The Marmot Drive

by John Hersey

  Finally, apparently beyond caring what people thought of him, Mr. Leaming cried out, “If I was only close enough to that plat-plat-platform, Mr. Selectman, I’d spi-spit in your face.”

  Quietly, with a humility so profound that it seemed insane, the Selectman answered, “Why don’t you step up here and do it, Mr. Leaming, if it would make you feel any better? I could wipe it off easy as pie.”

  The crowd sat aghast. Mr. Leaming looked sick at his stomach. People who had been clamoring for a chance to talk sat down. As if nothing had happened (except that he seemed ever so slightly short of breath as he spoke), the Selectman said he thought most of the points on the woodchuck drive had been covered—but would the gang of advance men, who were going to gas the groundhogs out of their burrows, mind staying a few minutes to talk over their program? Then, if there was no further business, he said, the caucus would stand adjourned. Murmuring, the crowd arose and broke. Hester had a feeling that its anger, though checked, was far from sated. Mr. Leaming was still rocking on his feet.

  TWO

  THE SUN WAS UP. Across the meadow from Hester’s right Mrs. Tuller came, and as she strode through the tall grass the teacher swung her right arm back and forth across her body, gracefully snapping her wrist at the end of each swing so her hand seemed to be weightless and followed her forearm like a flag waved to and fro; and Hester, still sitting on the stone wall, realized soon that Mrs. Tuller’s right hand was manipulating a nonexistent musical bow, and then Hester saw that the fingers of Mrs. Tuller’s left hand, which had seemed to be scratching her left shoulder, were instead drumming out on the throat-strings of a phantom instrument the stops of a passage of music that must have been, to judge by the transported expression on the teacher’s massive face, cause for ecstasy on a summer morning. As Mrs. Tuller came closer, Hester heard her humming in time with her shadow-playing. The teacher sat on the wall beside Hester, spread her knees to grip the imagined violoncello, and played a final passage, a desperate trilling run up the fingerboard of air, her outsized head bent over the work and wagging slightly in counterweight to her flying bow arm, her left hand trembling a vibrato when her little finger at last hovered over the final ghost-tone.

  “Practicing?” Hester foolishly asked when the teacher finally dropped her arms.

  “Wish I played the piccolo,” Mrs. Tuller said; “something you could just slip in your pocket and take wherever you went. There ain’t time enough in a day in the summer.”

  “What were you playing?”

  “Brahms’s violin and ’cello concerto, opus one hundred and two; doubt if you know it.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard records of it,” Hester pretentiously lied.

  “Isaac Stern was on the violin part with me there, and the Boston Symphony was carryin’ the background. Koussevitzky—only he’s dead. Wish you could’ve heard us!”

  “So do I.”

  “That’s the trouble,” the teacher sighed. “It sounds so much better in my head than when the blighted instrument is right there in my embrace.”

  “I used to play the piano,” Hester said. “I gave it up when I went away to college.”

  “There’s more music nowadays,” Mrs. Tuller said, “more music everywhere. When I was a girl, nobody’d ever heard of Johannes Brahms up here. On the Sabbath the only musical instruments they allowed in this village were churchbells, the trumpet, and the jew’s harp. No one ever got sent to the whippin’ post in my lifetime for breakin’ that rule, but they did in my great-grandfather’s time—my father told me that.”

  When Mrs. Tuller spoke of the whipping post, a light came into her eyes, a kind of fervency, a gleam of allegiance to a fearful and wonderful past. Mrs. Tuller seemed to have an abnormally large head, but Hester realized that this was at least partly illusion, for the teacher wore her voluminous gray hair in a vast system of cranial bunting, a large turban of braids and loops and buns that made her quite topheavy. Still, the head was big; her face was broad, her eyes wideset, her lips generous, her earlobes redly drooping. Her mouth and eyes were sweet and warm, but they held between them, as if a hostile and scarcely manageable captive, a mean, sharp, Puritanical nose which seemed, now and then, to infect its neighbors with its own bleakness, so that the lips would suddenly seem thin and blue, the eyes metallic and cold; these moments were brief, however, mere glints as of ice, sun, and cloud on a winter’s day of open-and-shut. Such was the glint when she spoke of the whipping post. Mrs. Tuller’s shoulders were narrow and sloping, her torso compact, her hips and legs sturdy and thick, and she wore a delicate light blue blouse and a cotton skirt made bold with large checks of black and white.

  “Last night they mentioned a concert you gave the woodchucks once,” Hester said. “Did that really happen?”

  “Sure it did. Best attended recital I ever gave. Young Forward had noticed the woodchucks perked up whenever he sang to ’em, so he asked me to go up to Romeo Bacon’s lots and play to ’em one sundown, and I did. I sat on a foldin’ chair right in the feedgrass in the middle of their mounds, and they came out there by the score and set up as quizzical’s could be, turnin’ their heads back and forth and settin’ there more patient, if you ask me, than humans. I think they liked Sindbad’s music from Scheherazade best of all. They just hated Mozart, and that’s one reason I hate them.”

  “You must dislike a lot of human beings on that count.”

  “I do, child.”

  “Why were people so angry at Mr. Avered last night?” Hester asked.

  “Some people in the town think he’s a little too stuffed with brains. You know the expression, ‘Missin’ a few buttons’? Well, these people think the Selectman has a few too many buttons, and that they’re sewed on peculiar. There was a whisperin’ campaign goin’ round durin’ the election that his father and grandfather were both very meanderin’ in their declinin’ years, due to excess brains, and that our Matthew was about ready to follow in their footsteps. They think he just imagines the threat of these groundhogs.”

  “But he doesn’t, does he? They came to your recital, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, there’re groundhogs up here, all right. Maybe not so many nor so serious as the Selectman thinks. I do believe his imagination’s a shade too sprightly.”

  Pushing down an impulse to make a remark about Mrs. Tuller’s just-completed performance with Stern and the Boston Symphony, the applause for which must scarce have died down in the teacher’s ears, Hester asked instead, “But what about all the evidence that young biologist had?”

  “Pliny Forward? Gracious me, he is addled. They said at Harvard College that he’s a genius, but I taught him, I know better. There’s an old sayin’ that fits him: ‘He’s too bright to be right.’ ”

  “Do you mean you think there’s no reason to hold this marmot drive?”

  “I can’t say as to that. May be and may not be.”

  “But you’re a captain of a division. You must believe in it.”

  “I believe in holdin’ with my fellow townsfolk.”

  “Should I marry Eben?” Hester blurted out.

  “Gracious, child, what a question!” Mrs. Tuller said. “I can’t answer that. Do you want to?”

  “Oh, yes; at least I think so. But you…you frighten me, with the things you say.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” Mrs. Tuller said. “Matthew Avered’s a kind-hearted man. Barrin’ Anak Welch, who’s so tall he’s obliged to be mild-mannered, there’s no more gentlemanlike person in Tunxis than our Selectman. More than that, he loves us all! That’s his weakness! You’re old enough to know, child, there’s somethin’ terrible troublesome to plain mortals about saints and near-saints. Bein’ a saint is gettin’ awful close to the edge…. By the bye, they say the only witch we ever had in Tunxis in the old days was an Avered. She was the daughter of Philemon Avered—he was a famous doctor here that tended people durin’ the spotted fever i
n the seventeen fifties. As they tell it, this girl, Nell Avered, was terrible saucy, and she married a blacksmith, name of Pinney, and bore him a son. Right after a new wild-eyed preacher came down from Massachusetts and started frenzyin’ the village, Nell bust out with a temper like a tomcat—it came out mostly at night and made an awful noise through the whole neighborhood. She began to lay spells on Pinney, so that if he shod a horse when she’d put the wrath onto him, no matter how careful he was, no matter how sound the hoof and how strong the nails, the shoe would loosen and the horse would throw it in a matter of minutes, after the animal was led away from Pinney’s smithy. Before long Nell’s ways got so scandalous she was branded a witch, and the blacksmith was forced to turn her out or else be considered by the parson and the congregation to be in league with Old Harry. Nell took her son and went up to Zion Hill and built a shack o’ poles and boards, with filthy straw on the floor, and she supported herself and her boy by beggin’ from door to door. No one dared refuse her. Once she asked a Pitkin housewife for pork ribs; the Pitkin denied her them; and afterwards that family’s hogs all failed—they became like the lean kine of Genesis, and nothin’, not even fresh oats and whole milk, could fatten ’em. If she’d come in on a housewife spinnin’, the band of the wheel’d fly off. If she visited a churnin’, no butter’d form. They tell how once a man whose wife couldn’t get a churnin’ to cease remembered that Nell had dropped in to see her while she worked, so the man heated a poker to burn the witch out of the cream and stuck it in the chum—and the butter formed right off. One day a party of girls, includin’ one of Nell’s younger sisters, went up near her cabin to pick grapes. They moved secret and posted a sentinel between the vines and the cabin, and after a while the sentinel warned the others that Nell was cormin’, and though they ran across lots so’s Nell never saw ’em direct, all the same the grapes proved spoilt and unfit and no good. Nell and her son both died from exposure durin’ their first winter in the cabin, so the village was spared havin’ to take steps…. But that was all near two hundred years ago, child.”

  Hester, conscious that her sickly looks must have brought that final assuaging protest, remained silent; she had begun to understand what the pleading voice in the half-dark had meant when it had talked about Mrs. Tuller’s ferule.

  “I wonder,” Mrs. Tuller said pleasantly, surveying the hollow, “what’s holdin’ us up. Can’t imagine what they’re waitin’ for, unless it’s the Earl of Chatham.”

  “The Earl of Chatham?” Hester asked, on the verge of tears.

  “The Earl of Chatham, sword all drawn,

  Was waitin’ for Sir Richard Strachan;

  Sir Richard, eager to be at ’em,

  Was waitin’ for the Earl of Chatham.”

  * * *

  —

  Dimly on the left Hester heard whistling and shouting. Nearly half an hour had passed since Mrs. Tuller’s brief visit, the sun was well up, the world’s oven was getting warm; and Hester had begun to wonder whether discord among the leaders of this adventure, or stubbornness among the hunted in their burrows, had caused a delay that would never be overcome. She half hoped so; she was not sure she wanted to go into the dark woods ahead. Then the noise of the suddenly stirred-up drivers drifted down to her from the woodland toward the ledge, and she stood up; Coit waved to her, and she waved back with a sudden festive thrill. They waited for the group on their immediate left to start moving. She considered what Eben, in that group, might be thinking just then. He was so boyishly ambitious, she thought, and his ambition was so vague and objectless.

  “What do you want in life?” she had asked him during one of their very first conversations, when they had been eagerly discovering each other.

  “Something big!” he had said, his eyes a-smoke.

  She could see him, in her imagination, standing alone in the untended, half-overgrown meadows up to the left, rather tense, determined to excel, to make himself famous with some heroic exploit, in this drive that he thought ridiculous; intent upon himself, as was his fixed habit of being, and only incidentally ringing in his relationship to the objective world—to woodchucks, now, to his father, and to her. He was in a kind of lingering hobbledehoyhood. He was forever looking in a mirror and seeing an untrue image; he and his real self were bare acquaintances. He wanted to be big; she had a fear that he might some day prove merely swollen, inflated, pompous, lighter than the summer air—yet see himself as big. Sweetly she ached; motherly pity, wearing a mask, so that she thought she recognized it as love, warmed her, and she suddenly hurt all over for him, as if feverish, and a feeling of incipient power flowed into her; she would help him to be full and big, whatever true bigness he might strive for or drift toward. Ah, Eben, she thought, I love you and I’ll manage you.

  She saw Roswell Coit put his fingers to his lips and then she heard a piercing whistle that would make woodchucks prick up their ears all the way to New Hampshire; she decided she would shout, not whistle, during the drive, for she couldn’t compete with that metallic mouth of Coit’s. But shout what? Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the absurdity of what she was doing. She saw Coit cup his hands and heard him call to her, “Move forward slowly!”

  Caught in a team, she made her own delicate megaphone and shrilled to the dancing master on her right, “Move forward slowly!”

  “O.K., dearie,” Friedrich Tuller called back to her; and then he passed the message down the line.

  Hester stepped into the jeweled meadow before her. Unlike the adjacent fields up toward the ledge, this one had been kept up for hay, and its good-shafted grass, just coming into seed, bent slightly now in the shallow sunlight under a treasure of sparkling dew. Moving at last, wading through better-than-diamonds, Hester felt giddily happy. The field sloped fairly steeply forward and somewhat to the right, and beyond it began a stretch of second-growth woods. Hester’s legs grew soaking wet again. On both sides of her along the picket line, now near, now distant, she heard the sharp-pointed whistling of young men who knew how to make their breath scream through fingers and lips, while down to the right Friedrich Tuller hallooed as if to nearby, visible creatures that needed his persuasion, “Hi! Hi on, now! Go on, woodchucks! Go on, now! Hi on, there! Aha! Move along, my friends!” Timidly Hester began to mimic him; she heard other cries up and down the line, and soon she felt less self-conscious and quite recklessly shouted. She thought of the image someone had used at the caucus of a fence of noise, and as she walked and called she began to feel that she was part of a substantial moving barrier that would surely contain its quarry. The pace of the line was very slow; it was hard to picture this leisurely amble as a serious hunt. Nevertheless it seemed soon, too soon, that Hester approached the hedgerow at the beginning of the woods, into which she was loath to go. The sun, coming from the right and from beyond the woods, touched only the elegant crowns of the trees; below, from where she came near, could be seen only darkness, dampness, impenetrability. She walked into the shadow; her cries grew anguished, as if she were the threatened, not the threatener. On her right, since the line of the division was echeloned that way, the dancing master had already been engulfed by the thicket, and from within it she could hear him shouting, “Hi on, there, you woodchucks! Get on!” Coit to her left was still out in the sunlight in the precious meadow. She hesitated. She saw a wall covered with vines that she recognized as honeysuckle (for Eben had, the previous afternoon, showed her the shape of poison ivy and cat brier leaves—“the only things you really need to know for this damn-fool drive of Father’s”—and, in passing, of those of honeysuckle, too). Low along the wall, on both sides of it, there was a screen of young trees and shrubs, honeysuckle-heavy; she parted it, climbed the wall, and broke through into the woods themselves. She had gone forward only about twenty feet when she heard Coit’s voice bellowing, “Hold up, Avered’s girl! Pass the word to hold up!”

  “They say to hold up!” she called to Tuller, and she heard the dancing m
aster’s rather merry call to his next neighbor.

  Hester looked around her. She was twenty-four years old; she had never been in woods like these before—wild, undisciplined woods like these. She had been in city parks; she had been in thin groups of man-subservient trees on the edges of the Massachusetts town where she had gone to college; and she had been in clean pine woods in the South. But here the honeysuckle fighting the trees for light made an equatorial jungle in New England. It climbed trunks and hummocked triumphantly over underbrush it had long since choked. The gloomy, embattled green was islanded with patches of in-sneaking sunlight. Now that the line of the hunters was silent, Hester suddenly heard the sweet clamor of hundreds of startled birds, themselves drawn back somewhat from the fence of human noise and apparently trying to raise a stockade of sounds of their own. Hester felt exhilarated by the woods; to her surprise, she felt relieved of fear and entranced.

  Then her fear returned, as down to the left, ahead in the falling-off forest, she heard a noise that moved: limbs and twigs were being broken, there was a swish of continuous motion toward herself, or at any rate toward the line. She had to be in the open where she could see; she scrambled back to the wall and out into the field and ran part way to Coit and called to him, “Something’s coming up through the woods! Do you hear it?”

  “Don’t wet your pants, baby doll,” Coit said. “I heard it. Ain’t naught but some of the advance men comin’ back to the line. You better hold your position.”