The Stories of John Cheever Read online

  The conversation between Paul and Virginia Hollis during the drive from the Junction to their farm, north of Hiems, was confined to the modest properties and affections they shared; more than this, it seemed to aim at a deliberate inconsequence, as if to mention the checking balance or the wars might ruin the spell of a mild morning and an open car. The drain in the downstairs shower was leaking, Virginia told Paul one morning in July, his sister Ellen was drinking too much, the Marstons had been over for lunch, and the time had come for the children to have a pet. This was a subject to which she had obviously given some thought. No country dog would last in a New York apartment when they returned in the fall, she said, cats were a nuisance, and she had concluded that rabbits were the best they could do. There was a house on the road with a rabbit cage on its lawn, and they could stop there that morning and buy a pair. They would be a present from Paul to the children, and so much the better for that. The purchase would make that weekend the weekend when they had bought the rabbits, and distinguish it from the weekend when they had transplanted the Christmas fern or the weekend when they had removed the dead juniper. They could put the rabbits into the old duck house, Virginia said, and when they went back to the city in the fall, Kasiak could eat them. Kasiak was the hired man.

  They were driving upland. From the Junction north, one never quite lost the sense of a gradual climb. Hills blocked off the delicate, the vitiated New Hampshire landscape, with its omnipresence of ruin, but every few miles a tributary of the Merrimack opened a broad valley, with elms, farms, and stone fences. “It’s along here,” Virginia said. Paul didn’t know what she meant until she reminded him of the rabbits. “If you’ll slow down here… Here, Paul, here.” He bumped the car over the shoulder of the road and stopped. On the lawn of a white, neat house, darkened by rock maples, there was a rabbit cage. “Hello,” Paul shouted, “hello,” and a man in overalls came out of a side door, chewing on something, as if he had been interrupted at a meal. White rabbits were two dollars, he said. Browns and grays were a dollar and a half. He swallowed, and wiped his mouth with his fist. He spoke uneasily, as if he had wanted to keep the simple transaction from someone, and after Paul had picked a brown and a gray, he ran to the barn for a box. As Paul turned the car back onto the road, they heard behind them a heartbroken shout. A boy ran from the house to the rabbit cage, and they saw the source of the farmer’s uneasiness.

  The cash market and the antique store, the Civil War cannon and the post office of Hiems fell behind them, and Paul accelerated the car happily when they escaped from the narrow streets of the village and drove into the fresh lake winds. The road brought them, first, along the unfashionable, or gregarious, end of the lake; then the houses thinned and gave way to pine groves and empty fields as they drove north. The sense of homecoming—of returning to a place where he had summered all his life—became for Paul so violent that the difference between the pace of his imagination and the speed of the car annoyed him until they turned off the road onto grass ruts and saw, literally at the road’s end, their farm.

  The gentle shadow of a cloud was passing the face of the Hollis house. At the edge of the lawn, there was an upside-down piece of porch furniture that had been abandoned in a thundershower and that seemed to have been drying there since Paul’s youth. The light and heat increased and the shade deepened as the moving shadow of the cloud darkened the barn and the clothes-yard and vanished into the woods.

  “Hello, brother.” It was Paul’s sister Ellen calling to him from one of the open windows. His business suit bound at the shoulders when he left the car, as if he had taken on height, for the place told him that he was ten years younger; the maples, the house, the simple mountains all told him this. His two small children stormed around the edge of the barn and collided against his legs. Taller, browner, healthier, more handsome, more intelligent—they seemed to him to be all these things each weekend when he was reunited with them. A sere branch on a maple caught his eye. That would have to be cut. He stooped down to pick up his little boy and girl in a scalding rush of love, for which he was unarmed and, it seemed, unprepared.

  The duck house, where they put the rabbits that morning, had been empty for years, but there was a cage and a shelter, and it would do. “Now, these are your pets, these are your rabbits,” Paul told the children. His sternness transfixed them, and the little boy began to suck his thumb. “These are your responsibility, and if you take good care of them, perhaps you can have a dog when we get back to New York. You’ll have to feed them and clean their house.” His love for the children and his desire to draw for them, even faintly, the mysterious shapes of responsibility reduced him to a fatuity that he was conscious of himself. “I don’t want you to expect someone else to help you,” he said. “You’ll have to give them water twice a day. They’re supposed to like lettuce and carrots. Now you can put them in the house yourself. Daddy has to get to work.”

  Paul Hollis was a summer farmer. He mowed, cultivated, and waxed angry about the price of scratch feed, and at that instant when the plangent winds of Labor Day began to sound he hung up his blunted scythe to rust in the back hall, where the kerosene was kept, and happily shifted his interest to the warm apartments of New York. On that day—the day when he bought the rabbits—he went to his bedroom after he had lectured the children, and changed into a pair of coveralls that were still dimly stenciled with his name, rank, and serial number. Virginia sat on the edge of the bed while he dressed, and talked about his sister Ellen, who was spending a month with them. Ellen needed the rest; Ellen drank too much. But there was no suggestion of correction or change in what Virginia said about Ellen, and when Paul glanced at his wife, he thought how forgiving and comely she was. The room was old and pleasant—it had been his parents’ room—and what light reached it reached it through the leaves. They lingered there talking about Ellen, the children, tasting the astringency of their contentment and their worthiness, but not so long as to seem idle. Paul was going to help Kasiak scythe the highest field, and Virginia wanted to pick some flowers.

  The Hollis property was high, and it was Paul’s long-dead father who had called the highest pasture Elysian, because of its unearthly stillness. This pasture was mowed on alternate years to keep the scrub from taking hold. When Paul reached it that morning, Kasiak was there, and Paul judged that he had been working for about three hours; Kasiak was paid by the hour. The two men spoke briefly—the hired man and the vacationist—and picked up the tacit bond of people who happen to be working together. Paul mowed below and a little to Kasiak’s right. He used a scythe well, but there was no confusing, even at a distance, Kasiak’s diligent figure with Paul’s.

  Kasiak was Russian-born. This and everything else Paul knew about him he had been told while they worked. Kasiak had landed in Boston, worked in a shoe factory, studied English at night, rented, and eventually bought, the farm below the Hollis place. They had been neighbors for twenty years. He was doing the Hollises’ work that year for the first time. Up until then, he had been merely a persevering and colorful figure on their landscape. He dressed his deaf wife in salt bags and potato sacks. He was miserly. He was bitter. Even on that summer morning, he cut a figure of chagrin and discontent. He kept his woods clear and stored his hay at precisely the right moment, and his fields, his gardens, his compost heap, and the sour smell of milk in his immaculate kitchen conveyed the sense of security that lies in the power of intelligent husbandry. He mowed, he walked, like a prisoner in a prison yard. From the time he went to the barn, an hour before dawn, until his day ended, there was no hesitation in his thought or in his step, and this flawless link of chores was part of a larger chain of responsibilities and aspirations that had begun with his youth in Russia and that would end, he believed, with the birth of a just and peaceable world, delivered in bloodshed and arson.

  Virginia had been amused when Paul told her that Kasiak was a Communist. Kasiak had told Paul himself. Two weeks after he had begun to work for them, he had taken to cutting edit
orials from a Communist newspaper and handing them to Paul or slipping them under the kitchen door. Reasonableness was Paul’s watchword with Kasiak, he liked to think. Twice, in the feed store, when Kasiak’s politics had been under discussion, Paul had defended Kasiak’s right to draw his own conclusions about the future, and in their conversations he always asked Kasiak lightly when he was going to have his revolution.

  That day fell at the end of the haying weather. As it got late in the morning, they could hear dull blasts of thunder. A wind rose in the neighborhood, but there was none to speak of in the field. Kasiak trailed after him a rich blend of citronella and vinegar, and both men were plagued with flies. They did not let the chance of a storm change the pace of their scything. It was as if there were some significance, hidden, surely, to them, in completing that field. Then the wet wind climbed the hill behind them, and Paul, taking one hand off the snath, straightened his back. While they had been working, clouds had blackened the sky from the horizon to above his head, so he was given the illusion of a country divided evenly between the lights of catastrophe and repose. The shade of the storm was traveling as rapidly up the field as a man walks, but the hay it had not touched was yellow, and there was no portent of the storm in the delicate sky ahead of him or in the clouds there or in anything he could see except the green wood, whose color the storm had begun to deepen. Then he felt against his skin a coldness that belonged to no part of that day, and heard at his back the rain begin to drop through the trees.

  Paul ran for the woods. Kasiak followed slowly, with the storm at his heels. They sat beside each other on stones in the shelter of the dense foliage, watching the moving curtain of rain. Kasiak took off his hat—for the first time that summer to Paul’s knowledge. His hair and forehead were gray. Ruddiness began on his high cheekbones and shaded down to a dark brown that spread from his jaw to his neck.

  “How much will you charge me for using your horse to cultivate the garden?” Paul asked.

  “Four dollars.” Kasiak didn’t raise his voice, and Paul couldn’t hear him above the noise the rain made crashing into the field.

  “How much?”

  “Four dollars.”

  “Let’s try it tomorrow morning if it’s clear. Shall we?”

  “You’ll have to do it early. It’s too hot for her in the afternoon.”

  “Six o’clock.”

  “You want to get up that early?” Kasiak smiled at his gibe at the Hollis family and their disorderly habits. Lightning tipped the woods, so close to them that they could smell the galvanic discharge, and a second later there was an explosion of thunder that sounded as if it had destroyed the county. The front of the storm passed then, the wind died down, and the shower fell around them with the dogged gloom of an autumn rain.

  “Have you heard from your family recently, Kasiak?” Paul asked.

  “For two years—not for two years.”

  “Would you like to go back?”

  “Yes, Yes.” There was an intent light in his face. “On my father’s farm, there are some big fields. My brothers are still there. I would like to go there in an airplane. I would land the airplane in these big fields, and they would all come running to see who it was and they would see it was me.”

  “You don’t like it here, do you?”

  “It’s a capitalist country.”

  “Why did you come, then?”

  “I don’t know. I think over there they made me work too hard. Over there, we cut the rye at night, when there is some moisture in the air. They put me to work in the fields when I was twelve years old. We get up at three in the morning to cut the rye. My hands are all bleeding, and swollen so I can’t sleep. My father beat me like a convict. In Russia, they used to beat convicts. He beat me with a whip for horses until my back was bleeding.” Kasiak felt his back, as if the welts still bled, “After that, I decided to go away. I waited six years. That’s why I came, I guess—they set me to work in the fields too soon.”

  “When are you going to have your revolution, Kasiak?”

  “When the capitalists make another war.”

  “What’s going to happen to me, Kasiak? What’s going to happen to people like me?”

  “It depends. If you work on a farm or in a factory, I guess it will be all right. They’ll only get rid of useless people.”

  “All right, Kasiak,” Paul said heartily, “I’ll work for you,” and he slapped the farmer on the back. He frowned at the rain. “I guess I’ll go down and get some lunch,” he said. “We won’t be able to scythe any more today, will we?” He ran down the wet field to the barn. Kasiak followed him a few minutes later, but he did not run. He entered the barn and began to repair a cold frame, as if the thunderstorm fitted precisely into his scheme of things.

  Before dinner that night, Paul’s sister Ellen drank too much. She was late coming to the table, and when Paul went into the pantry for a spoon, he found her there, drinking out of the silver cocktail shaker. Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten. Ellen was a heavy-featured woman who held her strong blue eyes at a squint. She had had her second divorce that spring. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her head for dinner that night and put on an old dress she had found in one of the attic trunks, and, reminded by her faded clothes of a simpler time of life, she talked uninterruptedly about the past and, particularly, about Father—Father this and Father that. The shabby dress and her reminiscent mood made Paul impatient, and it seemed to him that a vast crack had appeared magically in Ellen’s heart the night Father died.

  A northwest wind had driven the thundershower out of the county and left in the air a poignant chill, and when they went out on the piazza after dinner to watch the sun go down, there were a hundred clouds in the west—clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed. “It’s so good for me to be up here,” Ellen said. “It does so much for me.” She sat on the rail against the light, and Paul couldn’t see her face. “I can’t find Father’s binoculars,” she went on, “and his golf clubs have disappeared.” From the open window of the children’s room, Paul heard his daughter singing, “How many miles is it to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can we get there by candlelight?…” Immense tenderness and contentment fell to him with her voice from the open window.

  It was so good for them all, as Ellen said; it did so much for them. It was a phrase Paul had heard spoken on that piazza since his memory had become retentive. Ellen was the mote on that perfect evening. There was something wrong, some half-known evil in her worship of the bucolic scene—some measure of her inadequacy and, he supposed, of his.

  “Let’s have a brandy,” Ellen said. They went into the house to drink. In the living room, there was a lot of talk about what they would have—brandy, mint, Cointreau, Scotch. Paul went into the kitchen and put glasses and bottles on a tray. The screen door was shaken by something—the wind, he guessed, until the thumping was repeated and he saw Kasiak standing in the dark. He would offer him a drink. He would settle him in the wing chair and play out that charade of equality between vacationist and hired man that is one of the principal illusions of the leafy months. “Here’s something you ought to read,” Kasiak said, before Paul could speak, and he passed him a newspaper clipping. Paul recognized the typeface of the Communist paper that was mailed to Kasiak from Indiana. LUXURY LIVING WEAKENS U.S. was the headline, and the story described with traitorous joy the hardy and purposeful soldiers of Russia. Paul’s face got warm in anger at Kasiak and at the uprush of chauvinism he felt. “Is that all you want?” His voice broke dryly. Kasiak nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at six,” Paul said, master to hired man, and he hooked the screen door and turned his back.

  Paul liked to think that his patience with the man was inexhaustible—for, after all, Kas
iak not only believed in Bakunin, he believed that stones grow and that thunder curdles milk. In his dealings with Kasiak, he had unconsciously sacrificed some independence, and in order to get to the garden at six the next morning, he got up at five. He made himself some breakfast, and at half past five he heard the rattle of a cart on the road. The puerile race of virtue and industry had begun. Paul was in the garden when Kasiak brought the cart into view. Kasiak was disappointed.

  Paul had seen the mare only in pasture, and, aside from the fact that she was costing him four dollars, he was curious about the animal, for, along with a cow and a wife, she made up Kasiak’s family. Her coat was dusty, he saw; her belly was swollen; her hoofs were unshod and uncut and had shredded like paper. “What’s her name?” he asked, but Kasiak didn’t answer. He hitched the mare to the cultivator, and she sighed and labored up the hill. Paul led the mare by the bridle, and Kasiak held down the cultivator.

  Halfway along the first row in the garden, a stone stopped them, and when it had been dislodged and rolled away, Kasiak called “Gee-up” to the mare. She didn’t move. “Gee-up,” he shouted. His voice was harsh, but there was some tenderness hidden in it. “Gee-up, gee-up, gee-up.” He slapped her sides lightly with the reins. He looked anxiously at Paul, as if he were ashamed that Paul should notice the mare’s extreme decrepitude and reach a mistaken judgment on an animal he loved. When Paul suggested that he might use a whip, Kasiak said no. “Gee-up, gee-up, gee-up,” he shouted again, and when she still failed to respond, he struck her rump with the reins. Paul pulled at her bit. They stood for ten minutes in the middle of the row pulling and shouting, and it seemed that the life had gone out of the mare. Then, when they were hoarse and discouraged, she began to stir and gather wind in her lungs. Her carcass worked like a bellows and the wind whistled in her nostrils, and, like the bag Aeolus gave to Ulysses, she seemed to fill with tempests. She shook the flies off her head and pulled the cultivator a few feet forward.