by John Hersey
“I saw one walking right along Sodom Street the other day,” Mrs. Avered said, speaking gently to Eben, “that looked like he thought he was the Pinneys’ dog—just so pleased with himself!”
“We’re going to have a caucus tonight at the Grange,” Mr. Avered said, “to tell folks how the drive’ll be run off.”
“How can it be a caucus?” Eben asked. “A caucus is a political meeting.”
“It can be a caucus because I decided to call it a caucus, and I’m the Selectman, that’s how it can be a caucus.”
“Now don’t be high and mighty, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said.
“I don’t like this young aristocrat telling me what I can say and what I can’t say,” the father answered.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Mr. Avered neither accepted nor rejected the apology; he seemed not to notice it. He drove as if dreaming through the village streets at a very slow rate of speed. Now he said, “Expect to have some people raising high-tantrabogus at the caucus tonight”; and he explained to his son that since Eben’s last visit home, the town had split itself down the middle over the location of a new school; half the town wanted to place it down by the Leaming property, he said, near the state fish hatchery, and the other half wanted it on Johnnycake Meadow—both fair enough situations for schools, but people had grown obstinately set on one or the other site, for all sorts of meaningless reasons. “They’ve lost all their neighborliness,” he said. “I tell you, Hester, these folks in Tunxis can be real Yankees when they put a mind to it.”
Hester, still dismayed by the realization that she was on trial, and for a moment hoping that active curiosity might be thought to equate with good breeding, or with whatever the Avereds esteemed, asked lamely, “What is a Yankee, anyhow? I have some cousins in South Carolina, you see, and they seem to feel…”
Mr. Avered waited a few moments, after Hester’s voice trailed off, and then said, “Being a Yankee doesn’t have much to do with what I was just saying; cantankerousness is just a side issue. A Yankee, a real Yankee—well, that’s a person who’s an idealist even after he’s come to see how hopeless life is. The folks here in Tunxis know the whole situation is rotten right to the core. They know their private dreams’ll fail, sure as night follows day; they have a sneaking idea God’s mostly a hailstone-thrower. They hate each other, they feel good when somebody goes to pot. And yet they go on living with straight backs and high hopes as if they could make everything better. Of course where they run into trouble is trying to make each other better…. They know how bad things are, but at least they keep trying to be decent people.”
The phrase “decent people” caught in Hester’s mind, and she thought of a time in the city when Eben had…The sudden flashing memory made her think how much she loved the city…Something, something in what Eben’s father had said was disturbing…. It was in a tiny nightclub they had wandered into after seeing a musical; they had been glowing with the sentimental wish-dream into which they had for a few hours been transported. The place was just a small dark room with a bar and a piano. A waitress led Eben and Hester to a table near the piano. The piano player was a woman whose features were handsome but whose skin was evil with pockmarks—a livid battlefield, some indefinite time ago, of adolescence. There were several rather noisy, perhaps drunken, young men at the bar, revolving around one they called Duncan. After a while, Duncan went into the ladies’ room, and in a few minutes he came back out with paper towels on his head, arranged in careful overlapping scallops, with water poured over them so they would stay plastered in place, and he went out on the dance floor and did a dance by himself. He was very funny. He was obviously trying to attract the piano player’s attention; several of the young men tried to persuade Duncan to stop dancing and go back to the bar, but he waved them off and shouted at them, “Get away from me, all you phonies.” Hester and Eben laughed at his antics, and Eben said, “I bet I can get him over here,” and he walked out on the floor and invited Duncan to join them for a drink, and Duncan did. Perhaps Duncan accepted because there was a girl at the table; Eben seemed to feel grand. All the time Duncan continued to eye the piano player. He still had the towels on his head. He was really very tight. He fell out of his chair, finally, in a graceful, sprawling spill; his head hit the floor hard, and Hester thought he would have to be carried out. But he stood up. The piano player was laughing at him. Duncan began to shout that his watch had been stolen, and that he was going to get the police into the place. Before long a policeman did appear from somewhere and showed Duncan quietly out onto the street. “He was just mad because I laughed at him,” the piano player, still smiling, said to Hester across the piano. The waitress serving Hester and Eben seemed upset, and after the piano player had moved to the bar to take a rest, she told them that this little nightbox had used to be doing fine, but that now the managers were going crazy, because they had booked this piano player “and they billed her ‘Straight from the Tin Halo,’ you know,” she said, “you know, that place on Ransom Street, and the minute she walked in the door, they started coming in here. By the dozens. Drunks. You heard what he said: ‘Phonies.’ They hate daylight. Nothing to live for except staying up nights trying to forget the days. Look at their faces!” And then Eben, who had been laughing hard not long before, asked the waitress, evidently trying to keep his question light, “Where do we find the decent people in this town, anyway?”…Eben had already lived in the city for at least three years at that time, Hester realized…and now she was struck by this echo across the Avered generations, their vague and separate, though shared, quest for something they unclearly called decency.
“Whatever can they find to fight about tonight?” Mrs. Avered asked, leaning forward in the back seat.
“Some of these hardmouthed people can’t see any purpose in cleaning out the hollow,” the Selectman answered.
“They must be the ones who don’t grow any vegetables,” Mrs. Avered said. “If they’d had those creatures in their dooryards, they’d see some purpose.”
“No, I expect they do have gardens. They’re the ones who don’t want Tunxis to collect any taxes to speak of, but also get deathstruck with rage if the town doesn’t plow them out half an hour after a blizzard or if it leaves a puny frostheave on a back road where they have to drive.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll shame them, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said placidly, sitting back again.
Soon after that, they reached the homestead—a former farm just outside the settled area of the village. The house was red, with white trim. The Avereds led Hester around to the front door, though it was obvious, from where the car was parked, that familiars usually entered through the kitchen. Inside, the house was fairly clean and smelled of cooked bacon. In the small front hall, Eben’s father said sharply, “I declare, Uncle Jonathan’s stopped again.” He was quite angry. He opened the door of a grandfather clock and began to rattle the works. Hester remembered Eben’s accounts of his father’s four tall clocks, named for men who had owned them: Uncle Jonathan in the hall, after Eben’s grand-uncle; Ardon (Eben’s maternal grandfather) in the living room; Sam Jones, bought at an auction, in the kitchen; and, upstairs, Himself, which Eben’s father had made with his own hands. All four, including the one Mr. Avered had built, had wooden movements and brass chimes, and they tolled the hours, when all ran properly, not exactly together but one by one, in order of seniority, Ardon speaking deeply first, then Uncle Jonathan, one of whose brass pipes was cracked, Sam Jones next with a whang and a whine from beside the breadbox, and finally Himself at the head of the stairs with a slightly tipsy authority. Eben had said that his father had had the patience to spend the nights of four winters carving the cogwheels of cherry for Himself, the pinions of laurel, the case of maple, and the white-wood face with its warty, tuberous numbers, and time then had seemed the least of his worries; but nowadays if Ardon ran a minute slow or if Sam Jones slipped his chime a quarter hour, it appa
rently drove the Selectman into furies. It seemed that Uncle Jonathan was being troublesome this season. Eben’s father straightened up, turned with glowing cheeks and desperate eyes to his wife, and said, “That damned clock’ll be the death of me.”
* * *
—
The boy on the whipping platform abruptly stopped whistling in mid-hymn and began to make the noises of a rifle fired down onto a stony desert—percussion, the flight of bullet, whining ricochet; he was, it appeared, a Good Guy crouching in his eyrie, from whom all Bad Guys were getting their comeuppance as the mist thinned on the mesa. It was growing a bit lighter. An open truck drove up and parked behind another that had already been standing not far from the whipping post. Hester overheard two townspeople reviewing the caucus of the night before. “Didn’t you get the goose-pimples,” one voice, a woman’s, asked, “the way old man Leaming threatened to spit in his face?” And the reply, from a jolly-sounding man: “It was just as good as the Selectman hittin’ him in the potroast, the soft answer he gave him! You could most hear old Leaming groan.” There was a duet of merry, sadistic laughter.
Eben came back. Hester could tell even before he spoke that he was angry. “They’re gone and switched me to another division,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I won’t see you all day. I came up here to have a weekend with you, not to go thrashing around in the brush with these fogies. I knew it would be like this.”
“If you knew it would be like this…. Can’t you speak to someone?”
“Already complained to the Selectman,” Eben said. “He was a great help! He said to do as the Romans do. He thinks Tunxis is Rome.”
“Couldn’t you ask Mrs. Tuller?”
“I tell you I spoke to my father,” Eben said, as if there were no higher, no other appeal. Then he added petulantly, “I wanted to be with you.”
“Me, too,” Hester lied, recognizing as she said the words that she was, to the contrary, perversely relieved—perhaps because she was so self-conscious about how she would conduct herself in woods and swamps that she was glad she would not have Eben’s disapproving supervision of her every footfall. “I’m sure I’ll make a fool of myself,” she said.
“Don’t be anxious,” Eben said with quick concern, his anger and distress all gone. “It’ll be easy.” Hester was aware of his eager warmth, but for some reason she did not feel properly touched by it.
Someone called out from the steps of the Grange through a megaphone, telling the divisions to assemble at various points on the green. Division Four, Mrs. Tuller’s, was told to go to the big elm at the left end of the building. With the sound, now, of an urgent fire engine, the Good Guy hurried down from the whipping platform and howled off across the green to his rendezvous.
“What division did they move you into?” Hester asked hastily. “Where’ll I ever find you?”
“I’m in Three,” Eben said. “We’ll be next to yours, at least. I’ll try to find you when we rest—or at lunchtime, anyway.”
The two young infatuates were pulled apart by the mill of hurrying volunteers, and Hester made her way reluctantly to the big tree.
About a dozen people gathered there gradually. A short woman with a very big head, evidently Mrs. Tuller, began to speak in what seemed to Hester a gentle, kindly tone; Hester had expected gravel to come spitting out of the teacher’s mouth, after what that half-seen man’s pleading voice had told her in the fog. Mrs. Tuller reviewed the part Division Four was to play in the drive: It was to advance across the low ground of Thighbone Hollow, along the canal, on the right-hand end of the whole picket line. At first, she said, the division would echelon out to the right, each person about a hundred feet from the next, on a line of bearing that would connect the right flank of Division Three with the bend in the canal, which would be somewhat forward of the rest of the line at the start. Mrs. Tuller said that her group would have to wait, holding that diagonal line, about half an hour while the gang of advance men drove the woodchucks out of their burrows; this period would require patience and diligence, she said, since it was possible that the animals would be in a panic and might try to break backwards through the line, in a swarm. She reviewed the instructions on stamping, shouting, and especially whistling, and warned against rushing at the beasts. When the signal would come down the hill from Division One, up against the traprock ledge on the left flank, which was to move first, Division Four would slowly pivot forward on its fulcrum at the canal, keeping in contact with Three on its left, until it would be in a straight line with the rest of the drive, perpendicular to the axis of the hollow. Then it would move forward with the canal on its right, crowding a bit toward the canal, since the animals were liable to double back at the water’s edge. “We shall move forward in order and tranquillity,” Mrs. Tuller said, belying Hester’s anticipation of the event. And Mrs. Tuller said, “Don’t plunge too valorously into the cat brier. We want to catch the marmots in this drive, not ourselves. But hold your spacin’ if you possibly can. Keep track of each other by your whistlin’.” She said that to get to the starting place, the division would ride to the Spruce Gate on the Cherevoy farm in the second of the two trucks parked by the notice board, and would walk from there up Manross Lane through the woods to the mouth of Thighbone Hollow. Mrs. Tuller was done.
“Why don’t we have two lines, one in front the other?” a man’s husky voice behind Hester asked. “If the groundhogs form up in a tight patrol and bust through us when we’re in a single line, we’ll never in a dog’s age round ’em up again.”
“That’s a good question,” Mrs. Tuller said, dropping into the encouragingly patient manner of a schoolteacher speaking to a slow boy in class; “but as you know, it’s not up to us to think up ways of collarin’ these creatures that don’t fit in with the rest of the drive. The Selectman and his committee decided how we’re to proceed.”
“What in the name of Sam Hill does the Selectman know ’bout tactics? I don’t see why our division couldn’t try to do it right.”
Suddenly Mrs. Tuller’s voice, though it kept its warm timbre, was imperious and not lightly to be disregarded. “You’ll obey orders, Roswell. I guess even in the Rangers they expected you to obey orders, didn’t they?”
“I know one thing for a fact,” the young fellow grumbled in acquiescence. “We never would’ve used ice-age tactics in the Rangers.” He turned to whoever was beside him and loudly asked, “Where’d our great Selectman ever go to school to study tactics?”
This would be Roswell Coit, Hester realized, the one who had catapulted Eben from the seesaw, and she turned to look at him and could just see against the white Grange Hall a fine torso of a bully, a man as thick as his voice. Suddenly she thought of Eben as a habitual victim, dodging out of the way of arguments and fights, apt to whine under pressure, yet like a worried gamecock forever encountering, if not actually seeking out, adversaries—wits and brutes. She thought of a story of revenge he had once told her, and guessed that Roswell Coit might have been the one on whom the tables had been turned. A certain boy, Eben had said, who could “flax out any kid in school,” had stretched himself one day on a slope between a big, half-rotted sawmill log and a brook and had casually told the three smaller boys before whom he’d been showing off that they could, if they wished, roll the log down the hill over him and kill him—never dreaming, of course, that they could budge it. But with a united spasm of strength nourished on resentment, Eben and the others had managed to start the log, and before the big boy could scramble out of the way, it had struck him, rolled over him, and gone on into the brook. Hester remembered vividly Eben’s delighted description of the big boy standing up, his mouth full of dry rot, his nose bleeding, his eyes streaming tears, as he spewed out, in a hoarse Yankee drawl—yes, that huskily mimicked voice must have been Roswell Coit’s—his incredulous protest: “Gaul durn you boys! What on earth did you do that fur?”
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Hester stood alone, at first, when the discussion was over, but soon Mrs. Tuller came over to her and said, “You’re Eben Avered’s friend, aren’t you? Mrs. Sessions told me about you.”
“Yes, I’m staying at the Avereds’,” Hester said.
“Eben always had a remarkable head of hair,” the teacher said. “There might be times when I’d use that expression to mean there wasn’t much to speak of underneath the hairline,” she added cryptically—giving Hester an impression, but scarcely a certainty, that this was not her intention in Eben’s case.
A middle-aged man with monstrously short and bowed legs rolled up to Mrs. Tuller and, in a suppliant voice that Hester recognized as belonging to the one who had bumped into her near the whipping post (how grotesque that brief fogbound intimacy seemed now that she could see the creature who housed the voice!), he said, “The Selectman’s given us the high sign to start, Mrs. Tuller. If you’d ask your people to load into the second truck—that’s the one Rulof Pitkin’ll be drivin’—we’ll get away in five minutes. ’Preciate it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Challenge,” Mrs. Tuller said. “You’re goin’ to fall in with our division later on, we hope?” The teacher spoke as graciously, Hester thought, as if she were inviting the oddly shaped man to some lawn party or open house.