All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  But beatitude too. You don’t know yet, probably, how it is when the wind finally quits in May and the late spring comes on. Lyrical is the word. Dawns with choirs of meadow larks; noons celebrated by our mockingbird friends, afternoons that go down in veils of blue to the sweet sad Tennysonian intonings of mourning doves. The fields turn gold, the trees throw purple shadows down the hills, deer begin to jump the fences and go down to water at Weld’s pump house. We took all that in, and nearly forgot Weld. Even the horses were beautiful when the girls who owned them came out and rode them in the evenings. They used to canter around the knoll over there like the horses of heroes in the Welsh and Irish ancient books—you know, the steeds that in their prancing threw into the air from each separate hoof a proud divot of turf.

  The only excitement we had in several weeks was one night when I rescued a young opossum from Weld’s dog, which had treed him in the carport. The possum was a real gentleman. He played dead while I drove the dog off, and still played dead when I reached him out of the rafters with a glove, and never cracked an eye while I looked him over. A possum looks like something left over from the Ordovician, and I was curious to see his marsupial pouch, but this one, being a gentleman, didn’t have one. There he lay, though, as if chloroformed, and let me look. Finally I carried him out and put him on the low branch of an oak.

  It was a night of white moonlight. The mockingbirds were making an unbelievable racket, piping like bosuns, squawking like jays. The oat grass had turned into cloth of silver, the shadows were velvet. I stood watching and listening for a long time before the possum moved. Then he lifted his snout and crept away along the mottled moonlight of the limb, and I went back inside and reported to Ruth that this backward little creature had restored my faith in the Earthly Paradise. He proved to me it was possible to get along with anybody if you would only make yourself harmless.

  So what does she say? She whispers from her disturbed midnight bed and asks me how well the possum’s meekness was working with Weld’s dog when I intervened. All winter she preaches me sweet reasonableness, which is not my natural move, and then the minute I show signs of conversion she reminds me of the unappeasable aggressor.

  3

  Somewhere about that point I stopped. I was getting tired of my own prose, and a little uneasy about the figure I cut in my own story. Piling it on, making old cretinous good-natured Weld into something more than the mere irritation he was, sounded uncomfortably like Joe Allston justifying himself at the expense of the neighbors. So I stopped.

  They were both still smiling at me, waiting. “Yes?” Marian said. “That isn’t all, is it?”

  “Don’t miss tomorrow’s exciting episode.”

  “But what happened? Is the dog still around? Have you still got horses in your flower beds? Haven’t you ever worked it out and got to be friends again?”

  “The dog is in the happy hunting grounds,” I said. “He was scavenging a run-over rabbit in the road and a truck got him. The horses went last July when the kid set the pasture afire and burned up all the feed.”

  “So now there’s nothing to fight about and you’re all reconciled.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Look at that eyesore over there, for instance.” Ruth caught my eye pleasantly. “And the bridge,” I said. “Shall I strike the body just once more?”

  “Why not let it go,” Ruth said.

  “Just once,” I said, for I found that I did want to justify myself to these people. I wanted it to be clear I was much put-upon, not merely cantankerous. “Of course Weld isn’t home when his boy sets the grass afire,” I said. “I went over with a shovel and tried to fight it, but it chased me up the hill with my shirttails smoking, and while I was up in the plowed orchard getting my breath, I saw the fire truck come out the county road and in our lane and stop at the bridge. Wouldn’t trust the bridge to hold them. Eventually another truck came through the fences over the hill and put things out. But consequences, see? If the fire had swept the neighborhood, he’d never have comprehended that his refusal to fence his pasture had anything to do with it. He’d have blamed the fire department. He never has the right answer. If they had him up on the charge of fatherhood he’d say, ‘Me? I never done one thing but sleep with my wife.’ ”

  “But if you’d followed your impulse and offered to pay half the fence, maybe the bridge would be solid and we’d all be as happy as clams,” Marian said. “Don’t you sort of wish you had?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d look terrible with my nose that far out of joint.”

  The beagles break out again, and this time when I stand up to look, I do see the shotgun couple coming. The Catlins are making moves to leave. Quick, speed the parting guest, even though giving her a glimpse of that systematized slaughter would probably persuade her that I have not done Weld an injustice. It will be ten minutes or so before the shooting starts. Smile, rise, adjourn.

  At the corner John Catlin slides his arm around his wife, not playfully but with a grave sort of protective-ness pleasant to see. As we walk around the house between the rose garden and the border of iris, I pause by a rosebush and examine its tip leaves. Just as I thought, a fat cluster of aphids. I tip the branch to show Marian. “This is one I’ll send to you when it blooms,” I say. “You like your roses with holes in them.”

  “Absolutely natural,” she says stoutly.

  She would rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in my grace.

  I start on again, but Ruth, proud gardener, leads the way along the bank that slopes up to Shields’s pasture, obviously bent upon giving us what in Jane Austen novels is called a stroll in the shrubbery. I have had a curving asphalt path put in up there to keep us out of the mud. Now as the Catlins follow her single file, with me bringing up the rear, I see Marian squirm loose from John’s hand and drop to her knees. Instantly he is bending over her. But she has not slipped, she has only seen something in the path. Her upturned face is that of an overacting child. “Oh, get a pick or something! Here’s something I have to show Mr. Allston. I saw one just like it the other day.”

  At her feet the asphalt has been humped into three round hillocks almost as big as grapefruit. The dome of the biggest has cracked partly open. Gophers? Moles? I hope their fingers are sore from trying to tunnel through those four or five inches of steam-rollered asphalt. And I would rather ignore them now, and get the Catlins started home before the shooting. But I have no choice. I go down to the garage and get the pick, and Catlin takes it from me and digs out the biggest hump. You know what is down there, just about ready to force itself through all that macadam? A mushroom. A dinky mushroom the size of my thumb and as soft as cheese.

  Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. Her voice escapes her and goes fluty and shrill. She cries, “Now, you see? You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Don’t you know now? The same thing that’s in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under, or grub out, or poison. There isn’t good life and bad life, there’s only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born!”

  I have a moment’s fear that she may break into tears. My mind tells me, softly, softly, while Ruth throws me an unnecessary tuck of the eyebrows and Catlin watches his wife with a concentrated alertness before he hides his mouth behind the lighting of a cigarette. But since I have been addressed in my capacity of Exterminator, I have to say something. Being a phunny phellow, I blink and sing:Oh de farmer took de mushroom

  And paved him underground.

  De mushroom say, “I’ll be back up,

  Stick around, boy, stick around,

  Gonna be my home,

  Gonna be my home.”

  “Aha,” Marian says. “I think you’re licked.”

  “I’m licked.” Privately, I am also relieved that the hysterical edge has faded from her face and voice. She is obviously tuned up ready to snap. It is as
tonishing, considering that she is both thin and pale, how she manages to give all the time the impression of vivid life.

  Vividness is the last impression I have of her, for as they reach the bend of the drive they are silhouetted for a second or two against the greening apricot orchard beyond the fence. The afternoon light is full on them. The healthy responsible attentive New England face lifts, smiling; the thin one flashes like a turned mirror; then they are out of sight below the turn. A sort of thunderous silence remains behind them, cracked at its far edge by the clamor of the dogs on Weld’s hill.

  I turn and find my sardonic wife regarding me with an odd peering expression which changes at once into her skeptical-ironical one. I suppose I am responsible for Ruth’s attitudes. She complains that her mind is shaped like a jai alai cesta from catching me and hurling me back when I come bursting out at her. Now, because I have been moved by that skinless young woman, I say rather crossly, “What’s the matter, have I got a hole in my pants, or something?”

  “Your doglike devotion was showing.”

  “Let it show. I like them. I think he’s interesting and I think she’s charming.”

  “She’s enchanting,” Ruth said. “And a little foolish. And sad ”

  “Sad, why?”

  “She obviously isn’t well.”

  “Then what’s the joke?”

  “You are, ducky,” Ruth says with her abstracted, bothered air. “You tickle me.” But it is clear I don’t. She hooks her arm in mine and walks me toward the house, and after a few steps she squeezes me around the waist and says, “You should have had six beautiful daughters.”

  Since this comes close to what I have been thinking myself, I let it pass. I only say, “I suppose you’re going to eat me out for bending her ear about Weld and arguing with her about the sacredness of life.”

  Ruth looks up from examining the buds on the dwarf orange tree against the garage wall. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Known what?”

  “I don’t suppose you noticed she’s pregnant ”

  “No,” I say. “If she is. How do you know?”

  “How does anybody know anything? She told me.”

  “Well,” I say, “don’t act as if you got it by female intuition, then. It isn’t something she’d likely confide to me. How far along?”

  “Just barely. A couple of months, maybe.”

  “Well, fine,” I say. “Distributing her seeds. It couldn’t happen to anyone who’d appreciate it more. But I can’t say it seems to agree with her. I thought pregnant girls were supposed to go around blinking and placid and dreaming warm dreams and smelling of milk.”

  For a second Ruth looks as if she were going to be annoyed. She stands holding her hair away from her temple with the back of her hand. The meadow lark over in the pasture sets himself for some late-afternoon song with a whistle or two, clearing his pipes. “Ah,” Ruth says, “that’s where it could be sad. She’s had an operation. Didn’t you notice how she moved her left arm as if it were stiff, or even a little crippled? They took the breast on that side and all up into her armpit, all the little lymph nodes.”

  The shadow of the house has reached across the lily pool and halfway up the garage wall. Ruth’s face is in the shade. I think of that girl, who is like a patch of sun-and-shadow woods, and of the obscene tendrils that have crawled through her, and of the withering that has already gone on. “But good God,” I say, “she’s so young.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has it recurred? Is that why she looks peaked?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She’d have told me, I think. She’s very open about it.”

  The meadow lark has a different pattern from either the mockingbird or Browning’s thrush. He sings neither doublets nor improvisations, but like a child going through a series of set pieces he sings one tune eight or ten times, switches to another for a while, switches to a third. I am aware of his mechanical rhapsodies almost with irritation, and of the continued uproar of the beagles from the other side of the house. Then the air whistles with wings, and a pigeon flashes over us, silvery in the sun, and circles and comes back. I see the purplish breast feathers, I hear the wing tips beating together. A second afterward, I hear the boom of the shotgun and the redoubled cracking clamor of the dogs.

  Ruth and I stand looking at one another. A silent understanding passes between us. After sixty you are aware how vulnerable everything is, including yourself, but even after sixty you may need an occasional reminder. And though I am glad the Catlins got out before she had to go through the distress of the pigeon shooting, I am remorseful at the discomfort my big mouth must have caused her.

  “Christ, I’ve got a gift,” I say. “Why didn’t you shut me up?”

  “Shut you up?” Ruth says. “How?”

  But her tartness is only habit. Going inside—for find that I want to go in, I don’t want to stay out and hear the boom of those shotguns or the excitement of the dogs as they quarter through the grass hunting the fallen birds—Ruth takes my arm again. Recalling that gesture, I understand it with every nerve in my body. I know what she meant to say to me.

  We were once more exposed, and we were even more dependent on each other than we were when all our acquaintance was new, casual, and undemanding. Paradise, so late our happy seat, was lost, and lost not through any of the people I felt like casting in the snake’s role, but through one to whom our hearts instantly went out. It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to comprehend it then, and I have not repudiated it now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death—the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant. Otherwise it is what Marian pretended to think it was, a simple interchange of protein.

  III

  I BEGAN THIS rumination in the mood of an old-fashioned Christian who opens the Bible at random, hungry for a text. Because I could not reconcile myself to the way life cheated one who so loved being alive, I wanted to talk to her and about her, quietly. I see that I have been talking at least as much about Joseph Allston and how life has cheated him, who only wanted to retire and tend his garden.

  Mischance is a collaboration, I have told myself; evil is everywhere and in all of us. Yet I am steadily tempted to poke around the garden looking for the snake. Sooner or later I shall find myself going (coming?) down my hole after myself. I do not forget the ambiguous serpent I dug out of the ground last summer, though I cannot make him fit any easy pattern of moral meaning.

  None of us, surely, is harmless, whatever our private fantasies uige us to believe. Whatever any of us may have wanted in retiring to these hills, we have not escaped one another. The single-minded rancher anxious to capitalize on his remaining land, the Italian native son with the invalid wife and the sullen daughter and the narcotic adobe bricks, the threatened young woman desperate for continuity, the kook who lived in the birdhouse and this kook who lives at the top of the hill—whatever we wanted, we stumbled into community, with its consequences. And at the heart of our community was the Catlin cottage.

  It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland. Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock. To me it had an underwater look-that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light. It wasn’t air you looked at in that pocket. It was an infusion of green and brown plants, it seemed always to have a faint murkiness of sediment sinking through it. The small hollylike oak leaves lay thinly on the ground, as unstirred as settlings on a sea bottom, and all through the spring and summer oak moths flickered and wavered among the trees. You half expected mermaids to scatter in clouds of bubbles from the picnic grove that Thomas had cleared down along the creek.

  The moment we met Marian Catlin, we knew that this was her sort of place. Until we met her, we had thought it shabby. For six months or so, while the Thomases lived there, we had driven past with no more than a nod or a wave, and had ne
ver been inside the house or sat in the grove. Once the Catlins moved in, we were in and out of the house almost daily, and the grove became a place as familiar as our own terrace.

  I find it hard to reconstruct how that intimacy happened. One day we had never heard of them, days later we were close friends. All our lives Ruth and I have tended to protect ourselves from people and cherish our privacy, and we have been more likely to reject individuals peremptorily—the way I suppose I rejected Peck—than to like them on sight. But we caught Marian’s affectionateness as if it had been a communicable disease: she was the Typhoid Mary of love. We have never had the kissing habit, knowing how little it usually means, but the Catlins we kissed on greeting and parting as if they had been our children. Which, by a sort of spontaneous mutual adoption, they were. For Debby, at Marian’s request and by the terms of her will, we are now legally responsible in case anything happens to John.

  We are a frail enough last resort, but our willingness gave Marian comfort, for she was anxious about the child and afraid of her aloneness in the world. John had no relatives closer than a brother whose State Department assignments kept him always in some Arab state or other. Marian’s parents had been killed in an automobile accident when she was five, and she had been brought up by a grandmother with a pin in her hip, who took as much care as she could give, but who did give her an intense and sentimental love. Marian wanted at least that much for Debby. More, actually, much more. That was why she passionately and mystically bent herself to produce flower and fruit and create her a brother or sister. If she had a religion, it was biological.

  The day after the Catlins’ first visit, we passed down by the mailboxes a girl who had to be Debby—six or so, her hair pulled back in a pony tail from her thin wedge of a face, her eyes lost behind owlish little-girl glasses. Our waves got only a turning stare. Looking back as we crossed the bridge, I saw her moping along the lane touching mustard flowers with her fingers. “Moving is hard on children,” Ruth said.