The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (51 page)

“Steady,” I said. “Stand like the trees.”

We waited.
Stand by,
I said to myself. I was the only one of us without a weapon to his shoulder. I don’t want to be a John One either, I prayed to them across the water. I only want to be John Willard. See us, standing by.

And the peewee was the one to say it, in his scratchy, dead-white voice. “They don’t see us.”

Then the Buddy. Then all of them. “They don’t see us. We are nothing to them.” They murmured it like the leaves. This was all the breath they had.

All except John, my deputy, who swung his weapon high. How could they not see him, even if, all bone as he now was, they only saw the scythe? “If I had a good New Hampshire boulder to ring it on, instead of these old slates!” he cried, and buried the tip in the ground. It made no sound. The others did the same, but a tiller is not made to speak loud against slate, or even granite. The peewee’s hubcaps, clashed together, made a faint cry. We had chosen our place too well, or had they chosen it for us? We were moss to the ankles, like the stones in the graveyard those across the water love so well.

“All right,” I said. “Stand back.” And I bent to the gun. “You can talk,” I said. And without any help, bracing myself against a birch tree that presented itself like an aide-de-camp, I shouldered the thirty-ought-six.

Across the water, the couple on the platform each held up a little flag, while the crowd applauded. I could hear them, see them, clear as clear, as pond water. Did the men from Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware, have a flag? They had a boat.

Through the telescopic lens, on the crosshair, I could see the weathercock; slowly it turned in the evening wind, a double pennant, a man on his side, blowing in the wind. I shifted the gun past the boy in his sawed-off jeans. He was a Blazer too, but only her brother. Shaking under the weight of the gun like a body on my shoulder, I brought her slowly to center, on the crosshairs. And there she was, my summer Venus, shining to the wind like the weathercock of a country I had never seen to the full before, her arms spread to its birches. Would she be the rosier without us, without me?

“Shall I shoot our weathercock?” I whispered to my deputy. “Or the weathercock girl.” But nobody answered behind me, nobody at all. And the gun bore down. But the birch bore up, lifting me like a brother. This was why it took so long to decide.

Caught on the crosshair with her, was all her new countryside. I could see it well. The horses were returning to fill the barns again. In time, as the summer people lingered, there might even be cows. I couldn’t see Blazer in the old grocery store for all the teeth in China, but if I studied it with care I could see the son; I could see it well. And what of us? Would we go to the city in our turn, hoping to be seen again by someone? Or back to the freckle on the air, the horn. And is all this just the balance again, blowing like the wind?

They don’t need to see you, Johnny One. Or not much. No more than a mirage of upkeepers, holding up the summertime. All that’s needed now, is what already is. You see
them.

So spoke the gun.

How gray your skies will be without them. They were what drew you through the woods—the biggest mirage of all; you couldn’t have done it without them.

So spoke the birch.

My eyes were burning with the choice, and I couldn’t last the weight much longer—what did they ever plan to kill with a gun like this, the old-timers?

I centered the gun, holding aim. They would see me across there this time. I shoot to kill.

Was it the birch, holding me? Stand by, John Willard, all of you. It’s not just a summer rebellion. Stand by.

Or the last minute, did my foot twitch, saying—“beautiful?”

No. I aimed higher than either, high between the sun and the moon. To shoot a mirage, you have to shoot that high. And I aimed to kill us both.

I fired.

They saw me then.

Everything stopped over there, too. And I could see they saw me, milling and talking among themselves. Some had already scattered, on their way around the rim of the Pond, to this side. One took a boat—still carrying her flag. Others got into it. As they all scattered toward me, I could even see what they had in their mind’s-eye. Now that I had put down the gun, or fired it high, I could be a hero if I wanted—for a day. I have excellent sight.

I turned to my companions behind me. Their final effort had been too much for them. They could gather for a week, to help a friend with his summer. They could stumble through his wood, behind him on a string—he was their control. But now they were done for. Except for their implements, they were now so faded that nobody but me would see them at all.

Just then the bushes parted, back where the woods begin—and what do you know? I never expected him to come, even though I wrote. But here he was—nobody could miss him!—in a jumping red shirt that matched the car. He was panting. “Don’t shoot!” he called. “Don’t shoot.” And he panted up to me.

“I couldn’t lift it again,” I said, “if I tried.”

“I had to leave the car at the edge of the woods, that’s why I’m late. I had to
walk.
”

“We’re all a little late,” I said. And I could see he was still walking round me in his mind.

“How are your researches?” I said.

“Fine, just fine.” He was looking at the people just beginning to straggle up the rim of the hill from below on this side—they would have to climb a bit to get here. “And how are you, Johnny—you see I got your letter.”

“Oh, everything’s stopped,” I said. “For the moment.” Down below, a boat was pulling into shore. There wasn’t much time. “There’s something I want to ask you though,” I said. “You’re the instructor.” Then I looked over at my army, so quiet there without any acknowledgment, almost like the trees. “But first—let me introduce my—assistants,” I said. “Axe, Hoe, Tiller, Pitchfork, Knife. One Buddy. The rest—Johns. Too late to do anything about that. They all look as dead as stones in a graveyard, I know, but they’ll revive shortly, once they remember their last names. All except him, my deputy, there under the scythe.” I was watching my new arrival sharply.

He was watching me too, but he strolled nonchalantly to the edge of that mossy precipice. “So this is Willard Pond,” he said, staring over the water. “What a great natural oval. I wouldn’t mind being buried here myself.”

“It belongs to us,” I said. Who can sell a grave?

He nodded. “All yours?”

“All ours,” I said. “All mine.” But I faltered. The boat had docked.

“And those?” he said, half-smiling, pointing to my weapons, which were standing up bravely to the evening, planted one to a mound.

“Those are my forefathers,” I said, half-smiling.

“Both?” he said, looking at each mound with its implement.

“Both.”

I drew him to the mound under the scythe. “John of Contoocock is his name.” I like to say it; it brings back the rivers and the towns, the woods and the ponds. “He was earlier than any of the others. He needed animals, it’s said, the way we others only need the winter weather. He’d have been all right if we could have got a pig to him in time.”

He stood there, looking down. “We had a boy from Contoocook in class too, didn’t we.”

“Don’t confuse me,” I put my hand on the scythe—so thin. “He had no last name,” I said. “He was the earliest.” And could not survive.

He stood there thinking. “Johnny—” he said. “You were my smartest boy.” Then why did he look so miserable.

What can you answer, when you know your own condition exactly?

“Is there—a question you wanted to ask me?” he said.

I looked over the rim. They were out of the boat now and on the land on this side—her and her brother, and even her mother with the curls, and burly Blazer too. And on either side of us I could hear the crowd which had gone round by way of the shore, crashing through the underbrush. They don’t know how to walk in a wood yet. And the woods are not yet on their side. They were closing in, from all directions except the woods in back of me.

I nodded at him. “About them—and us. I wanted to ask you. Is it just the balance again, like the elms, like the aphids? Will they ever see us for more than a minute? Can you answer me that? You’re the instructor. Can’t you teach us which tree is which to the other? Is a rifle across the water the only way? Can’t we
both
stand by?”

It was some dose of a question, of course. Though I waited politely, I’d already seen by his shirt he couldn’t answer it; he was only Mr. Wilderness.

And when I looked away from him, I saw them all now in their half-circle around me. They thought they had me closed in.

“I see you,” I said. Mildly, for after all the gun was still at my feet. “And you see me. Don’t you.” Even though I could tell from their eye-mirrors how they saw me, it was a satisfaction. And their misery wouldn’t last.

But I don’t intend meanness either. It’s my weakness does it.

“Oh, don’t you take all the blame,” I said. I cast back a farewell glance at my fallen ones, behind me. “Who can sell a grave?
Us.
”

And then, what do you know, there was a great, windy sob from the middle of them. “Ohhhh Johnny, Johnny One!” It was Barbara the weathercock, with sentiment streaming down her face.

“Don’t be so proud,” I said. “I didn’t dip the gun for you. I raised it. I did it for the birch.”

“Oh, Johnny.”

She crept nearer me.

“How’s your leg?” I said.

She showed me a patch on it I hadn’t seen from across the water. She reached out to touch me. “Let me—”

“Let you what?”

“Take you—home with us. To rest.”

“Don’t come any nearer,” I said. “Don’t even—remember me. The way you look at me, so proud, I might have shot
myself.
” And what would I do with a flag?

Just then, down at the edge of it all, I felt a tugging at my elbow. It was the peewee. I had forgotten him. “Interduce
me
,” he said. He’s a moron, but he can’t help it.

I took his scaly hand. “This is one of my friends also,” I said. “He’s the one you can see.”

But he wasn’t satisfied. Still tugging, he sent up a scratch of a question, like the voice of the moss itself. “Did we do it, Johnny? Did we do it? Is it over?”

He was only a moron, but I had to tell someone. “Yes—we did it,” I said. “But it’s over. The summer people are real.”

M
RS. BOWMAN, THE SMALL
, dark American woman walking up the Via Aurelia Antica in the sauterne Roman sunlight, was glad that she had worn the good brown pumps with the low French heels. “Take the Monteverdi bus from the Piazza Fiume,” Mrs. Wigham, the British journalist resident in Rome, had said on the phone. “After that, it’s a twenty-minute walk.” But of course it was turning out to be a very British twenty-minute walk, as the American had suspected it might.

Visiting Italian villas, if one had no car and must watch long cab fares, had a technique of its own. One had to be dressed to cope with the crammed
filobus,
the dodging between motorcycles on the steep walk afterward, the long, cobbled approaches to the houses themselves. But once there the
amour-propre
might have to cope with a room full of signoras dressed with their usual black and white graffito perfection or, worse still, with those of one’s own countrywomen who traveled preserved in some mysterious, transportable amber of their own native conveniences. Well, the new coat and the brown shoes would about do. She smiled to herself, remembering that she had read somewhere that a lady always traveled in brown.

The road was walled on each side, so that the sun scarcely glinted on the occasional green Vespa, red Lambretta or on herself, the only pedestrian. Here was a door set tight in the wall—number four, and number three had been minutes back. Number twenty-two might well be another mile away. Well, time is not
time
in Italy, she reminded herself. “My time is your time,” she sang under her breath, and walked on. After a while she came to the top of a hill and saw four priests approaching from the opposite direction, walking along in their inevitably coupled way. From above, the four black discs of their hats, with the round, center hubs of crown, looked like the flattened-out wheels of some ancient bas-relief vehicle. The wheels of the church, she thought, and crossed the road.

“Per favore,”
she faltered.
“II numero ventidue—é lontano?”
In a flood of smiles and gestures they waved her on. High above her head the embankments hid the greenery, making the way seem endless. From the dust of the road came the deciduous, stony smell of antiquity. Her lowered eyes caught sight of a pebble, smooth and egg-shaped, rather like the white jelly-bean stones her younger boy at home in the States had in his collection. She passed it, hesitated, and went back for it. I found it on the Via Aurelia Antica, she would tell him. On Easter Sunday afternoon.

At home it would still be morning. Her boys, released from the school chapel, would be at dinner in the commons or horsing in the yard. It was a habit she had not been able to break, these six months away—this counting back to what time it was over there. She hadn’t wanted to go, she hadn’t. But “Go!” all the others of the faculty had said. After all—a sabbatical. Once in seven years. “And four of those a widow,” they must have whispered behind her. “Perhaps … over there …” Well, they would find her the same as before her sea change. At forty, forty-one, to range the world like a honing girl, the eye liquid, the breast a cave, was no more decent abroad than it would have been at home. One learned to be alone over here, as one had back there. It was like baggage. She slipped the stone into her pocket and went on.

At last she came to the high iron gates of number twenty-two. They swung open, released by the invisible keeper in the hut at the side, and at the end of a driveway shorter than most she came to the house—nothing of museum grandeur about it, like others she had visited, but low, extended in a comfortable way and about the size of her house at home. No one was about.
“Ciao!”
she would have liked to have called, but did not. “Hello?” she said, and waited. “Hell-lo-o.”