by John Hersey
Apparently Coit had the same idea, for he called mockingly to Hester, “Your Eben’s making quite a hullamaloo up there.”
Hester shushed Coit again.
Eventually, however, the uproar above receded and the one below advanced and swelled, and Hester became excited. In a few moments she would see a dreadful crowd of marmots. She felt afraid, and to her surprise she yawned.
She began to make out Tuller’s blithesome tootling and the cattle moans of Anak Welch, and before long both those men were on her side of the wall, a-crouching silent, and the rest of the line could be heard tightening, closing.
There one was! And others, too!
Hester saw then a whole curve of advance scouts of the woodchuck force. These scouts would run forward liquidly a few feet at a time, then rise on their haunches with their forepaws in prayerful poses and glare awhile, heads steady, each in a single direction, then they would fall and run again, and next time up each look another way.
Hester heard a hiss to her right. It was Herr Tuller, motioning to her and Coit to squeeze down toward the stream. All four above the wall crept along toward the brook, as stealthy as the furry quadrupeds on the other side of the barrier, until they were posted only twenty feet apart. Hester, peeking, saw that others of the line had begun to approach beyond the wall and to the right. Then behind the point of the marmots’ scouts she saw furry, rippling masses. She yawned enormously.
Out in front was a great bull of the species, ranging this way and that in his leadership. Hester saw him look at the stream and look at the wall and listen to the line of drivers, which had halted and was quieter now, to give the animals time to decide to use the bridge. The big one and his band were encircled, and he swayed, like a being behind bars, while back of him his scouts marked time and the ranks all paused. The leader darted straight at the wall, and Hester missed what happened next, because, as Coit and Tuller and huge Anak rose up and bellowed at the poor thing, she ducked and hid from it.
When she was on her knees again blushing, she saw the leader run along the stream away from the wall until he reached the bridge, whose planks he sniffed in a leisurely way. He walked slowly three or four feet out onto them, then turned and in a rush ran downstream on the bank, but Mrs. Tuller shrilled at him from beyond as if he were a naughty boy, and, alarmed, he ran up again toward the wall. This time Hester managed to stay up and chatter at him as her three flankers roared. The leader ran back a few feet. Then he and the scouts and many of the other animals all at once broke in a pack directly away from the stream, but the line of human beings on the right pressed together shouting in awful unison and holding firm; Hester saw George Challenge standing square and solid on his short bowed legs like a Queen Anne lowboy.
The woodchuck wave pulled back, and with a deliberateness and hauteur that seemed insulting to all human life, the leader walked to the bridge and crossed it in stately ease. One, Hester said to herself.
Three scouts followed scuttering over the planks. Two, three, four, Hester counted.
The line of drivers resumed now a murmuring all around, and other woodchucks dared to run across the open wooden bridge. Then a general rushing eagerness to cross set in, and Hester had her head full of figures, and she felt dreadfully sleepy. One woodchuck fell off the planks and drowned. Hester yawned and counted. Several times small groups, unfavorable to the bridge, tried to rush off this way or that, but each time the drivers discouraged their escapades; and the circle tightened continually, and at last all the animals save the one that had drowned were on the other side. The people then walked across the planks congratulating each other, and four men pulled the bridge over after them.
Hester was quite a center of interest. About sixty-five, she reported, give four or five either way. Yes, about sixty-five.
It puzzled her that after all her curiosity, fear, and fellow-feeling toward the woodchucks, after all her complex and disturbing sensations during the drive, her response to the thrill of the noose at the bridge had been drowsiness.
Not until the division had secured the last of its work, and Hester was walking down toward the canal with Coit in the crowd of well-pleased drivers, and it was too late to go back, did she exclaim, “Oh, damnation! I left my bezoar stone up there by the stone wall.” She was inappropriately sad and angry for some reason, and she began to try to beat out the reason from the underbrush of her mind, as if it were a dark wild beast that would go to ground, and all she could find was a sense of the failure of her idea of love, a vague feeling that in some way her idea, and even her love itself, had proved during this day not adequate to her needs. “Oh, well,” she said at last, having had no encouragement from Coit, “maybe I can find it in the morning.”
The members of Division Four, enjoying a pleasant deceleration of heartbeat after the tense last few minutes of the drive, convened at the juncture of Job’s Creek and the canal, where, while some chatted easily in the shade of an enormous sycamore tree, others were ferried across the canal in two large skiffs to the shoulders of the highway beyond. Nearly half the division was across the water before the first drivers of Division Three reached the sycamore, Eben among them.
“Didn’t they give you folks sandwiches?” Mrs. Tuller in bluff tones asked Manly Sessions, the captain of the group. “Never saw a crowd of rapscallions look so down in the mouth.”
The teacher’s friendly barb was not well received. She was informed, with tight lips all round her, that Division Three had not driven a single woodchuck across Job’s Creek; it hadn’t seen ary creature in the last hour of the drive.
This calamity of Division Three increased the good humor of Division Four, which began to pour onto its inept fellow unit a spicy dressing of sarcasm and fun—did so, that is, until drivers of Division Two appeared with glum brows and on their behalf their bitter-eyed captain, John Leaming the younger, reported that his unit had sent only seven woodchucks across its bridge; whereupon the jokes ceased, as cicadas fall quiet under the first of a drizzle.
And then, when the drivers of Division One came down, the Selectman out in front of them, with a face as gray as summer mildew, in a very great hurry to hear the tallies, and when it was learned Division One had rounded up only sixteen woodchucks, and when, taking into consideration the approximateness of Hester’s count (which, sorry as she was for it, she could not mend), the total for the entire day’s drive was set at about eighty-eight—after these dismaying turns, all signs of gaiety vanished. The number was very small.
Where now, Hester thought with a sinking sensation, were the Selectman’s four hundred black-backed fleeing animals? Where, for that matter, were the huge Anak’s quietly affirmed half that many?
Eben, who after the bad summaries of the day’s work had an intimidated look on his face, as if he had been caught very much in the wrong about something, guided Hester by the elbow to one of the trucks parked at the highway’s edge and pressed her to board it, which she did. The truck was soon full of people who were not leaders, unaggressive people who all seemed rather ashamed of themselves and anxious to depart the scene of ignominy as quickly as possible, and its driver, responding to their almost sneaky ways, pulled it away in haste from the knot of captains and self-appointed counselors and congenital pushers who stood shouting at each other between the canal and the highway, arguing about the fiasco, searching explanation but only finding fault.
THREE
HESTER STEPPED DOWN the narrow and worn wooden stairs, noticed in passing that Uncle Jonathan in the close hall had lost his face and that some of the clock’s curious wooden cogs were scattered in disorder on the floor beside it, and then, as she turned into the sitting room, saw the Selectman, his face lustrous after a scrub, dressed once more in his flannels and walnut-colored coat, sitting in a rocker with a magazine spread in his lap to catch the dust of his labor, rubbing one of the cogs with a scrap of sandpaper, and humming a tune she’d never heard.
“Come in, my dear,” he said, looking up.
Hester had lolled long in a lukewarm, rust-tinted tubful of water, and she felt refreshed. She had put on a silken dress with little formal flowers strewn across it, her favorite of this summer, and she traveled in a capsule of honest cheap soap smell. Eben, who had had to wait for the tub, was not down yet. She walked self-assured.
“You look kind of tuckered out,” the Selectman said in the teeth of her freshness.
“I feel it in my legs and my back,” Hester said, knowing better, by now, than to be disappointed by anything the Selectman might say, but being so, nonetheless. What a chary man!
The room was a frugal place, this family room, with nothing overstuffed, all backs straight and wood considered good enough to sit upon; and there was nothing sentimental, no appeal to the past, no spinning wheel or cobbler’s bench or other reminder of times when life was simple and crude work was everyone’s. The things in the room were made of wood, metal, and cloth to be used. The rug was hooked in a dull pattern. There were some books in a cabinet with a wire-mesh front. Over the mantel was a reproduction—incongruous here, Eben’s protesting touch of younger years, surely—of an impressionist painting, by Manet or Monet, perhaps, Hester thought; she never could keep those two straight.
There were sounds from the kitchen, and Hester said, “Do you suppose I can help Mrs. Avered?”
“She keeps a lonesome kitchen,” the Selectman said. “I think you’d better stay here and help me.”
“I’d like to show that I can be of some use in the household department,” Hester said. “I can boil water, honest I can.”
“Aunty Dorcas’ll be looking in soon,” Mr. Avered said. “I’m sorry we aren’t having some young people in for you to meet, Tunxis young ones, but Eben’s got himself citified and he’s floated away from the ones that used to be his friends, he hardly knows them now. Aunty Dorcas can tell you anything you want to know about Tunxis and the Avereds, for better or for worse—for worse, no doubt…. Say! I can’t get over that chicken-hawk epic. You don’t think Ros Coit was pulling your leg, do you?”
“I don’t think he could,” Hester said smiling.
“She’s got some spunk,” the Selectman said; then he, too, smiled at what Hester had said.
“You’ve found out the matter with the clock,” she said.
“These consarned black oak cogwheels in Uncle Jonathan get all warped up like potato chips when we begin to catch thunderstorm weather. Don’t know why they didn’t use common-sense cherrywood.”
“Do you have to work every minute day and night?” Hester asked, suddenly irritated, at what she did not know.
“Would you have a rum toddy?” the Selectman calmly asked, putting the cogwheel and sandpaper on the magazine and the magazine on the floor beside his chair. “It’ll limber up your back muscles.”
“That’s absolutely necessary.”
Eben came down while his father was out mixing the drinks. “How pretty you look!” he quickly exclaimed, and he went to her chair and kissed her on the cheek; and she thought of rough Coit.
“How’s he seem?” Eben asked, bobbing his head in the general direction of the back of the house to indicate his father.
“He seems about as usual,” Hester said.
“I doubt if he’ll ever be the same,” Eben said. “He doesn’t relish being wrong.”
“Who does?”
The Selectman came back with three warm rum drinks. “Ice in the icebox,” he said cheerfully to Eben, “if you want to cool off your gizzard.” But Eben took his drink warm and murmured that it was good.
“What did you people decide about the drive?” Eben meekly asked.
“They settled on leaving the final decision up to me whether we’d go ahead tomorrow or not,” the Selectman said. “They told me to digest my ideas on it along side of supper, and then let ’em know by phone.”
“I take it, then,” Eben said, “that they’re not very enthusiastic about going on the rest of the way.”
“Most of ’em are very enthusiastic about not going on the rest of the way.”
“Why don’t you give it up?” Hester asked in a voice whose heavy note of compassion startled her.
“Because,” the Selectman bristling said, “as I told those lazy so-and-sos, a thing that’s worth beginning is worth finishing. I mean to say that a thing that’s worth trying to do at all is worth trying to do well from beginning to end. Else why exist?”
“In other words,” Eben said, sounding more tender toward his father than Hester had ever heard him be, “you’ve already made up your mind.”
“Well, no,” the Selectman said much more mildly, looking here and there around the room, as if for a speck of guidance, “I haven’t decided, really. I’ll just have to think it over…. What puzzles me to beat the band,” he added with great weariness, “is how so many trickled away….” He began then to stare in his way of dreaming. “I wonder, I wonder,” he muttered at one point.
Hester thought of Uncle Anak turning the hay in the rain—he’d said he’d turn the whole field that very day, and “vummed if he didn’t do it”; and now the Selectman had to decide whether to finish what he’d said he would. Yet this choice of the Selectman’s was, in some way, different. There might be purpose in destroying eighty-odd woodchucks, even if they were but a fraction of the colony, but Hester saw that for the Selectman the issue transcended such practicalities; the issue for Eben’s father had by now drawn into it many terrible considerations: of personal confidence, of trust, of sacrifice, of the gift of power, of common responsibility, of interdependent life, of friendship, love, and self-esteem in Tunxis. The choice was far more complex, Hester saw, than it had seemed on the surface just now when she had made her silly, pity-ridden suggestion that he simply quit this drive he had been thinking about for a decade, and she felt, suddenly, a glow of embarrassment for herself and of admiration for him, who was so very troubled but so very deliberate.
At two sharp raps from the front door knocker, Eben and his father both hurried to the hall. Hester, hanging back, heard greetings, heard a small but firm treble against the two deep hellos, and then:
“How’re you feeling?” Hester heard the Selectman ask.
“Poorly,” the voice of Dorcas Thrall said. “My food don’t set well, Matthew, I kind of gullop up a lot of air about two hours after I eat. Otherways, I’m fit as Mrs. Tuller’s bull fiddle.”
“Your appetite’s too good,” the Selectman said. “You shouldn’t gorm into your food the way you do, that’s the why and the wherefore of that air you get, Aunty Dorcas.”
“Flatterer!” Dorcas Thrall said after a little protesting cackle. “You’re the worst one for handing out the taffy I ever saw.”
“Come in, Aunty Dorcas, come in,” Hester heard the Selectman say. “Come in and meet Eben’s girl. Eben’s and my girl.” Hester heard that, and she saw Eben coming in from the hall turn and give his father a quick patricidal look, which the Selectman, with a hand on his son’s shoulder half shoving Eben into the sitting room, did not trouble himself to see.
Dorcas Thrall was slender and short, and Hester, stepping forward with hand outstretched, was struck at once by the thought that the old lady’s face was like a bird’s—though perhaps, she realized, the idea might have been induced by what she knew of Dorcas Thrall’s terror; at any rate, the nose was narrow, sharp, and pointed, the eyes large-pupiled and dark, and the chin nothing to speak of, so that she looked like a nice little birdy. She did not wear all of her age; for although her face seemed somewhat dry and around her eyes there were a few of the small skin-folds of an ancient human being, her lips were scarcely creased and pulled at all, and her cheeks looked soft, and she had no hanging dewlaps.
Mrs. Avered came softly from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, and she kissed the old woman on a cheek, and Mrs. Thrall p
atted her shoulder and then said to Hester, “You never in your born days saw a girl as pretty as this one”—patting Mrs. Avered—“as pretty as this one when she was ten years old. She looked as tasty as a sherbet. A big sateen ribbon right here,” and Aunty Dorcas reached up and touched the right side of Mrs. Avered’s hair; “always that ribbon!”
“Pshaw, Aunty Dorcas,” Mrs. Avered said.
Hester swallowed despair as she contemplated the decay, the rotting of the heartwood, the falling away into dullness, that Eben’s mother had all too obviously suffered since the hair-ribbon time of life, for in her born days Hester had seen a million women prettier than this one who now stood before her with a splash of spilled gravy on her apron—a million women simply more alive; and Hester was afraid of that decay, wondering uneasily whether the Avered men had had anything to do with it.
When all were seated, Dorcas Thrall said, “Did you hear about my triumph—my triumph—over the forces of Darkness?”
“We heard you mashed a Cooper’s hawk, if that’s what you mean,” the Selectman said.
“I brought something to show you,” the old woman smugly said, reaching into her handbag and drawing out the pair of shanks and fierce talons of the chicken hawk she had assassinated. “He acted as if he felt ashamed of what he’d been doing to that poor kitten, while I was wringing his neck,” Aunty Dorcas said.
She offered the cruel claws for view, holding them up in her delicate-looking hands that were streaked with the tiny blue veins of old age.
* * *
—
Eben’s father, having served the roast all round, got up from the table, went into the kitchen, could be heard descending the cellar stairs, mounted them again, and came back with a galvanized iron pail in his hand, and in the pail, nested in cracked ice, Hester saw the neck of a bottle.
“Bubbles for beautiful ladies!” the Selectman cried, looking at his wife and, Hester egotistically thought, not meaning her. Still standing, he took the bottle from the pail and began to worry the cork with his thumbs.