by John Cheever
“Yesterday afternoon,” says Aunt Adelaide, “about three o’clock, three or three thirty—when there was enough shade in the garden so’s I wouldn’t get sunstroke, I went out to pull some carrots for my supper. Well, I was pulling carrots and suddenly I pulled this very unusual carrot.” She spread the fingers of her right hand over her breast—her powers of description seemed overtaken, but then they rallied. “Well, I’ve been pulling carrots all my life, but I never seen a carrot like this. It was just growing in an awdinary row of carrots. There wasn’t no rocks or anything to account for it. Well, this carrot looked like—I don’t know how to say it—this carrot was the spit and image of Mr. Forbes’ parts.” Blood rushed to her face but modesty would not halt nor even delay her progress. Sarah Wapshot smiled seraphically at the twilight. “Well, I took the other carrots into the kitchen for my supper,” Aunt Adelaide said, “and I wrapped this unusual carrot up in a piece of paper and took it right over to Reba Heaslip. She’s such an old maid I thought she’d be interested. She was in the kitchen so I give her this carrot. That’s what it looks like, Reba, I said. That’s just what it looks like.”
Then Lulu called them in to supper where the smell of claret, fish and spices in the dining room would make your head swim. Leander said grace and served them and when they had all tasted the carp they said that it hadn’t a pondy taste. Leander had caught the carp with a rig of his own invention, baited with stale doughnuts. They talked about other carp that had been taken from the fresh-water inlet to the river. There were six in all—six or seven. Adelaide would remember one that the others couldn’t recall. Leander had caught three and Mr. Dexter had caught two and a mill hand who lived on the other side of the river—a Pole—had caught one. The fish had come from China to St. Botolphs to be used in ornamental garden pools. In the ’90’s they had been dumped into the stream to take their chances and their chances had been good enough. Leander was saying that he knew there were more carp when they all heard the crash that, considering the dilapidation of the car, sounded extraordinarily rich as if some miscreant had put an ax through the lid of a jewel box. Leander and his sons got up from the table and went out the side door.
It was a vast summer night. There was an unusual softness to the dark air and the bland starlight and an unusual density to the darkness so that even on his own land Leander had to move cautiously to keep from stumbling over a stone or stepping into a brier patch. The car had gone off the road at the bend and run into an elm in the old field. Its red tail lamp and one of its headlights were still burning and in this light the grass and the leaves on the elm shone a bright green. Steam, as they approached the car, was escaping from the radiator and hissing, but as they crossed the field this hissing lessened and when they reached the car it had stopped, although the smell of the vapors was still in the air.
“He’s dead,” Leander said. “He’s dead. What a Christly mess. Stay here, Moses. I’ll go up to the house and call the police. You come with me, Coverly. I want you to drive Adelaide home. They’ll be enough trouble without her. He’s dead,” he muttered, and Coverly followed him up the field and across the road to the house where all the windows were being lighted, one by one.
Moses seemed stunned. There was nothing for him to do and then a sound of crackling—he thought Leander or someone had returned and stepped on some brush, crossing a field—made him spin around but the field and the road were empty and he turned back to the car and saw a fire under the vents of the hood. At the same time the clammy smell of dirty steam and rubber was joined by the smell of heated metal and burning paint and while the hood contained the fire its paint began to blister. Then he seized the dead man’s shoulders and tried to pull him out of the car while the fire crackled with the merriment of a hearth fire in a damp house at the end of the day and began to throw a golden light on the trees. The fear of an explosion that might send Moses to join the dead man made his movements hasty and constrained and while he wanted to get away from the fire he could not leave the man there on his pyre and he pulled and pulled until the body, released, sent them both backward into the field. There was sand there at the edge of the path and now he scooped this up with his hands and threw it onto the fire. The sand checked the fire and now he loaded it onto the hood and then knocked the hood open with a stick and threw sand onto the cylinder head until the fire was out and his fear of an explosion was ended and he was left alone in the field, he thought, with the wrecked car and the dead man. He sat down, exhausted, and saw that all of the windows of the farm across the road were lighted and then heard, north of the four corners, a siren and knew that Leander had got the police. He would sit there and catch his breath and his strength, he thought, until they came, when he heard the girl saying from somewhere in the darkness: I’m hurt, Charlie, I’ve hurt myself. Where are you? I’m hurt, Charlie. For a moment Moses thought: I’ll leave her too; but when she spoke again he pushed himself to his feet and went around the car, looking for her. Charlie, she said, I’ve hurt myself, and then he found her and thinking that Moses was the dead man she said: Charlie, oh Charlie, where are we? and began to cry and he knelt beside her where she lay on the ground. By then the sound of the siren had passed the four corners and was bearing down the road and then he heard, from the darkness, Leander’s voice and the voices of the police and saw their flashlights playing over the field—idly, inquisitively—heard their sighs as their idle, inquisitive lights touched the dead man and heard one of them tell another to go to the house and get a blanket. Then they began, idly, to discuss the fire, and Moses called to them and they brought their inquisitive lights over to where he knelt beside the girl. Now they played their lights on the girl, who kept up a bitter light sobbing and who, with her fair hair, seemed very young. “Don’t move her, don’t touch her,” a policeman said importantly. “She may have sustained some internal injuries.” Then one of them told another to get a stretcher and they put her on the stretcher—she was still sobbing—and carried her past the wrecked car and the dead man who was now covered with a blanket toward the many lights of the house.
Remember that crash on 7B—one of them said, but the question was put nervously and the others didn’t answer. The strangeness of the night, the probing lights, the distant sound of fireworks and the dead man they had left in the field had unsettled them all and had unmanned at least one of them and now they followed closely the one course open to them: to bring the girl into the lighted house. Mrs. Wapshot stood in her door, her face composed in a sorrowful smile—an involuntary choice of expression with which she always confronted the unknown. She assumed that the girl was dead; more than that she assumed that she was the only child of a devoted couple, that she was engaged to marry a splendid man and that she had been standing at the threshold of a rich and useful life. But most of all she thought that the girl had been a child, for whenever Mrs. Wapshot saw a drunkard lying on the street or a whore tapping her windowpane the deep sadness she always felt in her breast lay in the recollection that these unfortunates had once been fragrant children. She was unsettled, but she restored herself with a kind of imperiousness as she spoke to the policemen when they carried the stretcher through the open door. “Take her to the spare room,” she said, and when they hesitated, since they had never been in the house before and had no idea of where the spare room might be, she spoke as if they were stupid and had compounded the tragedy. “Take her up to the spare room,” she commanded, for to Mrs. Wapshot all the world knew, or ought to know, the floor plan of West Farm. The “up” helped them and with this they started for the stairs.
The doctor was telephoned and he came over and the girl was put in the spare-room bed. Small stones and sand had cut the skin of her arms and shoulders and when the doctor came there was some indecision about whether he should first pronounce the man in the field dead or look at the girl but he decided on the girl and they all waited in the downstairs hall. “Get her something hot, get her something hot,” they heard him tell Mrs. Wapshot, and she came
down and made some tea in the kitchen. “Does that hurt?” they heard him ask the girl. “Does that hurt, does that hurt you at all?” and to all of this she answered no. “Now, what is your name,” he asked her, and she said, “Rosalie Young,” and she gave an address in the city. “It’s a rooming house,” she said. “My folks live in Philadelphia.” “Do you want me to notify your parents?” the doctor said, and she said warmly, “No, please don’t, there isn’t any reason why they should know.” Then she began to cry again and Sarah Wapshot gave her the tea and the front door opened quietly and in came Emmet Cavis, the village undertaker.
Emmet Cavis had come to St. Botolphs as a traveling salesman for the gold-bead factory. He had impressed the village with his urbanity and his sharp clothes for those were the days when it was the responsibility of a drummer to represent for the people of isolated places the turbulence and color of urban life. He had made a few trips and had then returned with a mortician’s diploma and had opened up an undertaking parlor and furniture store. Whether or not it had entered into his calculations, this transformation from a jewelry salesman to an undertaker had worked in his favor, for everything that he was associated with as a salesman—jewelry, promiscuity, travel and easy money—set him apart from the rest of the population and seemed, to the farm women at least, to be suitable attributes for the Angel of Death.
In his dealings with bewildered families he had, in the exchange of furniture and property for his services, been guilty now and then of sharp and dishonest practice; but it is a custom of that country to regard craft and dishonesty with respect. His cunning made him seem formidable and intelligent and like any good Yankee he had never trimmed the bereaved without remarking on The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things. He had retained and improved upon all his gifts as a commercial traveler and was the life of the village square. He could gossip brilliantly, tell a story in dialect and comfort a poor woman whose only child had been drowned in the surf. He put up, unwillingly, with the habits of mind his occupation had formed and when he spoke with Leander he judged him to be good for another fifteen years, but he suspected that his insurance policies might have elapsed and that the funeral would be modest if the two boys didn’t interfere, as was sometimes the case, and insist on a cremation. What would the Day of Judgment be with nothing but ashes to show? He shook hands all around—neither hearty enough to be offensive nor diffident enough to seem sly—and then left the house with two policemen.
He told them what to do. Beyond opening the doors of the hearse he didn’t raise a finger himself. “He goes right in there, boys, right on that platform. Just give him a push. Just give him a push there.” He slammed the doors and tried the handle. He had the biggest car in St. Botolphs, as if first among the powers of death was richness, and he climbed into the driver’s seat and drove slowly away.
CHAPTER SIX
By morning the news of the accident was known to almost everyone in St. Botolphs. The young man’s death filled them with sadness; and they asked what Honora Wapshot would think of the stranger at the farm. Now it was only natural that they should think of Honora, for this childless matriarch had done much more for the family than give Leander the Topaze. She had, as they said, the wherewithal, and Moses and Coverly were, on a contingent basis, her heirs. It is not my fault that New England is full of eccentric old women and we will merely give Honora her due.
She was born, as we know, in Polynesia, and raised by her Uncle Lorenzo in St. Botolphs. She attended Miss Wilbur’s Academy. “Oh, I was an awful tomboy,” she often said of her youth, covering a smile with her hand and thinking, probably, of upset privies, tin cans tied to dog tails and other small-town pranks. She may have missed the tender love of her parents, who died in Polynesia, or been oppressed by her elderly uncle or been forced by something such as loneliness into the ways of a maverick but these were her ways. You could say of Honora that she had never subjected herself to the discipline of continuousness; but we are not dealing here with great cities and civilizations but with the society of an old port whose population diminished year by year.
After her graduation from Miss Wilbur’s, Honora moved with Lorenzo into the city, where he served in the state legislature and where she occupied herself in social-service work that seemed to be mostly of a medical nature. She claimed that these were her proudest years and as an old lady she often said that she wished she had never given up social work, although it was hard to imagine why she should long, with such snarling and bitterness, for the slums. She liked, at times, to reminisce about her experiences as a Samaritan. These tales could take your appetite away and make your body hair bristle, but this may have been no more than that attraction to morbidity that overtakes many good women late in life. We hear them on buses and trains, in kitchens and restaurants, talking in such sad and musical voices about gangrene that they only seem to express their dismay at discovering that the body, in spite of all its ringing claims to the contrary, is mortal. Cousin Honora did not feel that she should use a medical vocabulary and so she had worked out a compromise. What she did was to pronounce the first syllables of the word in question and mumble the rest. Thus hysterectomy became hystermumblemumble, suppuration became suppurmumblemumble and testicles became testimumblemumbles.
When Lorenzo died he left Honora with a much larger trust than she might have expected. The Wapshot family had never—never in the darkest night with the owls chanting—discussed this sum. A month or two after Lorenzo’s death Honora married a Mr. de Sastago who claimed to be a marquis and to have a castle in Spain. She sailed for Europe as a bride but she returned in less than eight months. Of this part of her life she only said: “I was once married to a foreigner and was greatly disappointed in my expectations. . . .” She took her maiden name again and settled down in Lorenzo’s old house on Boat Street. The best way to understand her is to watch her during the course of a day.
Honora’s bedroom is pleasant. Its walls are painted a light blue. The high, slender posts of her bed support a bare wooden frame that is meant to hold a canopy. The family has urged her to have this removed because it has fallen several times and might crash down in the middle of the night and brain the old lady while she dreams. She has not heeded these warnings and sleeps peacefully in this Damoclean antique. This is not to say that her furniture is as unreliable as the furniture at West Farm but there are three or four chairs around her house which, if you should be a stranger and sit in them, will collapse and dump you onto the floor. Most of her furniture belonged to Lorenzo and much of it was bought during his travels in Italy for he felt that this New World where he lived had sprung from the minds of Renaissance men. The dust that lies on everything is the world’s dust, but the smell of salt marshes, straw floor matting and wood smoke is the breath of St. Botolphs.
Honora is waked this morning by the whistling of the 7:18 as it comes into the station and, half asleep she mistakes this sound for the trumpeting of an angel. She is very religious and has joined with enthusiasm and parted with bitterness from nearly every religious organization in Travertine and St. Botolphs. Hearing the train she sees in her mind an angel in snowy robes with a slender trumpet. She has been called, she thinks cheerfully. She has been summoned to some unusual task. She always expected as much. She rises up on her pillows to hear the message and the train hoots again. The image of a locomotive replaces the angel, but she is not very disappointed. She gets out of bed, dresses and sniffs the air, which seems to smell of lamb chops. She goes down to breakfast with a good appetite. She walks with a stick.
A fire is burning in her dining room this July morning and she warms her hands at this to get the chill of age out of her bones. Maggie, her cook, brings a covered dish to the table and Honora, expecting lamb chops, is disappointed to discover a perch. This makes her very irritable, for she is subject to severe attacks of irritability, night sweats and other forms of nervousness. She does not have to admit these infirmities for if she feels out of sorts she can throw a dish at her cook. She ban
gs the metal cover against the platter now, like a cymbal, and when Maggie comes into the room she exclaims, “Perch. Whatever made you think I wanted perch for breakfast? Perch. Take it away. Take it away and cook me some bacon and eggs if it’s not too much trouble.” Maggie removes the fish and sighs, but not with any real despair. She is used to this treatment. People often ask why Maggie remains with Honora. Maggie is not dependent on Honora—she could get a better job tomorrow—and she does not love her. What she seems to recognize in the old lady is some naked human force, quite apart from dependence and love.
Maggie cooks some bacon and eggs and brings them to the table. She announces then that there has been an accident near West Farm. A man was killed and a young woman was taken into the house. “Poor soul,” Honora says of the dead, but she says nothing else. Maggie hears the mailman’s step on the walk and the letters fall through the brass slot and spill onto the floor. She picks up the mail—there are a dozen letters—and puts them on the table beside Honora’s plate. Honora hardly glances at her mail. There may be letters here from old friends, checks from the Appleton Trust Company, bills, pleas and invitations. No one will ever know. Honora glances at the pile of envelopes, picks them up and throws them into the fire. Now we wonder why she burns her mail without reading it, but as she goes away from the fireplace back to her chair the light of a very clear emotion seems to cross her face and perhaps this is explanation enough. Admiring that which is most easily understood we may long for the image of some gentle old woman, kind to her servant and opening her letters with a silver knife, but how much more poetry there is to Honora, casting off the claims of life the instant they are made. When she has stowed away her breakfast she gets up and calls over her shoulder to Maggie, “I’ll be in the garden if anyone wants me.”