The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever

  The trail went uphill. He got hot. He sweated. He watched his father’s head and shoulders with feelings of admiration and love. It was the middle of the morning when they saw the clearing ahead of them through the trees. They pushed up the last slope and there was the pond and they were the first to have seen it since the hunters in the fall. The place was ugly but it had the exalting ugliness of the swamp. Leander looked into the bushes and found what he wanted—an old duck-shooting battery. He told Moses to get some wood for a fire and when the fire was lighted he took a can of tar out of his pack, rigged a crane of green wood over the fire and heated the tar. Then he swabbed the boat’s seams with hot tar which hardened quickly in the cold. They floated the battery and rowed out onto the water against the north wind. In spite of the tar the battery leaked but they baited their hooks and began to troll.

  Five minutes later Leander’s rod bent, and with a grunt he set his hook and with Moses keeping the boat in motion he played a big trout that rose, a hundred feet to their stern, and then sounded and fought, taking his last sanctuary in the dim shade of the battery. Then Moses caught a fish and within an hour or so they had a dozen trout between them. Then it began to snow. For three hours they trolled in the snow squall without a strike, eating their dry sandwiches at noon. This was an ordeal and Moses had the sense to see that it was part of their trip. In the middle of the afternoon the squall blew off and then Leander had a strike. Then the fish began to bite again and before the sky began to darken they each had their limit. They pulled the battery up onto the banks—stupefied and brute tired—and stumbled down the trail to the lake, reaching this not much before dark. The wind had backed around to the northeast and from beyond the mouth of the swamp they could hear the roar of water but they crossed safely, with Moses bailing, and made the boat fast by her bow and stern. Moses lighted a fire while his father gutted four trout and fried them on the stove lid and when they had finished supper they mumbled their good nights, put out the lamp and went to bed.

  That was a good trip and they returned to St. Botolphs with enough fish for all their friends and relations. On the next year it was time for Coverly to go. Coverly did have a runny nose, as it happened, but Sarah didn’t mention this. However, late on the evening before they left, she came into his room carrying a cook-book and put it into his pack. “Your father doesn’t know how to cook,” she said, “and I don’t know what you’ll eat for four days so I’ll give you this.” He thanked her, kissed her good night and left with his father before dawn. The trip was the same—the stop for lunch and whisky, and the long voyage up the lake in the Cygnet. At the camp Leander threw some hamburgers onto the stove lid and when they had finished supper they went to bed. Coverly asked if he could read.

  “What’s your book, son?”

  “It’s a cookbook,” Coverly said, looking at the cover. “Three hundred ways of preparing fish.”

  “Oh Goddamn it to hell, Coverly,” Leander roared. “Goddamn it to hell.” He took the book out of his son’s hands, opened the door and threw it out into the night. Then he blew out the lamp, feeling once more—Icarus, Icarus—as if the boy had fallen away from his heart.

  Coverly knew that he had offended his father but guilt would have been too exact a word for the pain and uneasiness he felt and this pain may have been aggravated by his knowledge of the conditions of Honora’s will. The sense was not only that he had failed himself and his father by bringing a cookbook to a fishing camp; he had profaned the mysterious rites of virility and had failed whole generations of future Wapshots as well as the beneficiaries of Honora’s largess—the Home for Aged Sailors and the Hutchens Institute for the Blind. He was miserable, and he would be made miserable again by the feeling that his human responsibilities had been abnormally enlarged by Honora’s will. This was some time later, a year, perhaps, and anyhow later in the year and the matter was a simple one, simpler than fishing—the village fair which he attended late in August with his father as he always did. (Moses had planned to go, but he grounded the Tern on a sandbar and didn’t get home until ten.) Coverly had an early supper in the kitchen. He wore his best white ducks and a clean shirt and had his allowance in his pocket. Leander gave him a toot on the whistle when the Topaze rounded the bend and swung the boat over to the dock, putting her into half-speed and then neutral but just touching the dock long enough for Coverly to jump aboard.

  There was only a handful of passengers. Coverly went up to the cabin and Leander let him take the wheel. The tide was going out and they moved against it slowly. It had been a hot day and now there were cumulus clouds or thunderheads standing out to sea in a light of such clearness and brilliance that they seemed unrelated to the river and the little village. Coverly brought the boat up to the wharf neatly and helped Bentley, the deck hand, make her fast, and knocked together the old deck chairs, upholstered with carpet scraps, and lashed a tarpaulin over the pile. They stopped in Grimes’ bakery, where Leander ate a plate of baked beans. “Baked beans, the musical fruit,” the old waitress said. “The more you eat, the more you toot.” The mild crudeness of the joke had kept it fresh for her. Walking up Water Street toward the fair-grounds Leander let several loud farts. It was a summer evening so splendid that the power it had over their senses was like the power of memory and they could have kicked up their heels with joy when they saw ahead of them the matchboard fence and within it and above it the lights of the fair, burning gallantly against some storm clouds in which lightning could be seen to play.

  Coverly was excited to see so many lights burning after dark and by the apparatus for the tightrope artist—a high pole secured by guy wires with a summit of fringed platforms and pedestals, all of it standing in the glare of two up-angled searchlights in whose powdery beams moth millers could be seen to swim like scraps of gum paper. There a girl with powdery skin and straw hair and a navel (Leander thought) deep enough to put your thumb into, and with rhinestones burning blue and red at her ears and breasts, walked and rode a bicycle over the tightwire, pushing her hair back now and then and hurrying a little it seemed, for the thunder was quickening and the gusty wind smelled clearly of rain and now and then people who were anxious or old or wearing their best clothes were leaving the bleachers and looking for shelter although not a drop of rain had fallen. When the high-wire act was over Leander took Coverly down to the head of the midway, where the argument for the cootch show had begun.

  Burlymaque, burlymaque, see them strip the way you like, see them do the dance of the ages. If you’re old you’ll go home to your wife feeling younger and stronger and if you’re young you’ll feel happy and full of high spirits as youth should feel, said a man whose sharp face and sharp voice seemed wholeheartedly dedicated to chicanery and lewdness and who spoke to the crowd from a little red pulpit although they stayed at a safe distance from him as if he were the devil himself or at least the devil’s advocate, a serpent. Lashed to poles at his back and billowing in the rain wind like idle sails were four large paintings of women in harem dress, so darkened by time and weather that the lights played on them to no purpose and they might have been advertising cough syrup and cure-alls. In the center was a gate in which some lights spelled GAY PAREE—the gate scuffed and battered from its long summer travels up and down New England. Burlymaque, burlymaque, hootchie cootch, hootchie cootch, said the devil, striking the top of his little red pulpit with a roll of unsold tickets. I’m going to ask the little ladies out here just once more, just one more time, to give you some idea, a little idea of what you’ll see when you get inside.

  Reluctantly, talking among themselves, shyly, shyly, as children called on to recite “Hiawatha” or the “Village Blacksmith,” a pair of girls, dressed in skirts of some coarse, transparent cloth like the cloth hung at cottage windows, side by side for company, one adventuresome and one not so, their breasts hung lightly in cloth so that you could see the beginning of the curve, climbed up onto a ramshackle platform, the boards of which gave under their weight, and looked boldl
y and cheerfully into the crowd, one of them touching the back of her hair to keep it from blowing in the rain wind and holding with her other hand the opening in her skirt. They stood there until the pimp released them with the words that the show was about to begin, about to begin, last chance, your last chance to see these beauties dance, and Coverly followed his father up to the stand and then into a little tent where perhaps thirty men were standing apathetically around a little stage not so unlike the stage where he had seen his beloved Judy hit Punch over the head when he was younger. The roof of the tent was so shot with holes that the lights of the carnival shone through it like the stars of a galaxy—an illusion that charmed Coverly until he remembered what they were there for. Whatever it was, the crowd seemed sullen. Leander greeted a friend and left Coverly alone and listening to the pimp outside. “Burlymaque, hootchie cootch—I’m going to ask these little ladies out here just one more time before the show begins.…”

  They waited and waited while the girls climbed up onto the plat-form and down again—up and down and the evening and the fair passed outside. A little rain began to fall and the walls of the tent to luff but the water did not cool the tent and sent up only in Coverly’s mind memories of some mushroom-smelling forest where he wished he was. Then the girls retired, one of them to crank a phonograph and the other to dance. She was young—a child to Leander—not pretty but so fully in possession of the bloom of youth that it couldn’t have mattered. Her hair was brown and as straight as a cow hand’s except at the side where she had made two curls. She swore when she pricked her finger with a pin that held her skirt together and went on dancing with a drop of blood on her thumb. When she dropped her skirt she was naked.

  Then, in this moth-eaten tent, filled with the fragrance of trampled grass, the rites of Dionysus were proceeding. A splintered tent post served for the symbol on the plate—that holy of holies—but this salute to the deep well of erotic power was step by step as old as man. The lowing of cattle and the voices of children came through the thin canvas walls that hid them. Coverly was rapt. Then the girl picked the cap off a farm hand in the front row and did something very dirty. Coverly walked out of the tent.

  The fair was persevering in spite of the rain, which had left a pleasant, bitter smell in the air. The merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel were still turning. At his back Coverly could hear the scratchy music of the cootch show where his father was. To get out of the rain he wandered into the agricultural exhibit. There was no one there but an old man and nothing that he wanted to see. Squashes, tomatoes, corn and lima beans were arranged on paper plates with prizes and labels. The irony of admiring squashes, under the circumstances, was not wasted on him. “Second prize. Olga Pluzinski,” he read, staring miserably at a jar of tomato pickles. “Golden Bantam Corn. Raised by Peter Covell. Second prize, Jerusalem Artichokes …” He could still pick out, past the noise of the merry-go-round and the rain, the music where the girl was dancing. When the music stopped he went back and waited for his father. If Leander had seen Coverly leave the tent he didn’t say so, but they walked to the village where the car was parked in silence. Coverly remembered his feelings at Langely. He had not only jeopardized his own rights—generations of unborn Wapshots were in jeopardy as well as the aged and the blind. He had even endangered that fitting and proper old age to which his parents were entitled and might have imperiled their way of life at West Farm. Everyone was asleep when they got home and they drank some milk, mumbled their good nights and went to bed.

  But Coverly’s troubles were not over. He dreamed about the girl. It was a humid day when he woke with a salt fog drifting upriver and catching, like bits of carded wool, in the firs. There was nothing about the morning into which he could escape. The rags of fog seemed to turn his mind and his body back onto themselves and their troubles. He groped among the piles of clothing on the floor to find his worsted bathing trunks. They were wet and smelled of a dead sea—the damp wool felt like a corruption on his skin and, thinking piously of saints and others who practiced mortification, Coverly drew them up over his groin and went down the back stairs. But even the kitchen that morning—the one room in the house that could be counted on to generate light and sense in the overcast—seemed like an abandoned hulk, dirty and cold, and Coverly went out the back door and down through the garden to the river. The tide was low and the mudbanks were exposed and reeking, but not so stinking, it seemed to Coverly, as the damp worsted wrapped around his loins so that, with every movement he made, and warmed now by his own miserable flesh, new odors of decayed sea water were discharged. He went out to the tip of the diving board and stood there on a scrap of potato sacking, warming the skin of his chest with the skin of his arms and looking up and down the cold, fog-hung valley where a little mortifying drizzle had begun to form and drop like the condensation of moisture in some subterranean prison. He dived and swam, shivering, out to the middle of the river and then ran back up through the wet garden, wondering if the joy of life was in him.

  The boys took their mother to church at eleven and Coverly got vehemently to his knees but he was not halfway through his first prayer when the perfume of the woman in the pew ahead of him undid all his work of mortification and showed him that the literal body of Christ Church was no mighty fortress, for although the verger had shut the oak doors and the only windows open were not big enough for a child to enter by, the devil, so far as Coverly was concerned, came and went, sat on his shoulder, urged him to peer down the front of Mrs. Harper’s dress, to admire the ankles of the lady in front and to wonder if there was any truth in the rumors about the rector and the boy soprano. His mother nudged him with her elbow when it was time for communion but he looked at her palely and shook his head. The sermon was grueling and through it all Coverly’s mind turned over tirelessly the words of an obscene double limerick about a bishop.

  Late in the day, when the family were drinking tea, Coverly went out to the back of the house. He smelled a clearing wind and heard it stir in the trees and saw the overcast rise, the miserableness of that day carried off and a band of yellow light spill out of the west. Then he knew what he had to do and he made his preparations; he washed his armpits and emptied his bank. He had enough money to pay for her favors. He would join the blessed company of men, so lightly screened by canvas from the lowing of cattle and the voices of children. He walked, he ran, he walked again, he took a short cut over the Waylands’ pasture to the dirt road to the fairgrounds, wondering why the simplicity of life had not appeared to him sooner.

  It was dark by the time he reached the dirt road and in spite of the clearing wind it seemed to be a starless night. He did not stop or hesitate until he saw at the gates to the fairgrounds that all the lights were out. The fair was over, of course, and the carnival had gone. The gates hung open and why not, for after the cakes and squashes, the kewpie dolls and the exhibitions of needlework had been removed what was there to guard? With so many dark lanes and tree-shaded places not even the most harassed lovers would seek the shelter of the fairgrounds which, tenanted in these times no more than three or four days each year and nearly as old as Leander, breathed out into the night air the smell of rotted wood. But Coverly went on, into the space where the smell of trampled grass lingered in the air, down the ruts of the midway to where, or where as best he could see in the dark, she had gone through her rites. Oh, what can you do with a boy like that?

  As for Moses, it was only a matter of chance that he was not already a father.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Henry Parker brought Rosalie’s clothes out from the city in his produce truck and she stayed on at the farm, although she talked about going on to Chicago to visit a girl she had known in Allendale. But her plans to go, whenever she made them, seemed to render the old square house and the valley in such a fine, golden light and to arouse such tenderness in her for everything she saw that she stayed on. Sometimes, walking on a beach and when there is no house near, we smell late in the day, on the east wind, lemons,
wood smoke, roses and dust; the fragrance of some large house that we must have visited as children, our memories are so dim and pleasant—some place where we wanted to remain and couldn’t—and the farm had come to seem like this for Rosalie.

  She liked the old house best when it rained. When she woke in the morning and heard the noise of rain on the many roofs and skylights it was always with a great sense of comfort. She planned to read on the rainy days—to catch up on my reading, she said. All the books she chose were ambitious, but she never got through the first chapter. Sarah tried gently to direct her. Middlemarch is a very nice book or have you tried Death Comes for the Archbishop? After breakfast Rosalie would settle herself in the back parlor with some book and in the end she would take the old comic sections out of the woodbox and read these. She sometimes went into the village, where she was pleased to find that there was no question about her identity. You must be the young lady who’s staying with the Wapshots, everyone said. She tried to be helpful around the house, sweeping the living room and wandering around with a dust cloth, but she was at that time of life when the ornaments and moveables of middle age seemed like thorns and stones in her path and she was always knocking things over. She secretly did not understand why Mrs. Wapshot should bring so many flowers into the house and put them into vases and pitchers that kept tipping over. Her laughter was loud and sweet and almost everyone was glad to hear her voice; even her most distant footstep. She was good-natured about everything including the water pump, which broke down several times. When this happened Coverly drew water from a well near the woodshed for Rosalie and Mrs. Wapshot to wash with but the men took their baths in the brook.

  Honora had never come to judge her. This was a family joke. “You can’t go to Chicago until you’ve seen Cousin Honora,” Leander said. The drill and stir of rain on the roofs assured her that her idle life at the farm was natural—that she was charged with nothing more than letting time slip through her hands. When she thought of her friend she tried to rationalize his death as we will, stumbling onto such conclusions as that it was time for him to go; he was meant to die young; and other persuasive and consoling sentimentalities. She dreamed of him once. She woke from a sound sleep, feeling that he was in trouble. It was late and the house was dark. She could hear the brook and in the woods an owl—a small and gentle chant. He is in trouble, she thought then, lighting a cigarette, and she seemed to see him, his back to her, naked in that he was defenseless, and lost, she could see, by the way he held his head and shoulders—lost or blinded, and wandering in some maze or labyrinth in great pain. She could not help him—she saw that—although she could feel the pain of his helplessness in the way he moved his hands like a swimmer. She supposed that he was being punished although she didn’t know what sins he had committed. Then she went back to bed and to sleep but the dream was over as if he had wandered out of her ken or as if his wandering had ended.