by John Hersey
“What does that prove?” Eben said. “What in hell does that prove? After all, that was a long time ago, that was in another world, and anyhow, what did they propose to do with the town idiot there? They put him up for sale! Oh, God! Everyone’s so mixed up! Nobody knows what we’re coming to—and you sit there reading me eighteenth-century town records.”
“Grow up,” the Selectman said, in a father’s commanding tones.
“Nobody knows what the score is,” Eben said, “least of all this hick town.”
“Grow up,” the father said. “Do you hear me, or do you want me to come over there and put some hearing into you?”
This made Hester feel rebellious; she was on the point of protesting that Eben was no longer a child and should not be treated as one, when:
“If I could offer a suggestion,” Aunty Dorcas said, “why don’t these young ones go across to my house and turn on the television set? The latch is up, and”—she added with nonagenarian innocence—“the settee’s comfy.”
“That suits me,” Eben said in an unenthusiastic voice, standing up. “Come on, Hes, let’s watch a ball game.”
“Aunty Dorcas is the only person I know,” Mrs. Avered said composedly, “who has a television set and still lights her way to bed with candlewood.”
“Don’t stay too long,” the Selectman said, melon-cool. “We may have another hard day tomorrow.”
* * *
—
The pitcher uncoiled, the white ball rode spinning down the bulb-lit alley toward home plate, and the batter leaned on the night air as he pulled the bat around. Then parts of the picture became molten, viscid, elastic; the batter in the act of swinging put forth a horribly distended arm which reached, bat in hand, brutally out over the grass of bunting-land toward the pitcher, who had suddenly shrunk and stood quaking rhythmically on the mound. The weird distortion on the screen seemed to Hester a gesture of retribution, a hitting back at torment on behalf of all those who stand forever having difficulties pitched at them. She laughed.
“What lousy reception!” Eben said disgustedly. “It’s hopeless.” And he got up from the stiff little couch and went to the machine and snapped it off.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” Hester asked in the dim place.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so grumpy.”
“You would be too, if you were me.”
“What’s wrong with being you?”
Eben still stood by the television set in the darkened room. His feet were at the edge of a trapezoid of light that fell onto the parlor floor from the hall lamp. The room where the old lady dwelt smelled faintly of balsam and mold.
“I knew it was going to happen,” Eben dejectedly said.
“ ‘It’?”
“I knew you’d fall for his line.”
“ ‘His’?”
“You know who I’m talking about. You’re in love with him.”
Hester stood up. “Really, Eben,” she said, “you’re beginning to sound like that crazy parson—what was his name?”
“You don’t deny it.”
Hester found herself thinking for a moment about Roswell Coit, about the powerful, vindictive, envious, childlike man who had embraced her under the lee of the stone wall by the brook. “I’ll grant you, your father’s a fascinating man,” she said with a deliberate light-heartedness.
“You’re in love with him!”
“I’m sorry for your father because there were so few woodchucks at the end of the drive today—that’s about where the truth lies.” Then Hester asked with sudden energy, “What is love? What’s it to be in love? I was trying to figure that out in the woods all day today. I’ll bet you can’t tell me the answer. I’ll bet you don’t even ask yourself the question.”
“It seems to me,” Eben said, driven by Hester’s attack into conciliation and pomposity, “that if we’re going to approach marriage with this kind of background—”
“Don’t bother your head about it,” Hester said. “Who’s not going to marry you is me. Don’t even talk to me about it. I wouldn’t think of marrying you. Let’s go back to the house.”
“You don’t give me a chance to say what I mean.”
“After you say what you mean, you try to cover it up with what you wish you’d meant.”
* * *
—
The Selectman seemed glad to have them back. “Well!” he exclaimed. “That was a short nine innings. What was the matter—dull game?”
“No,” Hester said, “no, it was fine. Three to one for the Red Sox in the fifth.”
“Was it wobbling?” Dorcas Thrall asked. “Some nights that screen’s unsteady as thunderation.”
“No, Aunty Dorcas,” Eben lied, cheerful as a bluebird, “it was O.K. Good signal.”
“My gracious,” Aunty Dorcas said, “don’t you children have anything to talk about? When I was your age sparking—sparking—used to take us a longful while. Lands alive! We could sit and droop our heads and just get ready to talk longer than you two’ve been gone all told. I guess there’s no such thing as shyness any more.”
“Of course there is,” Mrs. Avered said. “Eben always was a shy one.”
Now Eben looked as cheerless as a low-lying cloud.
“See here, Matthew,” Dorcas Thrall said, rising by stages to her feet, “can I take this girl in the kitchen and talk to her a piece? Could I talk to her? You asked me to come look her over tonight, and here I’ve done nothing but listen to you gab and gossip. Come along, dear, let’s chitter awhile, I want to look you over.”
Hester, blushing, said, “I’m game,” and followed the old woman.
When they were settled on kitchen chairs, Aunty Dorcas asked, “Now! How do you like Tunxis?”
“People seem so—so—so almost cruel here,” Hester said.
“Ayeh, maybe; maybe,” Aunty Dorcas said reflectively. “We’ve had a long learnin’ in mean rascally behavior round here. The Pequots were the first to give us lessons; they used to cut gashes in a person’s muscles and put live coals inside, and they’d make people eat parts of themselves.”
“Oooh,” Hester said.
“So you’re going to marry little Eben,” Aunty Dorcas said in an unchanged tone of voice, as if she were still talking of Indian tortures.
“I—I guess so,” Hester said.
“Well, child, if you’ve found the pearl you want and are inclined to sell all your worldly goods to buy it, advice is useless, advice is worse than useless. That doesn’t stop people from givin’ it, though, and my advice to you, young lady, is, go ahead and marry this boy and then leave him be; these Avereds have to be let alone, you can’t hobble ’em, they have to be themselves. You’ll be miserable as any housewife, but you might as well marry. Listen! I know these Avereds like the inside of my coat-sleeve that’s frayed. Why, I carried your Eben’s father pooseback all over Tunxis when he was an infant. I had a little sneakin’ hanker for his father, only I wasn’t pretty enough to suit him. He was a man for you! His stature was ridiculous, a small man, he was always the titman in his class in school, a regular runt. But a person! He didn’t care a continental what people thought of him, and bad luck never bothered him, and he had a plenty: Whenever it rained porridge, it seemed his dish was always upside down. He was a great one for learning; he called the outhouse—no plumbin’ in those days, dear—he called it Avered University. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘I guess I’ll go out to the college and study awhile.’ He could do more work on a stretch than any man I ever saw. He had a watermill when he was young, and once when a landslide the other side of Beggar’s Mountain cut off the railroad—they had a landslide over there that cut off the railroad—he ran his mill day and night for the neighborhood a whole week long, and he trained himself so’s he could turn a grist into the hopper, lay down on a bench with an old t
urnip watch he had hammerin’ alongside of his head, and he’d sleep till the split second when the last kernel dropped out and no more, then up and at it again. He carved his own gravestone, said you couldn’t depend on your survivors to say anything good about you on your headstone, so he’d have one handy of his own composition. I forget right now what he wrote on it. There was a mighty big donnick in a meadow on the Pinney farm that one of the Pinney children was killed sleigh-ridin’ into, and the Pinneys told Reuben Avered he could have the boulder if he’d kindly remove it from their eyesight, so he split it up and made a good profit out of posts, lintels, underpinnin’s, and whatnot—and ’twas out of that donnick that he took out a choice piece for his headstone and memorial, and now he lies under it, dear small creature! I’d give my bond and swear he got to Heaven, though he’d broken with the church when they decided to support the meetin’house by sellin’ the pews instead of rentin’ ’em. He said he didn’t want God on the basis of short-term financin’. He never once went back.”
“Tell me about Eben’s father,” Hester said.
“Oho!” Aunty Dorcas said, “he’s a puzzler. I remember once when he was a boy he come over boastin’ about his father’s house, said it was big, boastin’ how his father was plannin’ to put a mortgage onto it—like addin’ a piazza or a cupolo, I guess he thought.”
“What kind of trouble did he get into? Someone told me he was caught out in some trouble once.”
“Mercy, child,” Aunty Dorcas said, looking at Hester as if assessing her. “Mercy…. Oh, well,” she then said, “I guess you’re old enough to tell milk from cream; to judge by your stories, you can bandy the human anatomy around, right down to the last particular—I didn’t understand half the words I wanted to, when you were talkin’, and didn’t want to understand the ones I did. Anyway, Matthew’s little accident doesn’t take any tellin’ at all. It was just one of those things that happens to soft-hearted people. It was the night of a storm here one fall, oh, ’bout fifteen years back, there was a wind that’d blow all Hell out by the roots, and Matthew said he’d better run up to see how old Aunty Dorcas was makin’ out all alone in her house. Well, he visited me by a hell-fired roundabout route, ’cause the next thing anyone knew Roger Booge, who thought he was just makin’ the rounds of his animals with a flashlight, found his daughter Belle in her shimmy and one Matthew Avered pullin’ on his pants in under a sheep shed out of the wind and rain. No sheep in that shed, it was a cleaned-out one. Matthew, poor soft-hearted individual, he’s got a soft heart, he was just detourin’ to my house to look to my safety—but Roger made a fuss all over the county! That girl of his, Belle, she never was no good. My father was a lawyer, I remember he used to say when a girl would get caught that way, ‘In the court of law,’ he’d say”—Aunty Dorcas put into her voice a juristical pomp—“ ‘they call it flagrante delicto’ (I think that was it) ‘but between us,’ he’d say, ‘between us, I call it “in heat.” ’ ”
Hester felt a surge of outrage at Aunty Dorcas for telling this valuable story in such an offhand way. Then for a tangential moment she thought of Coit by the wall in the woods. I should have slapped him, she decided to herself; yes, I certainly should have slapped him. “I suppose that hurt him in Tunxis,” she said out loud, of the Selectman.
“Hurt him? Well, he’s the Selectman. But people just can’t seem to take him whole the way they used to. Most times we take into account everything a person has done and said when we weigh him for market, but it only takes one little caper like that to make people stop thinkin’ about the rest of a man, even though they may have gone in for some of the same themselves and not got found out at it.”
“Do people trust him?”
“Nobody trusts anybody any more. Nobody trusts anybody.”
The two talked a few minutes longer, and Hester thought the old woman liked her, because it was easy for her to listen to Dorcas Thrall.
When they went back into the parlor, Mrs. Avered was splitting an apple. “Have a taste of apple, Aunty Dorcas?” she said, giving the halves in her hand to her husband and son.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Aunty Dorcas said.
Mrs. Avered cut a second apple in thirds. She gave pieces to Dorcas Thrall and Hester, and kept one herself.
“You’re a thrifty being,” Aunty Dorcas, chewing apple, said to Mrs. Avered, “to cut up your helpin’s accordin’ to the size of the customers.” Delicately she unlocked a slender belch. “See what I mean?” she said to the Selectman. “It was a good supper,” she said to Mrs. Avered.
“Can I walk you home, Aunty Dorcas?” the Selectman said. “I know you’re just raring to stay up, but it’s time for us tired old folks to hit the hay, isn’t it, Miss Hester? We’re stiff in the hams, Aunty Dorcas, and we’ve got a hard day ahead of us.”
“We have?” Eben said. “My God! You don’t give up easily, do you?”
“Of course not, son,” Mrs. Avered proudly said. “You ought to know your father better than that by now.”
“ ’Tis a wise child who knows his own father in this day and age,” the Selectman said, with a trace of a not-very-happy smile on his face. He stood up. “Could you hold on just a minute while I make a telephone call, Aunty Dorcas? I won’t be a minute.”
Hester, glancing at Eben, who had dark circles under his eyes, was oppressed with a sense of lost opportunities. She had suddenly, at the end of this day, a feeling something like one she always had on leaving a holiday place: that she hadn’t done half the things she had meant to do, that she loved the view, that she would have to come back and relive what she had enjoyed and make amends for what she had been too lazy or unknowing or complacent this time to do; yet already understanding that she would never come back again, because there were other places and moods to visit if ever a new chance came. Toward Eben, who looked so tired munching apple in a chair, she had a heavy feeling of unkept promises and unrealized intentions; of choices that could never be revisited.
Before he left the room to go to the telephone, the Selectman stooped to pick up off the floor the magazine with the cogwheel and sandpaper on it, and Hester saw him wince, as if with an imaginary pain that came from heaviness of the heart, as he bent over.
FOUR
“WE SHALL RALLY,” Mrs. Tuller had said, “at the chestnut,” as if everyone in the wide world knew that tree.
The drivers had met again on the common in the dark before day, and Hester had stood again beside the whipping post, stiff, half awake, fearless, and dull. She hated doing things a second time; once in a parlor game in which the players had been asked to list on a sheet of paper their likes and dislikes, she had headed her roll of the latter with “Repetition.” Mrs. Tuller’s briefing, Coit’s cavils, the onloading into Pitkin’s truck—all were familiar and boring and a waste of the minutes of a young life. They had been ferried at last to the new day’s workplace on the far side of Job’s Creek.
The sun was upping now. Hester and Mrs. Tuller and Anak Welch walked in the van of the group along the bank of the creek through a saffron thicket, and Mrs. Tuller complained of the humidity of summertime Tunxis. “I finally decided,” she said, “that the only way to keep my ’cello from splittin’ open at the glue was to treat it like a brood of chicks and keep a light bulb goin’ alongside of it.”
“The summers are gettin’ wetter and wetter in the air and drier and drier in the ground,” Anak Welch said sadly, shaking his head, as if the plan of the universe had lately been changed and was now too much for him.
“I can’t understand our Selectman bringin’ us out here today,” Mrs. Tuller said, as if the ways of the Selectman were, like those of the weather, forever unpredictable, fickle, and fit for commonplace talk.
“What did he say when he called you?” Anak Welch asked.
“He said folks who start a thing ought to finish it.”
“That’s plain bullheadedness.”
/> What about the day, Hester wanted to ask the huge man, but didn’t dare, the day when you turned the hay in the rain?
“I tell you one thing, Anak,” Mrs. Tuller said. “I think a person ought to be civil to another person on the phone. Land’s sakes! The way he ordered me to get the chain of phone calls started, why, he made me feel like the dirt under a bed in a lazy woman’s house.”
“He was tired,” Hester tiredly said.
“Yes, child,” Mrs. Tuller said with a kindliness that made her implicit censure seem all the sharper, “we were all tired right to our marrow.”
They came soon enough to a clearing. “Well, here’s the old chestnut,” Mrs. Tuller said, “God bless it.” She sat down on an enormous stump.
“Do you mean that’s all there is to the chestnut?” Hester asked Anak Welch. “Just a crumbled-up stump on the ground?”
“Law love us, girl,” the big man softly said. “There’s not a chestnut tree alive anywhere around—the blight left our woods in an awful hue, you know. This old tree used to mark one end of the parish in the hollow, that’s why it’s the chestnut, as you call it; you don’t have to scorn the thing.”
“I didn’t mean to sound—to sound that way,” Hester uncomfortably said.