by Jane Langton
“Well, I’m sure they would. I’ll pass the word along,” said Buddy easily.
“Oh, and say, Buddy,” said William, “now that I’ve got you on the phone — you know, there are some odd patterns of land holdings turning up.”
“Is that so?” said Buddy.
There was another pause. “Well, just tell Barbara that I called,” said William.
Buddy stared at the phone in his hand and put it down slowly. Odd patterns of land holdings. What the hell did the man mean by that? Well, nothing. Nothing that anybody could do anything about. And even if Buddy had made a mistake somewhere, left something hanging loose, what the hell did it matter? Nothing had been put down on paper that wasn’t perfectly straightforward. And of course if anything didn’t exactly match past history, then past history was wrong. Those old surveyors, everybody knew they made mistakes. Everybody knew you couldn’t trust those primitive methods they had in the old days.
The phone rang again. This time it was for Buddy. “Young man, I just want to thank you,” said Randall Jones. “I’ve just heard you’re going to take that back land off my hands. You know, when I put that ad in the paper I didn’t think I had a chance in the world of selling it. Not after the Conservation Commission turned it down. I mean, you’re aware it hasn’t even got any frontage? Of course it’s a real nice piece of woods. I suppose you just want a chunk of nice woods not far from your own place, right?”
“That’s right,” said Buddy. “I’ve always been fond of that stretch of woods. I shot a hawk in there once when I was a kid.”
“Well, Betty and I are truly grateful. I won’t disguise the fact that we’ve been pretty short lately. We were casting around for everything we could think of. Those kids of ours, all in college at the same time. It’s brutal, even with the two of us working.”
This time Buddy put the phone down with a feeling of magnanimity and kindliness, and started upstairs to get his shotgun. Talking about that hawk he’d shot ten years ago made his fingers itch to try it again. Just the other day he’d seen a red-tailed hawk sailing over the cornfield, going around and around in high lazy circles. It might be out there again this afternoon. Then halfway up the stairs Buddy heard the phone ring again.
This time it was Henry Knickerbocker. Henry was grateful to Buddy too. “Now, listen here, Buddy, you can’t loan me all that money without getting some interest in return. It’s just ridiculous.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t ask an old friend to pay interest. Forget it.”
“I was really surprised by your offer, Buddy, and grateful. I mean, especially after I turned you down about that land of ours. I’m sorry I can’t sell it. You understand. Well, you’re a chip off the old block. More like your good father every day.”
Buddy hung up again, and drew a deep trembling breath. His breast felt charged, excited. His head was full of his own goodness; it was jiggeting with the multiplicity of things in his control. This afternoon he really ought to be taking care of six or seven things for Croney, and there was something he had been meaning to do for Barbara, only he’d forgotten what. And the drug store — he kept forgetting to get that old prescription filled at the drug store. Well, for Christ’s sake, a person had to take time off every now and then. What was life for anyhow? Cheerfully Buddy loaded half a dozen shells packed with #4 shot into his old Winchester and headed for the cornfield, still aglow with his own saintliness, untroubled by the gulf between the charity of today and the rapacity of tomorrow, somehow keeping the two things separate in his head with innocent barbarism.
In the selectmen’s office in the Lincoln town hall, William Warren adjusted the lens stand over two of his nine-by-nines, shifting the square photographs until the houses on Baker Bridge Road leaped up in exaggerated perspective and the rows of maple trees along the roadside separated themselves from their shadows and stood erect. There, look at that. William felt a twinge of shock and pleasure every time the optical effect worked. Then he jumped, as someone touched his sleeve. “Oh, Mrs. Bell, forgive me. Thank you, the morning mail.”
William opened the first envelope, and frowned. It was a letter from a local attorney, reporting an exchange of property off Sandy Pond Road from Jones et Ux to Clarence Whipple.
Buddy Whipple again. Swiftly William turned to the great black-bound book of property maps on the cabinet against the wall. Yes, Jones’s back land was right in line with the rest.
William’s gaze drifted up from the book to the view of the old cemetery out the window. The pattern was there, becoming clearer all the time. Should he discuss it with Barbara Heron? No need to worry her. Not yet. It might not mean anything at all.
Then again, worried William, it might. It just might.
Twenty-Eight
IN THE ARCHING YEW OVER THE STONE STEPS TO THE DRIVEWAY, the white-faced hornets were prospering. Every time John went in and out of the house he ducked his head to look at them. It was too bad he couldn’t get an X-ray view of the inside of the nest as it grew larger and larger, and see the inner walls being torn away to add dimension to the outer surface. How many generations of grubs had hatched by now, as the stacks of layered apartments increased in number? All through the month of July and the first week of August John watched the steady stream of worker females emerge from the hedge beyond the tall yew and float purposefully away.
He kept track, too, of his seven-legged spider. He had lost her for a while, but then she had turned up again on the south side of the house in the shade of the great sugar maple that towered over the roof. One breathless night, unable to sleep, John had come down in his pajamas to see if he could catch a glimpse of her at work. Yes, there she was, moving briskly under his flashlight, destroying her old web, consuming the threads — John could see a bit of silken fluff in her jaws, and then it was gone. Now she was starting again, working outward, laying down a spiral building platform. Patiently John held the flashlight and watched her work her way in again, pausing at each radial thread to fasten her line, then running quickly on to the next, measuring the distance between her spiraling circles with one hind leg, pulling out silk from her spinnerets, fastening it with her forelegs, dodging, turning, moving rapidly to her resting ground in the middle, then returning to her niche behind the rain spout to await events. She was bigger now. She must have molted again. Her regenerating leg was fully half the size of the others. Her prey was larger too, moths rushing blindly for the lighted window in the early evening, blundering into her interfering trap. The web itself had increased in diameter. Now it was at least a foot across, with structural threads stretching up and up — John’s flashlight followed one of them — to the shutter of the second-floor window, and down, down to the granite foundation of the house.
John went back to bed and lay spread-eagled on his back.
He still couldn’t sleep.
He began planning the next day’s work. First there was the beauty bush in the front yard. An hour for that. Then maybe he could find some four-by-fours and set them up around the compost heap and nail those fallen slats onto them. And then —
It occurred to John that he was thinking up his day’s work for himself. He didn’t have to ask what to do any more. At first all his assigned jobs had seemed random and disconnected. But now he had begun to see the relation between one task and the next, to get a feeling for the plan. It wasn’t a plan on paper, any more than the barn spider’s web was built according to a blueprint. It was a picture growing slowly in Virginia’s head, following the curve of her arm, the flourish of her pointing hand, sweeping from a cluster of red cedars and spreading juniper to an empty place beside the driveway where another cluster might balance the first. Virginia’s Great Compromise was in full swing. There were to be indigenous shrubs and trees placed left and right on the sloping lawn and scattered along the path to the vegetable garden.
John would look up from the bottom of the hill where he had been transplanting a fat infant from the nursery of white pines, to see Virginia gazing down at him, not
seeing him, seeing instead the whole landscape with the new tree growing in it. The little white pine was a new stroke of her brush, painting a slow green picture — bush and tree, wilderness and lawn, fence and field and faraway road. The house, too, was part of the picture, part of the slowly emerging hand-fashioned whole. Yesterday John had found Virginia and Barbara staring at the clapboards beside the kitchen door. “You see,” said Virginia, “we could put a lattice right there, up and across, and grow something on it, that Sweet Autumn clematis or something.” “Mmmm,” said Barbara, “I see what you mean.” And they had dropped everything and figured out the lattice with pencil and paper, and John had been rushed off to Wilson’s Lumber for two hundred feet of lath and some three-quarter-inch finishing nails. And then they had worked on it together, sometimes in companionable silence, sometimes with brisk talk — John keeping up his end of the conversation, sometimes bounding ahead. Once his paintbrush, running along a strip of lath, met Virginia’s. Her brush dabbed playfully at his. “There,” she said, reaching to the very end of the lath, “that’s done,” and John had admired the eager stretch of her arm. She was leaning forward into some perfect future, when the paint would be dry, the lattice erected against the door, a vine growing up it, all the trees full-grown and majestic, the shrubs spread wide over the edges of the hillside, the landscape completed. Even the house seemed to be straining forward at its perfected self, as they swarmed over it with spackling tool and paintbrush. Even the newly planted young trees were pulling themselves upward as fast as they could grow.
But under the surface of the work, under the easygoing talk, there was a foundation of silence and helpless inaction. No one mentioned Buddy’s name, but he was there just the same. Buddy too was an urgent force moving inexorably forward, arranging things to his liking. John lay on his bed in the dark and envisioned Buddy’s broad red face, his brown beard streaked with sun-bleached gold. Buddy’s bold laughter echoed and re-echoed among all the tender surfaces of John’s brain, and in his bones he could feel Buddy’s heavy tread shaking the house. Buddy was like a clever animal, an enormous dog tugging at a leash, ears erect, nose on the scent for excitement. Even at the supper table there was always the sense that the chain would be torn from their grasp, that the huge dog would lunge free, bounding high over every obstacle in his way. Only Barbara took the trouble to talk back to him, to break into the restless monologue. John would sit silently eating his supper, and Virginia too would say nothing. But Virginia’s silence was different from John’s and more menacing. In some terrible way she was being picked up in those strong jaws and dragged along blindly, moving neither hand nor foot to save herself.
Oh, God, God, God. John sat up, then threw himself down on his side.
The next morning he was exhausted from lack of sleep. His face was drawn and hollow in the dime-store mirror that hung on a nail over the set tubs. But John was determined to carry out the whole list of jobs he had thought up for himself during the night, so he set to work on the beauty bush right after breakfast.
First he clipped off the straggly arching branches and piled them to one side. Then he circled the bush with his garden fork. Only then did he remember that he needed a tarpaulin to throw his diggings on. And a pair of hand-clippers. And a bucket of good dirt mixed with compost. And a wheelbarrow. Horticulture was mostly going back and forth to get things you had forgotten.
Philosophically John put down the fork and set off at a run up the slope to the shed. His feet were bare. He made no sound in the grass. In his head there was only the image of the place in the back room where the tarp lay folded on the floor. But the instant his hand reached for the latch, a murmur within the shed sent him a warning. Too late. His hand was already flinging open the door.
“Oh, excuse me,” said John, blood rushing to his head, as Virginia pulled away from Buddy and ran out the door on the other side of the shed.
Buddy turned to John with a thick slow smile.
Virginia didn’t stop running until she came to the top of the hill. Then, breathing heavily, she climbed through the gate, walked across the field and began circling the pond. At one end there was a marshy place from which the water sprang, and grey rocks at the base of a beech tree, and a pool of dead backwater. The gnarled grey roots of the tree were indistinguishable from the mottled rock. Virginia lay on her stomach beside the pool and looked at the cloudy shape of her head in the water, remembering Sunday afternoons long ago, when guests had trailed in twos and threes after her mother and father, exclaiming in surprise at the secret lake and the blossoming azaleas and the white birches leaning over the water.
Heaving herself to a sitting position Virginia looked out over the pond, watching dragonflies dart over the surface. There were black ones with wings like pirate flags and iridescent blue ones. Iridescent was spelled with one r. The dragonflies were mating in midair. Virginia shook her head and got to her feet, impatient again at the greed and hunger in the middle of everything. A bird tumbled the underbrush and moved away swiftly with a small cry. There was a sound in the air; thin, high and constant, like an insect’s shrill faraway note. Virginia listened, gazing at the ground. Then she stopped and picked up an apple and a piece of birch bark. The apple was pinched, worm-eaten, malformed. She bit into it gratefully, savoring its sweet wild flavor as if it contained special strengths. The strip of birch bark had curled back on itself and peeled away from one of the trees along the shore of the pond. Holding it in her fingers, Virginia studied the tender fawn color of the underside, the papery whiteness of the surface.
Impulsively she spread it flat on a rock, pulled a pencil stub from her pocket and scribbled a letter to the air: Who am I. Lifting her arm, she tossed the letter skyward.
John finished the job of uprooting the beauty bush in a burst of angry energy. With gritty fury he spaded the rocks and sand back into the hole, trampled them down, covered them with topsoil, bounced the wheelbarrow over the lawn, filled it with compost, bounced it back, dumped the compost into the hole, stirred it into the topsoil with the fork, trampled the dirt with his feet again, and topped the edges with the clumps of forked-out turf. Then with elaborate care he finished the job and fetched the hose. Only when the sprinkler was turning lazily over his new grass seed was the job done. John gathered up his tools, trundled them up the hill in the wheelbarrow and put everything away. Then in the privacy of the shed he wept three dry sobs, choked them off, and stalked up the hill, looking for Virginia.
Not that he had anything to say to her. Anything to say at all.
Where was she? Crawling between the bars of the gate, John walked across the field and circled the pond. He didn’t find Virginia, but he came upon a scrap of birch bark on a bed of Quaker ladies, and he picked it up and carried it home.
Twenty-Nine
IT WAS VIRGINIA’S JOB TO RUN THE LITTLE ELECTRIC LAWNMOWER around the edges of the front lawn before John worked over the rest with the big power mower. The cable was heavy. Lugging it from the shed, Virginia attached one end to the lawnmower, picked up the other end, and opened the lid of the outdoor socket. Then she stopped, and stared at the socket. There were two earwigs in it. Exposed to the light, they dove into the plug holes. Their tail pincers stuck out, waving at Virginia. Should she plug in the cable and fry the earwigs?
John came thundering up with the power mower. He turned down the machine to an idling throb and looked at her mournfully.
Virginia wanted to say something kind, but instead she said, “Look at this. What shall I do?”
John put his head down solemnly and gazed at the earwigs in the socket. Then he turned it over and dumped them into his hand. “For my spiders,” he murmured, and went away.
Virginia plugged in the cable. Then she gave a little shriek of surprise. Someone was standing at her elbow. “Oh,” said Virginia. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”
It was the girl from the church. Her car was in the driveway, a cunning little sports car, fire-engine red. “Here I am. I told
you I was coming. In person! Cherry Peaches Schermerhorn always keeps her promises.”
It wasn’t fair, thought Virginia, opening the kitchen door. This combination of chubby childishness and sexual bullying wasn’t fair. The girl looked like a baby, with her plump cheeks, her long lashes, her orange hair boiling in fuzzy ringlets out of her scalp. But beneath her sleeveless orange jersey succulent bosoms swelled like Barbara’s pumpkins expanding in the July heat. Radiance sprayed in all directions, filling the kitchen, rebounding off the wall.
They sat at the table. Virginia kept her eyes on the comforting sight of John as he moved erratically around the edges of the lawn with the electric lawnmower. “You’re the Sunday school superintendent, aren’t you?” said Virginia.
The girl laughed merrily. “Oh, we don’t call it Sunday school any more. Wholeness Seminars for Youth, that’s what we call it now. I’m the juvenile coordinator for young adults. You’re Virginia, aren’t you?” Rapturously Cherry Peaches swung in her chair, raising her arms over her head to shove her hands deep into the thick tumble of her hair. Her unfettered breasts obeyed Newton’s laws of motion. Waves of radiance shimmered and wobbled on the ceiling. “Oh, I’m so excited about my idea. I’ve hardly been able to hold my horses. It’s this retreat. Remember? I told you when I was here with Arthur.”
“Arthur?”
“You know. My boss, the minister of the Second Parish. I mean, it’s just so great to work with somebody who has the same parameters, the same visions for, you know, man and womankind, the whole world! And he’s Scorpio too! Isn’t that the most fabulous …? Say, you know what, I’ll bet you are too. I can always tell. Go ahead, admit it,” giggled Cherry Peaches. “I know a fellow Scorpio when I see one.”