All the Little Live Things (7 page)

Though I acknowledge these challenges, I do not accept them meekly. If God could not create a perfect world—and good God, how badly You failed!—Allston would lend a hand. So from February, when first spring broke, through November, when the battlefields were drowned by the rains, I was self-employed in a holy war against the thousand pests that infest Eden. Exterminator, that was the role in which Marian first saw me. Exterminator and clown. And I persisted in both roles, especially the last, for she bothered me. It was something like love at first sight, but something was obscurely wrong with the omens, and uneasiness, as much as my natural gifts, made a fool of me. And yet I did not mind being a fool; I would have turned hand-springs like a show-off boy if I had thought she would take notice.

There are many kinds of perfect days here. The day last spring that I am remembering was one of those that James Russell Lowell had in mind when he inquired what was so rare as a day in June. The fact that it was March should not confuse us. Every clod felt a stir of might, believe me. The ground had been soaked by a good late rain, and it steamed with growth. Weld’s apricot orchard that for two weeks had been a froth of pale pink was misty green as leaves began to replace blossoms. In our little family orchard the two almond trees were fully leaved and the fruit well formed. The plums, which for a while had been wedding sprays, were also setting fruit, but the sapling cherries were something out of Housman, or like young girls dressed for a lawn party in Charleston, S.C.

Ruth was cutting some gone-by daffodils on the slope above the parking area. Beyond her was the line of dark-red thundercloud plums, and beyond the plums, in the pasture, thirty acres of wild mustard so bright it yellowed the air. A cowslip under the chin of the sky: you like butter. From a hundred feet away I smelled the daphne in the front entry. A meadow lark was going crazy across the fence, and every male house finch had a head and throat as red as a tomato,, the effect of love.

So here I am contentedly sprinkling cutworm bait along my row of young tomato plants and amusing myself thinking what a quaint idea it is to perfect Eden with poisons, and wondering (let us suppose) what Adam and Eve did without rotenone, melathion, lindane, chlordane, sodium ammate, and the other deterrents. In the days when the lion lay down with the lamb, did the flea lie down with the dog, or the gnat with the itching mortal? Did the aphid make friends with the rose, or the San Jose scale with the peach tree? Did the picnicking dame consort with the poison ivy? And as I am ruminating in this fashion, I see the tomato plant at the end of the row shiver, stagger, and sink two inches into the ground.

Within ninety seconds I am into the house and out again with the shotgun. “What is it?” Ruth is calling, and “Joe, be carefull” but I pay her no attention, tiptoeing down the garden path. The tomato plant has not moved. Down underground there the trespasser is still chomping and smacking his lips. As I wait, holding my breath, I hear voices, and a strange young couple appears at the top of our drive where it turns onto the hilltop. The woman wears a look of startlement as if she might scream, and for fear she will I make a fierce gesture for silence. We see hardly any people up here. Who the hell are these? Trespassers, shakers of the earth, scarers of the enemy. My eyes are fixed on the half-submerged tomato, my nose tickles with the dense garden odors, I hear the meadow lark splitting his throat, singing beatitude, and the murmur of Ruth’s voice as she greets the strangers.

The tuft twitches, the plant goes down like the bobber on a fishline, and I pull the trigger. My ears are shattered by the appalling blast, and the two-foot circle of earth on which I have been concentrating splashes like water. I lay the gun aside, and dig, and behold him with a twig of tomato vine in his grooved teeth, a fat old bull gopher with a big head and naked-palmed feet:
Thomomys bottae,
the Evil One.

With my toe I scoop him onto the surface, and as he lies there on his back grinning his four-toothed yellow grin I see the fleas scuttling for cover through the thin hairs of his belly. Then I hear, from above me on the drive, this high, rather strained, but musical voice that says, “For heaven’s sake, what have you gone and done?”

Now for sure I look up, and it is a rather odd moment altogether, because my ears and my eyes don’t agree. I am prepared to reply to the voice in words of some acidity, but the first look corks my eloquence. She looks as if she had bloomed into this spring day, she has a tremble on her like young poplar leaves. It is hard for a sentimental man to say unsentimentally, and besides my heart is sore, but here is this girl—woman, rather, maybe thirty—with her hair a little blown, her face pale and strained but shining, her eyes most alive, and her lips parted in a look that mixes pity for the gopher with pleasure at meeting me even if I am a brute, and delight simply in the way the sun pours down and the browned daffodils lie in a sheaf across Ruth’s arm. She is one of old Willie Yeats’s glimmering girls, with apple blossom in her hair, and I admit to a pang. God knows what it is—maybe envy that someone is lucky enough to have such a daughter. I am old-fashioned. I believe that the human face was made for expression, and I like the way every emotion shows on this girl’s mouth and in her eyes. I wonder how this kind of innocent eagerness got born into the same world with the beatniks and the glumniks; and all the time I am being captivated I am annoyed at her sentimental cry over the death of a pest.

So I don’t answer her at once. I merely kick the gopher back into the hole and scrape dirt over him. Catarrh would eat him happily enough, but we prefer Catarrh to eat canned cat food. Ruth is whispering in her imperturbable voice, “Joe, these are the Catlins, they’ve bought the Thomas place.”

“Allston,” I say. “White hunter.”

“It’s not hahd to believe it,” Catlin says in a down-Maine voice. He is a healthy crewcut, the kind that every now and then reminds you how virile New England still is. He looks bright, and he knows the uses of a smile. But his charming wife is another matter. She is going to have an answer to why I go around murdering harmless little beasts. She says to me breathlessly, “Why did you have to go shoot it?”

“Because he was eating my tomato plants.”

“That’s like hanging someone for stealing a loaf of bread.”

“Today my tomatoes,” I say. “Tomorrow my wife’s daffodils—no, that’s one thing he won’t eat. Tomorrow the tuberous begonias, next day the agapanthus, following that the flowering quince. Pretty soon desert, nothing but poison oak and coyote brush again.”

“I should think you’d have a nice natural garden where things are in balance and you don’t have to kill anything. Is it fair to plant a lot of plants that were never intended to grow here, and then blame the gophers for liking them?”

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.