All the Little Live Things (8 page)

“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.

And does he hear the Great Emancipator’s solemn voice beginning, “Fourscore and seven years ago?” He does not. He hears something that sounds like seven Ukrainians plotting revolution behind a thick door. Failure. Enter Mephistopheles on a puff of sulphur smoke.

“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?”

“Joe,” Ruth says. “Not again. Not now.”

But I am already in full cry, and with Marian Catlin’s amused and attentive face before me, I outdo myself. Early explorer, old settler, garrulous gaffer, I regale these green immigrants with the hyperbolical perils of the New World. I start far back, when our relations with Weld were friendly and even funny, when he was a skin-clad native and we were white strangers who had quenched their prow on his beach, and I give it all its philosophical applications and extensions. It would have gone something like this:

There are certain orthodoxies in the associations between natives and new settlers. The newcomers land, see that the country is fair, kneel and claim it in the king’s name, plant a flag and a cross, and advance making signs of peace, with muskets at the ready. Usually the local chief is friendly; if he isn’t, a volley teaches him instant manners. He swaps corn, fish, squash, daughters, and other native produce for beads, mirrors, and needles. He throws a feast of young dog, signs a treaty of friendship for as long as grass shall grow or water run, and accepts a plug hat, a coat with epaulets, and a lead medal. He is offered raw alcohol cut with branch water and spiced with cayenne and powdered tobacco, and when he comes to, groaning, next day, his new friends thank him kindly for the gift of Manhattan Island.

Manhattan Island seems a small price for such enhancements of his life as the white men bring. He is employed as guide and hunter, there are new markets and job opportunities, the economy gets a boost. It even turns out that the newcomers value French and Iroquois scalps, will pay a dollar apiece and furnish the scalping knives.

So far, fine. But little by little the Indian finds that the white men have burned off the woods where he hunted, and drained the bogs where he used to pick cranberries and trap muskrats. Places turn out to be out of bounds, things are forbidden. Helping themselves to the white man’s corn, Indians get slapped in the stocks. Shooting one of his spotted deer, they get thirty lashes. No longer red brother—now thieving redskin. Young bucks mutter threats, old chiefs counsel patience, winter comes, redskin cold and hungry, meat scarce, blanket ragged, tobacco and firewater impossible dreams. Appears at white man’s door begging a meal and a smoke:
On your way,
you gut-eating vagabond! And keep a hundred feet clear of the chicken house as you leave.

That’s the usual pattern. Up to now my sympathies have been with the noble and ill-used redskin. I have applauded when he shoots burning arrows into the thatch and tomahawks the women and children who run out with their hair on fire, and I have sorrowed for him when he is cornered and done in by the Miles Standish types. But the clash of cultures between Tom Weld and me has taught me that the white newcomer sometimes has a case. When I think about this Mohican I signed a treaty with, I feel as if somebody has wrapped a blood-pressure band around my neck and is pumping it up.

Ruth keeps saying we came out here to buy some quiet; we should accept the local culture for what it is. Weld’s family has ranched these hills for sixty years with no success whatever—Ruth says because they never had a decent water supply, I say because all of them must have been cretins. These unirrigated hill apricots are small, and don’t bring top prices from packers. In dry years the trees hardly bear at all. What would you do in those circumstances? Locate a decent water supply, or move to some land that could be farmed? But you’re not a cretin. Cretins go on trying to farm it. Every time they hit a bad streak they sign a new treaty with the palefaces and dispose of another chunk of land. For the last twenty years it’s taken a really splendid incompetence to lose money in California real estate, but there are the Welds with about thirty acres left out of two or three hundred, and nearly as strapped as ever. When Weld sold twenty acres to a developer, who resold our five to us, he needed money to pay for his father’s funeral and to buy a new caterpillar tractor so he could go on raising minicots for a reluctant packing industry.