Thurber Tonight: "A Friend of the Earth"

"A Friend of the Earth" first appeared
in The New Yorker of June 4, 1949.

"There must be something grave the matter with me. From the moment I set eyes on Ephraim J. (Zeph) Leggin, I wanted to poke him in the nose. For the sake of a fair record, I must report that Zeph took an instant dislike to me, too."

-- Thurber, in "A Friend of the Earth"

A Friend
of the Earth

WHEN MY MOTHER was in Ludlow, Connecticut, on one of her visits ten years ago, she took a fancy to Zeph Leggin -- practically everybody did except old Miss Eldon and me -- and he gave her a picture of himself. People were always taking pictures of Zeph, in one or another of his favorite, and locally famous, poses -- playing his harmonica, whittling, drowsing in a chair against the wall of his shack, eating a hard-boiled egg. The most celebrated of the egg studies shows him on his thirty-sixth the day he ate three dozen at a sitting, on a bet.

Zeph Leggin was a character in the classic mold, a lazy rustic philosopher, whose comic criticism of the futility of action and accomplishment made up, I was told, for his inability to complete a task, his failure to show up on time (or, sometimes, even at all), his genius at waggish confusion, and his light regard for the convenience of others. "Wait 'til you meet Zeph Leggin," an ecstatic neighbor said to me just after I came to Ludlow. "He'll drive you nuts, the old rascal, but you'll love him. We all do -- except Miss Eldon. We always hire him for odd jobs. Used to be a master carpenter, they say, but now he doesn't give a good goddam. Funniest guy you ever heard talk, though. 'Lost my wife ten years ago,' he'll say to you. Play it straight. Say, That's too bad!' 'Yep,' he'll tell you, 'lost her in a drygoods store -- I slipped out the back door.' Ha ha ha!"

For such bewildered foreign eyes as may fall upon these lines, I should perhaps explain that ours is a good-natured commonwealth of straight men and stooges, willing and eager to let a wall crumble, or a roof sag, or a pipe freeze if the vandal responsible for the trouble has a Will Rogers grin, a soft drawl, and a dry way of saying things. There must be something grave the matter with me. From the moment I set eyes on Ephraim J. (Zeph) Leggin, I wanted to poke him in the nose. For the sake of a fair record, I must report that Zeph took an instant dislike to me, too. Zeph was a-sittin' in front of his shack and a-playin' his mouth organ -- he called it Ole Maria, I heard later -- when Paul Morton, the neighbor I quoted earlier, led me up to him one afternoon. I was presented to Zeph Leggin. It was regarded as an honor, I had been told, if he stopped playing, opened his eyes, and deigned to speak. "Zeph, I want you to meet Mr. Thurber," said Paul. Zeph kept right on playing. "He's come to Ludlow to live -- a new neighbor of ours," Paul went on. Zeph finished another bar of "Nellie Gray" and looked up -- at Paul, not at me. "He a married man?" he asked. That nettled me. He hadn't acknowledged the introduction by so much as a nod, and I didn't like the practiced twinkle in his eye. I could see what was coming, and I beat him to the punch. It was small of me, I suppose, but I offer the purely human excuse that we had come to dislike each other in the first few seconds. "I lost my wife ten years ago," I heard myself saying in a strained, chill tone. The twinkle in Zeph's eyes died and a hard look took its place. With our rapiers crossed and clashing, we searched for each other's gullet. He was shrewd, all right, and not slow of mind. He knew that I must have been tipped off to this opening gambit of his. He threw a quick, baleful glance at Paul, who he must have figured was the tattletale. "Lost her in a drygoods store, eh?" Zeph asked me, and the Devil took hold of my tongue. "She died," I said coldly, and it almost brought Zeph up out of his tilted chair. Then he saw the astonished look that Paul gave me, and he knew I was trying to knock his foil from his hand by an inexcusable trick. "Now, that's too bad, Bub," he said nastily. "Come on, Jim, let's go," said Paul. "I want to show you my studio." But Zeph and I were glaring at each other. "Yes, she died laughing," I said, "at a backwoods Voltaire." "Come on, Jim, for God's sake," said Paul, taking me by the arm. Zeph closed his eyes, leaned back, and began to play "Nellie Gray" again on his harmonica. The bargain of our enmity was sealed.

THE ONLY THING MISS ELDON AND I had in common, I found out later, was our lonely immunity to the magic spell of Zeph Leggin, and since she was a hard and hollow old lady, there were dark moments when I felt I must belong to the wrong school of thought in the case of the Ludlow minstrel. Miss Eldon had not spoken to Zeph, or allowed him on her premises, since the day of the Great Insult, May 16, 1934. She kept all dates, important and otherwise, neatly arranged in the back of her mind, along with her fine collection of old platitudes. On the day in question, she had summoned Zeph to her house -- or, rather, she had summoned him a week before, and he had finally shown up on the sixteenth. She told him that her problem was beetles in the pantry. Zeph had a considerable reputation as an exterminator. He would never tell what it was that he used, except to say that the secret formula had been given to his great-grandmother by a sick Indian she had nursed back to health. "They ain't beetles in your pantry, Ma'am," said Zeph. "They's cockroaches." Miss Eldon's nose expressed disgust at the man's frank vulgarity. "Well, whatever they are," she said, "they're as big as mice." She had asked for it, she had walked right into it. Zeph's eyes twinkled and he put on his Sunday drawl. "The only way to get rid of cockroaches big as mice, Ma'am," he said, "is to stop drinkin'." She ordered him out of the house, and he shambled away playing "Polly Wolly Doodle" on his harmonica. "The man is gross," she told me. I had some difficulty maintaining an expression of grave disapproval of the gross man, but I managed it.

The grinning face of Zeph Leggin hung over my house in Ludlow like a moon. He didn't come around during the first couple of weeks, and I didn't send for him, although a number of chores needed doing, but his face was always rising in my consciousness, bland and bright and impudent, and I kept hearing the mischievous music of Ole Maria playing on the edges of my mind. The fellow had called me Bub and I don't get over such things easily. Somewhere, I felt, he was thinking up gags, or planning pranks to disconcert me. Paul Morton thought I was acting like a child about the town comic, especially when he found out that I couldn't use the studio behind the house until several rotted boards in the floor were replaced. "Why don't you get Zeph over to fix it?" Paul wanted to know. It was a foolish question and I gave him a foolish answer. "He insulted the memory of my dead wife," I said. Paul was amazed. "You started that," he said. "You spoiled his little joke about the dry-goods store, and got me in bad -- he knew I had told you about it." "I'm sorry," I said, "but even if it hadn't happened, Leggin and I could never get along. Each of us wishes the other were dead. It takes all kinds of people to make up a world, Paul -- the seasick sailor, the surgeon who faints at the sight of blood, and the Man Who Hated Leggin, as I am destined to be known after I'm gone. If Zeph were the last -- " "Nuts," said Paul, and went away.

IT WAS ABOUT TEN DAYS LATER that I heard the sounds of someone moving around in the studio. I went out to investigate. It was Zeph. He was standing with his back to me, studying the rotted floor boards, and although he must have heard me come in, he didn't turn around. "Fella goes into this grocery store," he said over his shoulder, "and sez to the man, 'What you got in the shape of bananas?' 'Cucumbers,' sez the man." He tapped one of the boards with his shoe and turned around slowly. "What you got in the shape of tools?" he asked. I wasn't going to play any games with the old rascal. "I rented this house furnished," I told him, "and I haven't had time to find out where everything is. I thought you had tools of your own." He gave me the twinkle. "Won't know about that 'til I get back home," he said. He took it for granted that the job of fixing the floor, like all other tasks of the kind, was his by inalienable right and I decided to let it go at that. "There ought to be a toolbox somewhere in the house," I said. He gave me the grin. "Twon't come to us," he told me. "We'll have to go to it." On the way out of the studio, Zeph stopped at a table and picked up a flashlight that lay on it. He clicked it several times and then said, "Needs new batteries. I'll be goin' by Barton's store in Danbury this afternoon. Want me to take it along?" I told him that would be fine and thanked him, and he put the flashlight in his pocket. I can't remember now where we found the saw, but the search lasted a good twenty minutes. Zeph examined it carefully and then put it down. "Can't use it," he said. "Left-handed saw." I studied it for a few moments. "I guess you'll have to bring your own, then," I said. He frowned. "Job a work comes a little higher iffen I furnish my own tools," he announced. I turned without saying anything and led the way out of the house. "When can you get at the job?" I asked him. He looked at the sky and then held out one hand, as if testing the quality of the air. "Bit dry for sawin'," he said finally, but he couldn't trap me into any comment on this. "There are some sound planks in one corner of the studio," I said. "Did you see them?" Zeph's grin crinkled the corners of his eyes. "I saw 'em," he said. We both turned away at the same moment and went about our business, or, to be more exact, I went about mine.

It rained that night and there were showers off and on for several days. On the fourth day after Zeph's visit, I ran into him at the post office. "Why haven't you been over to fix the floor?" I demanded. Zeph unwrapped a stick of gum with great care, put it in his mouth, and chewed for half a minute. "Twant sawin' weather," he said. Paul Morton would have laughed his head off and I should have let it ride, but I didn't. "Twar," I snarled loudly, and several of my neighbors turned and stared. I decided I might just as well break with Leggin for good then and there. "I don't think you can tell a hawk from a handsaw," I said sharply. I told you before that his mind was quick enough. He squinted at me for only a few seconds. "You lay 'em out in the weather," he said. "The one that rusts is the handsaw." Several people who had listened in on this exchange laughed loudly. Old Zeph was in form. One of them slapped him on the back. I left the post office and walked home muttering to myself. "Mail?" said my wife when I walked into the living room. It was mail of a kind -- three letters I had taken to the post office and forgotten to put in the slot.

Zeph fixed the studio floor about two weeks later. I heard him sawing and nailing, with long intervals of silence in between, but I didn't go out to the studio to see how he was getting along. I confess there was more to this than my instantaneous annoyance at the sight of the man. I was afraid of his tongue. He had thrown me over his shoulder, easily and in public. He was in the studio most of the afternoon, and if I had hoped that he would go away without dropping in on me, I was doomed, as the saying goes, to disappointment. Zeph never knocked on anybody's door. He just opened it and came in. He found me in the living room. "Job's done," he said. "So soon?" I snapped. He pulled the flashlight out of his pocket, walked over to my chair, and handed it to me. "Thanks," I said unamiably. "Send me a bill for the carpentry." "Got it right here," said Zeph, and he handed me a slip of paper. I glanced at it, and it seemed reasonable enough. Then I clicked the flashlight. It didn't work. "It doesn't work," I told him. He twinkled and grinned. "Needs new battries," he said. I should have known better. I should have said nothing. But once again I walked into his little trap. "You said you would take it to Barton's and have it fixed," I told him. His eyes crinkled. "Nope," he said. "Told you I was goin' by, didn't say nothin' about stoppin' in." That was too much for me. I brought the flashlight down with great force on the edge of a table and smashed it to bits. Then I turned slowly to Zeph Leggin, my eyebrows up, in feigned astonishment. "Defective," I said coldly. Zeph took his harmonica out of his pocket and rubbed it with the palm of his hand. He had lost the twinkle and the grin. It was a moment rare, perhaps unique, in the life of the great philosopher. Zeph Leggin couldn't think of anything to say. He walked out of the room playing "Nellie Gray," and that was the last time we ever spoke to each other. I got a man named Larkin, from Danbury, whenever anything around the house needed fixing.

I THINK IT WAS IN SEPTEMBER that the Ludlow Men's Forum decided to ask Zeph Leggin to be the principal speaker at their monthly meeting. I saw the announcement in the Ludlow Journal. It said that Ephraim Leggin, Ludlow's most beloved citizen, had consented to address his neighbors and to share with them his rich and salty wisdom and his profound knowledge of life. The title of his talk, the Journal said, was "A Friend of the Earth." The Forum meetings were held in the small chapel across the street from the Congregational Church. There were about forty of us present when, after the reading of the minutes of the previous meeting arid the reports of various chairmen of committees, the smiling Paul Morton stood up to introduce the speaker of the evening. It was an introduction dripping with marmalade and ornamented with flowers, and everybody loved it and everybody laughed and applauded as Zeph got slowly to his feet. I had seen him only once or twice in passing since the incident of the shattered flashlight. I had felt ashamed about that show of temper and I hadn't even told my wife that I had broken the lamp deliberately. Zeph let his eyes roam about the room and they fell upon me at last, in a chair near the wall in a row at the back.

"Neighbors," began Zeph, "I ain't always bin like you good folks is nice enough to think, a man of philosophy and easygoing nature. They was a thing happened when I was a young fella that set me on the right path, you might say. My father give me a flashlight for Christmas one year and the battries wore out, like they is bound to do if a man aims to see more in this life than the good Lord wants him to. So I gave the flashlight to an uncle of mine, 'cause he sed he'd get it fixed for me. Well, he didn't exactly say he'd get it fixed for me. 'I'm a-goin' by Burke's store,' he sez, 'where they has battries. You want me to take it along?' So I sez that would be very kind of him. But he brung it back that evening and it wouldn't work when I clicked it. 'Needs new battries,' sez my uncle, and when I told him he promised to have it fixed, he sez, 'Never sed nuthin' 'bout havin' it fixed. Said I was goin' by Burke's store. Didn't say I was stoppin' in.' Well, sir, like many a man, young or old, that ain't growed up -- and some of 'em never does -- I lost my temper. I seen red and I smashed that there flashlight into a thousand pieces. I realized in a second this wasn't no way to act to a man a greater age and more common sense'n me, so I turned it off with a joke. I turns to my uncle and I sez, solemn-like, 'Def ective,' I sez. Then -- "

I got up quietly and quickly from my chair and started to slip out of the chapel. A number of the men turned and stared at me, and several frowned and said "Sh!" Bill Logan plucked me by the sleeve as I passed his chair. "Are you walking out on Zeph?" he whispered. I leaned down close to his ear. "Yes," I whispered. "Forever."

I had intended to spend the winter in Ludlow, but business took me back to the city, or, at least, I told Paul Morton and the others that business took me back to the city. My wife knew better, of course. She knew that Zeph Leggin was behind my determination to get out of Ludlow and stay out. Several months went by before I got up courage enough to tell her about the flashlight and Zeph Leggin's opening remarks on the night of the Forum meeting. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that I was able to laugh with her about what she called my straight-set defeat at the hands of the philosopher of Ludlow. She has promised, however, never to tell the Mortons about it, or Bill and Lucy Logan. I don't think I could stand that.

TOMORROW NIGHT: "The Letters of James Thurber" (from Let Your Mind Alone!, and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces)


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT):
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