The Last Adam

by James Gould Cozzens

  By the cemetery gate, surmounted by a curved iron scroll and small cross, Larry ran the car off the road. May helped Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Darrow out. The others, waiting for them, let them now lead, following Doctor Wyck and the coffin down the path past the weighty granite and marble monuments, the substantial blocks—Coulthard, Cardmaker, Allen, Bull, Banning— dominating railed plots, most of them already thick with small markers. Among lesser stones, and graves planted with the iron star of the G.A.R. holding a stick and faded tatter of cheap flag left from last Memorial Day, a grave had been dug for Mamie. The turned-up earth was elaborately covered by mats of coarse, bright green imitation grass. Stretched across the pit were the bands of the device for lowering; and laboriously the coffin was placed upon them, the flowers removed and laid to one side where Albert Foster waited patiently, leaning on his shovel.

  They were all gathered together now, forming a semi-circle—Doctor Bull on one end, the Bannings on the other. Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Darrow had quieted again. Doctor Wyck's distinct voice was the only sound while they stood, no one looking at anyone else, until Howard startled them all by making a motion to Albert Foster.

  Albert drove his spade into a heap of dry gravel, plainly brought there for the purpose, since the excavated earth was dark and damp. Shaking off any that was loose, he advanced clumsily, proffering the shovelful. Doctor Wyck took a little, hardly stopping his recitation except for the measure of emphasis. Fastidiously, he dropped it, in lieu of dust or ashes, on the coffin.

  May, her attention thus attracted, saw Mrs. Banning moisten her lips. One hand against the fox fur on her breast, she had found a small handkerchief with the other. She brought it inconspicuously first to her mouth, and then, turning her face away, to her eyes. Virginia's arm was through hers, and she held it a moment. Suddenly close to tears herself, May thought: she's just imagining if it were Virginia there instead of Mamie. Mr. Banning, composed and serious, slipped a hand under her other arm. Doctor Wyck was reading: "Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world—"

  May looked sadly at Albert with his spade, aware of the possible horrid irony in the words, thinking how unlikely it was that anything remained for Mamie except the earth Albert was waiting to shovel back. Now that she was right up against it, Mrs. Banning could probably feel that, too; and May looked back to see her still holding Virginia's arm, her face still averted and the small handkerchief tight in her gloved fingers.

  From big wooden drums deposited along the transmission line, wiring crews were drawing sixty-one-strand aluminium steel core wire over the great spans. Six conductors, caught up to the pendent insulator strings; two grounded guard wires; now joined the delicately shaped, strong towers with an airy warp of metal more delicate still. New and untarnished, these spun filaments hung hardly more substantial than so many threads of light, dipping from tower to tower across the valley, mounting the hill in fine, shining fines. On the high cross girders men worked hatless, in their shirts. The fields under them were growing green; there were already a few dandelions.

  Monday and Tuesday, it was agreed that this could not last; everyone who saw Mamie buried commented on it and said so. Wednesday and Thursday, most people said that they had never seen anything like it. By Friday, this spring in the midst of winter became as natural as life in the midst of death. Sunday would be the first day of March; and once it was March, a mere change of name could change what was wrong and amazing for February into what was right for spring.

  The light, the length of day, which had lasted ten hours and fifty-five minutes on Monday, lasted, Saturday, eleven hours and nine minutes; so anyone could see that it was spring. Snowdrops were open everywhere, and on Sunday Mr. Banning found two of his purple crocuses out. Behind the stables, the leafless forsythia was about to break in sprays of yellow blossoms. There were buds on the wild goose plums; in a few more days there would obviously be blossoms.

  3

  At eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, Doctor Bull, sitting in the old swivel chair at his office desk, grunted as he bent in the long process of lacing up a pair of hobnailed knee-boots. His shabby old bag stood open on a heap of not read copies of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Next to it he had laid out a couple of patent rubber ligatures, a cased scalpel, a hypodermic syringe, a pint bottle of whisky and a bottle containing a chloride of lime solution. Finished with his boots, he checked these articles over and added them to the contents of the bag. Rumbling contentedly: "Once in the dear dead days beyond recall —" he pawed through the closet in the corner until he was able to produce a roughly finished oak bludgeon and a forked stick. Taking a fold of his jacket, he wiped the dust off them, laid them beside a pair of worn leather gauntlets. The telephone rang then and he could hear Susie shuffling to answer it. "Hell!" he remarked, stopping his singing, for Harry Weems and Lester were due any minute and he wanted to get up to North Truro fairly early.

  Susie shrieked: "Doctor Bull, Mrs. Kimball says Ralph is sick; could you come right away."

  "Tell her to wait a moment," he said, shutting up the bag. He went into the hall and took the receiver from her. "Hello," he said. "What's wrong with Ralph? Oh! Take his temperature? Well, how do you know he's feverish? Oh, he says so, does he? Give him a dose of castor-oil and make him stay home. If I get back from North Truro early, I'll look in."

  He started to hang up, but Doris Clark's voice interrupted: "Oh, Doctor Bull, I have another call for you."

  "Who is it?" —

  "Mr. Ordway."

  "Well, all right —" His eyes swung around to find Susie listening anxiously. "Beat it!" he roared. "Oh, hello! What's the trouble?"

  "Well, I'll step in a minute and look at her," he agreed. "I'm trying to get off to North Truro. No, I thought I'd take Lester and Harry and try to clean out some of the snakes up on the ridge. Been so warm a lot of them may be out —" He heard the front-door bell and added, "Guess they're here now; but they can wait a minute. I'll be over. Come in, come in!" he shouted, hanging up.

  Lester and Harry stood on the steps and he said, "You'll have to wait a while. Molly Ordway's had to get sick. Be right along." Harry had his car at the end of the path. "Might as well get my things in now," Doctor Bull observed, turning back to his office. Out in the hall again with them, he called, "All right, Aunt Myra. I'm leaving."

  Mrs. Cole appeared at the door of the kitchen. "Good morning," she said sharply to Lester and Harry. "George, you'd better let those snakes alone. They aren't hurting anybody way up there. You'll probably get yourself bitten."

  "They aren't hardly awake yet, Mrs. Cole," Lester said. "This warm spell sort of fools them and they start coming out; but they'll be so stiff they can't hardly move."

  "Got to do my duty, Aunt Myra," said George Bull. "Can't be Health Officer if I don't protect the community."

  "You'd protect it better if you stayed home and tended to your business. You're too old a man to go climbing around cliffs killing harmless creatures."

  "These are rattlesnakes, Aunt Myra; we aren't hunting rabbits to-day."

  "Well, I expect they wouldn't harm anyone who let them be; and if you're going to be late for dinner, you call me up."

  "We'll be all right, Mrs. Cole," Harry Weems, promised. "Wait for you in the car, Doc."

  They had been waiting ten minutes when he came out of the Ordways' door and across the lawn. He got into the car and Lester said: "What's wrong with Molly?"

  "Oh, they used to call it spring fever —" He began to fill a pipe while Harry backed the car around. "Everybody's kind of run down in March. I'll bet half her trouble was she didn't feel like going to school to-day. I gave her a dose of castor-oil so she'd have something to do at home."

  "She's getting to be a good-looking kid," said Lester. "How old's she?"

  "Sixteen, I guess," answered Harry Weems. "Same age, about, as Gerry Bates and Virginia Banning. Looks like they were turning out all girls that year. Matte
r of fact, Charlotte Slade, too."

  "I hear she can be had."

  "Maybe so. She looks sort of warm."

  "Somebody saw her with Larry Ward parked outside that dance at the Odd Fellows Hall in Sansbury. Had her skirt around her neck and Larry climbing all over her."

  "Yeah, that somebody would be Grant Williams. He gets more peeking done than any six; and what he doesn't see he can always say he did."

  "I hear Virginia Banning's going to New Mexico with the Hoyts."

  "That's right. They're leaving a week from yesterday."

  "That Hoyt girl is some kid. I could use her."

  "Well, I doubt if you ever will," said Harry Weems, "so don't go brooding about it. Bad for his health, isn't it, Doc?"

  "It is. You keep clear of women, Lester. I'm telling you. You fool around much now and you'll work yourself up a good hot reinfection."

  "I'm listening, Doc."

  "You better listen unless you want to be back for a catheter party with me every afternoon. By the way, how's my old friend Henry Harris these days. He seems to be lying pretty low."

  "Oh, he's around," said Lester.

  "Who's going to get done now?"

  "It must be a secret," said Lester mildly, "he isn't telling."

  At North Truro they turned at the fork where a big sign showed a cowboy on a horse pointing to Robert Newell's Lakeland Lodge and Camps, and went the other way, up the muddy hill road in the warm second-growth woods. Through dense spots of hemlock and pine, the grey rock jutted out—short, sharp cliffs, towering split sections, a jumble of great glacial bouders.

  "There we are," observed Harry Weems. "We can get up this end of the ledges easiest. We'll just pull the car into the brush here and go up that side". He jerked on the brake and turned off the motor. George Bull opened his bag, took out the scalpel and syringe cases, the ligatures, and, testing the cork with his thumb, the bottle of chloride of lime, distributing them in his pockets.

  "That good whisky, Doc?" asked Lester.

  "We'll see when we get back," he promised. "Got a sack?"

  "May be one on the floor there," said Harry.

  "We'll try to get a couple alive. Bates would like them in a box in the store."

  "Supposing we find any."

  "If they aren't out after a nice week like last week, they're dead already."

  Up on the ledges, above the tree-tops, the rock was warm in the sun. George Bull, blowing a little, wiped his forehead, glancing down over the wooded slopes to fields in the valley bottom. There was a tone of pale, fresh green over willows along the creek. Cows stood bunched by the fences. Behind the Clark house somebody was hanging out laundry.

  Harry Weems had been studying the broken stone shelves, damp shades of moss, blotches of lichen, and the low huckleberry bushes growing from drifts of old leaves and open chestnut burrs. "Listen," he said, "I think the best thing would be for me to get up there and Lester up above and we'll all work along together. Then, if we go slow and look sharp we can cover quite a lot of space. Here's your club, Lester. If we see more than one, we'll stand still and let the others get there. The rock's so warm they may be feeling pretty spry."

  At the end of half an hour they had covered the whole southern face without success. "I saw a swell place for them," said Lester. "I'll bet they've got so much sense they know it isn't spring."

  "We'll try the upper ones," George Bull said, swinging the oak stick. "They're around here somewhere."

  "Wait a second," said Harry, seizing his arm. "What's that?"

  "A rattle. Right over there. Hang on, Lester. Let's see him first."

  They stood together, looking. "Funny," Harry said. "I bet I could walk right on him but I'm damned if I can see him."

  "I see him," George Bull said. "Middle ledge. See the dark lichen? Now, look right down; this side of the little hemlock. See? It's moving. Holy Christmas, there's another."

  "I don't see it."

  "You better get glasses."

  "Sure!" agreed Lester. "There's one, sliding down off the rock. See his head? Come on, let's go."

  "Cut down there and come round from the other side, Lester," Doctor Bull said. "You come up this side, Harry. I'll go up above and jump on them."

  "You'll what?"

  "Get going and I'll show you." They could see him clambering along the top ledge.. When he paused, he took a handkerchief from one pocket and what proved to be a match from another. Striking the match, he set fire to the corner of the twisted cloth. "All right," he roared suddenly, "come on in!" He dropped the burning handkerchief down the side of the ledge. "Get that old black bastard, Lester!"

  The drift of dry leaves under the overjutting stone began to frill with little flames from the handkerchief. "Come on, Harry! We've got them by the short hairs. They'll never get home to mother now!"

  Up a crevice, on to the stone at his feet came a pitted, fluke-shaped head, the adroit neck swinging. He stamped his hobnailed heel on it. "One down!" he shouted. Lester was slashing the leaves with his cudgel. From the sunny face of the lower ledge a half-dozen snakes were scattering, sliding away frantic, but too stiff and slow. A single courageous, or stupidly amazed, female had coiled, fire behind and enemies on all sides, tail tip twitching up, stub head couched. "Coming at you!" roared Doctor Bull. He leaped from the ledge, both nailed boots and his better than two hundred pounds landing on her before she could move. The thick end of his oak bludgeon rang dull on the stone; he struck again, catching a little one attempting a panic-struck ascent of the crevice. Wheeling, he brought it down with all his force on a thick sliding coil under a huckleberry bush, producing a head, writhing back in anguish. He smashed it against the stone. "Whee!" he shouted.

  "We'll be coming round the mountain —"

  "Doc!" yelled Harry. Some instinct had already warned him; he started to jump. Although the snake in the crevice was not coiled and had to pounce rather than strike, the head easily reached his hand holding the cudgel. Fantastically wide open, the small jaws swung, closing faster than sight on the side of his thumb.

  "Hell and damnation!" George Bull roared in what was both pain and anger. He dropped, his stick. His violent left hand grasped the neck, dragging clear a thick, three-foot body. The head was torn from its hold; one fang pulled out of the worn leather of the glove; from the groove of the other a drop or two fell. "Here's one son of Satan who'll never see town!" Regardless of his bitten thumb, he caught the writhing body, twitched it belly up and snapped the spine backwards. "Rattle for you, Harry!" He tossed it ten feet over towards him. "Go on, see if you can get a couple alive."

  "Aw, never mind," said Lester. "I'll bet we killed ten. We'll bring the rattles in. Did he get you bad?"

  "No. Went through the glove." He shook the glove off regarding the dark puncture in the thick side of the thumb. "Damn neat job, though," he said, shaking it. "He was full of juice.' He moved down the ledge. "No need to sit on another." He pulled the scalpel case from his pocket. "Take that out for me, Harry."

  Laying the thumb on the stone, his left hand a little awkward, he drove the keen blade point in one line across the puncture; grunting, he crossed it remorselessly with another line. Laying down the scalpel, he fished out the chloride bottle and the syringe case. "Too bad I didn't know it was going to be for me," he said cheerfully. "Might have got myself some of that serum. Can you figure it out, Harry?"

  "This come off?"

  "That's it. Fill it up. Needles right there. See how they go?"

  "Uh, huh."

  Doctor Bull thrust, the bloody thumb into his mouth, sucking it while he felt for the ligatures. "Here you are, Lester. Take the little one twice round the thumb." He looked critically at his hand. "Dare say we don't need another, but we might as well have it. Unbutton that cuff for me, will you? God damn it, it would have to be my right hand. Let's have it, Harry. We'll give it a couple of shots after I've sucked out a little more."

  "Taste good?" asked Lester.

  "I've drunk better.
All right, I can take care of the rest, thanks. See how many of those sons of bitches we got. Better stamp out that fire too. Think it's still burning under the side. Bring along the rattles."

  Down at the car, where Doctor Bull, unassisted, had managed to get a covering bandage around his thumb, Lester produced eight severed rattles. "There's your friend," he said, holding up a seven-ringed one. "I'll bet he wishes he hadn't been so smart."

  "I'll bet I wish he hadn't, too. Got a corkscrew, Harry? Two ounces of spiritus frumenti orally as a stimulant seems to be indicated. I'll leave the rest of it to you. Funny thing, though. Back in Michigan fifty years ago everybody believed whisky was the cure for snakebite. First thing to do was get pie-eyed. We're so smart now we know you couldn't do anything worse; but the fact is, everybody who did it recovered. Figure that one out."

  "Here you are, Doc. How're you going to measure two ounces?"

  "Weigh it on my tongue. Here's to science."

  Mrs. Cole said: "What did you do to your hand, George?"

  "Snake bit me."

  "My goodness! Didn't I know it? You can't say I didn't warn you."

  "That's right. I can't. How about some lunch?"

  "Are you in pain, George?"

  "Well, naturally it hurts, if that's what you mean. But I can eat all right if I ever get a chance."

  "Lunch will be ready directly. Some people called up. Susie, who called the doctor?"

  "Vogels did," shrilled Susie. "And Mr. Fell. And Mrs. Kimball called again."

  "Yes, there's plenty of sickness, weather like this. You better stay around and tend to people, George, and let those snakes alone."

  "Sure, they all get the pip. What can I do about it?"

  "I don't feel very good, either," announced Susie, appearing. "I-—"

  "Sure; you're getting a bad case of incipient dishwashing. I'd prescribe a couple of whacks on the rump with a shingle."

  "No, I ain't. I felt awful sick this morning. I got a pain in my stomach." —, "Well, we've got plenty of castor-oil." He brought his bag into the office, but he had scarcely set it down when the telephone rang. Susie cried out: "Doctor Bull's house. Why, yes, he's here. Oh, yes, I'll tell him —" She" came to the door, announcing with interest, "Mrs. Vogel says Jack is still awful sick. She says he's got an awful fever. She's put him to bed."