by John Hersey
There was a sudden crackling noise in the hemlocks at the lower edge of the open place. A breath was audibly drawn into a throat. Hester’s free eye saw something that looked like Mrs. Tuller’s black-and-white checked skirt flash between branches, and perhaps something else, too, and then there was a hurrying off.
“We almost had a caller,” Hester said. “Or maybe two.”
“Hold still!” the Selectman impatiently commanded.
“Sorry,” she said.
“There!” he triumphantly said, and drew back. He held up the twist of handkerchief, with a dark trifle on it, for her inspection. “There’s your little friend. Nothing but a little black atom—but I suppose it felt like Plymouth Rock in your eye there.”
Hester was bleak. The intruders had spoilt things—though she could not be sure that things would have been different had there been no intrusion; perhaps that was really why she felt let down.
“Who were they?” the Selectman stiffly asked.
“I didn’t see for sure,” Hester said, “but I think it was Mrs. Tuller, and I don’t know who else.”
“That’s just fine and dandy,” the Selectman sarcastically said. Then he said, “I guess we didn’t hear anything sooner because of the way I was gabbing along about that smidgen in your eye.”
“It feels a lot better,” Hester sadly said. “Thanks a million.”
* * *
—
The drivers moved through the fragrant, glistening, dripping woods toward the beginning of the funnel at the Lantern Flue. The woods, sloping rather steeply from an outcropping of Thighbone Ledge down to the canal, were light and open here, for the land had been cultivated in recent years; a sparse growth of sapling locusts and wild cherries, with a few older cedars, partly shaded the ground, which was bedded with water-bright grass and low thickets of sparkling milkweed. Compressed, as it moved, by the narrowing of the hollow, the line was gradually shortened so that, at last, the drivers were but twenty feet or so apart. A few woodchucks were sighted moving into the mouth of the funnel. A halt was called.
Hester stood dissecting a still-green milkweed pod with her fingernails, and was quite empty of thought, when a delegation came to wait on her: Mrs. Tuller, Anak Welch, George Challenge, Friedrich Tuller, and a woman and a man whom Hester did not know. Mrs. Tuller, whose face was sullen, peremptorily called Roswell Coit from his nearby post. All dripping, mussed, and be-slimed from the rain, these hot-eyed Tunxis people looked to Hester as if they had just crawled up out of some primordial ooze; she didn’t like their looks.
“Now,” the schoolteacher commanded Hester, when Coit had arrived, “tell us exactly what he tried to do to you.”
Hester looked at Coit, whom she supposed to be her fellow-accused, and she blushed, remembering how unbuttoned, how inwardly undone she had let herself become with him, and fleetingly she wondered what prurient, sneaky voyeur had been watching their embrace in the little clearing. She saw Coit grinning at her with his customary swaggerer’s face; apparently, she thought, he expects me to brazen it out. Her eyes traversed the other faces in the circle; they seemed suddenly like so many boulders in an old New England stone wall. She thought of the row of faces on the stage at the caucus two nights before—hard yet yearning. For what did these hard faces yearn? For what? What were they so intent upon now? Why were they so exercised?
“Oh,” she said offhandedly, her eyes turned away from Coit’s, “I guess he was just trying to prove he’s a man.”
“There!” Mrs. Tuller exploded to the others. “Is that enough for you?”
The great Anak shook his head. “I can’t understand it,” he said.
“We saw them plain as day—they thought they were tucked away in the hemlocks!—didn’t we see them plain as day, Roswell?” Mrs. Tuller said.
Half way between realization and incredulity, Hester looked quickly again at Roswell Coit’s face; the complacent grin still resided there—had, if it had changed at all, nourished itself on the recent speeches and grown some.
“What galls me,” George Challenge said in his pleading whine, “is the way he ordered us to round up those four creatures that had got away—I was the one who ran up there to him and you’d’ve thought he was talkin’ to a common garbage collector the way he sent me down—and what did he do while we were breakin’ our legs tryin’ to catch ’em? That’s what galls me!”
But—out of disbelief Hester still kept silent—the Selectman hadn’t done anything; that had been precisely her disappointment.
“It’s really too much,” Mrs. Tuller said with a kind of conclusiveness that sent a chill to Hester’s bowels. “We might’ve re-caught those animals if he could’ve been bothered to come down and help us. Law! With his own son’s girl!…” Mrs. Tuller broke off and stared contemptuously at Hester.
Other drivers, evidently having seen the knot of people, and complacent about the woodchucks in this constricted place, had begun to drift up or down to the circle; Eben was among them, Hester saw. Hester blushed with rage and frustration and bafflement, all of which expelled from her, at last, a violent, stammering utterance. “Wait a minute!” she burst out. “Do you mean—do you mean the Selectman—and me?”
“Too late for innocence,” the schoolteacher said in a kind of jeer. “You’ve already confessed.”
“Confessed to what? I haven’t confessed a thing!”
“What’s this all about?” asked Manly Sessions, the captain of Division Three, who had lately sauntered down.
Mrs. Tuller’s face seemed to turn a deeper shade of mad purple as she said, “We caught the Selectman tryin’ to rape this girl.”
“Oh-oh,” Manly Sessions said. “Not him again.”
“What?” Hester shouted, straining to control her tongue. She was afraid she would burst into tears. For a moment she saw Eben’s face, pale as the flesh of an apple; drained of blood but full of belief. “What? What do you mean, rape?”
“Well,” Mrs. Tuller said, as if yielding a mile of hard-won ground, “I guess it ain’t accurate to speak of rape when both parties are willin’.”
“You people are crazy,” Hester said with conviction and vehemence—though the number of stones now in the wall roundabout made her heart sink. “He was trying to get something out of my eye.”
The stones all split open and laughter came out; the circle laughed loud.
“Back this mornin’,” Coit now offered, “they ducked into the old church. I guess they were in there half an hour, seemed like that much.”
“That’s true,” Anak Welch said, “the Selectman even told me he was goin’ to show the girl the church, asked me to cover her section of the line for her till they caught up again.”
“He did?” the strange woman who had come up with the original posse broke out. She had heavy bangs that, hanging like a valance across her forehead, made her eyes seem tiny, inadequate windows. “Why, we could’ve lost some more of the woodchucks right then and there, thinnin’ out the line that way.”
“Guess he was tryin’ her then,” Coit said with that smirk of his.
Hester turned slowly to Coit. “You know I had something in my eye.”
“How would I know that? Now just how would I know that?” The smirk held firm.
Hester had begun to tremble, because she did not know how to deal with the situation in which she found herself. Something seemed to have been wrenched loose in her world. She was used to living in a quiet world in which truth was abused slightly now and again for the sake of tact and social ease; this was all on too grand a scale. “Do you like blackberries?” she asked Coit.
“Not too much,” Coit said. “They’re liable to turn sour.”
“Wait a minute,” Anak Welch slowly said. “What tune are we playin’ now?”
Coit shrugged. “She asked me did I like blackberries,” he said.
“That’s
right!” Hester said, stepping over to Anak Welch and grasping the sleeve of his shirt. “Ask him what that’s about till you get an answer.”
“Well, what is it about?” the huge man gently asked.
He was looking down at Hester; he was asking her. She thought suddenly of what she had wished on the bezoar; she thought of her acquiescence to Coit; she thought of Eben; she realized that it was not her fault that this crazy allegation was not a fact. “Ask him,” she feebly said, knowing that this little hope of hers was spent.
Mrs. Tuller, impatient with all these speeches that she evidently considered irrevelant, broke in, demanding, “Well, what’re we goin’ to do about this?”
“The whole town knows about it now,” George Challenge said with less whine than usual, and he surveyed all the faces in the circle with evident satisfaction.
“I think people should know about it,” Mrs. Tuller, who was obviously one to make such a thing possible, declared. “I think it’s time to make a public example…”
“Holy catfish!” Roswell Coit suddenly shouted, pointing off into the underbrush. “Look down there!”
* * *
—
Down there a whole crescent of woodchuck scouts was, for the moment, erect, a-begging, and all seemed to be staring toward the cluster of Tunxis people, with a comical pious look, as if appealing to them in a dignified way for tax-deductible gifts. Then the animals serially ducked down and could not be seen in the tall grass and undergrowth, but what could be realized and what could be seen were these: that the curve of upright scouts had been oriented toward a gap in the drivers’ line which stretched from the clump of people to a point more than a hundred feet down toward the canal, and that, behind the scouts’ screen, there was a widespread progressive disturbance in the grass tops, quickly moving toward the gap.
The circle around Hester became at once a cavorting, many-throated body, desperate for want of discipline. Everyone started running somewhere and crying something, Many people appointed themselves commanders, and called out orders at cross-purposes—this one, to cut the creatures off; that one, not to rush them; another, to shout but not chase; another, to skirt but be silent—so that all did various errands and were angry and practically useless.
The woodchucks meanwhile were of one mind. They moved in full rout toward the opening.
Hester and two or three others followed the instinctive Coit, who had darted off in the one direction that seemed to make sense—directly back along the hollow; for evidently he thought a wide loop could be thrown around the animal band, which was, one could see, certain to break through the old line. Much as he would shout for other followers, though, his leadership was spurned by drivers with notions of their own. It was for Mrs. Tuller to pursue circumstances from bad to worse and finally make them splendidly worst. In an unthinking fury, as if releasing a pent-up anger at generations of irrepressibly contrary schoolchildren, she rushed, uttering warbling screams, right at the core of the woodchuck pack, and this hysterical headlong charge of hers had the effect, at first, of making the whole herd swerve toward the canal and away from the main concentration of drivers who might have encircled the animals; and then, despite moaning cries of warning from Anak Welch, she bore on with a hurtling, unstoppable rage and soon was right in the midst of the rippling island of fur. That was the disaster. The manageable pack disintegrated. Individual woodchucks ran off in all directions save toward the funnel.
Now the hunted and the hunters were pitted, as it were, one for one. There was no more herd. There was also no more line. Single persons ran looping and winding awhile after single animals, then switched to other individual quarries, for the creatures outnumbered their pursuers. Breathless, Hester ran heavily here and there to no purpose at all. The woodchucks slipped away as easily as sand through twitching fingers; their escape was a perfect demonstration of the occasional value to a group of disunity.
Very soon the creatures were all gone, and the uselessness of an un-co-ordinated chase was clear to every driver.
Gradually the still-wet villagers came together in the young dripping woods; their frustrated anger was immeasurable, and it was directed, with a sweet unanimity such as Tunxis had obviously seldom enjoyed in all its history, at the species Arctomys monax. These people were one in hating woodchucks. Their cheeks were red, their eyes like the ends of sharp sticks just withdrawn from fire. “Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!” cried Coit, and even Mrs. Tuller nodded slightly at the sound of his cursing.
Then Hester, who in this feeling was truly conjoined to Tunxis for the first time, saw and heard a strange thing happen, which all too soon separated her again from Tunxis. The wrath of the drivers turned away from the animals, which were now, as receptacles of temper, far out of range, toward the Selectman, who was more available.
Hester heard George Challenge utter the first suggestion of the switch. “This whole thing’s as rotten as a dozy post,” he said. “Just a lot of damned boondogglin’ nonsense.”
“It’s that God-damned greenhorn lecherous Avered,” Coit said. “What the hell, anybody knows you have to shoot woodchucks.”
“If you’d ask me,” Mrs. Tuller said, her eyes extruded, as if there were not room even in her capacious head for so much anger and eyeballs too, “if you’d ask me, an old-fashioned whippin’d be too good for Matthew Avered.”
The faces in the circle turned with slow speculative interest toward Mrs. Tuller’s scowling countenance, and Hester saw an awful concord flowing into almost all of them. The silence was prolonged; this seemed to be an idea with a slow grip, and even when it had taken hold, there was something about it that needed prolonged ventilation.
“A light public whippin’,” George Challenge finally said in an apologetic whine, on a note almost of charity, “would seem to me to be a very practical solution.”
“I agree a hundred per cent,” Roswell Coit said with ill-hidden jubilance.
“Isn’t this a kind of disgusting kangaroo court?” Friedrich Tuller objected in a high, strained voice. “What right do you people have to pass judgement?”
“I don’t think newcomers and foreigners ought to meddle in Tunxis affairs,” the woman with the bangs said.
“I came here sixteen years ago looking for freedom,” Herr Tuller said. “How long is a newcomer new?”
“Let’s not get shunted onto a siding,” said Mrs. Tuller, who had had ample experience in committee work and knew how to keep things moving.
“We mustn’t be carried away with haste,” Anak Welch said with a fairness that seemed to give him physical pain. “Let’s put on our thinkin’ caps and try and do the right thing. I have to say that I lean toward the opinion that a public example would be good for all of us. I’d suffer for our Selectman if we did this thing that’s been suggested, and I think that sufferin’ would probably be good for me. It’d probably be good for all of us. But we oughtn’t to be hasty.”
“Whippin’d be too good for Matthew Avered,” Mrs. Tuller repeated, quite satisfied with having invented this sentence.
“It’s not as if this wasn’t a sound traditional practice hereabouts, Anak—in the old days anyway,” pronounced Judge Pitkin, the Town Counsel, the Selectman’s close friend.
“Oh, it’s an institution with a great deal of heft behind it,” Anak Welch said in a troubled way. “I’ll grant you that. A very respectable institution. Long honored here in Tunxis—though not anytime lately, that’s the part I’d want to analyze. I just have a feelin’ we ought to think this through pretty careful.”
“Too much thinkin’ gives folks the rheumatism,” the woman with the bangs said. “You’d better make up your mind afore you get a crick in your neck, Mr. Welch.”
The Selectman himself came running now from up above. “How many got away?” he asked with an uninformed coolness that seemed grotesque to Hester.
Hester was surprised, and then afr
aid, when she heard the slow, sober, cautious, kindly giant, Anak Welch, say sharply, “God damn you, Matthew.”
“Am I to blame?” the Selectman angrily retorted. “From what I hear, some of you people got careless down here.”
“We’ll see about that,” the big man said. “We’ll tend to that in its own time.”
“How many got away?” the Selectman asked.
“We’ll settle up accounts when it comes time to send out the bills,” Uncle Anak said.
“What’re you all standing around this way for?” the Selectman shouted. “Do you want to lose them all? Get back to your positions and let’s at least keep the ones we have!”
The drivers, with a sudden amazing sheepish obedience, resumed their line.
* * *
—
As Hester moved up the funnel, with the line constantly shrinking, so that Coit on the one side and Uncle Anak on the other closed more and more with her, she felt, above everything else, a heavy apprehension, a presentiment of something from which she would surely have to run away. She tried, for a time to attract Coit’s attention without getting Anak Welch’s as well, for she wanted at least to make a reproachful face at Coit, and thereby somehow seem to justify herself; but the thickset, good-looking young man kept his eyes forward in an excess of conscientiousness, as if, by God, no woodchuck would ever get away from an alert young fellow like him.
The drive up the funnel was no work at all, and soon the line grew so tight that people began to drop out of it, and Hester, feeling very weak, was one of the first to resign. Toward the end a dozen men were all who stood pickets, and in due course they reached the gate—only ten feet across—and shut it, and then lifted planks off a ditch that traversed the opening, rolled the gate-wire down into it, and filled it with dirt to complete the deep-fence around the enclosure.