The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [30]
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