living needs of a house, only a man growing old who intruded where he had no usefulness, insisting on his presence because he loved Marian Catlin and could not bear her loss—and can’t yet—I said, “Does Debby know? Have you told her ... anything?”

  John’s attention seemed fixed on the infinitesimal dry rasping of the wasp’s mandibles. He peered at me with eyes in which the wetness of unshed tears still glittered. His frown deepened, his lips pursed, he shook his head with sharp impatience. I realized that he was listening for sounds inside the house. But he did not open the door.

  Inside there, bent upon protecting her daughter as she would never have wanted herself protected, what was she doing? Reading a story? Playing a game? Planning some excursion or trip that would never be taken? I doubted that she would be that dishonest. She would sin only by omission, not outright. But could she hold herself back from tears and paroxysms of love, smothering the child to her for the last time? Yes, I thought she could. The object was to say goodbye without Debby’s ever knowing it was forever. No tears, no sobbing, above all no outward sign that she was in pain. The final act of the phasing out.

  It seemed to me we had been standing in the gnawed silence for half an hour. I turned my wrist to see my watch. Ten past four. Barely five minutes since our telephone had rung.

  With an opaque look at us, John opened the door. “Marian?”

  “Yes,” said her clear voice, lifted to carry from the back of the house. “I’m ready.”

  And that was no pain-shrunk or dope-numbed voice. It was as natural as laughter, it was marked only by the tuned-up fluty tone that came into it when she was excited. It told nothing of how she was feeling, it said only that she was in command. She could have sung a song through without a quaver, I believe. The sound of her voice broke me down, I was ready to cry or laugh, but above everything I was proud of her and for her. She would go like a queen, directing her life to the end, and if she was a queen bound for the scaffold, you would not know it from her bearing or her voice.

  John pushed the door wide. The nurse came hurriedly in from the hall and whispered to him. “Ruth,” John said, “could you come with me?” They went together into the dark room, dark at least as I looked into if from the glare of outdoors. “I’ll get the car ready,” I said. From the suddenly mysterious interior I heard Debby crying, “Where are you going, Mummy? Mummy, where? I want to go.”

  The nurse came out of the hall again with a weekend bag, ready packed as if for a honeymoon or a birth. I grabbed it from her hand and took it out to the car.

  Briefly I debated between our two-door and the station wagon, and chose the station wagon because it was the easier to get in and out of. But the back end was half-full of wood, with a Swedish saw, an ax, and a splitting hammer on top of it. I am afraid it gratified me, and made me at once more critical of him and more friendly toward him, that John had not prepared better.

  Climbing in, I began to throw the wood out onto the edge of the drive. The inside was like a sauna. Hurrying, afraid they would come before I was ready, I scraped out bark and litter with the back of the saw, raised up the back seat from its nest in the floor, wiped it off with my handkerchief, stowed tools and suitcase behind it, and ran down all the windows to let out the stifling heat. As I backed out, blotting my face in the damp shoulder of my shirt, I heard hoofs, and looked up to see Julie LoPresti riding through the trail gate from the bottoms.

  Sentimental return to the abandoned pad of her guru? Whiff of freedom the first time her mother had untied her from the clothesline? Or perhaps a call on Marian, to dump her garbage of filial vengefulness at this roadside? She rode at a slow walk, eying the house, and I straightened up ready to warn her off. Of all the things Marian did not need at that moment, Julie ranked pretty high on the list. But if she had been planning to stop, the intention died as soon as she saw me. She touched me coldly with her hating eyes and rode on past.

  I looked toward the door. From out in the blazing sun it looked as black as the opening of a cave. There was a narrow stripe of shade beginning to reach into the drive, and I backed the station wagon into it and sat waiting.

  The bulldozer roared into life again, much closer than before, and bending, I could see it coming around the shoulder of the hill on a long descending angle evidently aimed at a junction with our lane about at the mailboxes. Clods broke from the wave of earth thrown downhill by the blade. Two or three made it all the way to the lane, jumped the bank, and burst like bombs.

  For a minute my head was full of the thought of those Indians who ha
d made noble speeches to Congress and commissioners, speeches in which they spoke of such reverence for the Earth Mother that they would not plow her breast. I thought of the druids who worshiped trees, and of the Great Goddess who was ancient, and anciently worshiped, centuries before she came into history on the tablets of Sumer. I swear I thought of them all, because with that destroyer tearing up the hill Marian loved, and just at the moment when she was ready to make her last trip from the country house she loved, I had to think in her terms. The earth was literally alive for her; she would suffer to see it mutilated.

  It didn’t help that the young fool driving the bulldozer, and his ambitious fathead of a father, would go home to a hearty supper and the satisfaction of a good day’s work accomplished, while any minute now Marian Catlin, who loved the earth and its creatures in ways the Welds could not even imagine, would come out that black door and start down the lane toward the hospital where they would tape another needle in her bruised arm and jab her in the hip with a massive shot of morphine, and if a flicker of life still showed itself present, they would numb it with another needle until it gave up, and keep it numbed until it died. And then they would cut her open, warm, barely still, to get the bloody lump upon which she had concentrated her last vitality.

  You ugly son of a bitch, I said to the reddish head through the dust, why can’t you tip over and roll down?

  And turned, and she was in the doorway.

  2

  She was in a wrapper of quilted white satin, but above that wedding-gown whiteness, between John’s dark tan and Ruth’s ruddiness, her face was death’s face. In days she had shrunk on her bones. Her feet moved weakly, one, then the other, from below the hem of the robe as they helped her down the one step to the walk. Safely there, she looked up and saw me waiting by the open car door.

  Even then, her whole spirit braced against the agony of parting and the agony of her riddled flesh, she could smile. Her generosity could shine across thirty feet of hot shade and give me something, reminder, acknowledgment of how much we had managed to cram into the few months of our knowing one another, and how firm the bond of affection was. Either my feelings or the effort she had to exert for that smile gave it a brilliance greater than ordinary. Doom was in it, love, gratitude, God knew what—everything that had made me wish, the moment I met her, that I had had such a daughter. It was not an expression she wore, it was an illumination. She stood between John and Ruth like a spark leaping a gap. If you had painted her at that moment, you would have had to paint her with a halo.