Collected Stories, page 8
“Let’s have a set then. The court’ll be empty in a minute.”
The Englishman knocked out his pipe, looked back toward the empty cocktail garden, puckered his lips. He had a pulpy nose and prominent teeth. “I didn’t bring a racket,” he said. “Perhaps …”
“The pro’ll have some.”
The Englishman rose. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll go pop into my things.” He went toward the hotel, walking springily, a preposterous, lumpy little blowhard, and Mr. Hart dropped a look of grim anticipation at the two lazy, amused youths.
“The International Matches,” Tenney said. “Shall I cry ‘Well struck, Cow College!’ now and again?”
“Don’t encourage me,” said Mr. Hart. “I might start shooting for the little stinker’s belt buckle.”
The Englishman looked even more preposterous in shorts than he had in polo shirt and slacks. His muscles were knobbly; his bones stuck out like the elbows of characters in comic strips. Mr. Hart, leading the way onto the court, was aware of the young men watching from their somnolent chairs. It was as if he had made them a promise. Opening the can of balls he made another to himself. He was going to play every shot as if dollars depended on it.
“Here we go,” he said cheerily, and wafted a warm-up ball across the net. From the very awkwardness of the Englishman’s run he knew his plan was not going to boomerang. The goof looked as if he’d never been on a court before. This, he told himself happily, was murder.
It was a murder that he enjoyed thoroughly. For three quarters of an hour he ran the Englishman’s tongue out, tricked him with soft chops that died in the clay, outran him with topped drives into the corners, aced him with flat services, left him going full steam in the wrong direction for an occasional American twist. He was playing carefully himself, not hitting anything too hard until he got a kill, and then plastering it with everything he had. He blessed the high altitude and worn balls of his youth which had made him learn to murder a high ball. The Englishman’s game, when there was any, gave him little to hit except soft high bouncers, big as a basketball and begging to be swatted.
As he went about his methodical mayhem his amazement grew. The Englishman didn’t have a thing. Then why in the world would he have the consummate gall to talk the way he had? Mr. Hart could not imagine; but he saw the two watchers in their chairs, and his unspoken compact with them kept him at the butchery. The Englishman got six points the first set, and his face was a little strained as they changed courts. You bloody upstart, Mr. Hart thought. This is where you learn to be humble. He stepped up to the service line prepared to skunk the Englishman completely, never give him a point.
In the middle of the set the two young men rose and stretched and picked up their towels. They lifted their hands and walked off toward the bath-houses, and Mr. Hart, a little disappointed at the loss of his audience, went on finishing the thing off. The Englishman was feeling his shoulder between shots now. Obviously, thought Mr. Hart, he has pulled a muscle. Obviously.
At five-love the Englishman walked up to the net. “I say, do you mind? I seem to have done something to my shoulder here. Can’t seem to take a decent swing.”
Mr. Hart picked up the ball can and his sweater. Without really wanting to, he let the alibi establish itself. “No use to play with a bad arm,” he said. And looking at the grimace pretending to be pain on the little man’s face, he said, almost kindly and to his own astonishment, “It was spoiling your game. I could see you weren’t up to scratch.”
“Makes me damned mad,” the Englishman said. “Here I’ve mucked up your whole afternoon. Couldn’t hit a thing after the first game or two.”
“Too bad,” said Mr. Hart. And so, condoling one another, they went back to the hotel. It was funny. It was, Mr. Hart decided while he was dressing, so damned funny he ought to be rolling on the bed stuffing covers in his mouth. That he was not, he laid to the complete incorrigibility of that dreadful little man. People like that would never see themselves straight. No innuendo, no humiliation, would ever teach them anything. Hopelessly inadequate, they must constantly be butting into situations and places where they didn’t belong. Mr. Hart shrugged. Let him live. The hell with him. If he couldn’t be overlooked, he could be avoided.
He brushed off his white shoes, felt his tie, and looked in the mirror. Nose and forehead pretty red. For an instant of irritation he wished he wouldn’t always burn and peel before he tanned. There was some system—tannic acid, was it?—but he always forgot till too late. The regulars around here, he was sure, never peeled.
In the dining room there were flowers bright against the stiff linen on every table, and the ladderlike shadow of a palm frond fell across the floor from the west windows. Mr. Hart answered the headwaiter’s bow and stepped down into the cocktail lounge. There was no one there except two waiters, the bartender, and some stuffed fish. Outside, however, several tables were occupied. At one of them sat Thomas and Tenney, and as Mr. Hart started over he noticed that they still wore sandals and no socks. Their arrogant feet seemed at home and unembarrassed. He wondered if they wore socks to dinner, and it crossed his mind that he might be overdressing. White jacket might look like ostentation. He didn’t want that.
“Well!” said Mr. Hart, and sat down. “What’s a good drink here?”
Tenney shrugged. His amber, remote, hawklike eyes were away off down the garden, then briefly on Mr. Hart. “Rum collins?”
Mr. Hart signaled a waiter. The three sat quietly while people came in twos and threes into the garden. The young men did not speak of the tennis match. Neither did Mr. Hart. And he did not remember, until a small party came pushing a blue wheelbarrow with a sailfish in it, that he had meant to go down and watch the boats come in.
There were a gray-haired man and a blonde older woman and a wind-blown, pretty girl in the party. They came through the garden in triumph, calling to people to witness. Everybody seemed to know them. Everyone got up and crowded around and admired. Thomas and Tenney went over with their glasses in their hands, and Mr. Hart rose, but did not want to push in. “Fifty-nine pounds,” the girl said. “And I caught it. Little me.” The tempo of the garden had picked up; the lazy afternoon was already accelerating into cocktail hour, dinner hour, the evening dance. Mr. Hart, standing at the edge of the crowd, thought what really pleasant fun it would be to spend a day that way. The fishing party seemed pleasant, agreeable people. And it would be fun to catch a thing like that sailfish. Lovely to see him break the peacock water.
“Come on,” the girl said. “I’m buying the drinks on this one.” She hooked arms with Tenney and Thomas, the gray-haired man picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and they went up the garden to a table under the hedge.
Mr. Hart stood a moment alone. Then he sat down. The chatter, the bright afternoon sounds, went over him, and he heard the fishing girl’s brittle tinkle of laughter. The long light of evening lay over the palms and the flowering trees and the golf-green lawn. Waiters tipped the umbrellas sideways and lifted the steel butts from the holes and stacked the canvas against the hedge. Mr. Hart watched them; his eyes went beyond them to the party at the hedge table, Tenney and Thomas leaning forward, no languor about them now, their talk animated.
Beside his own table he saw his immaculate buck foot. It irritated him, somehow, and he put it out of sight. The bronze feet of Tenney and Thomas, he noticed, were in plain view as they tipped their chairs forward to talk to the fishermen. The dead fish’s fin stuck up from the blue wheelbarrow like a black-violet lacquered fan. It was while he watched them that the cold finger touched Mr. Hart, and he knew what it was.
The garden was full of people now, brown-faced, casual. They were necessary, Mr. Hart thought, to complete the picture. The whole garden, tipped with light through the palms, was like a Seurat. And he sat alone, outside the picture. There were two rings of moisture on the enameled table, left by the glasses of Tenney and Thomas. Very carefully Mr. Hart squeegeed them off with his thumb and finger and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. When he looked up he saw the Englishman, fantastically white and sluglike in this garden of brown demigods, standing in the doorway of the lounge in white jacket and ascot tie, looking around the tables.
For an instant Mr. Hart hesitated. He heard the brittle chatter and laughter from the other tables. His elbows felt the tug of hands, heard the voices saying, “Come on, let’s have a drink on it,” his bronze face felt the sun as he went with the others across to a corner table. …
His fingers went around the cold glass, raised it. With his other hand he signaled the Englishman standing in the doorway.
Saw Gang
The sun had not yet risen above the woods when Ernie started, and the grass on the little road up through the hemlocks was crisp with frost. As he topped the stiff climb and came out onto Thurson’s meadow, above the town reservoir, the first flat rays hit him in the face.
He put his double-bitted axe through the fence, climbed through after it, crossed the meadow, and jumped the swamp from hummock to hummock until he entered the cedars. Cattle had been among the low growth; their split tracks were sucked deep into the ground and half frozen there.
On the other side of the rail fence belting the cedars he came again into open meadow, still green after a late mowing, and saw the long hill ahead of him, winter-black spruce scattered through the dying color of the maples. October was a very taste in the air of smoke and frost and dried seed pods, and he filled his lungs with it, walking rapidly up toward Pembrook’s farm and the crown of woods behind it where George Pembrook was cutting wood.
He did not trouble to stop in the Pembrooks’ yard, but ducked under the last fence and went on up the skid road George had worn hauling limb wood down to his circle saw. As he climbed, the sun climbed with him, but the air still had its winy sparkle, and there was a smell from grass and weeds as the frost thawed.
Just where the skid road turned left up a little draw toward the sugarbush, he saw Will Livesy and Donald Swain coming across from the other side, both with axes. Their greetings were brief.
“Hi, kid,” Donald said.
“Hi, boy,” said Will.
They walked along together, not talking. Ernie, matching his behavior to theirs, walked steadily, watching the woods. Only when Donald Swain breathed his lungs full of air, shifted his axe to the other shoulder, and said, “Good workin’ weather,” the boy looked at him and they grinned. It was what he had wanted to say himself.
Ahead of them, back in the woods, the saw engine started, and a minute later they heard the blade rip across the first log. Will Livesy took out a turnip watch, turned it for the others to see. It was seven-thirty. “Ain’t wastin’ no time,” Will said.
The saw was set up in a clearing at the bottom of a slope. Behind it was a skidway piled ten feet high with logs. George Pembrook was there, and his brother Howard, and John LaPere, the sawyer. George, dogging a log forward under the upraised saw, spat sideways on the ground, unsmiling.
“Up late last night?”
“ ’y God,” Will Livesy said, “I was up all night. Got any wood to chop to keep me awake?”
George looked at the mountainous skidway behind him. “Just a mite,” he said.
Ernie stood his axe against a tree and jumped to roll a chunk, solid and squat as a meat block, from under the saw. Donald and Will squared away. Donald spat on his hands, swung: the blade bounded from the hard wood. A second later Will’s axe came down on the other side, in the mathematical center of the chunk, and got a bite. Donald swung again, his blade biting into the crack his first blow had made, a quarter of an inch from Will’s axe, and the chunk fell cleanly in two.
Everybody found a job and went at it. Howard Pembrook rolled logs down onto the track, George dogged them through and braced them, LaPere dropped the saw onto them and whacked them into stove lengths, Ernie cleared them away, Donald and Will split. In the leaf-and-chip-strewn clearing, under the thinning maples, the pulse of the saw went up like the panting of a man.
Every hour or two, without talking about it, they changed off jobs, all except LaPere and Donald Swain. The work went on without pause while the sun climbed higher above the hill and the air warmed. Once in a while, seeing the lower part of the skidway bare, Ernie left his job and helped roll a new supply of logs down the skids with cant hooks. Nobody said anything.
About eleven, as Will was poking a six-inch pole under the saw, LaPere raised his denim cap and looked down his nose at the thing. Most of the logs they had been sawing were birch and beech and maple anywhere from eighteen to thirty inches through.
“Call that a log?” he said.
Will grinned. “George lost his fishpole.”
A few minutes later, as Ernie rolled a big twisted knotty rot-sided maple log onto the tracks and Will dogged it forward, LaPere let the saw down experimentally and raked it across the crumbling bark. “Kind of gone by, ain’t it?”
“Best George could find,” Will said. He dropped the bracing lever across the log and threw his weight on it. LaPere bore down on the clutch and the jerking blade came down. Halfway through the pulpy log it hit a hard knot, the blade bent almost double, the log kicked sideways off the track as Will’s lever slipped on the rotten bark and flipped upward like a swung bat. By the time LaPere could raise the saw the blade had jumped free and hung quivering, shaking shredded pulp from its two-inch teeth. Will was standing with his head down, feeling his jaw.
“Thunderation!” George Pembrook said. “That was a whack.”
“Lever kicked up,” Donald Swain said, watching Will. He said it for nobody in particular; they had all looked up instantly at the warning howl of the saw. “Took him right under the chin,” Donald said.
Will felt his jaw tenderly. His hat had fallen off, and his thin red hair stuck up on end. Looking down from the platform, LaPere chuckled.
“Lose any teeth, Will?”
Will shook his head to clear it, felt his chin again, and cackled with sudden laughter. “ ’y God, I didn’t have ’em in!” he said. He rolled the log back with a hook, and they were working again so abruptly that Ernie had to jump to get the chunk from under the saw.
At noon, without comment, LaPere cut the switch and the engine stopped with three lunging coughs. Donald and George sank their axes in the chunk they had been splitting, they all collected their frocks from the trees where they had hung them, and within three minutes they were strung out along the trail on their way to the farmhouse.
Ernie did not push himself up with the others. Though he had known them all his life, he knew better at fifteen than to take it for granted he was one of them. In silence he followed the silent file until they came into the open opposite George’s sugarhouse. There John LaPere, walking with George Pembrook, stopped and stared, and the rest piled up behind him.
“Great God, George!” LaPere said.
A little clump of spruces had been chopped down by the side of the road, and Ernie, coming up behind the clot of men, saw that the trees had been whittled and chewed and mangled with a dull axe and finally broken off instead of being chopped off clean.
“That city kid I had this summer,” George said. “I think he used his teeth.”
One by one, as they started again, the men looked at the mangled butts, then at each other. They whistled, grinning a little, and walked on. Will Livesy, a black smear of blood like a beard under his chin, turned and shook his head at Ernie, calling his attention to the stumps.
The table was set at the Pembrooks’. George changed from gum boots to slippers and turned on the radio while the men went one by one to the sink to wash. Ernie went last. By the time he sat down, the governor from Montpelier was discussing with the state the provisions he was making for coal supplies, and they listened to him in silence for twenty minutes, steadily consuming two plates apiece of Mrs. Pembrook’s meat loaf, baked potatoes, hot biscuits, string beans, carrots, and sweet pickle.
They finished neck and neck with the governor, loitered briefly outside in the sun while George got back into gum boots, and then went silently back up the skid road past the sugarhouse and the gnawed spruce stumps and into the woods. Before LaPere had his engine started Howard Pembrook and Donald Swain were swinging splitting hammers on the tough and knotty chunks that they had rolled aside earlier.
In midafternoon George’s hound wandered up muddy-footed from chasing through a swamp. It went around to each man, and each stopped for a second to scratch its ears, until it came to LaPere, up on the shaking platform. Then the hound sat down. “Hi, Sport,” LaPere said.
About three-thirty, with the saw halfway through a big yellow birch log, the engine died. LaPere looked surprised. “ ‘Nuts,’ said McGinty,” he said. He opened the gas cap, stuck a twig down, raised his eyebrows, and reached for the gas can. Ernie, straightening up to ease his aching back, saw that none of the others was stopping. Howard and Will were rolling down a new supply of logs, Donald and George stacking stove-wood against the spreading pile to keep it from engulfing the splitting space. Ernie got the shovel and cleaned the sawdust out from under the track.
Through the whole afternoon, while the sun rolled down the long slope of the western hills and the hound got bored and wandered away and the stack of split wood got head high, and more than head high, they worked steadily and in silence. Ernie, his back and his belly sore from leaning and lifting, kept his mouth shut and worked with them. He knew they would never have worked like this for any employer, that they kept up the pace only because they all owed George help and would give nothing but their best day’s work in exchange. Still, he kept listening, half hopeful that the engine would die again. The great pile of logs had receded twenty feet up the skidway, and sawdust was ankle deep all around the saw.
About four George began jacking the logs thirty inches forward instead of fifteen. “Got about enough stovewood,” he said.
The erratic, tearing rhythm of the saw, the panting of the engine, went on, punctuated by the solid, wet chunk of the splitters’ axes. Behind the splitters another pile began to grow, furnace chunks this time. The hound came back, found no one to scratch its ears, and disappeared again. The logs came faster off the skids now; George’s hand on the dogging lever was almost as regular as a hand on a pump handle.
