All the Little Live Things Read Free Page A

thinks he owns those bushes. No sooner does he chase off one batch than another whirls in behind him and starts gobbling. He turns on these, and here come the first ones, reinforced. In a single day they can pick him bare. They sit in clouds in the plane tree and spit seeds on the bricks, and when they get really illuminated they try to fly through the plate-glass windows. Then Catarrh carries the casualties to the mat and makes jackstraw patterns of their yellow-tipped tail feathers.
    This morning when I looked out into rain-washed sunshine, Catarrh had prepared a beauty: a gray nose, bristling on both sides with long whiskers, gleaming with four long teeth. Below and to the left, an intact paunch like a purple plum, enclosed within a coil of iridescent intestines. And along the top and down the right side, tying grin and guts together with a sweeping S curve that was pure dynamic symmetry, the nine-inch tail of a wood rat. Undoubtedly it was Catarrh’s best to date— Neotoma fuscipes was his masterpiece. He sat in the entry in the sun, washing himself and waiting for compliments, and he made no objection when I lifted the mat at arm’s length and hurried around the house with it. He understands that his art, like a Navaho sand painting, should not survive the hour of its creation.
    I was so intent on getting the mat around without spilling its contents that I forgot we have been avoiding that side of the house as accursed. Now as I threw the wood rat’s remains down the hill into the brush and straightened up with the mat dangling from my hand, I got the whole view of what Tom Weld had done to the opposite hill in little more than a week.
    The eyesore dog pen and pigeon house were gone, but so was the great oak that once crowned the hill. Below the summit Weld had gouged a harsh bench terrace thirty feet deep, and from that led off a deep road shelf with a bulldozer asleep in it like a hog in a wallow. Beyond the bulldozer a bench of gray dirt ended in a long cone that spilled down the hill. The rain had cut gullies in it; I knew that our road at the bottom would be a foot deep in mud.
    I looked Weld’s work over with bitterness. The hill that once swelled into view across the ravine like an opulent woman lazily turning was mutilated and ruined, and Weld was obviously not through yet. Only an amateur planning commission unable to read a contour map could ever have approved that site plan; only a land butcher could have proposed it and carried it out. And though I had every hope that the people backing Weld would swallow him before the operation was completed, there would be no restoring what he had ruined. It reminded me too painfully; it made me sick to look.
    I turned my back on it and went around the house. Too many miserable events in our recent life seemed to me in some way consequences of some ignorant act of Weld’s. Perhaps he is where I should begin. Am Anfang, God created Weld, and Weld was without form, and void. And yet I know that Weld, however irritating, began nothing. From before the beginning he was, after all ends he will be. He is only the raw material of mankind, the aboriginal owner of the undeveloped tract called Paradise.
    Neither was Lucio LoPresti a beginning. He too existed here, a prefabricated example, a dry run, a model and a warning, though I did not read him that way at once, and have never lost my sympathy with him.
    Begin where, then? With Curtis’s life and death, that uprooted us from habitual life and set us wandering? Not that either. My son is not what I want to examine now; I have examined him before, endlessly and without spiritual gain, and I can’t undertake all that again. Nothing that I really want to examine begins until after we settled in this place. Once we found it and made it our refuge, we were as if in hibernation; exasperations, troubles with the neighbors, demands from outside, were no more than the fly-buzzings that persuaded us our sleep was sweet. It took