Nobody's Fool

it?” was the way so many young people put it. To Miss Beryl’s way of thinking—and she prided herself on being something of a freethinker—you often
could
tell, at least if you were paying attention, and the man who’d just tasted the inside of the tree and made a face had no more reason to be disappointed than her friend Mrs. Gruber, who’d announced in a loud voice in the main dining room of the Northwoods Motor Inn that she didn’t care very much for either the taste or the texture of the snail she’d just spit into her napkin. Miss Beryl had been unmoved by her friend’s grimace. “What was there about the way it looked that made you think it
would
be good?”
    Mrs. Gruber had not responded to this question. Having spit the snail into the napkin, she’d become deeply involved with the problem of what to do with the napkin.
    â€œIt was gray and slimy and nasty looking,” Miss Beryl reminded her friend.
    Mrs. Gruber admitted this was true, but went on to explain that it wasn’t so much the snail itself that had attracted her as the name. “They got their own name in French,” she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table.
“Escargot.”
    There’s also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn’t mean God intended for you to eat it.
    Still, she was privately proud of her friend for trying the snail, and she had to acknowledge that Mrs. Gruber was more adventurous than most people, including two named Clive, one of whom she’d been married to, the other of whom she’d brought into the world. Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense? Now there was a human question.
    The man who tasted the inside of the elm must have been an evenbigger fool than Mrs. Gruber, Miss Beryl decided, for he’d no sooner made the face than he took off his work glove, put his finger back into the hole and tasted again, probably to ascertain whether the foul flavor had its origin in the tree or the glove. To judge from his expression, it must have been the tree.
    After a few minutes the white-coated men collected their tools and reloaded the happy tree vans. Miss Beryl, curious, went out onto the porch and stared at them maliciously until one of the men came over and said, “Howdy.”
    â€œDoody,” Miss Beryl said.
    The young man looked blank.
    â€œWhat’s the verdict?” she asked.
    The young man shrugged, bent back at the waist and looked up into the grid of black branches. “They’re just old, is all,” he explained, returning his attention to Miss Beryl, with whom he was approximately eye level, despite the fact that he was standing on the bottom step of her front porch while she stood at the top. “Hell, this one here”—he pointed at Miss Beryl’s elm—“if it was a person, would
be
about eighty.”
    The young man made this observation without apparent misgiving, though the tiny woman to whom he imparted the information, whose back was shaped like an elbow, was clearly the tree’s contemporary in terms of his own analogy. “We could maybe juice her up a little with some vitamins,” he went on, “but—” He let the sentence dangle meaningfully, apparently confident that Miss Beryl possessed sufficient intellect to follow his drift. “You have a nice day,” he said, before returning to his happy tree van and driving away.
    If the “juicing up” had any effect, so far as Miss Beryl could tell, it was deleterious. That same winter a huge limb off Mrs. Boddicker’s elm, under the weight of accumulated snow and sleet, had snapped like a brittle bone and come crashing down, not onto Mrs. Boddicker’s roof but onto the roof of her neighbor, Mrs. Merriweather, swatting the Merriweather brick chimney clean off. When the chimney descended, it reduced to rubble the stone birdbath of Mrs. Gruber, the same Mrs. Gruber who had been disappointed by the snail. Since that first incident, each winter had yielded some calamity, and lately, when the residents of Upper Main peered up into the canopy of overarching limbs, they did so with fear instead of their customary religious affection, as if God Himself had turned on them. Scanning the maze of black limbs, the residents of Upper Main