The Marmot Drive

by John Hersey

  “Pleasure,” Mr. Challenge said, reciprocating her formality, “—just as soon’s we stink the little boogers out their burrows. I’ll scamper back in your line quick’s I can. Believe Anak Welch is goin’ to do the same.”

  “Fine and dandy,” Mrs. Tuller said.

  Mr. Challenge half bowed to Hester, without seeming to recognize her, and then moved away on his cabriole legs, a self-important courier, to the next clump of people on the green.

  “Mr. Challenge—he’s our local political genius,” Mrs. Tuller murmured to Hester, on a note of cautious contempt. “He pulls the wires of the Republican Party hereabouts. You can always count on fair dealin’s from Mr. Challenge—as long as you’re face to face with him.” Then, caution predominating, she added, “We all respect him. He wouldn’t lame a titmouse—though I calculate he could get a titmouse elected to office here in Tunxis, if he put his talents to it.”

  Hester wondered if that last remark reflected on the Selectman but, suspecting that it did, held her tongue.

  Mrs. Tuller rounded up her volunteers and ushered them to the hinder truck. As she passed its cab, she stopped at the window and spoke to the shadow within: “This your conveyance, Rulof?”

  “Ayeh, this is me, ma’am,” the man at the wheel answered. “Would you folks like me to pull up to the whippin’ platform so’s you could load yourselves more convenient?”

  “Oh, we’re all spry as pullets in this division, I guess,” Mrs. Tuller said, looking round at her flock. “We’ll just clamber on right here, Rulof.”

  With that Mrs. Tuller moved from the cab to the rear wheel, put a foot up from the embankment of the green onto the tire, and, with an agility that was startling in a white-haired lady, moved like a spider up the web of the truck’s wooden side-racks. Hester did not know whether she herself could get up at all, and she hung back.

  Roswell Coit was the third or fourth to go up, and as he climbed he grumbled, “What is this—a God damned obstacle course?”

  “Mind your hairy tongue, Roswell,” Mrs. Tuller said with dreadful firmness.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the young man said. “I dreamt I was back at Camp Whisnant.”

  Soon Hester, pushed by something half way between fear and vexation that was probably courage, moved forward and took her turn at the unsteady ladder. She was surprised at how easily she rose up, and at the top, where she knew she needed no help, Roswell Coit took her elbow and gave her an awkward boost that nearly upset her. Without thanking him, she edged away from him toward the tail-rack of the truck and watched in the dim morning for Eben or Eben’s father, but neither one came near the truck, which was soon packed full.

  A tall, fair man of indefinite age, next to Hester, with enormous eyebrows over eyes so deepset that the dawn had not yet reached them, said to her in an accented voice, “Permit me. I am Friedrich Tuller. You are young Mr. Avered’s—um—houseguest, yes?”

  Not sure that she liked being so widely famous in Tunxis, or perhaps notorious, Hester repeated the shaggy-browed man’s last word, “Yes.” Then, with a mischievous mockingbird fidelity of tone, she said, “You’re our captain’s—um—husband, yes?”

  “Yes,” Tuller said, cheerfully playing the game, mimicking Hester’s treble in one syllable better than she had managed his tenor in a sentence. Then he added with ludicrous irony, “My rôle is camp follower, my wife is my captain! my captain!” Then, elaborately sociable: “How long do you honor Tunxis?”

  “Just for the weekend.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Tuller said, succeeding with his overstressed speech in sounding as if he were. “I hoped you were here on vacation and you’d come to my class. Mrs. Tuller teaches dunces, I teach the dance.” And he added, with a covetousness that had no danger in it, “You have nice long legs.”

  “How do you know, when it’s hardly even daylight?”

  “I scaled the walls of the citadel after you,” he said, nodding toward the side-racks. “I saw. You are ever so little knock-kneed—that helps for the dance, you know, makes you graceful.” He threw his big eyebrows up and murmured with facetious passion, “I want you.” For his class, he harmlessly meant, Hester understood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, laughing, “but you can’t have me. A metal desk on the seventeenth floor of a steel and concrete building in the midtown area has me, forever and ever.”

  “What about Avered?” the dancing master simply asked.

  “Oh, well,” Hester equivocated.

  Then Hester realized that if the dancing teacher knew about her, she also knew at least one thing about him. At supper the night before, she remembered, Eben, picking up currency about various people in the town, had asked about the Tullers, and Eben’s father, after remarking that Mrs. Tuller still held the seventh grade in a state of cornered terror, had said, “As for Herr Tuller, he’s in his crystal-spangle phase”; and the Selectman had told how the dancing master had hired local workmen to dig up stumps from the bed of a stream and from the swamp near Johnnycake Meadow, and had dried the roots of the stumps, had cleaned certain gnarled forms, and then had suspended from the ugly pieces of water-grayed wood tiny glass spangles and droplets he had taken from an old chandelier, as if they were clear water dripping from the dead and rotten roots—“purity falling away from corruption,” the Selectman had said. Hester, wondering how this rarefied German dancing teacher had drifted to Tunxis and into the substantial arms, the loglike arms, of the elderly schoolteacher, decided she was beginning to feel something like awe for this town—this backwater, as she had condescendingly thought of it the day before.

  Tunxis, Eben’s father had said to her during that same supper, was deep enough in Connecticut to be, as he put it, “apart.” It was too far from the metropolis to have been settled by a swarm of undesirable commuters, and was just far enough from the state capital, too, to be outside the easy range of those of its well-to-do who wanted the pretense of being simple countrymen. Tunxis had a scattering of summer people, the Selectman had said, dangerous drunken drivers who came to town meetings in city department-store blue jeans to vote in favor of local school appropriations. “I guess they do it,” he said, “because they think it’s charitable to pour a few mills of taxes into a poor little eddy in the stream like Tunxis, and gracious me! they are kind-hearted”—except, he had added, when a native trespasses on their precious land or when they get it in their heads that a Tunxis handyman or grass-cutter or plumber has been cheating them in his prices; “that’s when you feel like a manure-spreader’s just been hauled across you.” Then with a strange, fierce glitter in his eye the Selectman had said to his wife, “Our Eben’ll be taking a summer place up here one of these first years.” He had turned to his son. “Don’t forget to come to town meeting in a nice loud check shirt and brand spang new overhauls, son,” he had said. Hearing this bitterness of the Selectman’s against outsiders, Hester had recalled Eben’s telling her on the train coming to Tunxis that ever since his father had gone away to college—only twenty-three miles southwestward to a state normal school—and had come back with a certificate and a tranquil face and “a suitcase full of books and ‘doesn’ts’ and ‘isn’ts,’ ” he had walked through the village as one estranged, a magician, a clown, an Oriental wise man, respected, often called upon, rarely loved—really an outsider himself. That was what Eben had said.

  The truck started up. “Wait till you see the incredible valley where we go today,” the dancing teacher said through teeth that chattered with the truck’s motion. Then motion and changing sights relieved Hester of the obligation to converse, and she was glad to be alone among the unknown creatures who pressed against her, as lonely as on a teeming subway car. Pulling away from the village green, the truck passed through the Tunxis that was “apart,” past modest porched houses standing free and away from each other, connected formally by sidewalks of huge, slanting, frost-thrown fieldstone slabs that glistened like
wet steel, and informally by dark lawns lying back under great trees that still dammed back a large measure of the new day. The houses were gathered together in townhood, but they seemed to insist upon their separateness, their privacy; yew, hemlock, forsythia, and privet set up their definite screens and fortifications. The much-patched asphalt street had a steep-humping crown, which the truck seemed to have to keep struggling to surmount. Very soon the settled area of the village was behind them, and the road, after running beside a river for a short distance, turned away from it and began to oblige a series of farms. In time the truck swerved and entered one of them, bounced on a dirt road past its barns and through some of its fields, and fetched up, behind its companion, the other truck, at the edge of a meadow near a clump of evergreens, still black and mysterious in the half-morning. In the east a thin veil of sky-gauze had begun to glow with the softest of colors. “The sunup looks good on you,” the dancing master said to Hester, nodding his head, as they waited for their turns to disembark.

  A few minutes later Mrs. Tuller took her division—the first to start, because its right flank would have the farthest to go of any unit to get into position for the drive—through a gap in the dark conifers, evidently the Spruce Gate, and along a path set between high, casual rows of wild laurel. The path ran through hip-deep grass that was covered with dew, and Hester’s blue jeans were quickly soaked. The lane climbed upward toward a kind of saddle.

  The party soon reached the top of the divide, and Hester saw stretched out ahead of her the scoop of Thighbone Hollow. Up to the left was high ground, capped by a forbidding rampart of traprock, which, reaching away to the northward, set against the sky a dark, ragged limit to that side of the valley, while down to the right, running parallel to the ledge, could be seen a rigid, architectural stream of water, a gay ribbon of reflected cloud-tints, the canal. Between the parallels lay that part of Thighbone Hollow through which the drive was to go, a long, melancholy stretch of woods and stone-walled fields, sloping down to low ground, some distance away, then up again at the opposite end to another saddle like this one—a shape like a lengthwise half of a spoon’s bowl. At the lowest part of the scoop the fog still lay over the black terrain in pale, frayed heaps, and off to one side a sharp gray spike jutted up through the mist, a steeple with its belfry, which was, it seemed to Hester, askew, quite far from straight-standing.

  Mrs. Tuller took her division diagonally across a wet meadow and through some gate bars at the far corner into a field beyond, where she stopped and said, “This is where our left flank is anchored. Roswell, will you keep the left pivot? Keep touch with Mr. Sessions’ division up above there. Then, dear,” Mrs. Tuller said, speaking to Hester and leading her along the stone wall, “you’d better be next here, let’s see, about a hundred feet. Just mull along easy, straight ahead, whistlin’ and shoutin’, when the time comes, and keep track of Roswell up there and of my dear decrepit husband on your right, I’m goin’ to put him next…. Now, Friedrich,” she said sharply, “you’re next and—let me think—we’ll slip Anak Welch next to him when he gets back….” Hester found herself alone at her starting point beside the wall.

  She sat down on the stones, looking down into the somber hollow, shivering and waiting alone. Soon she heard, then saw, more people emerging from the laurel lane, another division taking its place; its drivers moved uphill to the leftward away from Hester, except for one man who came across the field toward Mrs. Tuller’s line. She saw that it was the Selectman, who had told her that he was eventually to be in the advance party that would drive the woodchucks from their burrows. He stopped for a moment and spoke to Coit, then turned and walked to her.

  “Came to see how you’re making out,” he said, “while we wait.”

  “I’m sopping,” she said. “Is that steeple in the distance cockeyed, or am I?”

  “That’s the abandoned church,” Mr. Avered said. “The spire took a twist in the hurricane of ’thirty-eight.”

  He sat down on the wall beside Hester and glanced at her. The sky had begun to glow more gaudily now, and the sunrise looked cheaper than Art, and Hester wondered whether the new, brighter downcast pinks were still becoming to her—if, indeed, the dancing master had not simply been flattering her when he had said she wore the first of the morning nicely.

  “You look kind of streaked. Are you scared of something?” the Selectman asked.

  “Yes, I guess I am,” Hester said.

  “What of?”

  She thought she was afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth. She remembered how, at the caucus the night before, the town dentist had talked about the marmots’ teeth. “Incisors like chisels,” he had said; and he had said the enamel is only on the fronts of the teeth, so the backs wear away and keep the chisels sharp. And she remembered he had said the jaws are hinged in such a way that they have no sidewise motion, only up and down and backwards and forwards. She was afraid of those rotating chisels. “I’m afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth,” she said.

  “That’s silly.”

  She was afraid of the thick skulls that woodchucks have, and what was it that the college boy with the glasses had said?—that their hides get to be a quarter of an inch thick! “They’ve got such thick skulls and thick skins,” she said, “how could you do anything to them?”

  “It’s silly to be afraid of woodchucks.”

  “I can believe you; I guess I can. But that doesn’t stop me from being afraid.”

  “Being a little scared can’t harm you—just stirs you up. There’s a woman you’ll meet tonight, old Dorcas Thrall, you ought to know about her if you’re timid. She’s ninety-one. She was always very stout of wind and limb. To begin with, she had a queer family. There’s an old well that’s covered over now with a big flag of bluestone in the turnaround of the driveway on the Thrall place; they say it used to be eighty-five feet deep. One day Dorcas’s Uncle George went down that well head first, and no one ever knew whether he meant to go down or was just peering down there looking for something and lost his equilibrium. They never got him out; spoiled the drinking water. Her father was avaricious and tightfisted. Once he harvested a whole barnful of onions when the price of onions was on the rise, and he decided he’d hold the crop till the top of the market came, but before he knew it spring came instead, and the price fell kerplunk, and pretty soon the onions began to sprout and the shoots began to stick out between the boards; Evits Thrall’s hairy barn was famous all over the county. Oh, they were a queer lot. Now, about Dorcas being afraid. She was always physically powerful, as I say, but she had one weakness—she couldn’t abide birds. Sometimes in the evening she would be out on the lawn, and the swifts would begin to dart and dip, and Dorcas’s hands would flutter up around her head, and then she’d pick up her petticoats and run for safety. Birds abound in these hills, and especially around the Thrall place—it has so many chokeberries and crabapples—beautiful birds in May and June: you can hear the chestnut-sided warbler and the black-and-white warbler all day long, and wrens seem to love that house; and brown thrashers shouting their heads off! Dorcas was constantly in a panic in all the leafy seasons, as you can imagine, and the winters, with swarms of juncos and chickadees, weren’t much better. Once she went to the Tullers’ for tea, and the Tullers had a pine siskin they set great store by, no great shakes as a singer but a friendly codger, and the siskin got out of the cage in the room where Dorcas was, and for a few minutes everyone thought that Dorcas was crazy for good and all. She’s been fearful all her days, yet look at her: ninety-one years old, strong as a post of locust wood, and everyone says, ‘What a good and happy life old Dorcas Thrall has had.’ ”

  “I don’t want to live till I’m ninety-one, and I’m still scared of woodchucks.”

  “I’m kind of wary myself a lot of the time—but never of groundhogs! Jehosephat! Your trouble is, you don’t know enough about them.”

  “What are you afraid of, then?”

&nbs
p; “My friends and neighbors: these folks are so almighty censorious.”

  “Don’t you know enough about them?”

  “Too much! It may not be the same for you, but as for me, I’m as brave as the front of a bank building till it comes to two kinds of things—those I can’t see for the dark, and those I can see as clear as the pores on the back of my own hand. Half-knowledge makes me fierce and self-reliant. If I could know just a little but not too much about everything and everyone in this world, I’d never tremble or wake up in a drench in the night.”

  He stood up. “I’d better get back up with my crowd,” he said. “About time for us to start.” He looked down over the hollow with a vague, abstracted look in his eyes that Hester had seen several times since her arrival, a look of awful, absent-minded involution, as if he were a helpless voyager in a searing, epic daydream that could only be interrupted for a few minutes at a time; he ran his tongue around his mouth over his lower teeth. “Be a hot day,” he finally said, coming part way back from his reverie. Then he turned and faced Hester and said straight to her, “I arranged to have Eben moved into Manly Sessions’ division, because I want to get to know something about you today and tomorrow without the boy around making cow eyes at you and forever shutting me up. Also want to tell you a little about him and us, if I’m able.” He looked back up toward the saddle where the laurel alley debouched and where a few townspeople were now moving to and fro; from this distance their scurryings seemed both urgent and aimless—insectile. “I don’t mean to be a busybody,” Mr. Avered said, “but by and large, the way two young people get themselves into a trance and get married…” Then, looking in Hester’s eyes again, so openly and cleanly returned from his daydream that she felt for a moment on the verge of true communication with another human being, he said, “I don’t want to try to manage anybody’s life”; whereupon she realized, with an inward shudder, that he was after all thinking mainly about himself, not about her or even about his son, and the ribbons that she had fancied about to run from his mind to hers and from her heart to his were suddenly frayed at the ends and now blew altogether away over the stone wall. Then the man himself was gone.