by John Hersey
Hester felt the tension between the two men, and she understood that the elder had been somehow stung, but what underlay the strain she could not know. It struck her that the assigned rôles were reversed—that Eben was arguing for a specific set of values, while his father seemed to be urging deeper realities on him. It disturbed her to feel, as she did, that the contest was being waged at least partly for her benefit, and she wanted it ended. “Weren’t you two going to tell me some local gossip?” she said.
The Selectman, too, had apparently had enough, for he said, “Aren’t you weary, son? Why don’t you march off to bed? I’ve some questions to ask your young lady.”
“And leave Hes alone with Selectman Avered?” Eben said. “Fat chance.”
“Then I guess it’s me,” Eben’s father said, accepting defeat with an agility that Hester could not consider flattering. He arose, said his goodnights, and retired.
Eben, who moved to the swing, seemed moody and disinclined to talk. Hester, knowing that his feelings had many currents and eddies, decided to let him drift. Finally he said, “I guess I ought to warn you, Father’s rather famous, or used to be, for girl-chasing.”
“ ‘Warn’ me? I can take care of myself, dear Eben.”
“I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Mother.”
“What did he do to her?”
“He squeezed all the vitality out of her, somehow, with his goings-on. Even I can remember when she used to be a regular vixen.”
Impatiently Hester changed the subject, and in due course, after they had talked awhile, Eben embraced her and kissed her. She felt a sudden access of desire, stronger even than usual. Eben was tender; he denied her as always, but not before working his way through her defenses until, far beyond surrender, she clamored for utmost captivity. In his denial, murmuring that that was for marriage, he seemed strong, utterly male and unmanageable, and, Hester realized when she had gone frustrated to bed, surprisingly like his neo-Puritan father.
* * *
—
Across a tumbled wall of glacier-rounded stones, beyond the field with the four maples where Hester had seen the woodchuck, the landscape again grew more fretted and entangled, the second-growth became thicker and taller. The terrain still sloped forward, but more gradually now, toward the base of the hollow. Repeated calls had come down from the left to move more slowly, and yet more slowly, and yet more slowly. In the dark thicket, with her private woodchuck somewhere ahead, Hester became anxious again, and her heart leaped when she heard, then saw, the Selectman coming down the line. He was grinning; he was a welcome sight.
“I saw a woodchuck!” she called to him, as if she had seen an eclipse, or a whale, or a unicorn in a garden.
“We have the whole caboodle running along up there,” the Selectman said, pointing backwards over his shoulder with his thumb. “So Beauty has seen the Beast? How was he?”
“Oh, he was so comical—sunning himself against a tree.”
“All over being afraid, then?” the Selectman asked, falling into step beside Hester.
“Well—”
“That’s good, girl. Don’t stop being leery of them.” The Selectman seemed intensely serious, not trifling now; she remembered how he had teased her about being afraid, before, with his story of the old woman, Dorcas Thrall, and her fear of birds. “They’re horrible!” he said. “Once I was walking in a field up here with a stick in my hand, and I saw a mother woodchuck with four fat little ones. I went after ’em with my staff. Well, the mother herded her babies to the mouth of their burrow in the wink of an eye, and she jumped in, and then she turned and pushed the babies back out into the field, so I’d get them, not her…. Don’t stop being leery of ’em.”
“Thanks, I won’t,” Hester said, not without conviction. She thought for a moment of the Forward-Avered word, “wicked.” Infanticides; wicked, wicked. “So you organized this drive out of hatred of the evil things,” she said.
“Oh Lordy, no,” the Selectman said. “You mustn’t think that I’m some kind of Captain Ahab. No, no! I only look for good and bad in people. This drive’s just a practical measure.”
“But I have an idea that ‘values’ were involved in your mind when you set about planning it. Weren’t they?”
“Values are involved in everything we do.” Suddenly he took one of his leaps in thought—and later she wondered what his train of mind at this moment had been. “Are you a virgin?” he asked.
“No.”
“My son Eben?”
“No.”
“You mean he wasn’t the first?”
“I mean he wasn’t, period.”
“Ahem,” the Selectman said, as if to rebuke, or at least intercept, an impulse he had had to laugh. “How many?”
“You asked me a simple question and I gave you a simple answer. Do you have to hound me?”
“We live in a world of realities,” the Selectman ironically said. “Does Eben know?”
“He’s never asked.”
“I’ll have to have a short talk with that boy—not about you, Miss Hester. I just think his curiosity ought to have a whetstone applied to it.”
“I think he has a very lively curiosity,” Hester said, “about important things.”
“I worry about that boy’s curiosity,” the Selectman said, moving cautiously out of the mood of impudent intimacy into which he had plunged—warned away, perhaps, by the cool lack of emphasis in her last phrase. “His curiosity’s too mechanical. I remember once when he was just going from baby to boy, just between grass and hay, his mother was trying to teach him to say prayers on his way to bed, and he wouldn’t stop bouncing around, so she said, ‘Ebenezer, you have to keep still and speak clearly when you say your prayers, so God’ll hear you up in the sky; He lives up in the sky, you know.’ The boy, instead of asking who or what or whether God is, instead of a big, central question, just asked, ‘Will an airplane hit him in the ear?’ That’s what I mean. He’s always been that way. Side issues.”
Hester said, “I think that was a pretty central question—the conflict of science with faith, after all. You don’t give your son credit.”
“I hope Eben marries you,” the father said, walking close beside Hester as they moved out into a clearing, where a sudden, cheerful light fell on the strolling pair.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you give a feeling of confidence; you seem to know where you are. And”—he gave her a comically voracious ogle—“because you’re an eyeful.”
Hester was puzzled, because for some minutes she had felt an ambiguity in all that her companion had said and done; perhaps because of Eben’s “warning” the night before, she had now either detected or imagined a flirtatious note in his words and acts. She could not tell whether he had been turning over in his mind the possibility of some harmless woodland toying, or meant what he said and truly and selflessly wanted her for a son he loved and had set a canopy over his feelings in the Yankee way; and because the ambiguity tortured her, she felt maladroit, wordless, shy.
“Hey! You hogs! Hey! Hey!” the Selectman startled her by roaring to the woodchuck world. Then mildly he pointed up toward a stretch of Thighbone Ledge that had come into view in the clearing, at a great, deep scar in the dark brown traprock. “Look at the quarry,” he said. “They worked it for about twenty years and got the best basalt out of the ledge to use for roadbed on the county highways and then abandoned it. That’s New England for you—we’ve uprooted its meager wealth, and all that’s left is a lot of water-filled pits and empty mine shafts and worked-out fields that weren’t worth working in the first place—and folks, of course.” He seemed wholly taken up with this thought, for his expression was sober and deep, and Hester was annoyed now, not only with him but also with herself, because she could not deny that she was disappointed; her vanity had been let down with a bump. (And later s
he was annoyed with herself, or at least troubled, because in these moments she had not given Eben a single important thought.) She hated not knowing whether she had been flirted with; if she had been, she resented this sudden little lecture on the conservation of the earth’s resources.
“Folks!” she thought. “Fossils, you mean.”
* * *
—
For some time Hester had been threading her way through scattered patches of cat brier, and now directly ahead of her in the next field she saw a widespread expanse of it, a sea of glaucous leaves, glistening vines humping in choppy waves over bushes and boulders, only here and there an islet of grass or underbrush not yet engulfed by the vicious tide. She remembered the brier vines that Andrew had showed her the day before, with golden-green spikes like copper carpet tacks all along the sinuous stems; and she remembered Mrs. Tuller’s warning: “Do not plunge too valorously….” On her left and right, Coit and the dancing master were working inexorably forward, making their eccentric woodchuck-repellent noises, and occasionally, as well, she could hear Anak Welch exercising his bovine throat with tragic-sounding baritone lowings. She was alone again; a message had come down the line asking the advance men to report to Division Two, where there was some tactical problem, and the Selectman had run off with a boyish whoop. She had walked forward in a kind of daze, puzzling over what had just happened to her, or rather what had not happened to her, and thinking about Eben and the future, and about the Selectman and the present; and about ambiguities and uncertainties in others and in herself; and all the time she felt somehow bad-tempered and displeased with the way life was treating her.
As she crossed over into the new field and came close to the cat brier, she saw that the growth, at least on its outer edges, did not appear to be closely interwoven, and that by threading back and forth, skirting between the many hummocks and knots of vine that made up the whole obstacle, it would be easy to move through it; from a distance it had seemed much more compact. She started in, and made her way for some minutes without so much as being brushed by a waxy leaf, remembering to warn the woodchucks of her coming with a shout from time to time. Then all at once the mounds of vine grew taller and closed in; she came up against a tight and extensive entanglement.
There was nothing to do but go around; she would go Coit’s way, she thought, around the left—and at the thought of the bully she experienced a strange stab of curiosity and pleasure. With many a twist and turn, in a sort of waltzing detour, she progressed, somewhat forward of sideways, along the near edge of the impenetrability. She had only gone a few yards, however, when she saw a well-beaten path, clearly one of the woodchuck trails the Selectman had talked about at the caucus, and had urged the hunters to use, that led into a kind of funnel running deep into close-knit brier towering over her head. She assumed that this much-used animal trail must go all the way through the cat brier patch, so she turned and followed it. The funnel became a high-walled soft lane, winding, she imagined for a moment, like an eighteenth-century informal garden path to some out-of-the-way Fragonardish playroom of shade, where girls with their legs frilled in lace swooped high on swings pumped by desire-flushed swains. Cheerfully she tooted and yapped at the woodchucks, and heard, from the calls of her companions, that she was still fairly well in line.
After a bit the vines opened up somewhat again, into another area of clustered and mounded islets of brier. The path underfoot seemed less trafficked, then Hester saw there were several paths here wending and winding among the dangerous heaps, and she began to feel mazed. Still, oriented by the noises her friends kept venting, she moved, as she thought, forward. Gradually the vines thickened once more, the spaces between the clumps narrowed.
Hester thought for a moment that she ought to turn back again and escape and circle the whole troublesome field, but then she imagined she must be nearly through to the far side, and she was suddenly afraid of getting lost if she tried to retreat and of falling far behind the picket line.
She came up against a tight barricade; turned and met another; reversed herself and met another. She was encircled, bewildered. She found a place, toward the direction of the drive, it seemed, where the vines were at least shallow, and she decided to get a leg up and over and try to wade forward. The vines plucked at her jeans and pricked her legs. Still, she made some progress, and once she had a glimpse ahead to open meadow and saw that she had not too far to go. She felt encouraged and wallowed onward, ignoring many scratches, and for a moment came to a tiny open place where grass grew and through which, she fancied, a trace of a woodchuck path ran. Then she plunged, she realized, too valorously forward into the growth beyond, and soon was thoroughly caught. The vines embraced over her head. She pulled at them and tried to lift her knees and move her feet. Her heart raced. She felt stung and bitten and angry. She was able somehow to wriggle and stagger a few feet forward.
Then she fell and could go no further. She seemed tied down. She felt distended and enormous; she felt like a Gulliver lashed down by fabulous miniature powers.
Terror shook her. She tried to rise and back away. Her arms seemed bound, she could not move. She put her forehead down on a forearm and sobbed on her couch of thorns. Then, as she heard the dancing master, Coit, and Anak Welch calling, whistling, calling, she knew she had been left behind and she raised her head, thinking of trying to shout to them.
She lowered her eyes. Directly ahead of her on the ground among the vines, not two feet from her face, she saw the dry, whited skeleton of a woodchuck. She screamed, but knew at once that her cry would be thought merely part of the hunt, part of the day’s play.
The blanched skull before her was turned to one side on the dry vertebrae, as if the animal had, at last, simply gone to sleep.
* * *
—
On the wall of the beach terrace, carefully posed among some delicate shells and fronds of coral, on a doily of seagrape leaves, was the skull of a sea turtle, as big as a cow’s skull. It was whiter than the sand of the beach, white as the spindrift on the wave tops. Picking up the skull, their hostess, who was tan as a mulatto, so that the dry bone left a pale calx on the glossy skin of her forearm, told the others how a sea turtle begets its young: When the huge creature comes up to lay its eggs, she said, it labors up the beach leaving a trail like a bulldozer’s; the mother makes a mussy nest, a hill of sand, with twigs and seaweed on it—but that is only a decoy-place, for she moves away then and prepares another crater and lays her eggs (they hurt her so much, or parturition makes her so sad, that she cries immense tears) and leaves that place as tidy as she can and goes back down to the water. “The eggs are rubbery,” Mrs. Mandeson said, re-posing the skull; “they’ll bounce on the terrace here.” While the eggs hatch under the heat of the sun, the mother waits offshore, she said, and when they have emerged from their eggs the blind baby turtles turn around two or three times and then home, as if by a kind of radar, straight for the sea. The mother is waiting there offshore to keep the barracuda away.
“How do turtles make love, Professor?” George Mandeson asked his wife.
“The usual way,” she said, “I guess.”
“Is it usual to be wearing a tight-fitting house when you make love?”
Hester lay on a mat of woven rushes, half-hearing and aware that she glistened, for she was bearing some of the weight of the Florida sun, and the effort made her perspire; she was oiled, too.
“Listen to the rut of the waves,” Eben said. He was in a good mood—living for sensations on this vacation trip that he and Hester had arranged to share by purposeful coincidence; for all sensations, that is, save one, for he was a Puritan boy and proving himself splendidly in his physical restraint toward Hester.
“Boy!” George Mandeson said. “There’s power in them thar waves.”
“How many tons do you guess a wave weighs?” Eben asked speculatively. “I mean from here to the end of the spit, one wave hitting
the sand?”
“If only you could hitch a power take-off to a wave!” George said.
Hester noticed that George talked frequently about strength, and that he was big and firm himself. His body had a terrible rippling grace; when he moved, it was as if someone dropped a stone in the middle of him, making irresistible undulations spread outward all over him. His brain was his underdeveloped muscle. The Mandesons were older than Eben and herself, and away overhead economically. They were thirtying, ten years married and ten years childless, and they had a small house on this island on the West Coast, and they argued quite a lot, especially after drinks, of which they intook quite a lot. How lonely, Hester thought, they must be! She and Eben had gone unwarned one night into a night-place called the Golden Olive, where the tariff was far too steep for them; and this lonely tarnished pair at a nearby table had invited them over and, hearing of their unmarried, hitchhiking, motel-housed adventure, had asked them urgently forthwith to spend some days at their cottage. George had a powered skiff and had inspected the power plant at Fort Myers and could tell you all about the power play series developed by the Philadelphia Eagles; he was obsessed with vital forces. He and Ruth were from outside Philadelphia, from what they called the wrong side of the Main Line, which Hester, having heard George’s talk, thought of as a power line. Ruth was of the kind whom men fearfully love and women openly hate: beautiful and brilliant. There were tiny cracks around her eyes and on the upper curves of her cheeks, like those that appear in lacquer long kept in a too-hot room. She knew most things and would blandly talk about the other things that she didn’t know, and Eben’s eyes sparkled like stupid little firefly traps whenever he was around her.
“I’ve got to dunk myself,” Hester said disgustedly, standing up. “Who’s with me?”
“I’m ahead of you,” George Mandeson cried, and he exploded from where he lay into a sudden full gallop down the beach, crashing his dolphin shoulders at last against the very stomach of an overfolding wave, in contempt of the water’s might. He swam several yards under the surface, came up spewing air, and turned treading his legs to wait for Hester. She walked down the beach moving her hips warily and with her arms lifted and elbows back taking more time than she needed to put on her bathing cap; she had a queer feeling of submissiveness approaching the brute in the water—and she decided (“anyhow” was at the edge of her mind) that she was peeved with Eben for being such a lap-dog at the beck of their hostess; all through this trip she had felt a growing resentment of his Puritanism. Hester squealed and jumped as the waves hit her thighs, and she swam breast-stroke to George, who made sea-mammal noises at her, slappings and wet snorts, and she splashed him, and he said, “What’re you two doing tonight?”—for the Mandesons had generously set freedom of action as a condition of the young pair’s stay.