The Marmot Drive

by John Hersey

  Hester, furious at her panic and Coit’s contempt, said, “My panties are no dewier than yours, my friend,” and felt badly unsatisfied with her retort.

  She went chagrined back into the woods.

  In a few minutes three men—the Selectman, Anak Welch, and George Challenge—showed themselves approaching the line half way between her post and Coit’s. Because she was in the woods on their side of the hedgerow, they saw her first.

  “Where’s your captain?” the Selectman called, as if Hester were no one he knew.

  “Mrs. Tuller’s down by the canal,” Hester answered. “Roswell Coit’s anchoring this end of the division, right back there in the field.”

  “Here I am,” Coit, evidently overhearing, called; and he pushed into the woods toward the three men. Hester moved over to them, too. Their faces were red with exertion and excitement. The Selectman’s two companions each carried a pair of insect bombs.

  “They’re up ahead,” the Selectman exultantly said. “They flushed easily. So many you couldn’t count ’em.”

  “You ought to’ve seen ’em, Ros,” George Challenge said to Coit.

  “At least four hundred. Four to five hundred, I’d calculate,” Mr. Avered said, pounding a fist into an open palm.

  “Less, I’d say,” the huge Mr. Welch softly disagreed. “I’d say around two hundred.”

  “Oh, Anak, there were twice that many!” the Selectman vehemently urged.

  “Two hundred at the outside,” the big man insisted.

  “What does it matter? What does it matter?” the Selectman said, childishly joyful, verbally capering. “We’ve got ’em on the run.”

  “They could hear the line back here—it made ’em move,” said George Challenge.

  “We’ve got to tell everybody,” the Selectman said. He commanded Challenge to go down and find Mrs. Tuller and Coit to run up to the pivot of the next division; word should be passed along the whole line that a very large number of woodchucks had been successfully surfaced and were moving northward along the hollow; that a small party of advance men were deployed beyond the burrows to keep the animals from coming back to ground; and that the line should move forward firmly and vigilantly now. Hester was surprised at the peremptoriness of the Selectman’s orders, and, seeing the others stiffen at his lack of tact, she was visited by a disquieting reminder of the anger that had not been wholly laid to rest at the caucus the night before.

  Coit said Mrs. Tuller had wanted Mr. Welch just beyond her husband in the line; he didn’t know where she wanted Mr. Challenge. Hester noticed with interest and satisfaction the thickset bully, the dauntless Ranger, using respectful “misters” after hearing harsh commands.

  “I’ll walk with this young lady for now,” the Selectman said, falling in with Hester.

  “Never saw it to fail,” Coit grumbled loud enough to be heard, in another kind of response to heavy authority. “The brass gettin’ itself a setup.”

  “There were hundreds of them,” the Selectman said to Hester, acting as if he had not heard Coit’s impudence. “Almost all black, Pliny was right. Oh, what a sight!”

  The others moved away.

  “This means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” Hester said, slowly leading Mr. Avered back toward her place in the line.

  “It means I can look these Tunxis people straight in the eye,” the Selectman said. “Last night took the gimp all out of me—I believe some of the folks at the caucus thought these groundhogs were just some kind of nightmare I’d had, and I swan, I began to think so myself.”

  “It’s a good thing you have witnesses.”

  “You ought to see those dark creatures moving in a herd,” the Selectman exclaimed.

  How like one of Eben’s mild raptures, Hester thought. The capacity for excitement and happiness, for being lifted toward ecstasy by commonplace surprises—this was one of the qualities she liked and admired in Eben, though she could wish it augmented a hundredfold, for in truth his joys were somewhat pale. What she did not yet know was whether Eben could be exalted by extraordinary surprises beyond the verge, right over into the realm of shattering delight she sometimes experienced, into such a state of rapture as that into which she had been momentarily dissolved when she had stepped out into the dew-spangled meadow a few minutes ago, giving her an instant, as insubstantial as the fast-drying magical droplets that had inspired it, worth a whole month of bickering, grubbing, moping lazy and alone in a city. Could Eben, could the Selectman, transact such delight? They were both articulate men, they used their tongues readily enough—but seldom, it seemed, to speak of deep emotions. Hester wondered whether, keeping too long their Puritanical silence on all such feelings, they might, in the end, cease altogether to feel.

  “I’ll tell you what made things so bad last night: These people didn’t really want me for Selectman in the first place,” Mr. Avered said. “It was all very chancy, my getting this job, and now I don’t know if I want it.”

  “Mr. Welch—is that the giant’s name?—said something about a split vote,” Hester said, trying to be sympathetic; disappointed to see Eben’s father’s near-bliss aborted by self-pity.

  “It was because of the school fight,” he said. “People weren’t going to vote regular, they couldn’t agree on a candidate. I was a compromise—and now it curdles ’em to see that I won’t compromise. I just refuse to whop over from this side to that when I believe in things.”

  “Did George Challenge help you get elected? Mrs. Tuller said something this morning…”

  “George Challenge? Don’t mind his bowlegs: some say he’s taller sitting down than he is standing up.”

  “Did he pull wires for you?”

  “He’s crookeder than a ram’s horn. You remember what old Hosea Biglow said?—that rubber trees fust begun bearin’ when political consciences come into wearin’? That’s George Challenge for you.”

  “Did he help you?”

  “Nobody can get elected, not even as dog warden, around here unless Mr. Challenge nods in his direction. Just the way you can’t buy fresh meat at the market without the little blue pure-food stamp on it. Can’t you see ‘George Challenge’ stamped across my forehead?” Mr. Avered’s eyes were like those of a small boy, appealing for help.

  This was degrading; Hester wanted no more. “Then your witnesses aren’t worth much,” she said cruelly. “The giant is for you anyhow—he made a speech for your drive last night. And now it turns out you’re George Challenge’s poodle. Your witnesses are no good to you at all.”

  “There were others who saw the crowd of woodchucks. Don’t worry, girl. There are others up there right now looking at ’em. And you’ll see ’em soon enough yourself, buck teeth, shoe-leather hides, and all.” She had said she feared the teeth, the skins, the skulls; so, Hester thought, cruelty always answers cruelty. She wanted to make amends, but before she could, he had taken a startling jump.

  “Now tell me about you,” he said, with a kind of gentleness, as if she had not been attacking him; though there was, to be sure, a note of determination in his gentleness.

  * * *

  —

  Hester almost had to stop and think who she was. She knew she was standing beside a handsome older man in a woodsy place, among buoyant young trees that were menaced by sweet-smelling, murderous vines; she and this man were waiting; they were employed in an outlandish experience; they were alone, all alone, glimpsed in their green privacy only by the indifferent sun. “Now tell me about you,” he had suddenly said. Hester cast about for an easy, evasive answer, for she had been trying for weeks—for the whole period of Eben’s courtship, certainly—to discover exactly what she was, to make sure of her identity, to try to find out whether it matched, or complemented, or could be melted wholly away by, Eben’s, and so far she had not found any insights she could depend on, she was still only guessing at herself; she would have to put off E
ben’s father’s demand with some vague reply. She thought for a moment of her own father, of one of the last times she had seen him. She had been about twelve years old—it was half her life ago! The family—mother, father, Hester, and Pete—were living in the national capital then, in three dark rented rooms in a house of orange brick on an avenue named for a state. It was midsummer. Her unemployed father sat on the edge of his bed in the back room perspiring in an undershirt, some seersucker pants, and a pair of slippers; she was sitting in a straight wooden chair with a cane seat in the next room, which was connected with her parents’ by a doorless archway, trying to read; he kept breaking in. “What’re you reading?” he asked. A book by an English woman. “Good girl. Take care of your eyes, Hes,” he said. “Have you enough light there?” She had. “Don’t burn your eyes out, my Hes. You’re going to need those hazel eyes. The world’s going to need your eyes.” The more his personal failure bore in upon him, the more convinced he became that his children had the potentials of success. The world would some day be grateful for famous Hes, for the great Pete. How bitterly she and her brother had learned that aspiration wouldn’t buy groceries! That was probably why she was so afraid of Eben’s undirected ambition. Yet how lovable, too, that overleaping naïve hopefulness had been in her broken father. “Eyes on the lodestar!” he had used often to exhort his children. Looking now at the blur that, coming into focus, became Eben’s father, she wondered how Mr. Avered could be as complacent as he seemed, so satisfied with his small orbit…. She thought how, sitting at her metal desk on the seventeenth floor, she was always careful to have enough light for her hazel eyes to see by, just in case…. Mr. Avered lived here in his smallness perfectly satisfied with himself and openly contemptuous of Eben’s efforts to “better” himself.

  “I’ve always lived in cities,” she said.

  “Can’t hold that against you,” he said.

  “It makes me feel awkward here.”

  “You don’t seem so to me.”

  “I’d be lonely here.”

  “You can’t lick loneliness by huddling up with half a trillion strangers, can you?”

  “I don’t know. Where can you? Do you have any friends here in Tunxis? I mean real friends.”

  “I have a lot of neighbors. I’ll go that far.”

  “I mean friends.”

  “I had a friend once,” the Selectman said.

  “Who was that?”

  “My wife, Mrs. Matthew Avered.”

  “Why the past tense?”

  “I don’t know, we’ve taken our ways. I talk all the time and she hardly says a word, unless it’s to tell me I have a goneness about me. She’s so tired most of the time she can barely stiver along from day to day.”

  “She seems wonderfully placid to me.”

  “She is. She’s as calm as a pond that doesn’t have any inlet or outflow: some call it stagnant…. Whoa, girl, we were supposed to be talking about you.”

  “I’ve always lived in cities,” Hester said, smiling. “My father wanted to be a lawyer. Some of the time he was a clerk in post offices. Toward the end I guess you’d say he was a bum—no good to anyone, anyway.”

  “You’re just right for Eben,” the Selectman said. “We Avereds always try to marry the daughters of tramps and hobos…. How did you get to know so much about people?”

  “Out of books,” she said. “Whenever I read, I’m careful to have plenty of light, so I’ll be sure to see everything that’s there.”

  “I used to read a lot,” the Selectman said. “Did you ever read the poems of Patmore?”

  This was a real surprise to Hester. “We had to read some of his sonnets in college,” she said. “All I remember is, I liked his name better than his verses: Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore—that I’ll never forget.”

  “Well, girl, you’re about to tie yourself down, you ought to read his long one about marriage. Then pick it up twenty-five years later, the way I did night before last, when I got thinking about you and Eben, and see whether it sounds the same to you. One grows and learns.”

  Hester felt an onrush of anxiety. What was the Selectman trying to tell her? Why did everyone always traffic so much in hints, why couldn’t people speak out their straight thoughts? Why was everyone here trying to discourage her about Eben? Hester’s defenses rallied to a quickened drumbeat of her heart. She began to be defiant. Let them try, she cried to herself, let them just try to discourage me! And she said to herself for the first time that she was sure about Eben. It did not matter to her that she felt, in her turn, not a real softening of the spirit that could be called love, but determination.

  “Listen!” the Selectman said.

  Up to the left the noisemaking had begun again, and soon Hester and the Selectman could hear an order to move forward being passed down the line, then Coit shouted it, and Hester volleyed it on to the dancing teacher; and they stepped into the woods. Gradually the honeysuckle thinned away, and she and the father of her suitor walked through bare-floored green gothic chapels. Off to their left Coit, instead of whistling, was singing now at the top of his voice:

  “Oh, I’m a hayseed,

  A hairy seaweed,

  And my ears are made of leather

  And they flop in stormy weather;

  Gosh all hemlock,

  I’m tougher’n a pine knot…”

  * * *

  —

  “And that one,” the Selectman said, “is a beech—you could put your girl-hand around its trunk now, but it’ll grow to be enormous. It’ll beat out all these taller pignut trees around it, they’ll gradually be overshadowed and weakened and then some fall equinox they’ll plop over in a big wind, and when I’m dead, and Eben’s dead, and Eben’s son is dead, and the son’s son is an old man, this tree’ll stand up here over everything and cock its snook at the world—the paltry world. Whenever I feel pleased with myself, to the point where I can see I’m boring my neighbors, all I have to do is take a look at one of these beeches and I get humble pretty quick, humble and a little bit scared, because time is one thing to a beech tree and another thing to me. I put so many things off! Do you procrastinate?”

  “Oh, I do!”

  Hester felt a sudden, unexpected touch of the kind of poignancy which she had regarded, all through her adolescent years, as the earliest throe of romantic love, but which she recognized, now that she was more experienced, as being no more than the painful thrill of discovery, the pang of new acquaintance—with sometimes a fillip of desire thrown in. Any hazard there may have been in this incipient feeling was abated, and even made slightly ridiculous, by Coit’s lewd whistling and singing to the left and the dancing master’s musical halloos to the right, as well as by an occasional startling bellow from the Selectman right beside her and, afterwards, a dutiful, responsive shriek from her own throat. She understood that the emotion she directed toward this man was partly admiration and partly pity. Eben had told her more than once that versatility was his father’s curse: that while he was not quite broad enough or brilliant enough to be the kind of universal man New England had once produced in its out-of-the-way villages, he was, still and all, an extraordinary jack-of-all-hobbies, versed in various country lores, professionally inconstant—now an insurance salesman, now middleman for truck farmers, briefly a smalltime speculative building contractor, once town librarian, often a summer-month real-estate agent, and now, because so available, a public servant; never successful in Eben’s terms, yet never improvident, either. Hester savored the word “goneness,” which the Selectman had said his wife used about him. She was grazed again by that sweet sensation of incipience—whereupon, dispelling it altogether and shocking her uninsulated sensibilities, the Selectman suddenly imitated the clamor of a crow with horrible fidelity.

  “When am I going to see a woodchuck?” Hester asked, inwardly a-tremble.

  “Let’s see. Division Two oug
ht to be going through Romeo Bacon’s old meadows, where the burrows are, pretty directly now. Anytime after that. Pretty soon, I’d calculate.”

  “I told you,” she said, “that I was afraid of the woodchucks’ teeth. Now I’m scared of something else.”

  “What’s that, girl?”

  “Mrs. Tuller.”

  The Selectman gave out a single descending arpeggio of laughter, as if Hester’s idea were utterly ridiculous; then abruptly he was serious and thoughtful. “As a matter of fact, I think I see what you mean,” he said. “Mrs. Tuller must have half a bushel of brains in that head of hers, but I guess her heart’s no bigger than a French pea. It’s a funny thing: no one in Tunxis is more self-sacrificing than she is; she’s famous for her labors of mercy. She’s a teacher, to begin with—she lives her life for other people’s children; couldn’t have any of her own, or her ballet dancer couldn’t give her any, one or the other. She’s a devoted teacher—but ouch! Strict! She’s strong as an orang-outang, as any pupil she’s ever had’ll tell you. During the war there was a time when every one of the town’s doctors was off in the services, so what did she do? She appointed herself a medico, degrees and laws be damned. She has a motorcycle; you should’ve seen her in those years flying to sickbeds, with the saddlebags on the back busting with junk from the drugstore and her white smock flapping in the wind and her thighs shaking like laughing blimps. She didn’t kill a single patient, but it was pretty well understood that so long as she was in charge, a sick person had to get worse, and I mean miserably worse, before he got better; she had a way of seeing to that; she favored mustard plasters and emetics; she was a firm believer that New England folks could only be cured with counter-irritants. She’s always been a flower-sender and a train-meeter, and whenever someone passes on under a certified doctor’s hands, she’s the first to inflict condolences on the bereaved—and she knows how to make ’em felt, too. She was a Cherevoy; that family was of Acadian descent, her ancestors were shipped down here from Nova Scotia with the Acadians that were dumped in Connecticut twenty years before the Revolution. Maybe she’s never forgiven the Anglo-Saxons for that outrage. Maybe she’s furious at the world for giving her Friedrich Tuller. Maybe she hates herself because her head’s so big. You’re right, girl, watch out for her, don’t let her take your skin off on the pretext you need your back scratched. Her kindliness has a murderous edge to it. Yet I can’t help saying she’s a wonderful woman; Tunxis would be dull and wishy-washy without her. I’ll do anything for Mrs. Tuller—as long as I can keep my distance from her.”