All the Little Live Things

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels,
Remembering Laughter,
1937;
The Big Rock Candy Mountain,
1943;
Joe Hill,
1950;
All the Little Live Things,
1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal);
A Shooting Star,
1961;
Angle of Repose,
1971 (Pulitzer Prize);
The Spectator Bird,
1976 (National Book Award, 1977);
Recapitulation,
1979; and
Crossing to Safety,
1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954;
Wolf Willow,
1963;
The Sound of Mountain Water
(essays), 1969;
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto,
1974; and
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West,
1992. Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the
Los Angeles Times
for his lifetime literary achievements. His
Collected Stories
was published in 1990.

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press, Inc., 1967 Published in Penguin Books 1991

30 29 -

Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1967

All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., for permission to quote, on page 209, from “To Earthward” from
Complete Poems of Robert Frost.

Copyright 1923 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-All the little live things/Wallace Stegner. p. cm. “First published ... by the Viking Press, Inc., 1967”—T.p. verso.

eISBN : 978-1-101-07579-1

I. Title. II. Series. PS3537.T316A’.52—dc20 91-18312

 

 

 

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—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

A
HALF HOUR AFTER I came down here, the rains began. They came without fuss, the thin edge of a circular Pacific storm that is probably dumping buckets on Oregon. One minute I was looking out my study window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain. Now the flagstones are shining, the tops of the horizontal oak limbs are dark-wet, there is a growing drip from the dome of the tree above, the towhee’s olive back has melted into umber dusk and gone. I sit here watching evening and the winter rains come on together, and I feel as slack and dull as the day or the season. Or not slack so much as bruised. I am like a man so stiff from a beating that every move reminds him and fills him with outrage.

In the face of what has happened, Ruth is more resilient than I, she has taken up little life-saving jobs. It would not surprise me to see a FOR SALE sign on the cottage that for me still trembles a little, like settling dust in evening sunlight, with the ghost of Marian’s presence. But Ruth, making the cookies and casseroles and whole-wheat bread that she used to take there as offerings, puts the future under the pressure of sympathetic magic. She wills continuity, she chooses .to believe that before too long we will hear the slam of the old station wagon’s door down below, or have brought to us on the wind the voices of father and daughter talking to the piebald horse.

I? I came down here vaguely mumbling about finally starting on the memoirs. But the last thing I want to think about is what a retired literary agent used to do before he retired, and the people he used to do it among. I am concerned with gloomier matters: the condition of being flesh, susceptible to pain, infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death. My life stains the air around me. I am a tea bag left too long in the cup, and my steepings grow darker and bitterer.

Coming home this noon, Ruth and I said hardly ten words to each other. Our minds were back there on the lawn among the blunt stones. But when we eased over the stained and sagging bridge and saw the brush broken and trampled at its side, and a minute later when we rolled past the cottage with its weed-grown yard that I suppose expresses Marian without in the least resembling her, and a minute after that when the turning lane brought into view the gable of Peck’s treehouse, something jumped the gap between us each time, a succession of those moments that you come to depend on during a long life together. But neither of us dared look fully at the reminding things we drove by. Ruth sat studying her hands, rubbing one white-gloved thumb over the other. In silence we drove through the open gates, between the big eucalyptus trees, and on up the steep shelf of road under the oaks.

October is the worst month for us. Nothing I saw pleased me. The oaks were dusty, with many brown terminal twigs killed by borers. The buckeyes were bare. Only a few dull-red leaves dangled from the poison-oak bushes. Brittle weeds grew into the edges of the road, and as we swung around the buttonhook and onto the hilltop I saw in the adobe ground cracks wide enough to break an ankle in.

And there on the right as we coasted toward the carport was the cherry tree, its leaves drooping and its foolish touching untimely blossoms wilted. Ruth drew an audible breath. Cherry blossoms in October were exactly the sort of thing from which Marian would have derived one of her passionate lessons about life.

Ruth got out of the car. “I’m going to lie down for a while. Shouldn’t you?”

“Maybe I’ll work around the yard.”

The white hand was laid like a policeman’s on my arm. “Joe,” she said, “don’t take it out in highballs, now.

“What do you think I am?” I said, but her clairvoyance had put a barrier between me and a place I had half-consciously planned to visit. When I get sad or upset I can be a pantry drinker, and she knows it.

She pecked me with a kiss. “Poor lamb”—and then as our eyes met, “Poor Marian. Poor all of us.”

I followed her inside and changed the dark suit for old garden clothes and poked morosely out into the yard again. I found that I had maligned the day. Until the rain moved in just now it was one of those Indian-summer days, warm and windless, brown-colored, even the air faintly and purely brown like the water of some Vermont streams. It smelled leathery and cured—the oak leaves, maybe. On the bank the pyracantha was ripening heavy clusters, and the toyon along the hill was top-heavy with berries. I stood by the carport looking down across the gone-by vegetable garden and the baby orchard, and of course what stood up in my view as if it were a hundred feet high was that cherry tree.

My hands began to shake and my eyes got moist—outrage, outrage. To take all that trouble of digging, fertilizing, planting, spraying, pruning, coddling, only to have a blind vermin come burrowing brainlessly underground to destroy everything! My head was full of some poet’s bitter question: Was it for this the clay grew tall?

I walked down to look. The basin was disturbed by no more humps, of loose dirt, but something drastic had happened underground. The leaves that a few days before had been green now drooped like heat-withered cellophane. Along the branches, here and there, were the browning wisps of blossoms that the tree had frantically put out when the gopher began working on its roots. Before I even saw that it had begun, it was finished. Trying to produce flower and fruit and complete its cycle within a few days and way out of season, the tree was dead without knowing it. The sore sense of guilt that I felt told me I should have done something. But what?

I took hold of the sapling trunk and wiggled it, and with a slight threadlike tearing the whole tree came up in my hand. Except for the tiny root I had just broken away, there was nothing. The thing was as bare as a fishpole, gnawed off and practically polished about six inches below the surface.

Off in the brownish air a great flock of Brewer’s black-birds flashed into sudden dense visibility, roughened the sky a moment the way a school of fish can roughen the sea, and flashed off again, disappearing, as they all sheared edgewise at once. It was like something seen through a polarizer. The big red-tailed hawk that lives in Shields’s pasture was perched, I saw, high in a eucalyptus. Probably he was watching me with his X-ray eyes and wondering what I was doing, standing in my October orchard and brandishing the gnawed stub of what was once a promising Lambert cherry tree.

It was a fair question, and I could have answered it. I was pondering the vanity of human wishes and the desperation of human hope, the tooth of time, the vulnerability of good and the unseen omnipresence of evil, and the frailty and passion of life. That is all I was pondering, and I was overwhelmingly aware as I poked around that it was Marian who had exposed me to feeling as I had hoped not to be exposed again. I almost blamed her. Until she appeared, I had succeeded in being a retired putterer remarkable for nothing much except a capacity to fiddle while Rome burned and crack jokes while Troy fell. Now I feel the cold. I felt it up there in the orchard and I feel it now, I feel it as icily as I felt it after Curtis died. But where the death of my son drove me to find a hole and crawl in it, the death of this girl I knew for barely half a year keeps driving me into the open, and I hate it.

I threw the cherry tree onto the pile of cuttings that I would burn as soon as the fire hazard was over. The withered blossoms of that sapling, with their suggestion of unfulfilled April, put an ache and an anger in me where resignation might have been. Marian’s philosophy of acceptance was never mine-I remain a Manichee in spite of her. The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can’t look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can’t find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only, as she told me the first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no matter whose interests they serve or conflict with. Maybe there is good life and bad life, good choice and bad choice, and unending war between them as in the Sunday-school hymns I sang as a boy. And maybe the triumph of the good is less sure than my Sunday-school teachers believed.