All the Little Live Things (17 page)

“Do you think Julie should be taking Debby over there all the time?” I asked Marian one day. had dropped in after picking up the mail, and found her in the patio hulling strawberries. The air was rich with the smell of boiling jam. I saw the black gelding in the corral with the piebald. From across the creek came the sound of the guitar. As her stained fingers pulled blossoms from the berries and dropped blossoms in one pan, berries in another, Marian looked at me in the scented shade in the amused-serious way she had, as if giving a ridiculous remark every chance to make sense before she laughed at it. She shook her head.

“He and his bunch are all right. In a way, they really
are
sort of saintly.”

“Saintly! My God.”

“They’re kind,” she said. “They don’t push anybody around. They treat children like people. Debby adores them.”

“Naturally. They’re all about her age.”

“What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe all that about little children and the Kingdom of Heaven? Here.” Reaching, she stuck a great strawberry between my lips, but as soon as my mouth was clear of the succulent pulp I said, “One of the dangers of grown-up little children is that they have a child’s judgment and an adult’s capacity to do harm.”

“What harm could they do Debby?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Give her beer?”

“John does that.”

“Pot, then. They all swear it’s so harmless, and they’re so kind.”

About to answer, she heard or smelled something in the kitchen, laid her pans aside, and rushed in. A minute later she came out, and reassembling her work in her lap she said seriously, “Maybe they do smoke pot, I suppose they do, everybody their age seems to. But I’m sure they don’t give her any.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t, I guess. I just trust them not to.”

“What about Julie?”

Marian had continued to spend much of her time cultivating health. Her arms and hands and legs were deeply tanned, she had gained more weight, her eyes were a clear blue and white flash in her brown face. She frowned. “Yah,” she said as if disgusted. “That has bothered me a little. They treat both her and Dave like mascots or apprentices or something. They might think it was a joke to initiate them. But if it’s harmless, and John thinks it is, more or less, then it’s no worse than if a couple of fifteen-year-olds had a few drinks, is it?”

“The police would think it was a little worse.”

“Well, what would you do? I can hardly forbid her to go over.”

“Her mother could.”

“I wonder,” Marian said. “That’s such a fierce girl, sometimes. She’s so full of rebellion, what her mother tells her not to do is exactly what she has to do.”

“Does Fran know she goes over there all the time?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she thinks she’s here baby-sitting.” She moved her hands irritably in the pan of berries and scowled at me uncertainly. “If I didn’t have her as a sitter, she’d be over anyway. Maybe it’s better if she has Debby to keep an eye on.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess she’s her parents’ problem, and she’s probably insoluble: ”

“Ah,” Marian said, smiling, “she’ll get over it. Given a chance, we all grow up. Julie wants to be taken as an equal, not as a child. That’s why she finds Peck’s crowd so much more interesting than her mother. They aren’t really hoodlums, Joe. All they do is sit around and talk about the good life, the ideal life. That shouldn’t corrupt the young, should it?”

“It depends on how they define the good life.”

“They define it as freedom.
Absolute
freedom.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Anything goes, is that it?”

“That doesn’t seem to be it—well,
technically
it might be, but mainly they seem to believe in the natural virtue of primitive man. They’re romantics, I suppose. Man is naturally good, but he’s corrupted by society.” She giggled suddenly, eying me as if she thought I might explode. “Did I tell you they’ve painted a motto on a board and nailed it to the tree? BE YOURSELF. GOOD IS THE SELF SPEAKING FREELY, EVIL IS WHAT PUTS THE SELF DOWN.”

“Oh, that’s pretty!” I said. “Did Peck write that?”

“I guess so. Maybe he borrowed it. Why, don’t you believe in freedom?”

“Not to any great extent,” I said. “What’s Peck doing when he sits down to his yoga? Speaking freely?”

Looking at me doubtfully, she pulled the blossoms from three or four berries. She waved a wasp away from the pan. “But yoga is
self-discipline,”
she said. “Is that what you mean? That he’s contradicting himself? They aren’t opposed to self-discipline, only to the traditional and conventional kinds that they think are antilife.”

“He’s improvising his exercises, is he?”

Studying me with a frown, she said, “What are you getting at, you debater?”

“No debater,” I said. “I just want to keep this conversation on the track. Yoga is a system of very strict rules, none of them invented by Jim Peck. Absolute freedom, my foot. You can’t open your mouth or move your hand without living by rules, generally somebody else’s, and that goes for those birdbrains across the creek, too. It’s the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose
which
rules you want to live by, and it’s persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any. But if you say they’re harmless, they’re harmless. I only brought them up because I hoped they were a nuisance to you.”

Smiling, torn between hearing me out and dealing with a renewed emergency in the kitchen, she was sidling toward the door, and at the last word she bolted in. After a time she came out with a pot of jam in one hand and a great spoon in the other, lifting red spoonfuls into the air and letting them drop back, testing.

“Oh, damn!” she said, and knocked the spoon clean and fished for the wasp that had dived in. Carefully, she lifted him out and carried him to the hose bib. The water flooded him out onto the ground, and she rinsed the spoon and scooped him up again, slimed with jam and stickily crawling, too encumbered even to buzz, and washed him a second time, gently, and set him on the window sill to dry off.

So I went on picking up my daily beer cans along the lane where the freedom force threw them, and every day or so I built a little bonfire on the asphalt road by the mailboxes to get rid of the throwaway newspapers, box-holder letters, free samples, and other junk mail that began finding its way to Peck, as to other mortals, the hour he announced himself in residence. He never opened any of this, or carried it away, but pawed it out contemptuously onto the ground, where it lay or blew until I gathered and burned it.

As if they were ordinary people, and not fantastic adolescent freaks, I gave good day to the unkempt young men and apache girls who came in and out, most of them in the Illinois Volkswagen bus that had now reappeared, apparently to stay. I used to see them filing around Debby’s ring toward the bridge, bearing sacks of groceries and six-packs of beer. Invariably they wore a look of excitement as if headed for an audience with the Most High. The Most High Himself moved among them with a new, pantherine dignity, smiling his ambush smile and gleaming with his hypnotic eyes, benevolently dispensing sanction and welcoming all to the uses and premises of absolute liberty.

But newcomers, Julie told Marian, who told me, were not necessarily admitted to the Presence. Sometimes they spent a whole afternoon and evening there and never saw the holy one, who stayed up in the treehouse with favored disciples. This reservation of the sacred person was so fantastic that I slapped my naked head when I heard of it. I asked Marian what had happened to the absolute-freedom rule. Why didn’t the neophyte, speaking freely and not letting anything put the self down, simply climb up the ladder and barge in?

Self-restraint, she said, baiting me.

Yes, I said, taking the hook. Taking it? Gulping it, plunging for it. Yes, self-restraint enforced by a rule, or by a taboo, which was worse. Holy holy holy. Was it death to eat out of his rice bowl or touch his coveralls?

She only laughed at me. She thought of them as kids playing Utopia.

Which, if I could forget the harm they were capable of, I might admit they were. By few and many I observed them sitting or lying around Peck’s untidy flat beyond the web of ropes and cables and the crooked loop of the bridge—safe from intrusion, escaped from Babylon and the parental university, absolutely free to submit their minds to Peck’s charisma. I saw the favored ones sitting with him on the treehouse porch, throwing their beer cans down into the brush. Put away your nets and follow me.

Once their college closed in June, the group settled down to six or eight regulars, including the Volkswagen crowd. They were as fully in residence as Peck himself. The Honda had been removed from its winter quarters in the shed, and stood under canvas by the bay tree. The shed was filled with mattresses, folding chairs, card tables, cartons of books, wastebaskets filled with junk, the sort of shabby indispensable paraphernalia that passes from student to student or from student to secondhand dealer and back to student, and into storage and out again, providing at intervals the sitting and sleeping needs of generations of the penniless young. Maybe this stuff was being kept for someone during the summer, maybe it was being stored against some planned enlargement of the establishment. I saw it, as I passed back and forth, with uneasiness and nostalgia. To have so little, and it of so little value,
was
to be quaintly free.

Many nights we saw them sitting around a fire and heard them singing. (No fires, remember? But that was a rule imposed from without.) The first time I saw the fire I was furious all over again at Peck’s calculated challenging of every restriction I had laid down. But even in my anger I don’t believe I ever contemplated going over and making him douse it. I told myself that by now his flat was trampled so bare there was little hazard; that the creek, after all, made a firebreak; that the horses had picked the bottom land down to the adobe so that nothing could spread; that anyway Peck had all , the water in my well to fight fires with. The fact was, I wanted no confrontation with Jim Peck; and I avoided it not because it would bother him, but because it would bother me.

It was a permanent gypsy camp. Mornings, sleeping bags lay like khaki cocoons around the tent. Mealtimes, smoke arose and girls in jeans moved around the fire: either Peck had given up his vegetarianism or he did not insist on it for his followers, for I often smelled hamburgers broiling. Afternoons, a lot of bare feet and sandals might be propped against the lower corral rail and a lot of eyes might watch through altogether too much hair while Julie gave Debby lessons in seat and hands around the ring. Apache girls exposed a lot of leg, climbing on the old piebald for a turn. Unkempt boys leaped aboard the startled old thing and kicked him into a canter up the lane, showing off as if they had been normal adolescents, while Julie sat firmly aboard her gelding to prevent anyone from trying to ride
it,
and Peck looked down indulgently, lounging in the treehouse door. Play away, my children. Anything goes, even fun.

It was so incongruous to see those refugees from an intellectual coffeehouse disporting themselves in country pleasures that I half liked them, and this despite the probability that they were as promiscuous as a camp of howler monkeys. I began to recognize faces. There were two girls who were always around, and so far as I could see, they belonged to no one in particular or everybody at large. John told me, with some amusement, that the one called Margo was a founder of something called the Committee for Sexual Freedom that had chapters at all the colleges in the area and had staged spring demonstrations in some of them. We did not see their faces in the newspaper photographs of sit-ins and vigils that came up that summer all over the Bay Area like alkali salts in a drying lake bed. They did not go in for anti-Viet Nam parades, they did not picket the makers of napalm. They went to the heart of the matter: sexual freedom. The only time I saw Margo’s face in the paper, she had been photographed while conducting a rally to legalize abortion.

“My God,” I said to Ruth, “it’s the Oneida Colony all over again. First thing you know they’ll begin to manufacture silverware. Every time I remember that we’re the sponsors of this outfit, I doubt my sanity.”

“Not sponsors,” Ruth said. “Neutral observers. So observe.”

“O.K.,” I said, “I’ll observe. But if I were Marian I’d observe with less complacency, and if I were the LoPrestis I’d observe with no complacency whatever, and if I were Tom Weld my hair would be standing on end with horror and disbelief. Have you seen what that gun-toting rural Adonis is turning into? Did you see him up on the bulldozer the other day, grading the road?”

For there was no doubt that Peck, who never appeared in the papers and who had no cause but absolute freedom, had captured the neighborhood youth. More than once, after Debby had been called protesting in to supper, I saw Julie sitting cross-legged among the bohemians around the tent, tilting and rocking with laughter or laboriously learning the changes of some guitar tune. More than once, as we came home at night, we saw Dave Weld’s molded Mercury parked by the trail gate. He brought down his father’s chain saw and made the bacchants a woodpile, using his muscle and his country skills (and my trees) as an entree into the society he coveted. He quit carrying the pistol: old ahimsa got him. And by the end of June the flat-top haircut that had once been so short his skull was tanned had grown out to a prickly reddish brush. I offered to bet Ruth that it would go all the way to a John-the-Baptist bob, and I would have won, too. It used to fascinate and frustrate me to imagine the comments that hairdo got from Tom Weld, who whatever he was was no long-hair. On the other hand, he probably never noticed; he was not much for noticing.

Peck’s whole ménage, neighborhood and otherwise, piled in and out of the Catlin cottage as I had seen the summer crowd pile in and out of places on Vermont lakes. They were completely relaxed with Marian, and with John when he was at home. With us, or at least with me, they had a wary politeness about them—
non timeo sed caveo.
All except the Margo girl, one of those who are aware every waking minute of every square inch of their bodies. She, I thought, was provocative, but I withstood her charms.