Natural Enemy Page 4

  “Hmmmmm,” murmured Madeline Croney sagely. “I wonder what he wants?”

  Eight

  IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE DAY OF EDWARD HERON’S FUNERAL, the weather satellite hung high over the Atlantic seaboard in the eternal sunlight of outer space. From the house at the foot of Pine Hill in Lincoln, Massachusetts, it was only a fixed speck in the night sky. Virginia Heron lay awake in her bedroom at the east end of the house, gazing at the window. She was not thinking of the day to come and her father’s funeral. She was wondering whether rabbits were eating the peas in the vegetable garden. How many rabbits were there, anyway, on an acre of New England rural soil? How many woodchucks, racoons, squirrels? There had been a deer in the woods a year or two ago. Were they all gone now? And once she had seen a fox in the wilderness at the bottom of the lawn. It had been standing still, looking around curiously like a small dog. Alexander Higginson would have been pleased to see the fox. He would have put on his scarlet coat with the white collar and the green piping, the dark scarlet coat of the master of the Middlesex Foxhounds, and ridden after it with a hue and cry. Virginia stared at the rectangle of limpid sky, and imagined the out-of-doors alive with four-legged creatures. This hour of the night belonged to them. Only when the occupants of the house woke up, and yawned and dressed themselves, only when everybody was going about the day’s work, only then did the wild owners withdraw and the two-legged ones take over. It seemed fair enough to Virginia, sharing the place, owning it in the daytime, giving it up by night.

  Below Virginia’s window the spider was at work, building the first web of her second year of life. Dropping a line to the sill of the shed door, she secured her thread, then quickly ascended again. Soon she had constructed a framework and spread across it a set of evenly spaced radial filaments. Without pausing to rest she began circling outward from the center, adjusting the distance between one circle and another by the length of one of her hind legs, moving swiftly, as if she had not spent the last six months in a state of suspended animation. Around and around she sped, pausing at each radius to secure her line, hurrying on to a final circumferential thread, then working her way in again, laying down a new system of spiraling silk, more delicate than the first, more deadly, coated with sticky beads. Around she went, around and around, declaring this corner of the dim universe her own territory and hunting ground.

  Above the shed door and a little to the west was the window of John’s room. As the night sky turned grey, John, too, woke up. It was only the second waking in his new room. Getting up on one elbow, looking around possessively at the small space, he felt glad to be there, even though the ceiling was half fallen down and the window frames were rotten and the elegant cast-iron radiator wasn’t connected to anything at all. Virginia and Barbara had given him the choice of their father’s old bedroom and the guest room, even though Buddy Whipple’s gear was littering the guest room. But John had already attached himself to this room out in the shed. Some hired man had lived in it once, hanging his clothes on the iron hooks in the narrow closet under the eaves, coming and going through the laundry by his own pitch-black twisting stairway.

  Barbara had laughed. “Well, all right. Help yourself. You can wash in the set tubs downstairs, I guess.” And later she had handed him a white porcelain vessel with a matching lid decorated with violets. John had never seen one before, but he recognized its charm and usefulness at once and put it on the floor of his closet.

  And then he had moved in. He had piled all his possessions in Aunt Mary’s car, and on the top he had roped his mattress, a long piece of plywood, a pair of sawhorses and his bicycle, and Aunt Mary had driven him over. “Say good-bye to Uncle Homer for me,” said John, feeling guilty. “I’m really sorry to be leaving you people in the lurch.” He had spent a happy afternoon arranging everything. The sawhorses and the plywood made a table for his spider collection, his web frames, his screen-topped jars and plastic vegetable containers. John’s collection was mostly common spiders. He had a pair of cellar spiders, the female with her egg sac in her mouth, half a dozen house spiders with hundreds of nearly invisible young, a couple of sheet-web spiders with littered webs, and a little jumping spider with beady eyes that always seemed to be looking right back at him. John’s big brown tarantula was an old friend, the only spider with a name — Fred — living comfortably in one of the screen-topped vegetable containers. The prize of his collection was a trapdoor spider from Georgia, her shiny black face hidden under a mossy door. Behind the jars stood his web frames. John loved these spiders best. Every evening at dusk he could watch one or the other of his Nuctenea sclopetarias build a perfect orb, just as it had done on the covered bridge over the Nashua River where he had found it. Beside the web frames lay his tools: his flashlight, his tweezers for inserting bugs, his cup for trapping mosquitoes against the window, and his chart for recording what each spider had consumed, and how many wrapped carcasses turned up at the bottom of his frames and jars, and which spiders had spun egg sacs, and how many spiderlings had been hatched.

  At the end of the table John arranged his natural history notebook and his collection of spider books — his Emerton and Levi and Gertsch, and his precious old copies of Fabre’s The Life of the Spider and The Life of the Fly. John worshipped the memory of Jean Henri Fabre, just the way his Aunt Mary and Uncle Homer put their feet down reverently wherever Henry Thoreau had taken a walk in the woods, or tramped along the Milldam. Old Fabre had spent half a lifetime sitting under an umbrella in the burning sunlight of southern France, watching his beloved creatures, preferring to study them alive rather than dead under a microscope. Part of John’s mental furniture — along with the rules for the German prepositions that take the dative, and the anatomy of a dissected frog, and how to integrate from zero to infinity, and the feel of the long brown hair of a certain girl in his high school chemistry class — were bright pictures of Fabre’s experiments. John would never forget the Pine Processionary caterpillars traveling forever around the rim of Fabre’s pot, nor his tiny spiderlings floating to the ceiling on the warm column of air over a patch of sunlight on the floor, nor the eight bright eyes of the wolf spider in its hole, nor the luminous eggs of the glowworm shining under the ground. Maybe someday John would be another Fabre. Well, of course, probably nobody else could be as good an observer and experimenter as that. But there were a lot of things about common bugs and spiders that people didn’t know yet. Maybe by being patient, by just watching and watching, by just keeping an eye on things that were around all the time, maybe John too would discover things that nobody had ever known before — just by being patient, like Jean Henri Fabre.

  John punched his pillow upright, put his hands behind his head, and beamed around at his room. He liked being all by himself in the shed. He liked the windows that reached from the floor to the low slanting ceiling. In the morning the sunlight poured in from the southeast and in the afternoon from the southwest and at night he could see Scorpio hanging near the southern horizon, with Antares gleaming in the middle like the diamond eye of the wolf spider in its hole. Scorpio was John’s favorite constellation, because it was an arthropod, like a spider.

  John could see something else from his front window. Virginia Heron’s window was at right angles to his own. Most of the time he couldn’t see inside her room, because the light merely glanced off the glass, giving back only the color of the sky. It was a perfect example of something John had learned in physics class last spring: the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. If you are looking at a reflecting surface at an angle, you can’t see in, because the light entering your eye has just bounced off the glass at the same angle. It’s only if you’re looking from the front, more or less, that you can really see inside a room through a pane of glass. So Virginia’s privacy was safe. It was different, of course, at night, when the room was lighted. Then John could see the edge of a dresser through the transparent curtain. Modestly then he would turn his eyes away. But now it was morning, and John had no comp
unction about gazing at the crystalline light of early dawn in the wobbly glass of Virginia’s window. He imagined that she, too, was lying awake, looking out at the faraway line of trees, the white pines standing up above the rest, their irregular branches silhouetted against the sky.

  He had better get up soon. There were an awful lot of things to do today. After the church service there was going to be a sort of party for old friends of the family. The house had to be cleaned up. And they were going to serve some kind of fancy food, and coffee and tea. “Tea,” Barbara had groaned. “It’s so darned complicated. The hot water and the milk and the sugar and the little lemon slices.”

  So John would be running errands, vacuuming rugs, borrowing a coffeepot from the Star Market. Yesterday he had confessed to Virginia in the presence of Buddy Whipple that he wasn’t old enough yet to buy a bottle of sherry, so somebody else would have to get it, and then he had felt dumb, really dumb. Buddy had guffawed, and John had wanted to kill him. How old was Buddy anyway? Not much older than Virginia. And Virginia was only five years older than John. But in a funny way she seemed much older than that, as old as Barbara, as old as his mother. Not old and grey, but old and knowing. Not that she acted as if she knew everything. She kept it all to herself. She just looked amused as the world went past her, and didn’t say anything at all.

  Nine

  THE MORNING HAD BEEN COOL, BUT BY THE TIME BUDDY DROVE off to the Second Parish Church with Barbara and Virginia, there was a promise of midday heat.

  Left at home, John had a list of things to do. At the top of the list was flowers. He was supposed to pick some flowers and put them here and there. John picked a big bunch of peonies in the backyard, brought them into the kitchen and stuck them in a pitcher.

  “Oh, thank God, I got here just in time.”

  John jumped with surprise. A woman was standing at his elbow with a large carton in her arms.

  “Amelia Farhang,” said the woman. “I just happen to be the chairperson of the Middlesex County Society of Flower Arrangers. What are you doing to those wretched peonies? Move over.”

  John moved over and helped Mrs. Farhang heave her carton up on the counter.

  “I thought the least I could do for Edward was arrange the flowers for the service. But I got the time wrong. I mean, I peeked in just now, but the minister was talking, and they had this nearly invisible arrangement of wild flowers. You’d think they would have had the grace to display some of Edward’s own emerald roses or those remarkable cadmium-orange canna lilies of his, you know, the ones he bred himself. But all I could see was a jack-in-the-pulpit! Some kind of joke, I guess, because of being in the church, you see. Not in very good taste, do you think? Anyway, I rushed over here to see what I could do about the house. Something for the mantle, right? And the dining room table? Here. Stand back. What I need is elbow room. First of all, we’ve got to do something about these peonies of yours.” Mrs. Farhang picked up a peony and narrowed her eyes. “The problem of the peony. Only one, I think.” Swiftly she tore the leaves from the stalk and stuffed the bare stem into a piece of plastic foam. “What does the peony say? That is the question. The language of the flowers, you see. What, after all, does the peony say?”

  She was frowning at John, holding the peony and the plastic foam up in the air. He jerked to attention. The woman expected an answer. “What does it say?” John looked at the peony and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it’s sort of shaggy. You know, full. Sort of rich and full?”

  “Not bad.” Mrs. Farhang pulled a long strand of dried kelp out of her carton. “Success and prosperity, that’s what the peony stands for. Not exactly suitable for this occasion. Wait till you see what I do with the collection of materials in this box. Regret, that’s what these flowers are going to say. Gentle regret and sympathy. Consolation in time of sorrow. Here, take all the rest of these foolish posies and toss them out.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so.” John picked up his dazzling pitcher of peonies, cumulus cloudheads of feathery blossoms blood-flecked with random splotches of scarlet, and carried it upstairs. In the second floor hallway he hesitated between Virginia’s bedroom and Barbara’s. But then, feeling shy of Virginia’s, he opened the door of Barbara’s room and went inside.

  He had already visited Barbara’s room that morning. Barbara had sent him upstairs with her gardening basket, which was to be put away out of sight. Now he put the pitcher of peonies on the dresser next to the basket, with its clippers and trowel and green garden string, its small containers of lime and bonemeal, its new pair of gardening gloves. “Gloves,” Barbara had said scornfully, handing him the basket, “what good do they do? I put them on so carefully, and the next thing I know, I’ve taken them off and there’s dirt ground into my fingernails again. Look at these hands. How am I ever going to get them clean enough for church?”

  Buddy’s room was just across the hall from Barbara’s. John looked at the closed door, then turned the knob and looked in. Buddy’s suitcase lay open on the unmade bed. Was Buddy packing up, getting ready to leave? John stared around the room at the heap of heavy winter clothing piled on a chair, the pair of skis leaning in the corner, the big stereo speakers in the middle of the floor. Buddy wasn’t planning to go anywhere in a hurry. He was moving in, making himself at home. “Shit,” said John softly. Oh, the hell with Buddy. Slamming the door, John ran downstairs. He must get back to work. There were some trays in a cupboard somewhere. He was supposed to put a lot of crackers and some cheese on the trays.

  In the downstairs hall Mrs. Farhang was in his way. She was standing beside the hall table with her peony arrangement in a tall piece of sewer pipe. Fastening the end of a long strand of kelp to the wall with a piece of tape, she stepped back to take a look. “There,” she said proudly. “How do you like that?”

  John shook his head, and said “Well,” and wondered what the peony would say in the language of the flowers if it could talk. “I’m so embarrassed,” or something like that. He was relieved to hear a car in the driveway. Squeezing past Mrs. Farhang, he ran to the kitchen door.

  And on the doorstep he was thankful once again. The old red Volvo belonging to his Uncle Homer was pulling to a stop beside the stone wall.

  “What did you do with Benny?” said John, running up to the car.

  “Oh, we had to hire a kid around the corner, thanks to you and your new job,” said Uncle Homer gruffly. “Wasn’t in the contract. There we are, pinned down with that scary little kid, morning, noon and night.”

  “I’m really sorry, Uncle Homer,” said John, grinning. “He is a menace, isn’t he?”

  “You’re darn right. His brain ought to be pickled and put on display in some medical museum, not allowed to grow up and take over the world, the way it threatens to do now.”

  John laughed. He was fond of his Uncle Homer, although he sometimes wondered how the man had succeeded in becoming what he was in life. For one thing he was quite famous as a kind of detective, although John found it hard to imagine him running down criminals as an assistant district attorney in the old days, when, after all — just look at him — look at the way the poor guy was always tripping over his own feet. And he was supposed to be this big expert on Emerson and Thoreau, and that was strange too, because Thoreau had been a naturalist, like Fabre, and Uncle Homer couldn’t even tell a robin from a blue-jay. He couldn’t even see things when you pointed right at them, for God’s sake. “Look, Uncle Homer,” John would say, “there’s an Apis mellifera, you know, a honeybee,” and Uncle Homer would wave his hands around and shout, “Where, where?” and not be able to focus on the thing at all, even when it was right there under his nose. Uncle Homer was nice, all right, and funny, all right, but he was really stupid about some things.

  “Come on in, you people,” said John, holding open the screen door.

  But Uncle Homer was looking back down the driveway, and plucking Aunt Mary’s sleeve. “My dear, look who’s here. A vision from the past. Isn’t that —?”

>   “Mrs. Bewley,” said Mary. Smiling warmly, she went to meet the woman who was straggling up the road, her crazed old face alight, her hands reaching out to take Mary’s, and to help herself to any trailing ends of scarf or glove or pocketbook that might be unattached, or dangling, or otherwise not firmly chained or glued.

  “A famous kleptomaniac, Mrs. Bewley,” Homer murmured to John. “Nobody seems to mind. When something turns up missing, you just make a visit to Mrs. Bewley and ask her if she knows where you might be able to find a pair of size fourteen jogging sneakers, and she pulls them out of her closet and thrusts them at you with gleeful shouts, all thrilled and excited to be helping you out. She’s hard of hearing, so you have to speak up. You know, John, that knitted hat of hers looks awfully familiar. I’ve been missing it for some time, ever since that day at the library last month. WELL, HELLO THERE, MRS. BEWLEY. WHAT A NICE CAP YOU HAVE THERE. JUST THE KIND I LIKE MYSELF.”

  “OH, IS IT?” Mrs. Bewley snatched it off and forced it on Homer. “TAKE IT, TAKE IT! NO, NO, YOU JUST KEEP IT. ISN’T THAT NICE?”

  “WELL, THANK YOU. THAT’S VERY GENEROUS OF YOU.”

  Mary took Mrs. Bewley’s arm. “YOU’RE LIVING RIGHT NEXT DOOR NOW?”

  “YES, I MOVED IN WITH BROTHER WHEN I RETIRED. HE’S PASSED ON NOW, BUT I’VE STILL GOT MICKEY AND MINNIE AND MARGIE AND MOLLY AND MILLIE AND MURIEL AND MAXIE AND MICHELLE.”

  Baffled, Homer glanced at Mary. “Grandchildren?”

  “Chickens, I think,” murmured Mary. “Remember her little chickens?”

  “Come on in, why don’t you?” said John. “Make yourselves at home. I have to tell these other people where to park.”

  Homer was curious to see the house that had been nearest to Walden Pond when Henry Thoreau lived there. Homer had looked up the history of the house in the library, and he knew that some part of it had occupied this hillside a long time before Henry was born, way back when Walden was only a pond in the middle of a woodlot. A man named Billing had lived here when Lincoln was only an outlying part of Concord, and he was supposed to have made the rope for the meeting house bell. In Thoreau’s day Jacob Baker had lived here, and Henry had thought him an improvident farmer because he had raised as fair corn as anybody and had given it all to his stock. And then at the turn of the century along had come Alexander Higginson, who had been not merely improvident but extravagant. He had pursued his expensive horsey passion untroubled by the high cultural principles of his father, Henry Lee Higginson, who was busily founding the Boston Symphony, or of his second cousin Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had corresponded with Emily Dickinson. He had bought the whole farm. He had built a great imitation-Tudor hunting lodge and kennel and stable up the hill and housed his servants in Jacob Baker’s house and his Ayershire cattle in the now-vanished barn.