by John Hersey
The count was soon reported. There were but thirty-seven woodchucks in the corral.
They were such cheerful-looking, rotund animals!—only thirty-seven in number.
Hester, who had her eyes and ears open, neither observed nor overheard any further consultation among the drivers, but, as if some kind of agreement had been sealed between them in meditation, silence, and shared lunacy, a group of them went straight to the Selectman when the drive was over, and following closely, Hester heard Anak Welch say, “Matthew, I’ve got to tell you that we’re very pent up at you.”
“I don’t blame you,” the Selectman said. “I don’t blame you.”
Then Hester saw the Selectman’s face—dark, weary, defeated, abject he was. Only thirty-seven woodchucks!
An annoyed crowd had gathered around in a moment, and its swaying, its almost breathing together, its palpable unified mob-life showed that a rumor had already run its course.
“We’ve decided we’ve got to take it out on you,” the huge man said, obviously given courage by the many-eyed febrile entity around him.
“I can’t say I blame you,” the Selectman said, head down.
“You were very wrong,” Mrs. Tuller said with a tight mouth and ice-pick eyes.
“Let’s not discuss it right now,” the Selectman said, raising defiant eyes and aiming them at the schoolteacher, whose gaze grew blunt and dropped. “What do you intend to do?” he asked Anak Welch.
Now it was the giant’s turn to be abashed. He cleared his throat with a tiger’s rumble. “We had thought,” he said then with extraordinary mildness, “of a scourging.”
There was an excited indrawing of breath by some of the drivers who had not previously heard this thrilling news. The Selectman was silent awhile; he looked at the ground. Then dully he said, “Does Judge Pitkin know about this?”
“You’re thinking about legality?” Anak Welch asked.
“I just hold the opinion that the Town Counsel should know about it.”
“I’m here,” said Judge Pitkin’s voice at the edge of the crowd, in an unmistakable tone of adherence to the popular opinion.
“Oh, you here, Judge?” the Selectman asked with a calmness that gave Hester a chill.
“We want to be fair, Matthew,” Uncle Anak said with a disgusting, shameful affection in his voice. “We realize there ain’t been a floggin’ in Tunxis for I-don’t-know-how-many seasons. But—but—”
“We’ve taken as much as we’re goin’ to take,” Mrs. Tuller said for the hesitant giant, and for all.
“Let’s get it over and done with,” the Selectman said.
Hester wanted to scream out against the mildness and politeness of this talk. She wanted to cry out that the citizens intended to flagellate this man for one thing while he thought they were to punish him for something entirely else. She wanted to protest against his taking on his shoulders the blame for the outcome of this drive, which he had been thinking about and planning for a decade; and against his silly, vapid invocation of the name of the Town Counsel—what a response for a courageous man! She wanted to proclaim his innocence of the gossips’ crime, his absolute innocence, and Coit’s lack of it; she wanted to announce her own…. She was silent.
* * *
—
Hester wondered whether Tunxis had ever had such an entertainment as this. The Selectman stood on the lawn not far from the notice board—almost exactly at the spot where she herself had waited in the fog that morning so many experiences ago—and he gravely stared into an infinity that seemed nested in a sugar-maple tree across the way; he seemed to be gazing at mysteries, at the deepest paradoxes of life, whilst the townspeople busied themselves with happy, constructive errands of preparation. Rulof Pitkin was sent whirling off in his truck to Leamings’ Service Station to get a big pair of lug wrenches to take the notice board down with. Manly Sessions had gone away in his Chevrolet for a length of rope. Four clustered male elders of the town, exuding the sweet gravity of mortuary attendants, consulted in low voices as to where they might find a suitable instrument of their will. “Say!” exclaimed George Challenge in a subdued proud thin whine that surely carried to the Selectman’s ears, as it did to Hester’s equidistant ones. “Don’t Alenum Rust have the very thing on that buckboard he keeps paintin’ every year? Seems to me the stock is light and the lash good and short.” “That sounds like just the ticket,” Judge Pitkin rumblingly concurred. Hester saw the vast mouth stir in Anak Welch’s troubled face, but she could not hear the words that emerged—if, indeed, any did. Coit was sent off on a motorcycle to get Rust’s whip. Cars, mostly containing womenfolk, kept driving up, and Hester could imagine what a cheery tintinnabulation of phone calls must be hurrying round the town. Soon Hester even saw Aunty Dorcas, given a lift to the common by a kind-hearted friend, moving with her eyes shrewdly narrowed among the whispers that flew on praying-mantis wings from head to head—Aunty Dorcas, oh! so afraid of a sparrow on her sill, but not of this; afraid neither of death nor of this, hardy old lady. Mrs. Tuller, teacher of innocent children, believer in counter-irritants, kept shaking her huge head with what seemed to be regret—regret, was it, of her disastrous hysterical charge among the woodchucks, or of the necessity (pressed by other folks, mind you!) of punishing Matthew Avered for what she had seen with her own naked eyes? George Challenge, no weasel to be napping now, was going around on his parenthetical legs canvassing opinion for future reference in political conclave. Friedrich Tuller of the crystal spangles, after his one brief protest down by the enclosure, had by now busied himself with conformity, and was, at one moment when Hester glimpsed him, standing on the whipping platform sucking a forefinger and making the face of one stricken, for, in helpfully removing thumbtacks from the notices on the bulletin board, he had apparently sprung a fingernail from its quick. Pale Pliny Forward, intent upon science, tried to start a discussion with the Selectman on what had gone wrong with the drive, but the Selectman seemed deaf as a wedge of cheese.
Hester fought her silence all along. She wanted to speak up…but it would do no good, she kept telling herself. The village of Tunxis would simply vent one big unanimous guffaw at such interested testimony as hers would be. There was no chance of changing the course of things. There was something inexorable at work here, something on old iron rails that could not be turned aside; so she told herself. Besides (what a confused and mean comfort!), why was the Selectman so passive? Was he really somehow guilty of something? Why did he stare that way? Why didn’t he fight? Coit had become a kind of hero now. His was the prize errand; he was astride his snorting two-wheeled machine, fetching the whip. He was a strong young man—maybe they would let him swing it, too. No! That would be too much! Hester swore to herself that if Coit were appointed to do the flogging, she would surely cry out.
Eben walked past, apparently moving for the sake of motion. He seemed to have been suddenly set back into a gawky adolescence; his face was even faintly blotched, as if about to succumb to a miserable acne.
“How can you stand by and let them do this?” Hester hissed at him.
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Eben said with a ferocity that was staggering. Hester felt that this must be a day of unburdenings.
“But your father didn’t do a thing to me,” she protested, appalled by Eben’s fierce face. “I swear, Eben, he was just taking a speck out of my eye.”
Eben looked tempted to believe; in need of belief; tempted and awfully torn. “Why didn’t you fix up a better story?” he bitterly asked.
Rulof Pitkin returned, and several men worked at detaching the notice board from the whipping post. They threw each other occasional masculine morsels of advice and congratulation; the work went splendidly. A few drops of penetrating oil, a heave here and a counter-ho there, and soon the job was done. Four men carried the heavy bulletin board—Friedrich Tuller (what was it he’d said he’d come here looking for sixteen year
s before?) lugged at one corner in what appeared to be an ecstasy of accepted helpfulness, not foreign at all now, a real Tunxisman—and they leaned it carefully against the front wall of the Grange Hall. Then Coit was back, showing the whip to the elders, one by one; each nodded in sober admiration.
Hester’s heart was on the run. She would just wait until Coit climbed up to the platform, then…If she could but survive that long! She could hear the shushing of blood in her ears; her heart hurried toward toward toward toward toward toward…
They were leading the Selectman to the platform; he had that faraway staring look in his eyes. He climbed the steps and stood there waiting. Judge Pitkin, standing on the ground in front of the platform, leaned forward and murmured to him, but the Selectman did not hear, so Judge Pitkin spoke louder; the Selectman leaned forward and Judge Pitkin mouthed something into his ear. The Selectman straightened up, turned facing the post, and removed his shirt. How softly white the skin of his strong back below the copper of his neck!
Anak Welch, holding the small coil of manila that Manly Sessions had brought, climbed the steps and, while the Selectman agreeably held high his hands, the huge man, for whom this was no reach at all, lashed the wrists together and made them fast to the post. Roswell Coit stood at the foot of the stairs tapping the looped-back gad against his calf. Hester decided she was as ready as ever she would be.
Then Anak Welch went down the steps and took the whip out of Coit’s hand and turned round, with an agonized expression on his face, the veins standing inflated on his wide forehead, and climbed back up again.
Anak Welch was going to do the work. Hester felt a surge of sickening relief. How could she protest now?
She looked around her, and saw the eyes of the natives bulging with delight, terror, and foul hope.
She ran.
She hid behind the trunk of a huge New England elm. Over the hushed heads on the green, Anak Welch’s anguished voice came rolling: “I hope this’ll be for the good of all of us, Matthew.”
Hester did not hear any more because of the pressure on her ears of her vomiting.
* * *
—
Afterwards everyone seemed to go out of his way to be nice to the Selectman, who, when he descended from the platform, still wore his faraway look; George Challenge told him he’d taken his castor oil like a man, and Anák Welch threw an arm around his shoulders. Hester, back among the crowd and watching again almost in spite of herself, had a peculiar feeling that these gestures were far from friendly; they seemed to represent some kind of clearing away of loathsome thoughts, some kind of handwashing, and there was even, she thought, a hint of anger in them, as if to indicate that the Selectman should at least have whimpered under the wrath of the community.
“We’d better get down there and do away with the groundhogs before they start a-burrowing,” the Selectman mildly said.
That quiet remark called for a picnic atmosphere among the townsfolk, who rushed to load themselves in the trucks and chattered and laughed and winked at each other. “Come on,” Mrs. Tuller said to Hester, with a jovial, forgiving air, “let’s go down and watch.” Hester let herself be drawn along.
At the enclosure, Hester quickly saw that the thirst of Tunxis had not yet been slaked. Later, thinking back on what happened at the corral after the scourging, she guessed that the Selectman must have displayed an unbearably shaming nobility on the platform by the common, so that by the time the witnesses of that bearing had reached the woodchuck enclosure, they must have felt the choice of demolishing the man once and for all or feeling utterly ruined themselves.
“Who’s going to help me kill these animals?” the Selectman asked, holding out before him and offering to a taker one of a pair of machetes he had brought. “We’ll need about six people for a line,” he said, “to corner ’em.”
No one moved.
The Selectman looked around and evidently began to see what he was up against—but only began, dimly and unclearly, to see, for his locked mind was obviously on the work to be done. Still holding out the knife, pinching it by the blade so that someone could take the free handle, he glanced around at the faces near him and for some time seemed to expect a response, but no one moved, for the figures of the Tunxis people were frozen in a tableau of clenched wills.
At last the Selectman turned, with a slightly puzzled look, shrugging, and said over his shoulder, “If nobody’ll waltz with me, I’ll have to waltz alone.” He dropped one of the brush knives beside the gate and, putting a foot up on one of its cross braces, vaulted into the enclosure, swinging the huge knife he had kept in his hand in a wide blue-flashing arc through the air as he jumped. He walked slowly toward the cluster of woodchucks at the center of the fenced-in square.
Coit was the first to laugh. From the beginning it was clear that the Selectman’s situation was intolerable, and that he should never have let himself into it. He simply did not have the physical equipment to come upon these sly animals and destroy them all by himself. They were too many for him, too agile, and they had too much room to move about in. He seemed dazed and clumsy; they balked him and misled him and escaped him. He would make a stealthy, almost tiptoed approach, then would break into a sudden short rush and chop at—nothing. He became suddenly ludicrously angry, and when, at the end of one of his charges, he brought the machete whirling downward and again missed the scrambling animals and only split some sod, Coit laughed.
Then others did, too. There began to be a quiet little ripple of giggles after each frustrated rush, and then, as in his jerky, petulant dashes the Selectman grew red and wild-eyed, outright haws and roars began to be sprung.
The unhearing Selectman, culminating in his lonely onslaughts ten years of planning for this happy hour, evidently heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing but the need to destroy woodchucks.
Soon some of the Tunxis people had stitches under their ribs, and rocking, they gripped their waists to ease the pain of laughing.
Hester had bad trouble pushing down her own risibility, and once she caught a glimpse of Eben, letting up out of his mouth a little irrepressible laugh every so often; looking at him she was reminded of a pot lid occasionally jumping and releasing vapor and settling back again. Hester was far beyond protesting now, beyond even the sort of anger that engenders protest, as, clutched by some inner paralysis, she trembled on the silent edge of laughter.
The Selectman killed a woodchuck, caught it on the spine and cleft it in a ghastly, powerful, red-soaked whisk.
A few townspeople emitted a quiet “Aah!”, but Coit led others in a laughing cheer; and when the Selectman missed his next stroke, the laughter was redoubled.
Soon the Selectman began to adjust his eye and his arm to the needs of his task, and he managed, not without many failing rushes, to kill another, and another, and others. A regular rhythm of laughter and mocking cheers was established. The Selectman seemed to hear none of that.
Mrs. Tuller, standing beside Hester in the audience outside the enclosure, paused in her laughing, wiped tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, and said, “Mercy me! Sometimes I wonder.”
Coit, on the other side of Hester, gasped between laughs, “This is rich.”
“What a fine person he is! Whenever there’s nasty work to be done in Tunxis,” Mrs. Tuller said, shaking with mirthful delight at her own heavy irony, “you can depend on it, he’ll be the one to do it for us.” She pointed at the Selectman and rode off again on derision.
“Maybe,” Coit said, fighting his bubbling laughter, “maybe his heart’s as warm as ever a flame, ma’am—ho! ho! look!—but right now he’s up to his ass in blood.”
“Roswell!” Mrs. Tuller said, sniggering as she looked round at him. “You have the tongue of a serpent.”
“You should’ve heard me when I was in the service,” he said. “I’m nothin’ but Casper Milquetoast now.” And as the Selectman
killed an animal, “ ’Ray! ’Ray!” Coit shouted.
Then in one of his unsuccessful clumsy sallies the Selectman rushed close to the fence behind which the main body of drivers stood in their hilarious condition. In this instance, a sharp burst of laughter greeted the Selectman’s failure, especially as he stumbled slightly, with a little besotted stagger, when he made his futile lunge with the brush knife. Regaining his balance he stood straight, not a dozen feet from the fence, and, in a sudden lapse of his concentration on the animals, he focused his eyes on the crowd, took in the grimaces of his townspeople, heard their pealing, and seemed for the first time to understand something of what was happening to them and to him. Hester saw the awful sting of recognition spread across his face.
For a moment his lips trembled; it seemed as if his face would crumple under the wrench of sudden overwhelming pain. Hester was positive, without having seen, that no such expression had touched his face on the platform in front of the Grange.
In a pathetic voice, a voice denuded of authority and maturity, a voice without even the dignity of penance done or of regret or of apology, he pleaded, “Won’t somebody help me?”
The obdurate crowd was silent but for a few coasting murmurs of laughter, and no one moved; no one made a move to help.
A small pack of woodchucks seemed to be gathering not far from the Selectman, as if to rush at his legs, and someone cackled, “Watch out! Watch out for them groundhogs!”
The Selectman whirled. The pack moved toward him with rattling jaws. At first, instead of driving forward into the ridiculous posse, the Selectman backed away with a jarring timorousness; at last he made a half-hearted dash which scattered the animals.
The Selectman resumed his lorn work, and the townspeople tried again to laugh as merrily as they had before, but the lift had gone out of their effort. Still coursing erratically here and there, the Selectman seemed to have grown terribly tired, and he wore an expression of awful, incipient comprehension. He had destroyed perhaps thirteen or fourteen woodchucks, and now that he had no taste for it, he was learning craft in this unsavory contest and was having enough success so that it could be seen that with the help of half a dozen men to help condense the animals, the destruction would fairly quickly have been done with. He did not look at the crowd again. People began to drift away and go home.