All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page A

the wet he couldn’t ride his Honda across the bottoms, he cobbled together a wretched little shed beside the trail gate into our lane, an eyesore that offended me every time I passed it. (No permission requested, I pointed out to Ruth.) Observing from the lane, we noted other improvements. One day we saw him running his yellow pail across the creek on an overhead cable. Later we saw that he had rigged some way of pulling the whole far end of his bridge up into one of the oaks.
    “What’s he afraid of?” I said to Ruth. “I’ll bet you he’s got a half acre of marijuana planted over there.”
    “Grump, grump,” Ruth said. “He’s probably afraid of kids breaking in. He can’t lock his tent, after all.”
    “In a hermit’s cell there shouldn’t be anything worth stealing.”
    “If he did live like a sanyasi, you’d be the first to call him crazy.”
    “He irritates me,” I said. “He asks to put up a simple camp, being too poor to afford a room...”
    “He never said that.”
    “All right. Being unable to stand the restraints of a room or apartment. Then he spends more on lumber and gadgets and rope than he’d pay for normal room and board in a year.”
    “Maybe he’s having more fun.”
    “I wonder if he knows how to have fun.”
    “He has parties,” she said. “He tinkers. Whichever he does, you complain. Why? You work on your think-house every afternoon of your life.”
    “I’m retired.”
    “So is he, in a way. Why can’t you let him alone? He’s not hurting anything.”
    He was the least contemplative sanyasi I ever heard of. Every week there was a renewed outbreak of sawing and hammering. The one that began in mid-January went on for a whole morning, stopped, began again the next morning and went on through the day. Just after noon I went down for the mail. I could see the bridge, lowered into place, drooping crookedly across the creek. Beyond it was the front of the tent. I could hear the hammering but see no sign of Peck. What in hell was he putting up now? Steam-heated privy? Pergola? Studio? I told myself that I had better find out before he developed a subdivision over there, and went down through the mud to the bay tree.
    When I was halfway across the bottom, I saw movement in one of the oaks, fifteen feet off the ground. In his orange suit, his John-the-Baptist hair crawling over his collar, Peck was squatting up there with his back to me, nailing away. He had laid joists across two nearly horizontal limbs and was spiking two-by-fours to them for a floor. The lumber was secondhand, and dark, and the live-oak leaves were dense enough so that from certain angles you could hardly see anything up there at all.
    I coughed, and he twisted around. With his tangled mane and beard, he looked like some ridiculous lion out of a bestiary. And he was good and startled, as startled as I had been when we came upon him sitting his stealthy motorcycle under the bay tree. He grabbed a limb and glared, breathing steam.
    “What goes on?” I said.
    Peck rose until he stood crouching, one hand braced against the limb over his head, the other holding the hammer. I half expected him to heave it at me like a tomahawk, but all he did, finally, was make a little deprecatory gesture with it. He smiled. His voice was soft. “Little... treehouse,” he said.
    Looking up at this Tarzan, this fabricator, this retarded adolescent living a Swiss-Family-Robinson fantasy, I was full of conflicting emotions. Was I irritated simply because he had gone ahead and started something else without asking permission? Was it only an authoritarian insistence on being begged, an unpleasant property-owner desire to stoop grandly and confer favors, that made me angry at him? I was pretty sure he would have thought so, and I was ready to admit that there was some of that in my feelings. And yet wasn’t I more exasperated at his refusal to acknowledge his obligation to ask? Manners, if not ordinary openness of motive, might have