Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,73
enjoyed his salutary walks through the woods. Pine Hill was itself a quiet university town—“a bastion of learning amidst the untroubled fields and forests of the rural South,” in the words of William Jennings Bryan at a graduation ceremony. This had been said well before Grover’s day, and before the town and university had begun to sprawl across the untroubled fields and forests, but much of this ambience persevered, and it was entirely suited to Grover’s tastes.
Darren Grover was professor emeritus of medieval history at the university. Coronary bypass surgery had prompted his early retirement; his health became robust again subsequent to recovery, owing to regulated diet, exercise, medication, and his less stressful schedule. He was a regular at faculty teas, a frequent guest lecturer, and often at work on some scholarly treatise for the journals. Still in his middle sixties, he appeared rather younger: a bit over six feet tall with no trace yet of a stoop, thin and quite wiry now, with much grey in his once bright black hair and beard. His face was long of jaw and nose—the latter capped with bifocals assisting bright brown eyes. He was a temperate man, and after his second and final glass of sherry he would tell the history majors at the faculty smokers about when he and his students had occupied the dean’s office in 1968. Until now, this had been his greatest adventure.
A bachelor of the old school, Grover lived in a cluttered and book-laden cottage in a wooded glen, only a brisk walk to the campus where he had spent some thirty years instructing students in the fascinating history of medieval and early modern Europe. Forbidden now his pipe, he still enjoyed his constitutional, weather permitting, in his baggy tweed jacket and shapeless hat, to chat with former colleagues and putter about the university library. Darren Grover was fondly liked by both students and peers, and he was a man at peace with himself and with life. Except for one thorn.
One terrible thorn.
Her name was Clara Perth, and some ten years before she had buried her husband in Passaic, New Jersey and moved south to enjoy the untroubled fields and forests of Pine Hill. Bryan’s florid comments had been preserved in real estate ads in The New Yorker,; and Pine Hill was rapidly becoming a retirement community for acidulous Yankees who wanted a climatic compromise between Northeastern winters and Florida summers. Mrs Perth used her late husband’s insurance money to purchase the cottage next door to Grover’s.
The grounds of both properties were small. Both landowners liked to garden—Grover was himself quite the amateur botanist. All should have gone well...
Their war began over the English ivy.
Now then: Hargrove Terrace was a wooded cul-de-sac. The street itself ran along the bottom of the glen up to its head, where there was a small turnaround. Some two dozen small houses perched along either slope—most of them two-bedroom brick cottages of similar pattern and built cheaply just after the War. By now most of the houses along Hargrove Terrace were held as investment properties and rented to students and young couples. Groundskeeping was therefore not a high priority, and tenants changed from year to year, and the forest was reclaiming much of its former range.
When Clara Perth purchased her house, its former landlord had bothered with its upkeep about as little as had a succession of student tenants. The grounds were a tangle, the small lawn weed-grown, and the various plantings of shrubbery in a dismal state.
So it was that Darren Grover noted with approval when Mrs Perth began directing workmen to clear her yard. His own grounds would never make the cover of Country Living, but he had a fine mass of shade-loving plants and flowering shrubs that melded pleasantly with the returning forest, and he was delighted to have a fellow gardener as neighbor. True, his several attempts at introduction had been greeted stonily, but he shrugged this off as typical New York manners.
And one bright morning, there she stood on his doorstep rapping at the glass pane.
She said, “I want to know what you’re going to do about all that ivy.”
Clara Perth was a lumpish, stoop-shouldered thing of sixty-some winters, clad just now in a shapeless grey warm-up suit. Blued curls framed a pinched face set in a perpetual scowl. Her beady eyes, behind thick glasses, radiated suspicious hostility—on the rare occasions when she did make eye contact, and this was one such occasion.