Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  There was no doorbell, only a brass knocker like an ear of corn. John rapped it loudly, and waited, feeling a flush rise around his ears.

  No one came to the door.

  He knocked again.

  Still no answer. Slowly the fascinating structure so full of exciting life became a cavernous house of hollow rooms, empty and unoccupied.

  Disappointed, John turned away. Instantly he saw Barbara and Virginia Heron at the bottom of the front yard.

  Three

  THEY WERE KNEELING WITH THEIR BACKS TO HIM AT THE LOWER edge of the lawn, absorbed in something. John could see a number of things beside them on the ground. Swiftly he itemized them in his mind: the pile of lopped branches, the old bedspread heaped with sandy dirt and rocks, the basket of gardening tools, the big power lawnmower.

  John was pleased to see the lawnmower and the acres of uncut grass. That was something else he could do for them. In the last ten years John had cut about a thousand square miles of lawn. He ran eagerly down the hill, buffeted by the warm wind, then stopped short, afraid of startling the two women, they seemed so completely engrossed in what they were doing.

  “Here’s one,” murmured the dark-haired woman who must be Barbara. “Let me have those long-handled clippers.”

  John cleared his throat, stepped forward, and picked up the clippers. The two women looked up at him in surprise.

  “I’ve come about the job,” said John, holding out the clippers, handle end first. “My name’s John Hand.”

  The woman in the absurd squashed hat smiled at him — Virginia! The other one — Barbara — said a crisp “Thank you,” and bent once again to the task. “There,” she said, “that does it, I think.”

  Now John could see what they were up to. They had cut off all the branches of a honeysuckle bush and were groping underneath the bristling stump, cutting the roots one by one. They were fighting back against the weedy wilderness of honeysuckle that was tossing its wiry branches in the wind just beyond the edge of the lawn.

  They stood up. At once John was abashed by their height, by their slightness in their loose shirts and blue jeans, by the length of the dirty hands taking a firm hold on the stump. He reached down too with his clean hands, and together they jerked at the stubborn spiny mass. It wouldn’t budge.

  “There must be a tap root or something,” said John. Dropping to his knees, he felt around in the sandy dirt, aware of their keen eyes on his back. “Yes, here it is.” He pawed for the clippers, and felt them being put into his hand. Reaching under the stump, he wrestled with the thick root, cut halfway through it, grasped it again in the metal jaws, braced himself with one outflung leg, heaved hard with both arms on the handles, and snapped through the last inch. “There,” he said, getting up again, breathing hard. “It ought to come now.”

  Again the three of them laid hands on the honeysuckle stump. But before they could pull at it together, they were interrupted.

  “Here, you people. Just let go and let the old master give it the heave-ho.”

  The task was taken away from them. They were being brushed aside. Someone was grasping the stump with big sunburned hands, tussling it left and right, jerking it from its socket with a shout, brandishing the great bristling chunk of chopped stubs and sandy roots over his head, then hurling it high into the air and far away into the honeysuckle jungle.

  John followed its crazy arc with his eyes, hardly believing what he saw. Then he stumbled out of the way as the man with the brown beard snatched up the clippers and pushed past him to begin jabbing at another sprawling bush. Plucking out a snaky branch, reaching for another, he shouted cheerfully over his shoulder, “I’ve come for that job of yours. Why didn’t you tell your own next-door neighbor you needed help? What are friends for, anyway? Here’s old Buddy Whipple, at your service. And a room in your house is just what the doctor ordered. Did I tell you I’m renting my place to somebody else? People just moved in. So I haven’t got any place to stay myself. Promised them I’d get out right away. So if it’s okay with you kids, I’ll just move in this afternoon, right?” Whisk, whisk. Wiry branches flew out of the honeysuckle bush and flopped on the ground. The entire bush was decapitated. Buddy turned around, grinning. “How about it?”

  John’s heart sank. He had heard of Buddy Whipple. Buddy Whipple was the owner of the big old hunting lodge at the top of the hill. An old friend of the family. Well, so much for John’s chance at a job around here.

  But Barbara Heron was glancing at him shrewdly. She turned to Buddy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you’re too late. The job’s gone. We’ve hired young John here.”

  “John?” For the first time Buddy Whipple looked at John. Then he laughed, throwing back his head. “Listen here, Barbara, you don’t need to hire anybody. I’ll work for you girls for nothing in my spare time. Pay for my room and board too. Glad to do it. So you’ll be ahead of the game. What do you say, Virginia?”

  Virginia turned away and began picking up the stones they had clawed out from the roots of the honeysuckle. “Well, I really think we’re committed already,” she said, dropping the stones back in the hole.

  “Oh, come on, Virginia, John’s just a kid. John won’t mind.” Buddy grinned and winked at John. “There’s lots of jobs in town for John. I’ll speak to William Warren at the town hall. William will find him something.”

  But Barbara was firm. “A promise is a promise.”

  Ducking his head to hide his grin, John helped Virginia pick up the corners of the old bedspread and dump the dirt back where it had come from. But Buddy wasn’t giving up.

  “Listen here, you kids, let me talk to your father. Where’s Edward? I’ll just have a word with Edward.”

  Barbara picked up her basket of tools and said nothing. Virginia seemed not to have heard. Dreamily she flapped the bedspread in the stiff breeze. Idly a startled crow tipped off a branch of an oak tree and eased himself, cawing, into the air.

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “Well, come on,” insisted Buddy, “where is he? Is he up at the house? He must be around here someplace.”

  Relenting, Barbara pointed at the trees that mounded high above the surrounding jungle of honeysuckle and firethorn and blackberry bramble. “Well, go ahead, ask him. He’s over there somewhere. The idiot. Over there in the old orchard, if you can find a way in. It’s an awful tangle. Dad thinks he’s working out lot lines for some big real-estate boondoggle or other. Of course he’s got another think coming. He’ll have to reckon with us first. With me, anyhow. I’d commit murder before I’d sell a single square foot of this place.”

  “Can I tell him that from you?” said Buddy. Turning quickly, he began bounding through the sea of honeysuckle, leaping over entanglements of catbrier and wild grapevine.

  “Tell him anything you please,” said Barbara angrily. Then she looked at John, and her face cleared. “You came along in the nick of time. Good for you.”

  Virginia was smiling at him too. “I know who you are. You were four or five years younger, but you could spell better than I could.”

  The sun came out between two towering masses of rushing cloud. “No, I couldn’t,” said John, feeling warm with pleasure. “You won, remember? But on the whole,” — he cleared his throat, making a joke — “it was an iridescent occasion.” Then he turned sober. “But maybe your father will want to hire Mr. —”

  “No, no,” said Barbara. “You’ll be working for us. And you’re the one we want.” Putting down her basket, she dusted her hand on her pants and reached it to John. “I’m Barbara Heron. I went to college with your Aunt Mary Kelly.”

  “Well, say, Aunt Mary and Uncle Homer are living in my house right now, there on Barretts Mill Road in Concord. They’re taking care of my kid brother Benny while my parents are away.” John picked up the clippers and looked around eagerly, ready to rip out all the honeysuckle bushes in Middlesex County.

  “Here he comes again.” Virginia turned away from the sight of Buddy Whipple, a
nd began folding her dusty bedspread. Leaning toward Barbara she whispered fiercely, “He can’t stay, right? He doesn’t get the guest room. Never, never. Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course,” murmured Barbara.

  Buddy had been running, lurching through the underbrush, panting in sobbing breaths. Now he stopped running, put one arm around Virginia and reached with the other for Barbara.

  “I found your father,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry, Virginia, Barbara. I’m very much afraid your father is dead.”

  Four

  TRAILING AT THE REAR OF THE HURRYING PROCESSION, JOHN SAW the last of the yellow jackets. Beyond the upthrown arms of Virginia there was a glint of gold on striped abdomens as the last outriders lifted from the body of Edward Heron and hung motionless for a moment, trembling in the sunshine.

  “Vespis diabolica” he murmured to himself. “Yellow jackets,” John said aloud, speaking up in warning. “Watch out.”

  But they were gone. John watched as Barbara and Virginia threw themselves down beside the heavy man on the ground. Barbara was listening for his breath, feeling for his pulse. She was breathing into his mouth, pressing down with her hands on his chest, giving curt instructions to Virginia. Now Virginia was helping, blowing air into her father’s lungs while Barbara continued to bend over the blue denim jacket, her shoulders rising and falling, her arms thrusting, her hands locked together. She was accusing herself bitterly. “Another attack! I never should have let him out of my sight, not when he was so mad at me.” Barbara was looking around wildly. “His asthma medicine, where is it? He swore he’d carry it all the time. He promised me.” Leaning forward and back, forward and back, Barbara looked up accusingly at Buddy. “What happened to it? Where in God’s name is it?”

  Buddy merely looked sad and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Epinephrin,” insisted Barbara. “There was a syringe of epinephrin and some antihistamine tablets. It was in a little red box, a little cardboard box. He promised me he’d carry it all the time. It was in his pocket this morning. I saw it in his pocket.”

  “Maybe he tried to use it,” suggested John gently, “and he couldn’t manage it, and then, you know, maybe he dropped it.” Embarrassed, feeling like an intruder, John turned away and began looking in the trampled undergrowth for a red box, a glint of glass, a scattering of pills. He found nothing. He came back and watched as Barbara stopped pushing on her father’s chest and leaned back despairingly. Touching her sister’s shoulder, she shook her head.

  They were giving up. Barbara helped Virginia to her feet. Virginia began to cry as Buddy stooped to pick up the body of her father. John made a gesture, offering to help, but then he stood back, astonished at the ease with which Buddy slung the dead weight over his shoulder like a light sack and carried it through the tangled scrub of brier and honeysuckle. Virginia and Barbara stumbled after him, emerging from the vine-clad canopy of the orchard into the sunshine and the blowing wind.

  John brought up the rear. Even in his shocked confusion he couldn’t help noticing how many honeysuckle bushes remained to be rooted out — there were hundreds of them, thousands! At the edge of the lawn he saw Barbara pause to pick up her basket of tools. Virginia was making a vague dab at the bedspread. The wind was tugging it out of her hands. John ran after it and plucked it out of a dogwood tree. Folding the bedspread clumsily, he hurried up the sloping lawn, trying not to look at the dark grey-purple face lolling over Buddy’s shoulder.

  Ahead of them loomed the house. Its grey paint darkened as the sun disappeared again behind the racing clouds, and John saw how badly the place needed paint. It looked long and gloomy and ramshackle. Walking up the steps into the small courtyard, he felt his head throbbing with excitement and uncertainty. He hung back. What should he do now? Should he murmur something polite and just slip away? Would it be all right to come back again later on? But when? Tomorrow? Did he have a job or not? Now that Buddy Whipple was helping them out in this family disaster, Virginia and Barbara might feel they owed the job to him. John stood hesitantly beside the low stone wall. Oh, God, how could he think of anything so selfish at a time like this?

  “I’ll get the door,” said Barbara, moving quickly ahead of Buddy, holding the screen open so that he could shuffle indoors with his heavy burden, then following him in.

  Well, decided John, he’d better just go home. Reluctantly he began to back away. But at the last minute Virginia turned and glanced at him. Her face was a mute appeal, and the motion of her arm in the air was so bereft that John was bound by it.

  Mounting the stone step, he entered the house.

  Five

  THE SPIDER WAS MOLTING. BRACING HERSELF AGAINST THE FRAME of the shed door, she pulled the last of her eight legs from its dried sheath and began crawling upward. In the angle between the end of the horizontal lintel and the vertical board at the side of the door, there was a crack where the two pieces of wood had rotted apart. Here the spider made herself a resting place of crisscrossing threads. As Buddy Whipple entered the kitchen at the other end of the house and lowered the body of Edward Heron to a long bench against the wall, the spider hooked her claws into the threads and hung there suspended, her body expanding in the breezy warmth of the afternoon, every jointed leg freshly supple and newly coated with delicate hairs.

  Buddy was taking charge. John stood back and watched him moving around the kitchen with calm confidence, pushing Barbara and Virginia gently into chairs, pouring out small glasses of whiskey, urging it on them, taking some himself. Buddy flourished the bottle at John, but John shook his head. He liked whiskey all right, but it went to his head, and he didn’t want to look like a fool right now. He felt foolish enough, as it was, and envious of Buddy. Well, after all, Buddy belonged here. He was an old friend of the family. He’d be here to help them out all summer. They wouldn’t need John. They would thank him and say they were sorry, but he could see how it was, couldn’t he, now that things had changed? Instantly John chastised himself for being selfish again, for thinking only about what he wanted for himself. As Buddy hurried into the next room and began making phone calls, John went to the sink and washed a stack of dirty dishes, anxious to show he could be useful too.

  And then his hopes rose. Buddy was leaving. He was running past the window, waving at them gallantly. A gusty wind was tossing the lilacs and moving in a soft bluster through the maple trees beside the driveway. The wind blew back Buddy’s hair and beard as he ran down the steps. Was he gone for good? Looking possessively around the room, John felt his hankering for the job increase. The kitchen of the Herons’ house was the best room he had ever seen. It was a large room with a broad window on the south side. Trays of leggy seedlings lay on a board in front of the window. John wanted to get his hands on them. He yearned to dig up a patch of ground and plant the seedlings. He wanted to move in and be part of this place, this kitchen. He had never seen a house he liked so much. Well, of course it was easy to like the places where rich people lived. Their houses were just naturally better than other people’s houses.

  Barbara was standing with her face against the window, muttering to herself, staring after Buddy as he ran up the hill.

  “What did you say?” said Virginia, getting up to take her hand.

  “I said, it was my fault.”

  “Now, Barbara, you mustn’t let yourself be so —”

  “I shouldn’t have let father go down there by himself. He was in my care. I always felt he was in my care. But it isn’t just that. It’s more than that.”

  Barbara shook her head violently. Waves of chagrin flooded her as she remembered the rancor of the last encounter in the kitchen, and the fury with which she had shrilled at her father, refusing him the pond, the upper and lower fields, even the wooded borders of the driveway. And then, enraged at her, he had shouted back, “Well, for Christ’s sake, how about the orchard? Is there something sacred about the orchard? You haven’t even been in the orchard in twenty years.”

  “Well, go ahe
ad,” she had said. “Go ahead, damn you. I don’t give a damn what you do.” And he had rushed away to look at the orchard, to pace it off, to tell himself he was going to divide it up into expensive parcels of real estate and regain the family fortune. She had sworn at him. Her last words to her father had been, “Damn you.” And now he was gone. Gone with all his crazy schemes, his nervous chatter, his eager, impossible solutions. Barbara closed her eyes, picturing him gasping, struggling for breath.

  John was exploring the refrigerator. “There’s some ham in here,” he said softly. “I could slice up this piece of cheese. Ham and cheese sandwiches okay with you people?” Without waiting for an answer, John laid out slices of bread on the counter and began slathering them with mayonnaise. Behind his back he heard Virginia going to the door. Someone was outside on the doorstep. It was the doctor. Buddy was coming in too, right behind the doctor.

  The doctor was angry. Without a word of greeting, he crossed the room to the bench where Edward Heron lay, drew back the coat Buddy had thrown over him, and grimaced painfully. “Where the hell was he?” he said bitterly, turning to Barbara. “Where was his medicine? I told him it was a case of life and death. That last attack nearly killed him. I told him. And I trusted you, Barbara. I mean, with a registered nurse in the house to keep after him, I thought he would be all right. Oh, what the hell, I’m sorry. It was his fault, not yours.”

  Barbara at last began to cry. She wept silently, her shoulders heaving, her arms loose at her sides, watching the doctor listen to her father’s silent chest. The doctor stood up, threw the coat back over Edward Heron’s face, crossed the room and embraced her awkwardly. “Ah, well,” he said, patting Virginia’s arm, “he was an old friend. Look here, I’ll call the funeral people, if you like. Mr. Bailey is pretty straightforward. Would you like me to give him a ring?”

  “I’ve already attended to it,” said Buddy.