by John Hersey
“Shame on you, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said, in a rebuke that had no real scolding in it. “The extravagance of you!”
“You should have heard Seth Parmely down at the store,” the Selectman said, “when I asked him to sell me this. ‘Champagny!’ he shouts at me. ‘What the hell fur?’ I told him Eben was coming home. ‘So,’ says Seth, ‘the boy’s been to the city to see the elephant, now he’s comin’ home and you’re scared of him,’ that’s what he said. He said he hated to take my money for such nonsense.”
“I’m honored,” Eben said, with an edge of effort to his voice. The cork shot out, hit the ceiling, dropped to the floor, and rolled to a stop under Hester’s chair. When the Selectman had poured helpings to all in jelly glasses and had taken his place again, Eben raised his portion and apparently trying to be gallant said, “To the beautiful ones!” He bowed toward Aunty Dorcas, and the old woman giggled and shook her head, and everybody sipped laughing, and Mrs. Avered, choking on the wry, strange, expanding liquid, coughed above her glass and shed a tear.
Suddenly during the main course the Selectman began to talk like a man hard pressed by pocketwatch and calendar. He fell into a queer, luxuriant, reminiscent mood, and Hester thought he must be fighting through his decision on the woodchuck drive in some oblique way. “I’m contented,” he said. “I want to live forever like you, Aunty Dorcas.” He said that he wanted no end to his senses, for everything he saw or touched seemed magical to him, and he told of having gone to several doctors when he had felt fine, a few months before, to make sure that he was healthy; he had gone all the way to the city to see one of them. He began to talk of his happy boyhood. “Did you ever whip apples?” he asked Hester at one point. “My heavens, that was fun. What we’d do, we’d take some of the sucker shoots from an apple tree, we’d get some tough, supple green saplings by cutting off suckers, and we’d cut them to about this long”—he held his hands about three feet apart—“and whittle a sharp point, like a pencil’s, on one end. This was in August or early September, when the apples were fairly big but still green and hard. We’d stick the sharp point into the apple, so the apple was skewered onto the stick, then we’d rear it back and (this worked like the catapults the old Romans used) we’d whip it forward. It would fly off and follow the most marvelous trajectory. Up! Up! Up! Like a baseball when it’s been properly connected with, Aunty Dorcas, you’ve seen that happen on your television. It used to be an extension to the strength of our arms.” Later he said, again to Hester, “Do you remember that powder you could throw on a fireplace fire, some kind of salts that would give you flames of different colors—blue, green, red, yellow flames? Did you ever have any of that? We used to do it winter nights in the kitchen stove. Brilliant green flames!” His outwardly mellow frame of mind seemed thin and unreal to Hester. “Do you know my favorite form of art of all times?” he asked his tablemates. “The frescoes we used to put on the walls down at the Manross School when we were boys. We used to draw funny-faces of old Jared Andrus and the other teachers with a tallow dip and then we’d bring them into relief and shade them by rubbing hard with different-colored wool skullcaps. The fuzz of the knitting came off on the wax. Do you know who was our best artist, Aunty Dorcas? It was Corydon Jones.”
“Gracious me,” Dorcas Thrall said. “He was a pokerish-lookin’ thing.”
“He was a cripple,” the Selectman told Hester. “Gnarled up like an old crabapple tree.”
Aunty Dorcas said, “I forgave Frank Churnstick a lot of things he’d done in his clear days, after he lost his mind, but one thing I never forgave him was readin’ that hobbled-up Jones boy out of the church.”
“Ha! I’d forgotten that,” the Selectman cried, seeming almost to pounce on Eben. “You and your code! Parson Churnstick…. Wait a minute, wait till I get The Book.” The Selectman pushed back his chair with a clatter and left the room.
“Matthew! Matthew!” Mrs. Avered sadly said. “What a one for looking things up! Forgets to eat his meals half the enduring time.”
The Selectman came back with a Bible in his hand, riffling the pages as he walked. “Let’s see, let’s see,” he said when he had sat down. “Oh, that was shameful: it was long before his trolley hopped the wire, too.”
“Pshaw!” Dorcas Thrall said. “Even in those middle days he was too pious to eat black pepper.”
“Here it is. Listen to this, son, you with your capsules. Parson Churnstick got up in the pulpit one Sunday and out of the blue he pointed a finger as long and thin as a string bean at Corydon Jones—church-meetings were that poor boy’s only entertainment—and he said the cripple couldn’t come to meeting any more, and then he read out of the Bible, he read this: ‘Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is broken-footed, or brokenhanded, or crookbacked, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken.’ Well, Corydon Jones had most of those things wrong with him, except he wasn’t blind and I couldn’t say as to his stones, poor rascal. Parson Churnstick snatched that passage right out of context and threw him out then and there; I guess the parson just couldn’t stand looking at a monster in his pews week after week—maybe he felt as if he was looking at himself in a mirror. Things aren’t as simple as you think, my Eben.”
Eben flushed.
Dorcas Thrall said, “Frank Churnstick was whole-souled as you and me when he was a young man, you’d have thought his head was made of hardbeam or ironwood. The borers sure got into it toward the end, though.”
“Your end of Division Four’ll be going by the abandoned church tomorrow,” the Selectman said to Hester; then he pulled himself up short: “—if we go ahead, that is. I’d like to show you the old church.”
“Some woodchuck drive!” Eben exclaimed with more or less repressed vehemence.
“All I can say,” the Selectman replied coolly, “is, I hope we keep the ones we have, if we go ahead.”
“Here’s to your creatures, Matthew,” Dorcas Thrall said, raising her glass. “Never had any use for ’em.”
* * *
—
“What’s your prescription for a good old age, Aunty Dorcas?” the Selectman asked as they sat over dessert. He looked ashen and had begun to perspire. “You’re going to live an eternity. What’s the secret?”
“The first hundred years are the hardest,” Dorcas Thrall said merrily; evidently that was her standard response to good wishes for her permanence. As she answered, she dropped a gobbet of apple-slump off her spoon into her lap. “Dear me,” she said, shaking her head and scooping it up, “what an old slopdozzle I’m gettin’ to be.” Then she said respectfully to the sweating Selectman, “I calculate the main reason an old pelter like me has run on so long is that I’m not scared of dyin’, not a bit. Bein’ afraid of dyin’ is the most killin’ pastime there is. I remember when my brother Walter died—land of Goshen! that was forty years ago…forty years ago…a good lifetime right there, but I remember it as if it had happened yesterday—I sat beside him nine days, and in the end he just got soggy and wasn’t there any more. I can’t be bothered to shake and shiver about going to sleep like Walter; I’ve done it every night now for plenty of years, and glad to do it. I was just addin’ it up the other day. Countin’ naps and snoozes, I’ve gone to sleep close onto thirty-five thousand separate and distinct times. Why should I be afraid of one last doze?”
Death is nothing to her, Hester thought, but a hummingbird at the lip of a trumpet of honeysuckle would throw her into a panic. She thought of the city-panics Miss Morris was always having. “Some people,” she said, “think they can keep young just by taking care of themselves. I have in mind La Morris,” she said to Eben. “She’s my boss,” she said to the others.
“She’s a bad egg,” Eben gloomily said.
“People don’t set out in life trying to be bad eggs, Eben,” Mrs. Avered said in kindly reproach.
“She’s on the Yoga and yoghurt circuit,” Hester said.
“Carry me out with the tongs!” Aunty Dorcas said. “What’s that?”
“Miss Morris goes to a class and takes these exercises that were invented by Yogi philosophers to help settle their minds. You should hear her tell about the class! Flabby women with little purses and lapels of skin and fat behind their arms and between their thighs—as if she weren’t one of them. They stand on their heads and sit cross-legged and roll their stomachs and dream of being firm young virgins. Oof! Then on the yoghurt end of it: Miss Morris eats like a growing dog most of the time, till all at once she’ll have a fit of dieting and eat nothing but yoghurt, not a blessed thing but yoghurt.”
Suddenly Hester had a perverse impulse to shock the circle of Puritans at the table; it seemed suddenly important to her to shock them, for perhaps she would one day belong to them, and she must try them now, try them, shake them, see if she could stir their settled underpinnings. Especially, for some reason, she was aware that she wanted to shock the Selectman.
“Miss Morris thinks if she keeps hunting long enough, she’ll find the Fountain of Youth,” Hester said. And she told of a day she had gone with Miss Morris to see a hormone doctor. She described the doctor’s splendid office, hung with modern paintings, and the doctor himself, behind a huge carved desk bountiful with dictating contraptions and secretarial buzzery. Hester had gone with Miss Morris because that morning Miss Morris had pleaded nervousness and had asked for company on a round of errands, as she often did. Hester told how the doctor had explained to Miss Morris the effect on a body and mind of hormone deficiencies. “Then he started talking about his injections,” Hester said. “ ‘We have to watch things pretty closely,’ he told her. ‘One danger,’ he said, ‘is that even many years after the menopause, there may be a marked reassertion of the libido.’ Miss Morris didn’t know what that was, so he explained it to her and then he said, ‘This can be a sweet thing,’ he said, ‘or it can lead to tragedy. Now, I don’t want you to think I can make you over into a young woman. Human tissues,’ he said, ‘are resilient and capable of being kept healthy, but rejuvenation of most parts of the body is not to be dreamed about.’ Then—listen to this!—he said, ‘There is, though, one interesting exception. Certain of the hormones bring about a miraculous restoration of the vagina. I had a patient of sixty-five who, after a few months of treatment, had the vagina of a twenty-year-old girl.’ ”
“One of the hens looks to have some mites,” Mrs. Avered promptly said to her husband. “Do you think we ought to dust the chickens?”
“Women are the limit,” the Selectman said pleasantly enough to blushing Hester, who was not sure for a moment whether he was referring to Miss Morris or to what his wife had said. Then he went on: “I try to be a good husband, but I swan, I can’t tell how the wind is liable to blow from one minute to the next—whether it’s chickens or what. Remember that time, dear, last winter?” he said to Mrs. Avered. “It had snowed about twenty inches,” he told the others, “and it was cold enough to freeze two dry rags together, so Mrs. Avered said to me, ‘Matthew,’ she says, ‘don’t you think you ought to shovel the snow off the front path?’ So, I always try to be obliging, I say, ‘Yes, dear, I do.’ ‘Well,’ she says, ‘in that case I suggest you bring up some cordwood from the cellar.’ ”
“Ayeh,” Dorcas Thrall said sarcastically, “and our Selectman—our Selectman, he’s as consistent as Puritan virtue, be’n’t he?”
“I’m getting old, Aunty Dorcas,” the Selectman said with sudden sickly despair. “Last week I was supposed to make voters on a Saturday and I got my days mixed up, I showed up at the courtroom at eight o’clock Friday morning, according to scoodle as I surmised, but of course there just never was ary voter there to register, no matter how I’d wait, it was the wrong day. I’m too young to be old.”
“No harm done, Matthew,” Mrs. Avered said. “Everyone gets a lapse here and there.”
“I wasted the better part of a morning,” the Selectman protested. “You can’t call Friday back when Saturday comes. You know what the poet said about the Moving Finger….”
Hester felt a deep and delicious pity for Eben’s father; then she caught Eben looking mysterious swords at her.
“Shall we go in the sitting room?” Mrs. Avered said, picking up her dessert plate and reaching for Eben’s.
* * *
—
When Mrs. Avered joined the others after having washed the dishes (she had dispatched them with remarkable speed, having refused and ridiculed Dorcas Thrall’s suggestion that Eben and Hester wash them), the Selectman fetched a bottle of cider brandy and the jelly glasses he had used for the champagne.
“How about a little winkum, Aunty Dorcas?” he said.
“Just a smile of it at the bottom of the glass, please,” the old lady said. As the Selectman poured helpings around, Aunty Dorcas said to Eben, “Must’ve been a tidy elephant you saw in the city, boy. Your father’s outdoin’ himself for you.”
“It’s not all for me,” Eben heavily said, and Hester thought that was true.
“Shall we play a game?” the Selectman said. “Would your scruples permit you to gamble for some straight pins, Aunty Dorcas?”
“You know me, Matthew, my conscience lets me gamble—I’ll gamble—with anything but my worldly cash,” Dorcas Thrall said. “Why sure, let’s jostle some pins awhile.”
The game was a simple-minded one. At her husband’s request, Mrs. Avered got the Selectman’s felt hat and a card of pins. Eben’s father dealt out pins, ten to a player. Two at a time, pair after pair, the players would place a couple of pins parallel to each other on the brim of the hat. One adversary would tap the side of the crown with his hand, making the pins jump, and the opponent would follow, until one pin fell across the other; the one who crossed the pins won them both. The Selectman had placed himself beside Hester. At first the players all concentrated on the contests, and the tappings were followed by words of advice, groans of despair, cheers, and laughter. But eventually eyes wandered from the circulating hat, and the company began to talk.
“Aunty Dorcas,” the Selectman said, “do you think I’m George Challenge’s poodle? That’s what this young saucer of a girl called me this morning.”
Dorcas Thrall, with the hat in her hand playing against Eben, looked rather sharply at Hester. “Poodle?” she then said, twitting the Selectman. “No! Challenge’s mule, maybe.”
“Is that crook Challenge still running this town?” Eben asked, tapping the hat carefully.
“The Selectman runs the town, son,” Mrs. Avered said, firmly for her.
“Bah!” Eben said.
“He’s not exactly a crook, son,” the Selectman quietly said.
“Well,” Aunty Dorcas said, “he’s not the most sensitive man I ever saw. His nerves—his nerves are very deep, I must say.”
Hester remembered that in the woods that morning the Selectman had said that George Challenge was as crooked as a ram’s horn. But: “He’s not a crook,” the Selectman now said. “He’s just a combination of lazy and shrewd; he can sojer and he can peddle. Hester, this fellow’s so lazy he once broke one of those nail-keg staves he has for legs just walking across his office. That was when he was Tax Collector. He got up and started across the room with nothing in his way and stumbled and broke his leg, and everyone said it was just from the effort of moving his carcass. And what a weeper he is! That’s part of his trade, too. You tell him some sorry yarn about your troubles, and lo, his head is waters and his eyes a fountain of tears. His main source of wherewithal has been setting up petty estates, and I declare, it’s wonderful the way he grows fat as a consequence of bungling the legal process and j
uggling the Republican town committee.”
“He’s a crook,” Eben said. “In my kind of language, he’s a crook, and he runs this town.”
“It’s hard to catch a weasel asleep, I’ll grant you that, son,” the Selectman said in an even voice. “I was going through the town records some months ago, trying to make head or tail of our Tunxis finances, and I came across an item where George Challenge, when he was Collector, had a two-dollar per diem allowance for the trouble of dunning folks for their dues, and at the end of the year—that must have been six or eight years ago—at the end of the year he filed for three hundred and sixty-nine days of expense money. I said to Mr. Challenge when I ran across the item, I told him, ‘There are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year; how come?’ ‘Oh, you mean working days,’ he said, smooth as margarine; he said he’d worked a few extra days—some holidays and Sundays! I swan, I really believed he’d never studied a calendar.”
“There!” Aunty Dorcas shrilled. “I crossed ’em!”
“This town’ll never amount to a hill of beans,” Eben said, passing the hat to his mother, “so long as you let yourselves be run by a second-rate hack like him.”
“The people here,” the Selectman said, showing annoyance for the first time, “have more sense of responsibility about their town than the residents of some much bigger places that I can think of. Much bigger. And always have.”
“Phooey,” Eben tormentedly said.
“The trouble with you,” the Selectman said, quite angry now, “is that you don’t know enough to knock two pins together on a hat. These people in Tunxis are willing to work for each other. Why, look here.” The Selectman stood up and crossed to a bookshelf and pulled open the mesh door and took out one of a number of ledgers with cracked and curling spines. “We were talking about Corydon Jones at supper. Well, here’s a case, let me find it…. Here’s just one example of how this town learned way back to take care of its own…. Here: ‘Voted,’ here’s what it says in the minutes of a town meeting, I was going over this the other night, ‘Voted, that the Selectman’s office be directed to take charge of Parliament Taylor, and conduct with him as they shall think most for his comfort, and will be least expensive to the town, whilst he remains in his present delirium, either to set him up at vendue to the person who will keep him the cheapest, or dispose of him in any other way which may appear to the Selectman more convenient, and for such time as he may think reasonable, and on the cost of Tunxis town.’ You hear that?”