T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Nothing to worry about, Mr. McCormick,” O‘Kane assured him, sensing an episode coming on, “I’ll get the head gardener to take care of it right after lunch. And say, speaking of lunch,” pulling his watch out with a flourish, “if we hurry we’ll be just in time.”

Mr. McCormick ignored him. He was digging furiously now, with both hands, crouched over the expanding burrow like a fox terrier. Already his nails were ruined and you could see the blood like a tattered ribbon moving beneath the scrim of filth on his right hand. Mr. McCormick was distracted. He was obsessed. He was being sick and pathological. O‘Kane didn’t want any violence, not now, not today — all he wanted to do was go back to the house for lunch and a drink sneaked in the toilet — but he would have to intervene, and soon, he could see that. He signaled to Mart, but Mart wasn’t paying any attention — Mart was standing over Mr. McCormick’s shoulder and peering down into the excavation, saying, “I think it goes this way, yeah, that’s right, through the flowerbed and then maybe under those bushes over there—”

O‘Kane took him by the arm. “Maybe Dr. Brush will know what it is,” he said in a falsely hearty voice. “Mart, why don’t you go get Dr. Brush?” And then he tightened his grip and dropped his voice, adding, for Mart’s benefit only, “Right now. Right this minute. You understand me?”

When Mart returned ten minutes later with a wheezing, puffing and blustering Dr. Brush in tow, Mr. McCormick had already excavated a looping twenty-foot furrow through the daphne bed and back into the lawn, where he was working furiously with a stick he’d found beneath the oleander bushes (the very bushes O‘Kane had been repeatedly warned to keep him away from, as their flowers, leaves and branches were all highly toxic). “Mr. McCormick,” Brush bellowed, even as he was fighting to catch his breath, “what is this? You’re ruining the flower beds! And the beautiful lawn Mr. Stribling has worked so hard on.”

Mr. McCormick never even glanced up. It was his estate and he could dig the whole place down to China if he wanted to. Its — its a — a — a groundhog,“ he said. ”It lives here. Under the grass.“

“Yes, yes,” Brush said, bending over him now, “I have no doubt of that, but what’s it to you, Mr. McCormick, really? I’m sure the creature isn’t doing any harm, and if it is, well, we have the excellent Mr. Stribling and his professional gardeners to see to it. Now come on, come out of there and let’s get cleaned up and have some lunch. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

“No,” Mr. McCormick said, digging, and the dirt was flying furiously in the direction of the doctor so that Brush had to back up to avoid having his cuffs filled with it. “No. I want this, this thing. I want to k-kill it. It’s destroying the, the flowers, don’t you see?”

There was no use arguing with him, not when he was like this, and nobody really wanted to get down there in the dirt and restrain him, not after the free-for-all in the theater house yesterday, so Dr. Brush did the politic thing and sent Mart to fetch Stribling.

Stribling was a standoffish sort of fellow for a gardener — or landscape architect, as he liked to call himself — and on the few occasions O‘Kane had run into him, usually while jogging from one end of the estate to the other behind Mr. McCormick’s bobbing and weaving form, the man had been brusque and uncommunicative. He was in touch with Katherine by post and while he did submit all major plans to her for approval, he pretty much had free rein to continue the work of his predecessor, a famous wop whose name O’Kane could never remember, and he always had his team of laborers, truck drivers and manure spreaders under the gun. If they weren’t shoveling silt out of the reservoir or constructing a water tower, they were building stone bridges over the creeks and repairing and extending the roads, not to mention clipping every leaf of every shrub like a horde of overzealous barbers. It took no more than five minutes and Stribling was there, another man in tow — a gaunt tall Irishman with a wandering eye — the kind of man O‘Kane’s mother would have called a long drink of water. If O’Kane recalled correctly the man’s name was O‘Hara, or maybe O’Mara — the day laborers came and went like the weather and there was no way to keep track of them, not unless they turned up at one of the saloons, that is. Both Stribling and the Irishman had shovels slung over their shoulders.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Stribling,” Brush hollered, “and I see you’ve brought one of your, uh, associates along too, and all the better. You see, we have a problem, for the main and simple reason that some sort of groundhog has got under the lawn here and Mr. McCormick is very concerned about it, isn’t that right, Mr. McCormick?”

The dirt flew. Mr. McCormick said nothing.

Stribling and his man stepped up to examine the trench through the flower bed, the ravaged lawn, the uprooted oleanders. “It’s a gopher,” Stribling said matter-of-factly, and he was so burned by the sun you would have thought he was a spaghetti twister himself. He laid a finger alongside his nose and gave Mr. McCormick a look. “We’ll get him, don’t you worry,” he said. “But here, Mr. McCormick, you don’t have to do that now — a trap’s the thing, that’s what we need.”

The Irishman, his nose peeling and his eye wandering, began to shove) dirt back into the hole, but Mr. McCormick would have none of it. “Step away from there,” he said, glaring up at the man, and dug all the more furiously, every stitch of clothing on him ruined beyond washing or repair. The knees of his trousers glistened with compacted mud, his collar was a sop, his tie a rag.

“It’s past one, Mr. McCormick,” Brush remonstrated, “—you know you’ll miss lunch now if you don’t hurry, and we’ve got to allow time to clean up.”

O‘Kane put in his two cents then: “That’s right, Mr. McCormick. Lunch.”

For the next hour, as the sun roved overhead and they shifted from one foot to another, the five of them stood there watching Mr. McCormick at his work. He’d made his way through the oleanders and across the gravel walkway beyond and into another flower bed, this one of impatiens, fragile gawky things that drooped and fell over if you looked at them twice, and all the while Stribling saying things like “It’s no use, Mr. McCormick, he’s got a burrow a hundred yards across at least” and “There’s literally scores of the things out there and even if you get this one another one’ll move right back in — trapping’s the thing, I tell you.”

Finally, and they were well into the third hour by now, Mr. McCormick got up from the convoluted trench he’d managed to gouge out of the earth with his two bare hands and a stick of oleander, and looked Stribling in the face, no more than two feet from him. Bleeding in half a dozen places, his hair hanging in his eyes, their employer was all but unrecognizable behind a film of sweat and filth. “And what am I paying you for?” he suddenly snapped, pushing up against Stribling with his chest thrust out and spitting the words in his face. And then, trembling and gritting his teeth, he jerked his head round on the Irishman. “And you?” he said. “What am I paying you for? To stand around and, and watch? Dig, I tell you!” he shouted, his voice rheumy and dangerous all of a sudden. “Dig! Dig or you‘ll — you’ll be looking for another j-job! Both of you!”

Stribling gave Brush a sour look, but turned away from Mr. McCormick without a word and leaned into his shovel, and so did the Irishman. Dr. Brush, who’d kept up a steady stream of bluster and remonstrance for the better part of this ongoing charade, suddenly started in on a new tack, assuring Mr. McCormick that the task was in good hands now and that that was all the more reason to head back to the house and clean up — yes, and see what Sam Wah could put together for a late lunch. Because Mr. McCormick must be hungry after all that prodigious exercise, just the sort of thing to build an appetite, for the main and simple reason that the body needed fuel, didn’t it?