All the Little Live Things Page 6
She is laying it down, she really believes in this. But at the same time she has a serene, promising, transparent look as if, just as soon as this little cloud passes, she will bloom out again in sun. I say to her, and I am being neither scornful nor contentious, “You like little live things.”
“You have no idea how accurate you are,” her husband says. “I’ve given up fishing because she can’t bear to think of the worms.”
“Well,” she says, “how would you like an old hook clear through you lengthways?”
There seems no answer to that one. I suggest that we repair to the terrace and have a drink and I will introduce them to some birds who are also fond of worms. As we walk through the kitchen patio, young Catlin says, half joking, half fond, the way he might speak to a kid sister he adored, “All right, get it over. Tell’m about your foxes.”
“Laugh!” she says. “But you didn’t see them!” Almost as if dancing, she swings from Ruth to me, back to Ruth. “Did you know we had foxes?”
I am tempted to tell her about the fox with the strangulated hemorrhoids, but she is a little new for that. I say only, “We’ve seen a few on the road at night.”
“I saw two,” she says. “Last night. Honestly, I never had such a nice thing happen to me. I’d just put Debby to bed and was sitting by the window resting and wondering what sort of drapes to get, and there was this little scratching noise, and a fox came right up on the slab outside. He wasn’t five feet from me, on the other side of the glass, with the light shining on him. I guess he couldn’t see me because of it, or maybe he thought I belonged. I hope he thought I belonged, because he was the cleanest, sleekest, loveliest thing....”
I suspect that I have much the same feeling, watching her, that she had watching the fox. I feel that I should move quietly, if at all. I find myself preposterously holding my breath. Then she sees us all intent on her, and her cheeks get pink. She flops into a patio chair with one foot under her, and laughs, flashing her eyes upward in an amused, challenging way.
“I don’t care, he was beautiful. He looked right at me through the window like somebody shopping, and then he whined, I could hear him, and right away here came another one just as beautiful as he was. And you know what? They were in love. They kept nuzzling one another, and whining, and peeking in the window as if they thought it might make a good den inside if they could only find a way in. They must have been there three or four minutes, so close I could have leaned over and patted them. I could see every whisker on their chins. Now wasn’t that a lovely thing to happen on our first night out here?”
We agree that it was. In fact, the Catlins themselves seem a nice thing to have happened, a big improvement over Thomas. In a sneaky bid for favor, trying to solidify a friendship by tying a former neighbor to the whipping post, I tell them how old Thomas used to sit in his back patio on Sunday mornings, dressed in pink pajamas, and hold target practice on the towhees and quail with a .38 revolver.
Marian Catlin is suitably horrified. But then she slants her wide, strangely shaped eyes at me, and completely undiverted from her original disapproval, says, “But you shoot gophers.”
“You bet,” I have to say. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Who are you to say they haven’t got as much right to live as quail? They can’t help it if they’re not pretty, and can’t sing. All they’re doing is just innocently digging away and eating the roots they run into.”
“Did you ever look into a gopher’s beady eye?” I ask. “He knows he’s evil. He’s got guilt written all over him. Wait till one innocently eats up your begonias.”
“I haven’t got any begonias.”
“You will have.”
“Nope.”
“Carrots, then. Loganberries. Pole beans. Whatever you grow.”
“We’re not going to grow a thing,” she says happily. “We’re just going to let grow. While the house was vacant nearly everything dried up and died, and we’re going to leave it that way—let it go back to the things that grow here naturally. We aren’t going to tinker with nature one bit, we like it exactly as it is.”
“Poison oak and all?”
“It doesn’t poison me,” she says, as if she has pull with the management.
“The immune are bad witnesses,” I tell her. “I hope you’re immune to beggar’s-lice and cockleburs and needle grass and foxtails, too. I hope your nylons are immune to screw grass.”
“If I’m foolish enough to wear nylons in the country, I deserve to ruin them.”
“Barefoot, then. Have you got a dog?”
“We might get a pup for Debby—that’s our daughter.”
“Is she immune?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“So. Well anyway, if you get a pup, get one without ears or eyes or feet. Otherwise you’ll be taking him to the vet once a week, the way Fran LoPresti does her cocker, with foxtails in his tear ducts or his eardrums or the webs of his toes.”
Her eyes, I have finally determined, are shaped like some exotic sunglasses, turned upward at the outer corners, but they are wide, not narrow and heavy-lidded the way Oriental eyes are. And they are as blue as my mother’s were. She is watching me; the easy blush floods into her face. “Yes, but ...”
“Not even barefoot nature lovers can find anything nice to say of the foxtail,” I say.
“It’s only following its natural way to reproduce. If it sticks in your stocking or in a dog’s ear, it’s only distributing its seeds.”
John Catlin, who has been following the argument with a suspended half-smile, says to me, but with his eyes on her, “And if it’s distributing its seeds, don’t try to tell Marian it isn’t O.K.”
But by now I am beginning to rev up, because so far as I can see this girl seriously means the ridiculous things she is saying. I ignore the storm warnings that my good wife is beginning to fly, and I refill Catlin’s glass and my own, and I bring up my strategic bombing command and prepare to plaster her off the map.
“You like nature as she is,” I say. “Let me ask you. A gopher is nature, right?”
“Right. Just as much as any...”
“So it’s O.K. if he eats my tomatoes. He’s following his natural instincts. Is the tick on a gopher nature?”
“Sure.” She is smiling, blushing, amusedly at bay, prepared to fight to the last man.
“So it’s all right if the tick eats the gopher’s blood. Is the germ on a tick nature?”
“Well ... Yes, of course.”
“So if the germ on the tick on the gopher happens to get off the tick and onto you and gives you spotted fever, you should fold your hands like the suffering Arab and say, ‘God is kind’?”
“I wouldn’t like spotted fever, no.”
“It’s only nature,” I say with my district-attorney smile. “It’s only those little germs distributing their seeds. From their point of view, which you seem to suggest is as good as yours, you’re only a swamp where they have squatter’s rights.”
The girl says stubbornly, “You can become immune to germs just the way you can to poison oak.”
“Some can. How much do you envy the people you know who became immune to polio the hard way?”
Catlin looks at me pleasantly, sipping his drink. I have the distinct impression that he wishes, in a friendly way, that I would shut my mouth. But good Lord, what this charming idiotic woman is saying! She wants to restore natural balances that have been disturbed ever since some Cro-Magnon accidentally boiled his drinking water. The Jains who go at night to break down the pest-control ditches, and build little bridges so that the locusts can get across onto their fields, are her appropriate playmates. Though for the moment I seem to have silenced her, I have certainly not put her convictions out of action. They are down there in the cellars and bomb shelters and among the rubble, and as soon as I drone away they will come out and go about their business as before.
“Isn’t it lovely how violet the deciduous oaks look when everything is green around them?”
Ruth says.
If she wants to pretend that the conversation has now exhausted its present topic and will turn to others, she is whistling in a wind tunnel. I fix Marian Catlin with my wise old eye, and don my curmudgeon look, which says that though I speak brusquely my heart is as mushy as a papaya, and I say, “My dear child, it’s one thing to be fond of little live things—who isn’t?—but you can’t simply ignore the struggle for existence. There are good kinds of life and bad kinds of life....”
“Bad is what conflicts with your interest,” she says. This is more acute than I expected from her, and I grant her the touch.
“Yes, why not? We’ve become a weed species, we exterminate or domesticate species that threaten us, but we didn’t invent the process. Every kind of life you can think of is under attack by some other kind.”
“Of course,” she says. “Everything’s part of some food chain. But that doesn’t mean we have the right to ...”
“Even porcupines,” I say, riding over her. “Even porcupines seem to have been invented just to feed fisher-cats. Is it news that nature is red with tooth and claw? The gopher I shot back there was crawling with fleas and ticks, and he probably had tapeworm—at least our cat gets tapeworm from something he catches. If he knew how, don’t you suppose that gopher would eliminate all his pests and parasites so he could live happily ever after in my tomato patch? Do you think we could live here ourselves without fighting pests every day of the week?”
“Not if you want to live in a botanical garden.”
Ruth’s eyebrows are pulled clear up into the white widow’s peak of her hair. Young Catlin yawns and stretches, squints at the view of Weld’s shitepoke pigeon house and Tobacco-Road dog run across the gully, sips his drink, looks at me with a pleasant opaque expression. But I have to strike one more blow for sanity before quitting this silly debate.
“Look,” I say. “Do you really like the woods and pastures as kind old Mother Nature designed them? Once they start distributing their seeds, which they will about May, you can’t walk through them. The woods are choked with poison oak and wild-cucumber vines till they aren’t fit for a rabbit to run in. And did you ever dig underground in these parts? It’s underground that you really meet the evils. Ever examine the roots of poison oak? They’re dead black, with red underbark, and if you cut one with a shovel or an ax it squirts out juice that will put you in bed for a week. Or these wild cucumbers. I dug one up once, just to see where all that vile vitality comes from that can sprout these tentacles twenty feet long. You know what’s down there? A big tumor sort of thing as big as a bucket, an underground cancer. I very much doubt that any of these things are the friends of man.”
As usual when I get high on my own persuasive powers, I think I am making quite a case, but when I glance at Marian Catlin I don’t see any sign of conviction. She wears a delicate flinching expression as if she were forcing herself to look steadily at something ugly, or as if I am being embarrassing and she wishes for my own sake I would stop. Her husband stretches his legs abruptly. In a moment he will propose going home. And my good wife, who has been doing everything but kick my shins for five minutes, serves up at the conversational bar one of her patented dry murmurs, five-to-one with a twist of lemon peel. “Joe, lamb, you’re being carried away.”
“On my shield,” I say, and let it go.
So we must leave the foolish girl in her foolishness, with a smile but not without some residue of combativeness. I turn the conversation by asking Catlin what he does for a living. The answer may not explain the nature worship, but it’s consistent with it. He tells me he is an ethologist, which I understand to be halfway between an experimental psychologist and a veterinary. He came out here from Woods Hole last fall. His specialty is sea mammals—whales and porpoises and seals and such—and he spends a lot of time in the field. In the course of the conversation he tells me that a baby California gray whale grows a ton a month, a fact which, I feel sure, will agitate my mind on many a sleepless night. What in hell is in whale’s milk?
We discuss other interesting matters, such as the objection that geese have to incest, and the way birds are imprinted, almost immediately after hatching, on the first thing they see that moves or makes a noise. Apparently, you can make an unfortunate baby bird believe that almost anything is its mother—an alarm clock, a mechanical toy, anything. There is a duckling somewhere that yearns for Charles Collingwood, before whom he was hatched on television. Catlin is full of interesting lore, and the ladies are having their own intimate dialogue, and my argumentative bumptious-ness is passed over and forgotten.
Then a mockingbird swoops past, perches in the top of an oak below us, and sprays the whole hillside with song. He is in total disagreement with Browning’s wise thrush, who sings each song twice over. This one is mortally afraid of repeating himself, and he sings so loud and long, and leaps into the air every now and then with such wild somersaulting glee, that he forces us to stop talking, and with pleased acknowledging looks at one another, to listen.
For a moment I have an acute awareness of how we look, quiet on the terrace in the bird-riddled afternoon, with the breeze dropped to nothing, the leaves still, the haze beginning to spread amethyst and lavender and violet between the layers of the hills, the sun dappling the bricks like something especially sent down from above to soothe our mortal aches away. Marian Catlin’s face tells me that she has the same perception. This is the way she feels everything in her life—hungrily. Sensibility that skinless is close to being a curse.
I notice that her neck and face are thin; except when the easy blush comes on, she is pale. Her head is twisted sideward to hear, and against the strained cord of her throat a pulse is beating, a little hidden life. Her smile looks as if it pained her, and I swear her eyes are shiny with tears. I am ashamed of the way I hammered her down; it was like teasing an oversensitive child.
The mockingbird pours on, unquenchable. “Listen to him!” Marian cries, and because I have been caught in a kind of emotional nakedness I generally take pains to avoid, I cannot forbear to say, shaping the words nearly silently, “He does it on a diet of worms.”
Even so inert a witticism, reviving our argument but in a way to call it off, gets me what I hope for: a wrinkling of the nose, a widening of the flashing, white-toothed smile. Friends, then.
The mockingbird swoops away with a flirt of half-hidden white feathers. A hermit thrush, winter resident for some reason hanging around well after he should have gone north, hops onto the terrace and examines us with a large round eye. A signal passes from Catlin to his wife. To keep them a little longer, because by now I am being willingly dragged in chains from the chariot wheels of this girl, I ask him what ethological circles say about the mockingbird. Does he really mock other birds, or do his old folks teach him his repertory, or is it built into the egg?
Marian tips her head back with a gurgle, the hungry look dissolves in laughter. “Oh, tell him! Tell him about Hannes and then we have to go get Debby.”
So Catlin tells me about an Austrian friend who got a clutch of mockingbird eggs and incubated them in the dark and raised the young birds in total purdah to determine how they learned to sing. The only sounds they heard came from a tape recording of a man’s voice reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, stepped up in speed until it was nothing but a high twittering. Hannes found that his mockingbirds did indeed learn by imitating: pretty soon he couldn’t tell which was tape recorder and which was bird. But then his old scientific devil began to whisper to him, he started to cast covetous glances at the Unknowable. Like an ethological Faust, he dared too high. He taped one of his mockingbirds and then stepped the speed down to see if their encoded sound could be brought back to words. I see him bending, tight with suspense, above his speaker in some midnight soundproofed lab. The helpers have all gone, the whir of the electric clock is cut off by his pulling of the plug. The unmarked seconds drip away, there is a silent countdown. Hannes reaches out, his bony fingers turn a switch.
“See?” Marian says. “Original sin. He tried to tamper with nature.”
Just then the beagles across the gully, who have been unnaturally silent for an hour, erupt into a clamor. Still laughing, I stand up to see over the toyons, afraid I will see the owners in their padded corduroy-and-canvas shooting coats coming across the hill for their weekend sport with their shotguns over their arms. That would mean whisking the Catlins inside or around the house, because I doubt that Marian would enjoy watching this pair let pigeons loose and then gun them down for the dogs to retrieve. But there is no hunting couple in sight. Apparently, one of the dogs smelled something in his sleep and woke up yelling. That is the way the beagle mind works.
“Is it a kennel?” Marian asks. “Do they have pups for sale?”
“No,” I tell her. “Only Tom Weld’s latest way of making a dollar out of his pasture. His boy set it afire with a firecracker last Fourth of July, and burned off all the feed so he couldn’t rent it out to horses any more. Now he rents it to some dog-and-pigeon people. When the grass gets a little higher he’ll rent it for pasture again, without closing out the shooters, and before long one of them will shoot a horse, and I will sit over here watching and rubbing my hands.”
Both Catlins are smiling at me, waiting. When I don’t go on, Catlin says, “Weld is the man in the white farmhouse down on the county road, isn’t he?”
“That’s the least of what he is. He’s the house on the county road, he’s the busted bridge we all knock our wheels out of line on. He’s that pack of pestilential beagles, he’s Fran LoPresti’s mongrel pup, he’s irritations by day and alarms by night, he’s the Adversary, the Id, Adam Aborigine, Old Mister Consequence. He’s our fire hazard, our eyesore, our past, our future, our history, and our drama. You really want to know about Tom Weld?”