The Wooden Shepherdess (6 page)

No, perhaps the smithy
and
smith were both of them better left out. So he took a fresh sheet, and started instead to draw for Polly a mother skunk with her little ones—queer little black-and-white creatures all feathery tail and no head, as he'd watched them once with bated breath on his porch. As he did so, he wondered what sweet-hope-in-hell he'd got that he'd ever see Mary and Polly again—quite apart from the new one....

If only he'd had the sense to give himself up straight off when he landed, and tried to explain! For Augustine well knew what a fool he had been: it was no use pretending he hadn't, and any day soon he was likely to pay for it dearly. But yet ... Even now, as he feathered the tails of his skunks with elaborate flourishes—plumed them indeed like Victorian hearses, so black seemed his future—something from under his mind was struggling up towards daylight but couldn't quite make it, like bubbles in mud. For the fact was that though he hadn't one bit enjoyed being shot at, now it had happened he wouldn't have had it unhappen again for all the gold in the world. That unbridgeable chasm at Oxford between the men who had fought in the War and the boys too young for it.... Now he too had been shot at and might have been killed; and for-crying-out-loud, what a load of guilt that took off one's shoulders—even admitting one's “War” had lasted for only six seconds (or seven at most)!

When at last Augustine looked up from his drawing he saw that excited face at his window.... He dropped his pen, and jumped to his feet with a sense of relief so intense it took even himself by surprise that a grown-up man (one who had fought and been shot at and might have been killed!) should have come to depend on a child to quite the extent he had come to depend on this Ree. For he had to admit it: time spent in her company sang with a whole new octave of notes.

Yet who was this Ree? It had puzzled Augustine the way she had never once mentioned her parents, or said where she lived—let alone shown signs of wanting to carry him home and exhibit her prize, as most children would. Was she native? Or was she a summer migrant, one of that youthful holiday crowd from the country outside, which sometimes invaded the store like a flock of starlings then vanished again in a flock—like starlings?

As well as its woods the “township” included some four or five miles of small stony hills with scrub on their tops, and stone-walled fields lower down where grass fought a losing battle with sumac and rocks. Here there were small scattered farms built of timber and weather-board: long left unpainted and grindingly poor, there was hardly a building apart from the house—just an outside privy, a rusty old pump in the yard, the fag-end of last winter's woodpile and mostly not even an ice-house. The old Yankee stock which had built them and farmed them had long been dwindling: for generations, Yankees go-getting enough had all gone West leaving only the rather more feckless and pleasanter characters—men not over-given to work, so that one little struggling farmstead after another had given up struggling. Empty, some of these tumble- down houses had tumbled right down or caught fire; but others had lately begun to be bought up cheap on mortgage as family holiday-places by painters and writers not quite arrived enough yet to make Provincetown, followed by other adventurous small-income city-folk.... That seemed the likeliest background for Ree. Down in the valleys the much more prosperous farms had thriving fields of tobacco and slatted tobacco-barns, herds of black-and-white Holsteins in huge metal byres, towering tubular silos and clanking wind-pumps raised on legs taller even than silos; but most of these nowadays seemed to be owned by Swedes—and she certainly wasn't a Swede!

But anyway here the mysterious creature was, dancing about on his porch and agog with a plan she had formed....

Ree hadn't been consciously secret about her home: it was just that with so much else to be talked about “home” seemed a waste of her precious time with Augustine. For nowadays parents and even sibs had shriveled away in her eyes to the veriest “things,” like the dull old tables and chairs. Even her father, to whom she had once been so close, was now little more than a weekly lingering smell of five-cent cigars.

Poor Bramber! For Bramber Woodcock adored his children, and yet all summer he hardly saw them at all. He worked the whole week in New York, arrived each Saturday worn to a frazzle, slept half Sunday, woke to face bills and overdue handyman jobs—and late that night worn anew to a frazzle was back in the steam of New York: while even those precious weekends his darling Ree, the daughter he mostest adored—all day and half the night too the girl would be out.

Jess Woodcock also got little good from her daughter. Stuck at the farm from June till Labor Day, driven half-crazy by ants (let alone by children and chores, for none of these summer folk had the money to modernise), Ree was her great disappointment: the eldest, yet nowadays no help at all.

The Woodcocks of course were by no means alone in their woes. In these last few years (whether due to the War or the I.C. Engine or Freud) from ocean to ocean thousands of half-grown young had suddenly all like that burst out of their families, cut themselves loose and advanced on this dangerous rudderless post-war world in packs of their own: self-sufficient as eagles, unarmoured as lambs—like some latter-day Children's Crusade, though without any Cross on their banners or very much else and indeed little thought in their heads but their youth and themselves. You'd have thought they'd been found
and
reared under gooseberry bushes for all it apparently meant nowadays having mothers.

The holiday teenage young from all over the township had formed their own pack and lived in it wholly all summer, ignoring their homes except when hungry or sleepy or needing money. Their oldest ultimate Nestor (and only local among them) was Sadie: the pack had allowed that “kinda his niece” of the blacksmith to keep her place in their ranks however long-in-the-tooth, because of the glamour attached to a girl believed to have paid her way through Law School driving occasional liquor-trucks only to get a machine-gun burst through her shoulder just before sitting her finals. And down at the younger end little Anne-Marie Woodcock had just scraped in before quite reaching her teens by acting hard-boiled. She was game for adventure as any and everyone liked her; but what had undoubtedly turned the scales was the name she had earned as a bit of a biscuit already if given the chance—and young as she was, the males in the pack gave her plenty.... Maybe she simply reckoned this intimate fingering part of her price of admission, or maybe she found herself missing her father's erstwhile fondling: in earlier happier times he had fondled her more than a lot, and his loving fingers had left very little untouched.

For Ree, it was only this new-found life-in-the-pack which had meant very much before she took up with Augustine; and granted the essence of life in a pack is forty-feeling-like-one this wasn't so very much changed even now, for she felt “like one” with Augustine. His company kept her blissfully happy—provided she didn't begin to wonder.... But wondering left her sorely puzzled. He seemed to like her, and yet.... Indeed you'd have thought he liked her a
lot
, but.... Well, what boy had ever behaved a bit like Augustine provided he liked you at all?

For Ree's was a culture-pattern where no boy out of his diapers failed to get all the manual fun they allowed from the bodies of girls he liked once out of their diapers too: yet Augustine's fingers had never shown even the faintest desire to molest her, however lonely the places she took him. True, she was well aware that as boys grow big themselves they lose their taste for a “child” in the skinny, physical sense; but the thought that Augustine's culture-pattern was one so deranged as to class
her
a child even now that her “turtle was soft” (as she'd told him the first time they met) never entered her head. It is quite on the cards that the burning desire she had lately begun to feel for his lips and his fingers was partly at least no more than her need for their bare reassurance he liked her.

*

As for Augustine, where Ree was concerned his head was still in the clouds—or the sand, you can take your choice which; and here she was, dancing around on his porch agog with a plan that had come to her in a dream—which surely augured success!

Last night she had dreamed of a golden, sleeping, fairy palace with rows of beautiful marble pillars to stroke, where she found herself changed to a dazzling fairy princess with a prince on his knees at her feet. As she woke, her plan was already half-formed. This sleeping palace must mean the Big Warren Place (since to her that ruinous derelict breathed of romance): so today they two must battle their way through the bushes and climb in together where no one had entered for years, whereupon her dream would come true.... Therefore she routed Augustine out of his shack, and told him with dancing eyes she was tired of dreary old woods but this would be something new.

When a rather reluctant Augustine (aware that he couldn't afford to get caught on a prank of this sort) inquired what on earth she expected to find when she got there, she waxed mysterious: told him, the place being haunted she hoped for a ghost—and ghosts were the Cat's Pajamas, apparently.... Anguish so suddenly clouded her eyes at his hesitation he finally had to say Yes.

As Augustine lifted her over the boundary ditch her breath on his cheek felt cool, which proved what a scorcher the day was. Alas, here on land there was nowhere at all to get out of the heat: even here in the depths of the trees they were both of them soaked in sweat. It was better by far at sea, where even down in the tropics was cooler than this: in the belly perhaps of a close-hauled mainsail, half-standing and half-reclining, cooled by the steady downflow of air with your back in the curve of the canvas and feet on the boom.... Once, though, for a lark the skipper had put her about and he'd only just woken in time not to get catapulted into the ocean!

At this recollection he burst out laughing; but Ree squeezed his fingers to stop him (and Ree was quite right, for there might be someone in earshot across the road at the store and they simply
mustn't
be heard).

When at last they had fought their way to the house Ree just couldn't wait to get in: so Augustine tore off a sagging shutter, and heaved her light weight up and over the sill—but he did it with so much strength that she tumbled inside on her nose. Her jeans were too tight and too tender: they split, and a pale efflorescence of all that incongruous crêpe-de-chine escaped through the rent on her rump. Then she stood up; and the fingers she'd used to wipe the sweat from her eyes had streaked her features with dirt, for the floor where she'd fallen was thick.... But before he could even begin to tease her she pressed her grimy self to his side and “
Just you and me!
” she began, in a tense little voice which sounded rehearsed.

Then she stopped abruptly—appalled: for were these those golden and faery halls she'd expected to find? The room where they stood was dark except where some broken shutter admitted a pallid influx of ivy with glimmers of daylight among it: dazzled eyes from outside only started to see again slowly, but now her sight was returning and never in all her life had she seen or imagined such dirt! The cobwebs hung in swags and festoons from the ceiling. Felted dust had shrouded the shelves and walls, leaving never an edge nor sharp carved cornice anywhere—only everywhere curves with a surface like heavy sheenless silk (till you touched it); and faint but horrible smells. Though the furniture mostly was gone, some pieces had proved too massive and ugly for moving.... The springs of a cozy-corner had burst through the covers, displaying the grinning and mummified corpse of a rat in the spirals of one of them.

Dust on the floor was so soft and deep it accepted their footprints like snow. So Ree (like the page in the carol) imprinted her small ones inside his big ones; and thus they moved off, a procession of two—but only to find that the whole ground floor was shuttered and dark and silted like this with dust, while in places the smells were far worse.

They came to the staircase. The elegant spidery handrail felt sticky under its dirt like toffee partially sucked; but it had to be clutched if you wanted to get up at all, for most of the stairs were rotten or missing.

Above there was rather more daylight; but little to see by it, other than drifts of dirty dead flies as if someone had started to sweep them in heaps; and flies' wings stuck to their sweat, like feathers to tar. It was not till high in an attic, at last, that they came on a relic of even the smallest romantic interest: a closet, stacked with Civil-War-Period journals (the Last of the Warrens was killed in that war Augustine was told, and the house shut up ever since). But even those newspapers crumbled to bits when you touched them.

Almost in silence, and more depressed every moment, they wandered from garret to garret where giant fungi throve under shingles gone missing and hundreds of birds had flown in to add their droppings to those of the bats. Then all of a sudden they burst a door which was jammed, and ... found themselves high on the rickety brink of a wing which had burned: so below them, the whole way down to the ground, there wasn't a floor.

Dead-sick at her stomach and almost too giddy to stand, Ree cringed from the gulf in fear; but Augustine stood right on the edge, looking down. Ree reached out a wavering hand to grab him but couldn't force herself near enough: hating herself for her cowardice, knowing she'd
die
if he fell, yet ... almost wanting to give him a shove. Augustine's topsail yards had cured him for good of vertigo: now when he saw how she in her turn was green with the fear of heights the fool began showing-off on a charred and teetering beam—he balanced along on his sea-legs with nothing below him for three stories down.... Ree crammed her grimy fist in her mouth like a baby, and screamed.

When Augustine got back safe-and-sound, he was laughing; and that was The End! It made her so mad that she kicked him—hard, on the shins—with her eyes full of tears: while her firm resolve not to cry in front of him gave her the hiccups. They started down. In silence except for her hiccups they both climbed out of the window they'd used to climb in—and now she wouldn't be helped. In silence (except for the hiccups) they parted. But once he was well out of sight she let the tears flood.