by John Hersey
“I don’t know what Eben’s got in mind. I expect he’ll decide to be tired tonight.”
“Why don’t we all go down to the Golden Olive and have some drinks and a bite to eat?”
“Too expensive.”
“This is on me.”
“You’re doing too much for us, George.”
“I don’t do anything at my expense that isn’t fun for me.”
“An altruist,” Hester sarcastically said.
“Hey, take it easy,” George said with leaden suspicion, for he did not like to be teased, and the unknown (a vast realm to him, it appeared) seemed to terrify him.
“You know, just below soprano in the choir,” Hester maliciously tried on him; she had by now a deep-seated faith in his stupidity.
“Hey! What the hell!” George protested, his sense of manhood abused; he splashed Hester. To admit the truth, she thought, his voice was a little squeaky for such a ram.
“I’d love to go,” Hester said, “but you’ll have to persuade Eben.”
“Ruth can do that.”
“That’s a good idea,” Hester said, laughing inwardly now at Eben and swimming away from George.
And that was the way it was done.
In a moment of clarity, while she was dressing alone in the tiny guestroom at the end of the house in the sedge by the sand, Hester saw George Mandeson for what he was. It would have been possible to think of him as the American ideal, a kind of manly Cinderella, up from nowhere in a hurry, up from being an ingenious mechanic, alias greaser, to being, at thirty or so, a man who wore leather sandals and linen pants and Hawaiian shirts in the palmiferous regions for two months every winter. Hester was sure that he had come up by a straight path—by hard work and by recognizing Opportunity when she stared him so close in the face that he could smell her foul breath; there was something about a patent on a gadget that would go into every cigaret lighter in every car in the land. He was what, according to the native myth, every clever girl who worked at a clerical job, every Hester and every Ruth Mandeson, dreamt of catching and dangling from her wrist: rich, healthy, dull, as patient and good-tempered as a little plated charm. But now Hester saw that he was nothing more than one of the pretty coquina shells on the beach, housing a small rotted tenant within—that get-fairly-rich-quick had as its complement more-more-more, and that George had seen the shape of the spiral above his head and it terrified and disgusted him because he was not equal to it; that he was stupid, stupid, stupid; that he had hidden from himself, without knowing it, in a busy pleasure hunt;—in short, that he was well on his way to becoming not the American dream but the American nightmare: a lush, a lecher, and a loafer. There was some putrescence in him. He was bad. He was startlingly attractive.
They sat at a table in the Golden Olive. A section of the roof had been rolled back so the customers could see a black velvet pincushion of night overhead. The orchestra was mercifully soft and persuasive. George had ordered gin and Schweppes Tonic Water, and when it came, Hester, a merest novitiate in the sisterhood of gin-drinkers, sipped some of it.
“It tastes terrible,” she said, making a citrus face.
“You’ll have to educate yourself to this tonic water,” George said with apparently unconscious grandeur. “It’s an acquired taste.”
“I can’t help it,” Hester said. “It tastes awful to me.”
“It’s British. For the tropics. It has something like quinine in it—keeps the fevers down.”
“I can’t help it,” Hester said again. “Anyhow, this isn’t the tropics; this is the intemperate zone.”
Hester saw that George didn’t even duck as that one sped close over his head. “The temperate zone,” he said, gently correcting her.
“Yes, George,” Hester said, feeling that awful submissiveness again, “the temperate zone.”
Late that night, out on the sand, thanks partly to certain fevers that gin raised and sustained in easy opposition to the tonic from overseas, but thanks as well to a restlessness that was deep in her, deep in her, after a preliminary minuet of deception that had been eased by Eben’s constant yawning at the nightclub and by an ache that pounced fortuitously on Ruth Mandeson’s head, and also by the fact that Eben and Hester, being unmarried guests, were housed in separate quarters, she in the main house and he in the guest house, Hester, under the light of a sickle moon, terminated her virginity. Her disappointing collaborator in this ending was the stupid bull, George Mandeson. As she went to sleep in the pale blue guestroom later, with the bed-lamp turned on to steady the room on its axis, Hester kept thinking how much, how very much, she loved her sweet Yankee character, Eben Avered. She would marry him and they wouldn’t get rich and stupid, not very rich, anyhow.
* * *
—
Thus Hester, entangled in the cat brier near the small bleached skeleton, lay in the presence of death and thought of lasciviousness under a hot sun and of the act of generation under a new moon, of golden olives and suntan oil and turtle eggs and squeezed limes and cheating kisses and more than kisses; in the presence of the bones in the brier. “I’m getting morbid,” she said out loud, then started at hearing herself talk in a place where no one else could hear her. “Next thing,” she continued, still audibly, “I’ll be talking out loud to myself.”
She decided (in order, perhaps, to keep fear down) that she was not very afraid. They’ll come for me, she thought, they’re bound to come back for me. When they stop for rest or for lunch, Eben’ll look for me and they’ll miss me and they’ll come back for me. They know where I was in the line, it’ll be a lead-pipe cinch to find me. No, she decided, I’m not particularly afraid, and she wondered what her abdomen was independently shaking about. Maybe it was laughing about the boneheaded stud, George Mandeson. Why was it laughing? She wasn’t.
She tried again to work herself free. I was excited before, she thought, I’ll go about it more carefully this time. She began to make cautious motions with her wrists and hands, but the labor was discouraging. Just to give her forearms mobility, she would have to exert a kind of patience she simply did not have, the steadiness of a knitter, the unhurriedness of a thrifty woman clearing a snarled wad of twine without snipping it. Damn it, she was just the wrong kind of girl to get herself out of a mess.
The little skeleton was right in front of her all the time. “Chuckie,” Hester said, but not out loud this time, “were you like me? Didn’t you stop to think? Did you thrash around till the toils had you?” Not out loud, not in a whisper, not even silently did Hester explicitly ask the woodchuck’s relics what it had been like to die in the vines.
But we are different, Hester thought. We men and women think about each other. They’ll be back for me.
Ha! she let herself complain. When do we think of each other? When we’re afraid, when we need company, when we’re afraid of losing something, when we’re afraid of death—then we’re selfless enough. All the rest of the time: bellies, genitals, if possible a heel on somebody else’s neck.
And then Hester was thinking how pleasant it would be to be embraced by Eben’s father. Here in the woods. He was experienced, compassionate, and troubled by daydreams; he would be a hundred times better than the Mandeson, the only one she’d had. It would be wonderful, she openly thought. Not here in the snarled vines, of course, but in the soft-floored forest.
She could hear the drivers calling and whistling in the distance. Their backs were to her and they were going farther and farther away. Eben’s father was up there in that noise—and so, she thought with a little prick of annoyance, was Eben.
From here she heard the drivers’ calls as a definite line of noise. If I were a woodchuck, she thought, I’d move away from such a racket—if only I could move. Then for a while she had a weird idea that maybe woodchucks think about each other, too; and she pictured a posse of them coming solicitously, with long memories, to find their ossifie
d sister chuckie caught in the brier, but finding her, Hester, instead, and…Hester felt the tremor in her abdomen again.
The calling of the hunters seemed to die out, and Thighbone Hollow was silent but for the delicious fricative whistling of a city of crickets. Had the line moved so far as to be out of hearing? Or had it paused? Who would think of her first?
Now Hester saw something curious. Under the cage of the skeleton’s ribs, lying nested in vine leaves, there was a beautiful, queer globe of some kind, the size of a small orange, a vari-textured ball whose surface was of an iridescent light grayish color crisscrossed with delicate dark lines; it looked mysterious, semi-precious, a monstrous jewel among the remains. She had a fanciful notion that this woodchuck might have had a heart of stone, but then she decided that this glistening thing was too perfectly spherical to have been even an accidental symbol of the seat of love. She determined that she must have it, whatever it was, and she began carefully to plan how to reach out her left hand the two feet it would have to extend in order to grasp the lovely globe. If she could hunch her body around so that her left shoulder would be thrust forward, like a pugilist’s, then if she could clear a way with her left hand to poke her arm forward…. And soon she was working harder to capture that eerie prize than she had worked twice before to save herself from captivity.
Slowly, inch by inch by scratchy inch, she urged her small hand forward. Now it was a foot away from the pearly ball, now half a miserable mile-like foot, now closer, now—ouch!—closer.
There! It was hard, smooth, heavy.
She began to draw her arm back, knowing that the return would be even more tiresome than the reach had been, for her loaded hand was bigger than it had been empty, her fingers were tied down to their burden. Slowly, slowly.
“Hester! Hester! Oh, Hester!” Far away.
Pooh, it was somewhere Eben. He sounded like a scared chicken.
Knowing now for sure that she was safe, Hester decided to let Eben make the most of his great errand of mercy; let it last awhile; she just wouldn’t answer for a few minutes. She concentrated on retrieving the woodchuck’s treasure, while her brave but nervous Eben kept on bothering the welkin with her name off there.
At last her hand was back where it had started, and in it was this curious, pocked, resin-streaked, delicately lined gray globe, hers now; it had belonged to a woodchuck and now it was hers. It was a singular ball, very strange and fascinating.
Now Hester heard other voices calling her, with Eben’s, and they were all much closer and would reach her soon enough. She listened for one particular hail, lay tense over her scratched left hand waiting to hear it.
Then she did. There it was, not far away at all. Eben’s father’s voice.
“Here I am!” she shouted delightedly. “Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!”
* * *
—
They found her a scant eight or ten feet from the outer edge of the brier patch. The search party—Eben, his father, Coit, Friedrich Tuller, and Mr. Challenge-told her through the spiny screen as they worked to free her that the whole line of the drive had stopped for lunch and that Coit had been the first to miss her. They had a couple of machetes, which some of the advance men had been carrying, and Coit and the Selectman hacked at the vines.
Hester was cheerful and talked to her rescuers about the path she had followed and about how she had become caught and about the skeleton lying there near her. She said nothing about what was in her hand.
Eben chafed and asked if she was hurt and whether she had been afraid; Eben’s father was silent but worked hard to give her liberty. Coit teased her for a stupid city girl (evidently, being a talented bully, he had sensed the very point on which she felt most vulnerable); and the Selectman shushed Coit firmly. “Stop cruelizing the girl, Roswell,” he said.
Soon Hester was free and could jump up and walk out onto open meadow. The searchers exclaimed over her scratches and her torn shirt, and Mr. Challenge said she looked like the tail end of a hurricane. She went straight to the Selectman and held out the odd thing in her hand and asked, “What’s this?”
Taking it and scanning it, he said, “Where’d you find that?”
“It was inside the woodchuck, inside the skeleton of the woodchuck.”
The Selectman tossed the ball up and caught it several times. “Never saw the like of it in my life,” he said. “It’s a spooky thing—fairly gives you a grue. We’ll have to ask Pliny Forward what it is.”
They did that. When they reached the shady grove where the line had halted—only about four hundred yards from where Hester had been caught—they searched among the long-strewn clumps of people sitting and waiting to picnic, for the young biologist, until they found him. The Selectman put the ball in his hand, and Forward asked where it had come from, and Hester told how she had found it.
“You must be a lucky one,” Forward said, revolving the orb in his hand. “Are you lucky by habit?”
“Well,” Hester said, “as a matter of fact, no, I wouldn’t say so, I’d say that by and large I work for everything I get; after all, I’m a woman, no, I’m not very lucky.”
“You will be from now on,” Pliny Forward said; but there was a light-heartedness in his voice, a mocking note. “This is a bezoar stone, and uncommon big for a woodchuck’s. I saw a small one once, just a pint o’ cider alongside this one. This is a dandy. It’s nothing but a concretion of hairs and pebbles and indigestibles that the woodchuck ate by accident and coated with some kind of gum of his and built on up in layers—but it has magic properties. You must wear it as an amulet, because it’ll ward off everything from bugaboos in your nose to the yellow creeping paralysis. At least that’s what our ancestors, our old seedfolks as my mother called them, used to think. Don’t know exactly what to think myself.”
“Give it to me,” Hester said a little sharply, and she took the bezoar from Pliny Forward. “Will it get you what you want?” she asked. “Is it like a wishbone or the first star of evening?”
“You can look on it that way if you want to,” Forward said.
“Let’s eat!” the Selectman said. “I’m as hungry as a graven image.”
“I agree,” said Mrs. Tuller. “ ‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground.’ Is your acquaintance with Shakespeare sufficient to tell me what play that’s from, Miss Hester?”
“Seems to me I recognize the line,” Hester said abstractedly, while inwardly she addressed a vague wish, that had to do with herself and an older man who was troubled with daydreams, to the bezoar; she fervently pressed the round stone in her hand.
“Do you think you can eat, after what you’ve been through?” Eben asked her with a silly tenderness.
“Lead me to the trough!” Hester exclaimed.
“Richard the Second,” Mrs. Tuller said, settling heavily to earth.
“Oh, of course,” Hester said, as if annoyed with herself for forgetting, though in truth the only warrant for annoyance was that she had pretended to let slip from her mind something that had never been in it.
They sat in a circle and ate thick sandwiches that had been brought to the other side of the canal by Rulof Pitkin in his truck, had been ferried across in a skiff, and had been carried up the line and distributed, along with pitchers of milk and lemonade, and paper cups, by gentle busybody ladies of the village of Tunxis. While the hunters ate in clumps, a thin picket line of watchers stood out toward the woodchucks to give the alarm if any of the animals tried to go back toward their burrows. Anak Welch was the outguardsman nearest where Hester and the others sat.
“Did you see those damn fools showing themselves on the skyline up there on Thighbone Ledge?” Roswell Coit asked the chewing circle. “Don’t our people know the first thing about cover?”
“I doubt if groundhogs can see that far, Ros,” the Selectman said.
“Oh, they can see all right,” Pl
iny Forward said. “A woodchuck can see a single clover leaf from a hundred yards away.”
“Maybe I could train one to help me hunt for four-leaf clovers,” the dancing master said. “He ought to be able to see a four-leaf clover from four hundred yards away, right?”
“Those kernel-heads wouldn’t get up there on the skyline like that if the woodchucks had a few rifles,” Coit sullenly said.
“We were talking before you came,” Pliny Forward said abruptly to Eben, as if something about Eben had reminded him of the topic, “about the marmots’ love life.”
With Hester so close by, this affirmation seemed to make Eben fidget, as though he had just discovered he was sitting on an anthill. “Hadn’t somebody better relieve Uncle Anak?” he said. “He’ll want some lunch, his stomach’s as big as a cheese vat. I better go take his place.”
“Monogamous,” Forward said, fixedly eyeing Eben, holding him pinned on his haunches with the intensity of the gaze he shot out through his green-rimmed glasses. “Oh, yes. They start going steady with a member of the opposite sex at the age of one year. And they’re very faithful beings: the incidence of separation and divorce is very low among woodchucks, very low.”