The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (49 page)

But she had a long way to go, around
our
pond or
their
lake—anyway you look at it, and I could hear her for a considerable time, crashing her way—the sound of the mirage, going back where it belonged.

And the moon through the trees helped me find my echo. The moon was riding higher now, like a sign of how much time I had.

I called after her. “Why am I Johnny One?” I called, “Johnnn-nny Onn-ne? Because there aren’t two.” And I knew she heard me. All her way back, my echo would carry it.

Then I went home, to see how much time I and the other boys would have to gather, home to look it up on my aunt’s calendar, which is a large one, turned regularly to the last days of summer, and with many almanac directions, including moons. The strength her kiss hadn’t given me, her scream had.

On the night of the full moon to be, we were ready for them. For almost a week past, never in our house had there been such lights and noises and creepings, such a stamping and a brawling and a
blazing—
not in my time. I’d gathered them in by every marathon way I could think of, by bikes stole at evening and then passed on, by notes sent on by the diesel gas trucks—their drivers were the decentest, by tokens jammed in the pay telephone and then a message to the firehouse, where a town had one, by everything but drumbeat—and a little of that too it almost seemed, as the call got nosed about stronger—and always by our best chariot, shank’s mare. It was always hard to believe that something so modern as the Agricultural was only thirty miles away and most of the boys in near the same radius, but now that fact was gold to us. And I had done it, I and my best deputy, the skinny Johnny from Contoocook, who I’d remembered was a Johnny One too. If we had more get-up-and-go than the rest of them, it was because the onlies, like with some plants, fade slower than the rest. And we’d done it. We’d gathered in the club. Once I’d got them collected, I wondered why I hadn’t saved my strength by just staring at the sky and calling them in by mental telepathy. For funny thing, I didn’t hardly have to open my mouth, to tell them what they were here for.

And now here they were, lolling knees up, or on elbow and stomach, draped around like any boys you might see around a roaring fireplace, though the golden flames made them seem a mite rosier than they were. Gold of any other sort, we didn’t have much of. And now, though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon and the moon not to be up for several hours yet, we could tell by our blood that it was going to be one of those Hampshire early in September nights with scarcely a nip in it. The last of the locust-nights; that’s what it was. This was the way men in the wilderness used to tell the hours for fires and club-gatherings—by the blood.

And lolling with them, staring to the flames, I was almost happy, in thinking of the gathering business itself, and knowing they were too. I hadn’t yet told them everything. They didn’t know we were to gather at our side of Willard Pond earlier than they thought; but I’d about decided we weren’t to wait for the moon. But they knew all the rest of it, learning it as they brought in the wood from here and there—because for a long time at home there hadn’t been axe or arm for it—and bringing in the food by raid, like a cat with a chipmunk, or from some overlooked last pocket of rightful ownership. Bringing in the tools—that gathers people, like proudflesh to a wound. And even bringing in money if you happen to have any; it was Johnny Ten who brought in a sack, that first night we were up to score—a full dozen of us—and showed us old pennies like beans in it, and took one out, an Indian head, and then another, and said, “What’s it say? Read it out.” It was an old one too. “E Pluribus,” I said. Anyone knew that—if you’ve had my aunt.

Even she and my uncle had helped me as they could, bringing out things from the attic like ideas we hadn’t known we had. The old pine-needle mattresses came from the spare rooms we never went into. Like pine pillows they were, though without any inscription. My uncle’d brought out a sackful of bottles to sell, dug from the quarry once, and in ten minutes and four different directions we’d sold them, to buy the steakmeat I’d gone bold as a bear into the supermarket to buy for our strength—and we’d just now eaten, for the early supper I’d insisted on. Even my aunt said every morning “I’ll make you a flag”—though she didn’t quite know what for, and by evening had forgotten it. I lay there thinking of all this, from that first minute of the week, when John of Contoocook came up the heaved stones of the front walk, just as I was thinking on him, thinking on him—and I said to him, grinning. “How’s that pig of yours?” And laying down the sack he was carrying, he answered me, grinning. “Here.”

Gathering is the gold. They knew that now as well as I. But I lay there wondering, as any leader must, whether it wasn’t all the gold we needed, whether the gathering itself mightn’t be enough. But there wouldn’t be time to go back to school, to find out.

“We’ll train in that barn,” I’d said, that first morning we were all here. Plus a peewee little Johnny from the morons; we didn’t know what was his count and neither did he. He kept running in and out of our ranks, more trouble to shoo him than to let him stay. And we had to conserve our energy.

“As soon as we get the tools,” I said, “we’ll train. Go round to all the woodpiles and tight barns, there still are some on our side—and get the axes. Drag ’em, if you can’t heft. Go round to all the antique tables after dark—hook anything sharp, or that looks like a tool. There’s a thing called a sausage-grinder down in Kelley Two’s barn, you’ll surely have to drag that.” I hadn’t made definite plans yet, but that would come. “Scythes,” I said.

“Will crocks be useful?” said Johnny from Contoocook. I could tell he was puzzled for a plan of action too.

“No, I don’t think … pitchforks … no, there’s no time for
torture …
it’s too serious for that.” I found I’d decided. “Permanent useful tools only.” That way, whatever we made use of for training purposes would come in handy later also, if there was to be a later time. Would that depend on the training? And then the thought came to me, though I hadn’t since told any of them, even my deputy—guns. Or at least one gun. I knew who had a sharpshooter’s medal—before it was sold. Guns would be best.

You have to understand about the training. Wasn’t anything we could plan to do with any weapon—tool, that is—before we could lift. That’s what our training was. Over-the-summer had come to be like a hibernation time for our kind, and if we let ourselves get any weaker, this summer would likely be our last. When we could lift again, and swing and grind and mow and reap, each man alone, and not staggering onto the next one or cooling his temple against any wall that was left him to do it on, then maybe we could start to talk about action—or more of it than just a gathering on the night of the moon when their building was to be done, to make a great clatter to scare them with, over there on the opposite shore.

“Or going all the way round to their side to get our message across,” said Johnny from Contoocook. “If we are able.”

“Carrying the tools, of course,” I said.

He looked at me over the others, stern and thoughtful as always. “Oh yes,” he said, nudging me to note a Johnny Three from Nelson, who could almost lift a log singlehanded now, and a Four from West Wilton, who could handle the smallest axe. We had a couple of those Buddy names too, the one kid back at school had been so proud of—and what do you know, they turned out to be the weakest of all. “Oh yes. Carrying the tools.”

And here we were, on the very night, and almost able, if that steakmeat could be trusted—and I still had no plan of action. But I had the gun.

I’d hooked it from the store maybe easier than I could handle it. Couldn’t even call it a steal. He never even moved a shoulder, when I reached up above him and took it from the wall, up above the calendar. Had all I could do not to drop it; I don’t know what kind of game he and his china-teeth friends ever thought they’d need a gun like that for, this part of the country. It’s a high-powered rifle all right—a thirty-ought-six. With a telescopic lens. I was halfway out the screendoor dragging it in the gunnysack I’d brought, when he opened his mouth and said one word.

“Cartridges.”

They were in a tin box on the counter in front of him. So I had to go back in.

And so I practiced in secret with the gun, the way they all were doing with their implements, their tools. I didn’t worry about marksmanship. Once I could heft the gun, steadying my arm maybe in the crotch of a convenient tree, I knew I could fire it. And they all watched me, my army, and never said any more to me about our plan of action, just left it to me. But one thing more, I said to them. I was the leader: “We’ve got numbers to our names, can’t help that, it’s too late for it.” I happened to glance over at Johnny Ten, the highest of us in number and in brain the lowest; his big round face with the silly smile on it looked just like the hubcaps he’d chosen to carry but I wouldn’t let him. “But we won’t say Johnny any more; that’s how they weaken us too.” I took a look at my uncle, snoring there in the rocker. “We’ll at least say ‘John.’” And my dear deputy, who worried me so, he was getting thinner every day—John of Contoocook—grinned at that too. So that’s the way that was. Only one we couldn’t get to understand it was the little peewee, the moron, and he didn’t count; he’d be a Johnny until the end.

Otherwise, it worked fine. We’d had some trouble at first making Johnny Ten understand that our plan of action couldn’t be motorcycles. “Get those snazzy foreign ones!” he’d say every day, at training-time. “Wear those black-and-white crash helmets! Then—
zoom.
” And he’d raise the pick-axe with a hubcap on it, almost high. No use telling him that we had as much chance of motorcycles as of getting boats to cross the lake with, like from England to France. There’s never been any boats
between
them and us, only the boats on their side.

“What would that do for us, Ten?” my deputy would answer. His fingers were so dreamy-thin, looked as if they went round the scythe-handle twice. “No, it would just mean that we’d be the ones to move away.”

Watching us try to shoulder arms—nobody would exactly see twelve high-class buck-privates. Sometimes I wondered if, even with the training, anybody could see us at all—we were so faded. My own eyesight is still so damn good. But I consoled myself with seeing how at least getting into some action must have helped our circulation. And thinking forward to being Johns again seemed to satisfy everybody, and to improve our complexion too. For the mold that had spotted everyone of us, sometimes in places you wouldn’t like to think it—was gone.

One thing we talked out loud about, in those last evenings as we fed the fire before sleeping—was our ecology. We talked a lot about that, and what our summer rebellion could mean to the world. I wished I could ask the instructor. Sometimes we talked about him too, laughing at our secret nickname for him—Mr. Wilderness. For the funniest thing about him, what with all his talk about going to do research work or get him a job as a government forester in one of those high, wild tower overlooks where you can’t even have a wife—was that right out in front of the classroom, where we could all see it, he had the brightest, fastest, hottest little bug of a new red two-seater sport car.

And while we talked, I sometimes watched my aunt and uncle, him barefoot now in his rocker, her in her shawl. Soon he would be only ten yellow fingernails and ten toenails—he was going back to the horn. She was dozing, my tawny aunt, with her mouth open; soon she would be only a lost freckle on the air. Was this only the way it always should be, for the other generation? But then, what about us young? I wished I could ask the instructor—even
him.
I hadn’t ever told for sure whether his eyes, always so blind with teaching, hadn’t seen more about us than we thought he knew. Maybe he could be our control-group, I decided; he’d taught us that in any experiment where you’re matching one group of specimens against the other, in the best testing there ought to be still a third. One group, something gets done to it to produce
its
condition; to the second group, you do the opposite. The control doesn’t get anything done to it at all to narrow down its condition; that’s what it already is. He could be that.

So, two nights ago, I had written him a letter. He could listen to what we had in mind, I thought. Better still, I thought, as I was writing, he could come to be a witness; it was nothing to that red car, only thirty miles. So I wrote giving him directions where to come and when, and what to look for, and mailed it myself and according to what I knew the distribution time for the mail was out there—so he’d get it just in time to decide to come along for the show or not to; after all that effort I didn’t want us prevented. “We’re having a summer rebellion,” I wrote. “It’s to be a test. Not a battle.” For I knew it couldn’t be that. “It can’t be that,” I said, “even with the gun. Will you be our witness?” I wrote in the best grammar I had, deciding to use that from now on too, for the other only made me weaker. And I signed it “John,” without any number at all. What I’d wanted to do was to put my full last name after it, like one of their signatures—but I didn’t feel up to that, yet. Besides, he’d know by the postmark and the handwriting. And he always took the trouble to talk to me specially. He’d know.

So here we were, me and my deputy and all twelve of us, not counting that little thirteenth peewee with his white albino head and pink eyes held away from the firelight. Here we are, I said to myself, in our house that hasn’t caved in yet, in our flesh that isn’t mold yet, and with our tools we’ve rescued. And over there, on the other side of Willard Pond, their work is done. Turret on the outside—waiting for the weathercock, but that they’ll hang at the ceremony—and on the inside, hammered brass and hanging lanterns, and tables and chairs like a soda parlor’s, and a milk bar like a counter—and a fireplace, for winter. They couldn’t have an outside sign, not with their zoning rules, but just for today they had a great poster up on a tripod, with one of our iron kettles hanging on a chain beneath it. “Dedication ceremony. Everybody come and see us hang the weathercock. Six o’clock.” But inside, through the glass door, I’d seen that they had a sign saying The Pancake Palace. So that’s where our soda parlor number one, the old sign once on it, had gone. So there they are. Hadn’t I seen it all in the storekeeper’s binoculars, which on the way out his screen door the second time, he’d let me hock too? They had finished their job in time.