The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (50 page)

I went outside though, to look again for sure. Yes. It was now only a little past five o’clock, but small as the woods were, I’d better give us three quarters of an hour to get through it, even with the steak. A leader has got to plan. And I hoped I’d thought of everything, except what would have to be left to the last minute—my gun and its target. I’d half wanted to ask him that in the letter, but finally had let it be. For if I have a gun, but don’t know my own target—what do I have a gun for at all?

Outside, there was even a kind of double omen. The sun was still shining in that fool’s gold way it has at five o’clock. But on the other side of the world, not in any fair balance yet but trying, there was the palest full moon I’d ever seen in a sky. Even my keen sight could barely see it. Couldn’t see how it would ever have the energy to rise, except that moons do.

I went back inside, slamming the housedoor so that it shuddered back, wide-open. That was to be our signal. We don’t waste our energy. “Here we are,” I said. “And it’s time.”

One by one, we got each other up from the pine mattresses, and began helping the others fit themselves to their tools. Yes, we still had to do that—we’d only had a week. We still were twelve in number and made an honorable display. We’d kept the pitchforks after all, they handle so easy, and even if you aren’t going to use them in any other way, still their outline is so plain. I’d turned the house out, looking for my uncle’s clipping-shears, then found out he’d been using Blazer’s. So, after two of the forks, and counting my deputy’s scythe, we had four axes, large and small according to which could best carry the weight of them, two long butcher knives, one queer-angled iron earthtiller so antique we didn’t know what it was for but judged we ought to have it for that reason alone—and a hoe. Ten had let the little peewee have his hubcaps to clash.

I myself helped John of Contoocook with his scythe. We had to strap it on him; this was the only way he could manage it, and I’d have been doubtful of that except for his grin, which was still there. “Know you’ll do it,” I whispered to him. “After all, we don’t have to do anything after we get there but stand. But stand
by
!” It was the first time I’d used that expression out loud, and his eyes flickered at it. And you have the gun, he could have said to me, but didn’t. He’s like me in a way, with the difference that I’d hung on to more energy. Matter of fact, he was worse off than any of us. I couldn’t forbear asking him why. “Why do you suppose it is?” I whispered, as I buckled the strap. His grin was like the moon, just barely there, and like the sun, getting ready to set. “It was the pig,” he answered. “She was my ecology.” He’s hopelessly smart.

At the door then, I addressed my men at large as they went by me, both of us in a manner not to waste breath—in silence. My eyes keen upon them, I called their ghostly roll. “Johns of Four and Five—pitchforks. Johns Two and Three, Buddy Two—axes. A John Two and a Buddy One—knives.” Him with the tiller. Him with the hoe. And the rear guard. “John of Contoocook. Scythe.”

To make sure that none would fall by the wayside unless all did, I roped us all together. At the last minute, one of the knives broke down and couldn’t make it—one of the Buddies, wouldn’t you know? So to fill up the dozen, we had to count the peewee in anyway. Then they were all ready, weaponed and gathered at the door in the formation I’d decided on—a half circle which could at need fall into line. “You of Hillsborough,” I said to them. “Of Jaffrey and Hancock, of Dublin and Antrim, of Rindge and of Nelson, and even of Keene. You of the Monadnock Region. And of the winter time. Get ready. Get Set. G—”

And then my uncle got up from his rocking chair.

He faltered over to me, clickety-click. He was even able to dig his sharp fingers into my chest; he’s been a strong man in his day. “The old customs,” he said, in his wooden-doll voice. “We’ll go back to them. But first, we ought to know who we are, son, oughtn’t we.” He drew himself up straight as he could. “I’m Andrew. And that is Marietta, my wife.” Hearing that name, my aunt woke, looked around bewildered, at this battalion in her old sitting room, and then smiled straight at me, too, from her shawl. “And I know you’re John,” said my uncle. “I
know
you’re John. But son—” I felt his nails through my sweatshirt. “Son, remind me. What’s our last name? Our
surname,
as people used to say. I rock and I rock, but I can’t remember it.”

I smiled back at them, for love and for leaving, both. For who could know what would be, when and if we came back? And I had an awful temptation to say—“It’s Wilderness.” That little red bug-on-wheels maybe even now skipping toward us—he would like that. But that is not my style of interest. I know who we are. We’re not that faded, not to me. And I know who I am. I’ve always known. It’s our
other
distinction.

“It’s Willard,” I said. “For the Pond.”

And then we filed out the door, and made up our formation again, outside it. I hadn’t even had to say Go. But as we closed ranks, shouldering each as we could, with one hand, and ready to help his neighbor with the other, I heard my aunt’s voice. “I’m going to make you a flag.”

Then we were on the march. Marching is useful too; some say that all by itself it’s as useful to the spirit as gathering is, but in our state it wasn’t gold to us; it was simply what we had to do. Funny thing though, the woods, pine to maple to birch, were in perfect order for it. Even the underbrush lay quiet, as if somebody had swept. Yet I knew that although they across there had got as far as browning in the gardens and on the water, they hadn’t been much to the woods yet, for health. And they hadn’t paid to clear here; who would they pay that was left? Sometimes, toward autumn but before the leaves start twirling down, woods look like that, in perfect order for—something one can’t say. From tree to tree, these ragged woods of my forefathers let us by now, not putting out a root to trip us, passing us on, tree to tree. They stood by us. And we walked.

And we walked. Some might have called our pace a stumble. Or only a dragging, with a rope. But it was our pace. And we did it in silence. We had no extra breath for songs. Even the peewee’s hubcaps, heavy enough in his tiny hands scaled with skin rash like a lizard’s, were still.

Only my gun talked, braced on my shoulder. And only I heard it; it had such a soft voice. “Blazer, Blazer, go away,” it said. “Come again some other day.” But that was for rain, not people. I knew that, though my own head seemed now and then about to twirl and fall. Then it said, “Hickory, dickory, your son John, took our Barbara with his britches on.” Only a nursery rhyme, and wrong at that, but marching was not my true rhythm, and the air at this hour of the day was hot and cold by turns, shiver and blister both. I prayed to the steak in my stomach. I thought I could see the others were too; behind the iron and steel, their lips were moving. But for me, there was worse to come. That gun tried everything. And by the last yard of it—the whole woods isn’t half a mile—that gun and I had fallen in rhythm together. “Bar-bar-a
Blazer
,” it said, “is beautiful.” And my feet answered, “Beautiful”—treading on moss now, for we were there.

We were on the shoreline of my forefathers’ pond. We were on the peculiarly mossy and stony patch of it that I could call at least jointly mine, and I turned round to look at my men. They had formed their half-circle again, almost without command from me—my army, my posse, my eleven other Johns and one Buddy. And one whiteheaded peewee. But this was all they could manage. Everything had stopped, but my anger. Above our heads, the sun and moon had stopped too. Or were in perfect balance.

“At ease, men,” I said. In silence, their weapons slid to the ground. One voice slid after them. “Hadn’t ought to do that, John One. We’ll never be able to get them up again.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Anger is slow, eight generations slow. But it never stops.” And trusting I was right, I inspected my ranks, as must be done before battle—or before testing, to the specimen.

Under that sky of double omen, my friends seemed to me only a step mistier than myself. Their heads were bowl-cut or longhaired like mine, but not in the new style, and their jeans and shirts were ragged, but not ragged new. They were ragged in the old style. They were a strange, weak sight, my winter Apollos, and when their arsenal was raised against that sky, they would be odder still. But maybe the people over there would see them the better for it. That’s what specimens are. And they were standing by. In spite of all suffered or lazed or blamed away, they had not utterly gone down yet—into the grass, the ground.

I addressed them.

“We’re a little late,” I said. “It’s past six o’clock.” We’d taken a little longer than estimated, to go that half mile. “But I see that over across there, they are late too.” I raised the binoculars, to hearten the men behind me, though I could see perfectly well without. And faithfully, my men looked heartened, though as they stared sideways under their weedy fringes of hair, I could tell that they saw across the water just as well as me. “We and they are late together,” I said. “Maybe that’s an omen, too.”

None of my men had been with me to the shoreline before, only me and my deputy, to scout. And now, in their faces I saw all the sight before us across the water—its glass doors open to the shining games inside, and all the tanned people streaming in, or sitting without caution on the green itself. In the face of my Johnny Three, John Three—I saw a pair over there, going in through the door in their waterskis and goggles. Inside the new soda parlor, its hanging lamps were already lit to pale taffy against all that fresh white; I saw their sign, Pancake Palace, in the face of a John Two. One of our Buddies, the one left to us, was seeing that there were even red paper flames in the cookpot under the poster—the Buddy with the knife. Every man and his implement was seeing a detail of it, of that milling, laughing group of sports and silk-headed grandmothers bobbing like cotton—the whole foolish, rosy, expensive Blazer-crowd. On a bench out in front, sat a fat man, no not fat, burly, in bow tie and a flower in his jacket buttonhole—Blazer himself. There were babies scattered like plants all over the place, all with the round, superior look of babies whose mothers were not going to die. I could see it all in my men’s faces. Wasn’t it the way we had always seen the summer people, in the pale, expensive orange-light of the health-money they were always making? In the dream-face next to one’s own, isn’t that the way one always sees the mirage?

No, said the gun. This time you are seeing by yourself.

Against that joyous little turret, flipped up in paint-glow to the sun, they were now raising a black, lacy ladder. A band began to play; they had the breath for it. And to each ladder of the song, a golden-legged couple was climbing a step gracefully, hand over hand to the platform at the top. He had on cut-off jeans only, carefully sawtoothed off at the knees, the way they do, and his water-streaked hair had been cut with a scissors. The female of a genus, we had been taught, often has more protective coloration. She had on an orange and white swimsuit, sunset-colored as her limbs, and her hair floated, leafing out along the wind. When the two reached the platform, they stepped up on it, then turned and waved—two shadows, two golden statues, waving to one side and then to another, but not to over here. And I saw that the place for the weathercock was still bare. What were they going to raise there—the sun and moon both?

Down below them, Blazer was speaking. On that side of the water, the whole world was orange with the healthy glow of them. Blazer had a nasturtium in his buttonhole.

“Get ready,” I said. “Get set.”

All the better for their light, I told myself. We will make better shadow.

“The test is—will they see us?” I said. “That is the battle.”

I had never revealed this to my men before, and I turned to them now, to see how they would take it. I saw that they already knew.

“When I give the command,” I said, “raise your weapons. They cannot fail to see us—four axes, a scythe, a knife and a tiller, two pitchforks, and a hoe.”

My deputy spoke softly. “And a gun.”

I turned my back on him.

Across the way, they had raised the weathercock. It was in place. In the old days the style was often a flying horse or a golden rooster; we had sold them in the shop many a time, whenever we could find an old weathercock to sell. I’d expected it would be one of those; they wouldn’t buy new. There are other shapes, of course, including our own from the house, gone so long ago, that I’d forgotten what it was. The shape of this one was new to me, or so at first I thought. It was a double pennant, flying to the breeze from where it was fixed to its rod, fixed there by a heartshape over on its side, pierced by an arrow. Then I recognized it. It was exactly the same in shape as the one high on the Meetinghouse at Hancock, hard by Norway Pond. Had they dared to lift it from there? They were so powerful. And the shoreline at Norway Pond is off-limits for some of us, too. Even if nobody but a country is named after it.

The shape of that weathercock troubled me. In the flame of the wind, it looked like a man on his side, blowing in the wind, blowing, his head a heart on its side, and an arrow in his head. Maybe they got it from a closed-up church.

Behind me, I heard a murmur. My men were troubled too. And I had brought them here, over a week and a wood, to this shoreline. What else could I do?

“Shoulder arms,” I said.

I turned to watch them, proud. They were tall, all except the Buddy knife and the peewee, and they helped one another until all their artillery was up, shining its broadside against the evening clouds and the woods behind. I went from one to the other, straightening them. The scythe was the highest. And the hill we were on was higher than any rise of theirs, and the couple on the platform was still turning and waving, waving and turning. They couldn’t help but see us, I thought. We stood there, a thin rank of us, but sightable surely, black and separate, but gathered too. Even the Pond, rising to the last sun, sent off a sheet of light like a thunderflash, to encourage us.