All the Little Live Things (6 page)

I coughed, and he twisted around. With his tangled mane and beard, he looked like some ridiculous lion out of a bestiary. And he was good and startled, as startled as I had been when we came upon him sitting his stealthy motorcycle under the bay tree. He grabbed a limb and glared, breathing steam.

“What goes on?” I said.

Peck rose until he stood crouching, one hand braced against the limb over his head, the other holding the hammer. I half expected him to heave it at me like a tomahawk, but all he did, finally, was make a little deprecatory gesture with it. He smiled. His voice was soft. “Little... treehouse,” he said.

Looking up at this Tarzan, this fabricator, this retarded adolescent living a Swiss-Family-Robinson fantasy, I was full of conflicting emotions. Was I irritated simply because he had gone ahead and started something else without asking permission? Was it only an authoritarian insistence on being begged, an unpleasant property-owner desire to stoop grandly and confer favors, that made me angry at him? I was pretty sure he would have thought so, and I was ready to admit that there was some of that in my feelings. And yet wasn’t I more exasperated at his refusal to acknowledge his
obligation
to ask? Manners, if not ordinary openness of motive, might have dictated at least a telephone call. Is it O.K. if? Do I mind if? I accused his type, as much as him personally. They took, they challenged, they acknowledged nothing.

It struck me, during our half minute of silent staring at one another, that I hadn’t the slightest notion of what he might be thinking. What went on behind the beard and the dangling grin? What expression was that in his vigilant, feral eyes? Did I imagine our intractable antagonism, or was I only responding, stiffly and wrongly, to my finished but unresolved quarrel with Curtis? Certainly I could make no real case against the treehouse. The oak would carry it as easily as it would carry a jay-bird’s nest. It would be out of reach, almost out of sight. Why should I care? Why should I feel that stiff censorious knotting in my bowels?

“What do you need a treehouse for, meditation?”

The upward eyebrow. He had regained his watchful cool. “Sleep.”

“Too noisy in the tent?”

He was not one to respond to the jocular tone—not from me. He didn’t even bother to reply, but stood smiling his fixed smile down at me, the interrupted hammer hanging in his hand, waiting for me to go away. He didn’t say, as almost anyone in his position would have said, “Come on over and take a look.” Why not? Something in him, or something in me? Or something that hardened like cooling glass between us whenever we met? Well, since I was the unwilling landlord, I would go over without an invitation. But when I set my foot on the treads of the bridge and took hold of the cable handrail, the whole think slewed sideways and threw me off balance, and I lay along the cable for a second before I could straighten up and step off. I looked up into Peck’s happy grin. Uh-huh, it said. Walk on over, why not.

Ruth would have said I asked for it, going down there to spy on what he was doing. But I did not think I was going to abdicate control of my own property just because Peck made himself difficult to reach. Furthermore, he had not grubbed out the poison oak from any part of the bottoms except the flat where he had chosen to build. Scraping my shoes clean against his bridge post, using the diversion to take hold of my temper, I said I had come down to ask when he was going to get at the poison oak. It should be grubbed out in the winter, so that the new sproutings could be sprayed in the spring.

Well, that, he said from his tree. It didn’t appear that he was going to be able to do that, after all.

Why not? That was part of the bargain.

Yes, well, at that time he had thought he was immune. But when he cleared out the flat he had got such a dose he had spent a week in the infirmary taking cortisone shots.

I could have laughed out loud. He gladdened my soul, that arrogant young poop. Trying to treat poison oak the way he treated people, he had found that poison oak insisted on its integrity.

“You’ll have it again,” I said. “That stuff will be up all around you again in a couple of months.”

He said that when it came up he intended to spray it.

Fine, I said. When he sprayed his he could spray mine too.

The noise of the rain-born creek flushed away between us. It was cold and damp down there in the bottoms. Vapor was congealed on the hairs of Peck’s beard. His eyebrow went up, his smile widened, his nod was almost a bow. I lifted my hand and turned away. As I walked the muddy path back to the gate, the sound of hammering resumed behind me, and I doubt that either Peck or I could have said whether its beat was triumphant because he had put me down, or irritable because he had had to give in.

The hammering went on for several days. From the lane we saw a birdhouse taking shape in the leafage of the oak, a tiny irregular building perhaps seven by nine feet, with a steep roof that shortly became more visible in a coat of red asphalt shingles. The whole thing was crooked and misproportioned. Ruth thought it charming. “It’s like Hänsel and Gretel,” she said. “It ought to have a crooked stovepipe with a cap. And look, he’s got it oriented so the porch and doorway face east. Is that to face Mecca, or something, do you suppose, or just to get the morning sun? And look at that ladder, like an elf ladder leaned against a mushroom!”

“Curb your fairy-story imagination,” I said. “That’s no elf, that’s an oaf.”

Elf or oaf, nudge from the past, discomfort from an unhealed wound—and yes, prick of conscience, reminder of failure—Peck could not spoil the pleasure we, took in mere weather, simple spring. Wet January passed into a warm and sunny February over which blew brief fresh showers. Spider webs at sunrise glittered, the birds were wild. We spent most of our time outdoors, just looking and learning.

It felt like renewal, and yet it was not the beginning of renewal, as in colder climates, but an advanced stage. Renewal had begun way back in November, with the first rain. In February we were already knee-deep in grass and flowers, and growers around us were cutting the mimosa branches that in New York and Boston would bring an irresistible foretaste of spring, at two dollars a branch, to people still trapped in slush and soot and black ice.

After a couple of cautious weeks, when I was convinced winter had gone for good, I planted carrot and lettuce seed.

Promptly on February first the almond trees had broken into blossom. Promptly on the fifteenth the first daffodils popped their buds. By Washington’s Birthday the wild mustard was head-high in Sam Shields’s pasture, and our daphne odora and clematis drugged us with sweetness when we went in or out the front door. In the woods along our hill the ferns were a lush chemical green. Above them the buckeyes spread tentative fingers of leaf more delicate than anything we had seen since the spring beechwoods of Denmark.

I set out tomato plants.

We walked a great deal, mostly on the roads and on our own lane, where the smell of mold was rich and woodsy. At the foot of our hill there was one stretch from which we had a nearly unobstructed view of the bay tree, Peck’s bridge, and the tent, and above them in the oak the triangular gable of the treehouse. Peck had moved in, or upstairs; and obviously he had bought or borrowed another gasoline lantern, for at night a bright light swayed and stretched among the black shadows of the limbs, while down below the tent glowed amber.

One morning when we came along below the gate the sun was pouring in through the branches against the treehouse gable, lighting the little porch like a spotlight. As we walked along, turning our heads to look, a girl in a black leotard stooped out the doorway into the sun. She was laughing back over her shoulder, and she was bare to the waist. Outside she expanded opulent breasts in the sunshine, throwing back her head to let long dark hair shake down her back. Then her eyes left the morning and found us, and in one motion she closed her arms across herself and ducked back inside.

We had not even stopped walking: the whole vision lasted only while we took a half-dozen steps. “Oh my goodness!” Ruth said, half laughing.

I had perhaps enjoyed the vision more than she had, but I probably resented it more, too. I said, “Well, what is our official position on hamadryads?”

“Oh, dear, I don’t know!” But then she rallied a little, and said, “Well, we let him camp there, and we didn’t say he couldn’t have his friends in.”

“Friends,” I said.

“I certainly hope so,” Ruth said. Then she burst out, jarred out of her habitual whisper, “Good Lord, can you imagine how that rockaby-baby bower would seem to a romantic-minded girl? He can probably have them lining up, if he wants to.”

“O.K.,” I said. “It’s romantic. Just the same we have to make up our minds how much we’re willing to sponsor.”

“Do we have to sponsor it?” Ruth said. “I agree, I don’t like to see young people as promiscuous as they seem to be these days, but is that our business, any more than if we had rented Peck a place? Don’t we have to assume it’s his own business how he runs his life?”

“So we ignore it,” I said. “And he’ll know we’re ignoring it. She’ll tell him—she’s already told him—she saw us, and we saw her. So he’ll know. And he’ll think we’re either approving his high jinks, or afraid to squawk.”

Troubled, she looked at me in silence, and we walked on, and that’s the way it was left between us, exactly as it was left between us and Peck: nullified by silence. I suspect that Ruth had some hope it was a real love affair, and I think she watched as we walked past, to see if the girl would appear again. She never did, not that one. Either we scared her off for good, appearing just when she was embracing the pagan wilderness, or it wasn’t as romantic as Ruth imagined it. If you believe their novels, romance is not a thing that Peck’s generation specializes in. In their books, and perhaps in their lives too, love is about as romantic as a five-minute car wash.

I put him out of my mind, for to tell the truth his amours were less interesting to me than those of the lizards, which began on these warm days to emerge onto the bricks and do their attention-getting pushups and chase their lady friends wildly across the patio and under the junipers. And there were other aspects of spring as notable as the amatory play of Peck, the lizards, and the birds—the sorts of reminders that I seem never able to ignore or forget, and that I catch myself reading as somber parables.

Often, putting our noses outside to sniff the fresh beginnings of day, we poked them into the affairs of the nocturnals, and sometimes these were corroborative of life, as when we looked out and saw deer standing on their hind legs to browse the high toyon berries below the terrace, or caught sight of a raccoon’s tail just sliding out of sight into the brush, and sometimes they were not. I remember, for instance, out of the pictures of that spring, the morning I saw Catarrh doing a murderer’s dance with a mouse.

It was a long-tailed white-footed mouse, one of the pretty kind. Catarrh dribbled it the length of the patio, fifty feet or more, feinting and changing paws. When he lost interest and turned away, the mouse tried painfully to fumble itself out of bounds. Just in time the cat woke up, scooped it inbounds from the fringe of junipers, tried a hook shot over his shoulder, got the rebound, dribbled around in a circle, grew bored, walked away, returned, prodded the mouse into movement, dribbled it some more. After quite a while the mouse had lost all its bounce and simply lay there. When Catarrh saw that it was going to provide him no more exercise, he lay down in the misty morning light that was like the dawn of creation, and ate it, head first.

He was not long about his meal, and there was nothing left over for door-mat art. From the bathroom window where I stood watching, I saw him give one last gulping swallow, and the tip of the mouse’s tail disappeared like the tail of our resident raccoon, sliding home at sunrise.

I
N JACKSON HOLE there is a Catholic church, named Our Lady of the Grand Tetons by somebody who didn’t know what tetons are. If we had a Catholic church here (we don’t, it would be zoned out of this bedroom town) it would also have to be called Our Lady of the Grand Tetons. A real dumpling of a girl, a Boule de suif, our local Earth Mother, and her clefts are dark with oak and bay and buckeye, gooseberry and wild rose, and-appropriately-maidenhair, and-perhaps not inappropriately-poison oak.

No outsider comes to our town for anything, unless to bring children to one of our three riding stables, or to make love and toss beer cans on our dark lanes, or to dump garbage by our roadsides. Progress waits on water mains, because the strata under us are broken and disjointed and wells are uncertain. The reason the strata are all scrambled is that we are in the zone of the San Andreas fault. Right beside Mother Earth, in the same bed, lies Father Earthquake.

In a cross-eyed sort of way I have been comforted by the thought of that crack under the smiling hills: the devil’s in his diocese, all’s right with the world. The lady who, more than a half century ago, was my Sunday-school teacher tried to teach me that the world was created innocent, and that evil sneaked in, but even then, at eight or nine, I was a Manichee and thought her more innocent than the garden she had faith in. Evil lay underground in Paradise before life ever appeared. It was part of the mud life was made with. It awoke the moment life awoke, like a shadow that leaps up rods long when a man stands up at sunrise. Though we may not like it, we had better not forget it.

Where you find the greatest Good, there you will also find the greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for
Clematis armandi
makes a lovely home for leaf hoppers. A place where Joe Allston hopes to enjoy his retirement turns out to be Tom Weld’s ancestral acres and a place attractive to Caliban.

And look: here in authentic Eden, where plants grow the way fire goes up a fuse, you can’t turn your back for two days without having the place taken over by things that wither or curl or frazzle the leaf, things that feed on the hearts of roses, things like mildews and thrips and red spiders and white flies and mealy bugs and borers, the blights and the rusts and the smuts, the bindweed that in the hours of my innocence, east of Eden, I used to call morning-glory, the wild cucumber that strangles half an acre in its octopus tentacles, the poison oak that is already bursting out in flourishing patches where six months ago I grubbed it up to make a walk or a hedge—yea, and the things like the moles and the voles and the meadow mice, and most of all the gophers, that in spring work inward from Shields’s pasture, marking their invasion route by tailings of loose dirt kicked out of lateral holes, and when all else is brown arrive to set tooth to the succulent roots of the plants we have thoughtfully kept green for them.