“No, but we are not friends.”
His candor surprised Lucy, but only for a moment. Cocking her head in frank appraisal of him, she said with a smile, “It really doesn’t matter if we are friends or not. You need people to help you, although nobody seems to know what you’ve got up your sleeve. The thing is, I don’t have a job, so I can spare the time. So I’ll be there next Monday.” She brushed past him without another word and continued on her way.
*
Ganesh’s next problem was to convince his aunt that they must fight for the old house. He now knew her well enough to admire her deep feelings, but to suspect her resolve. After dinner, when they were sitting quietly in the parlor, Ganesh studied her awhile. It seemed that she had become listless, oddly silent. Taking a breath of resolution, he began to explain in a soft, measured voice exactly what sort of idea he had in mind to save the house. She listened as if riveted to the chair, her eyes becoming rounder and larger the longer he spoke. At last she shook her head sadly. “Boy, you know we can’t do a thing like that.”
“We will, ma’am.”
The woman sighed wearily. “I have tried every avenue of the law, but none works.” She explained that the state had proved its case for confiscating the land in the public interest; nothing could change it except the commissioner of highways — and that with great effort. All other such lawsuits had been settled; all the stores and residences in the path of the highway construction had been evacuated, and all the evicted people had been duly compensated according to law.
“Now we are the last ones,” she concluded.
“Can the road be going somewhere else?”
“That was the question my lawyer asked. Why not take the hamburger drive-in instead — it’s two lots to the west.”
“Yes, why not? Like that.”
“Because, Jeffrey, the drive-in is owned by a big food chain with political connections. It doesn’t do much business, but the food chain wants to hold onto the land. Maybe to build on it later.”
“We must be persuading the government to put their road through the drive-in.”
Aunt Betty gave him a grimace and a smile. “Do you have any idea what I mean?”
“You mean the government is not knowing how much we need this house.”
“That is not at all what I mean. First, it is a fact of life that you can’t fight money and power. Second, we simply can’t defy the law and get away with it.”
Ganesh sat ramrod straight in the chair. No one was going to dissuade him from his course of action. He would even stand against his aunt. “A hamburger place is not a home,” he declared simply. From where he sat, Ganesh could see the old man staring down from the mantelpiece in a black suit. “Great-grandfather,” he said in a slow, emphatic voice, “would be wanting us to save the house he built.”
Aunt Betty did not reply immediately, but sat in thought, looking old, tired, and small.
Ganesh did not move, awaiting her response.
At last Aunt Betty thumped the arm of her chair hard. “Jeffrey, I see your great-grandfather in you — his determination. It wasn’t there so powerfully in either your grandfather or your father. It has come down whole to you.”
Ganesh still did not move, but sat there erect, determined. “We must be ready on Tuesday for the police when they come.”
The woman sighed, then clapped her hands down on her knees in a decisive gesture. “You win, boy. We’ll be ready.”
*
From the top step of the porch, where he sat alongside Tom Carrington, he saw them straggling into the yard, squinting curiously at the weather vane turning in a summer breeze. He watched the kids stroll casually up the cement walk, past the privet bushes and small tulip bed that Aunt Betty hadn’t been able to coax into full bloom this year. They stared at the peeling clapboard of the old house, at the old-fashioned wooden scrollwork above the heavily curtained windows. To them, he realized, it was a strange, maybe even a forbidding place, an outcast among the houses of this town even as he himself was an alien among his schoolmates. How could they know that the polished banisters, the faintly creaking floorboards, the slant of light against darkly paneled walls, all whispered to him of a distant past that had come forward into his life? For a moment, seeing them all new, bold, and American, his resolve wavered. They said hello casually or merely waved and sat down in the grass in a semicircle in front of the porch, observing him critically, waiting for an explanation.
“Go on,” urged Tom from the side of his mouth. “Tell them!”
These words of crisp command, uttered by a friend, had the effect on Ganesh of unleashing a torrent of words. He had never spoken so quickly, so earnestly. He told them that tomorrow the police would take the house, but only because the government never understood how much it meant to the people who lived here. Once this fact was understood by the authorities, they would move the road elsewhere. It was that simple. Of course, they must first be convinced of the truth, and a firm grip on the truth was the heart of Satyagraha. His father had explained it to him. It was a way of showing your opponents, if they were wrong, that in fact they were wrong. To practice Satyagraha, you first had to control a vital piece of territory. In this case, obviously it was the house. You sat in it, refusing to leave no matter what happened. At this point the authorities, no doubt puzzled, would try to figure out why you behaved so stubbornly, at the risk of some kind of punishment. What was so important about an old house? Why did people sit on its porch and refuse to leave? Maybe then the authorities would think about their decision to tear down the house — think about it in a new way, beyond mere rules and regulations, into the lives of the people who cared so much for it.
“They’ll kick you out,” someone yelled impatiently.
Ganesh shook his head. “We will come back. We must be gaining their respect by being serious.”
“Ah, you’re just talking about a sit-in,” someone else said.
Ganesh shook his head again. “It will become more than just sitting. You will see.”
“In what way more than just sitting?”
“That will be depending on our opponents,” said Ganesh.
“What if our parents come and drag us away?” a boy asked.
“Come back.”
“Yeah? Easier said than done.”
“Come back.”
“Do we stay overnight?”
“Every night.”
“For how long?”
“Until the government tells us the house stays.”
“That won’t happen,” a girl muttered.
“How can they change their mind now?” Lucy Smith asked. “Isn’t the road already planned through here?”
“The road can be moved to the left,” Ganesh explained.
Lucy persisted. “How do you know that?”
“Because so far the road to this house is only on a map, isn’t it?”
A kid got up, brushed the seat of his jeans, and said briskly, “I don’t want any part of this nutty thing.” He turned and walked away.
“I got a question,” said another. “What reason do we give our parents for breaking the law?”
There was a deep silence, through which the light summer breeze whistled idly, like a random thought. Everyone, Ganesh included, understood that this was the essential question. Without an answer to it, none of them would return tomorrow.
Tom Carrington leaned forward and said, before Ganesh could reply to the question, “Tell your parents you have got to help a friend who needs help because he’s being treated unfairly. Tell them that and don’t back down.”
There was another long silence. Then someone called out, “Yeah, but help him do what? Stay in an old house like this?”
“It means a lot to him,” Tom argued. Then he added, almost as if realizing the truth for the first time, “It sort of means everything to him.”
“Yeah? Why?”
This time it was Ganesh who answered. “Because I belong to this house. Because it is the only thing I have be
en belonging to in my life.” He paused. “And because it is all my aunt has left.”
“Any more questions?” Tom asked. He got to his feet. “If not, then we’ll see you here tomorrow morning bright and early.”
Silently the kids rose too and left the yard, either singly or in small groups.
“Will they come back tomorrow?” Ganesh asked Tom, when they were all gone.
The basketball player shrugged. “Who knows.”
*
And the next morning they did come — or at least ten of fourteen did. They came with overnight bags, silently trooping up the cement walk, and deposited their gear in upstairs rooms assigned to them by Aunt Betty. She seemed overwhelmed by their presence, and kept muttering, “They’re here; they really are here.” Throughout the morning she appeared with trays of cookies, potato chips, and Cokes, while the Satyagrahis — Ganesh called them this — lolled on the grass, on the porch, playing card games and checkers.
Lucy Smith threw a checkerboard at Ganesh’s feet. “Do you play?” she asked. When he nodded, the girl sat down and took the checkers from a box. They played a game; she won. They played another game; she won. They were starting the third game, when someone called out, “Here comes trouble!”
A squad car was pulling up in front of the peeling white fence.
“Go tell my aunt, please,” Ganesh said. Lucy nodded and went into the house, while the other Satyagrahis left the yard and congregated on the porch.
Ganesh sat alone on the top step.
“It’s Chief of Police Halstead,” someone whispered behind him.
The man coming up the walk was very tall. He wore blue pants, black boots, a billed cap, but no gun belt. Approaching within ten or twelve feet of the porch, as if reaching an invisible wall, the police officer pushed his cap back from his forehead and said to the group on the porch, “Where is Mrs. Strepski?”
“She will be coming, sir,” Ganesh told him.
The police officer, waiting in silence, gave the kids a puzzled glance, then turned his gaze to the scraggly tulip bed, the oak and maple trees dotting the yard. There weren’t many houses left in town with so many old trees.
When Aunt Betty appeared in the doorway, the police officer touched the bill of his cap. “Good morning, Mrs. Strepski,” he said.
“Good morning, officer.” Aunt Betty sat on the porch swing, its rusty hinges creaking at the motion.
“Hot already and not even noon.”
“It does look like an early June scorcher,” she offered politely.
“That’s my guess too. Mrs. Strepski, I suppose you know why I am here.”
“Yes, officer, I do.”
“Time’s up at noon today. Then you must vacate.” He squinted in the glare at the line of kids on the porch, standing like spectators at a game. “Are you packed and ready to leave?”
“No, officer,” Aunt Betty replied in a thin voice.
He squinted at her. “Then I can give you until tomorrow morning.”
“I appreciate it, officer, only —” She stopped, unable to pronounce the words of defiance. “Only —”
Ganesh spoke up. “We are not leaving the house, sir.”
The police chief swiveled his head slowly and looked curiously at the blond freckle-faced boy sitting on the top porch step. “What did you say, fella?”
“We are not leaving the house, your honor.”
Screwing his face up in consternation, the policeman turned to the woman in the swing. “Who is this kid?”
“My nephew. Jeffrey Moore.”
“Jeffrey Moore, perhaps you can give this to your aunt.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket, gained the porch steps in a few rapid strides, and thrust the paper into Ganesh’s hand. “It’s the order for eviction.” Turning, he walked back to his original spot on the cement walk.
Ganesh handed the paper back — it went from hand to hand until reaching Aunt Betty.
“I will give you until tomorrow morning, Mrs. Strepski,” declared Chief Halstead.
“No, your honor,” said Ganesh. “We will not be leaving.”
The police chief turned to the woman in the swing, who was holding the eviction order in both hands as if ready to wring it like a wet towel. “Does your nephew speak for you?”
She nodded, wordlessly.
“The law says this is now state property,” the policeman said crisply to Ganesh. “I don’t think you fully understand.”
Ganesh said, “The law can move its road so we can stay in our house.”
The police chief blinked rapidly. He pushed the cap farther back on his head, until it threatened to slip off. “I am authorized to remove the occupants,” he was staring at the whole crew of kids on the porch, “and their possessions from this house at my discretion. Does everyone understand what I am saying?”
Ganesh, seeming to ignore this declaration, replied, “My great-grandfather built this house with his two hands.” He was sitting in the full lotus position of Yogis: left foot on right thigh, right foot on left thigh. He felt immovable, like a rock, his spine traveling straight down through his body into the floorboards of the porch and farther down into the earth itself, anchoring there in hot granite.
The policeman did not have a reply for Ganesh’s claim that his ancestor had built this large, rambling, half-decayed house with his two hands. He mumbled, “Yes, well, I’m sorry.” He stared with disapproval at the other kids on the porch. “What are you all doing here anyway?”
“They are staying with us in the house,” Ganesh explained.
“Then they can be removed too.”
“They will all come back.”
The police chief smiled bitterly. “Not if their parents say no.”
“Then,” Ganesh said, drawing in a deep breath, “they will not eat!”
“What?”
“They will not eat until they are being allowed to come back here.”
Police Chief Halstead took off his cap and wiped his brow. Replacing the cap, he turned and strode to the squad car, which took off with an angry screeching of tires.
When the car had disappeared, the porch filled with voices and sighs of relief and giggling.
“I don’t think the chief is used to being bucked that way,” someone said.
“Hey, Ganesh, you don’t call a cop ‘your honor’!”
A boy walked up to Ganesh and glared hard at him. “Who told you to say we wouldn’t eat?”
Ganesh shrugged. “I was taking a chance. Like that.” He caught the eye of Lucy Smith, who smiled back approvingly.
But in the swing Aunt Betty sat fanning her sweaty face with the eviction order. In a soft, musing tone she asked the summer air, “What’s going to happen now?”
*
That afternoon a well-dressed woman entered the yard, closed the gate behind herself carefully, and walked toward some of the Satyagrahis who were lolling on the grass near the front porch. Sitting on the top step, Ganesh watched.
“Is Mrs. Strepski here?” the woman asked, lightly scratching a rouged cheek with a manicured nail. “And my daughter? Ruth Hoving?”
A girl got up silently and went into the house. Soon Aunt Betty came onto the porch, looked at the woman, and frowned.
“Do you remember me, Mrs. Strepski? I’m Dorothy Hoving.”
“Yes, I remember you,” Aunt Betty said coldly. “My husband had business with yours.”
The woman glanced at her shoes, as if embarrassed. “Your husband was a fine man, Mrs. Strepski.”
Aunt Betty stood there in stony silence, waiting for the woman to continue. Ganesh figured that whatever business the two men had had between them did not end well. Maybe Mrs. Hoving’s husband had borrowed money. Mrs. Hoving bit her lip and glanced nervously at the woman on the porch. Sunlight fell into Mrs. Hoving’s eyes, making her squint, and beads of sweat appeared on her make-up, but Aunt Betty did not invite her into the shade.
“I know how you feel,” Mrs. Hoving said impulsively. “Los
ing the house this way. But you must understand my position too. I mean, Ruth — that’s my daughter, Ruth — she’s so young. I can’t let her stay in this house with all these boys.” She glanced around, shading her eyes to look at the Satyagrahis, most of them ranged on the porch. “It’s a crying shame the state is taking your place. My husband says so too. He so admired your husband —” Her voice trailed off a moment. “Believe me, if you have a petition that needs signing, I’ll sign it. Only I can’t leave Ruth here overnight. I always did have respect for your —”
“Ruth Hoving!” Aunt Betty had opened the screen door and was shouting into the house. “Bring Ruth out here! Ruth Hoving!”
“Nothing but respect,” the woman mumbled, pulling a Kleenex from her purse to wipe the sweat from her face. Blue eye shadow was beginning to run, giving her the woebegone look of a circus clown.
“Now, Mrs. Hoving,” said Aunt Betty, hands on hips, “we have a boys’ dorm on the second floor, a girls’ dorm on the third. Do you honestly think I would mix them up?”
“Of course not. Only —”
A girl came out of the house — small, thin, large-eyed, and blonde.
“I didn’t know your name was Hoving,” Aunt Betty said as if in explanation. “Your mother wants you to go home, Ruth.”
The girl looked at her mother. “Mom, I want to stay.”
“You’re coming home now.” She glared at Aunt Betty. “I only let her come in the first place because you needed help. But you have no right to keep my daughter here.”
“Thank you for your help, Mrs. Hoving, but I don’t need it. And I am not keeping your daughter here.”
“Come along, Ruth,” the woman said huffily.
“Let me stay one night, Mom. Please?”
“Come along or your father will see to it.” Again she glared at Aunt Betty. “My husband doesn’t even know she has been here. I did it out of my own good will. And look at the gratitude I get.”
Ganesh, watching intently, saw tears well up in the girl’s eyes, as she walked over to Aunt Betty and said, “Honest, I’m sorry.”
For a moment Aunt Betty hesitated, then smiled and touched the girl’s hand. “I appreciate your wanting to help us, Ruth. I won’t forget that. But you go on home now.”
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