"My first thing in this town," said Stern, "and I've got an enemy." He put his great, soft body on the stoop against his wife's hips, not at all comforted by the night now, and imagined his house with all its rooms burning to the ground, his child's hair aflame, while thick-legged firemen, deliberately sluggish, turned weak water jets on the roof, far short of the mark.

[Pg 26]

[Pg 26]

The Spensers had failed to tell Stern to spray the area, and, a month after he moved in, a caterpillar army came and attacked the grounds. When Stern first saw the insects, he said, "I'm going to get them," and went out to the lawn and began to flick them off the shrubs and then step on them when they were on the ground. But there were huge wet clumps of them on everything, and he called the spray company. "It's too early to get after them," the man said. "If you get at them too early, you just waste your spray. You've got to wait till they're sitting up perky." Stern waited a day and then called again; another voice answered and told him, "It's too late. You missed the right time. They're in there solid now."

"The other man in your place said to wait," Stern said.

"I'll rap you in the teeth you get smart," the voice screamed. "I'll come right over there and get you. You want to make trouble, I'll give you trouble all right."

Stern bought some chemicals in a store and said to his wife, "I know there are billions, but I'm going to get every one of them. This is our house." He went to work on a beautiful mountain ash tree first. There was little of it showing; the tree might as well have been one large wet caterpillar. Stern sprayed at it for an hour, until his hands were broken with blisters, but only a few caterpillars fell, not really from the potency of the chemical but simply because they lost their balance and got washed off. They were hardy when they touched the ground and Stern knew they would find their way back to the tree. He stopped spraying, and in a few days the caterpillars had left and Stern and his wife were able to see that they had attacked in a funny way, eating approximately half of everything, half of each bush and half of each shrub. In front of the house stood a wild cherry tree, lovely and fruitful on one side, black, gnarled, and cancerous on the other. The plants never went back to normal, and since[Pg 27] it was too massive a job to replace each one, Stern and his wife learned to approach them only from certain angles, ones from which they looked complete, and 

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