Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize), The - John Cheever [16]
Mrs. Garrison was indifferent to children, and with Mrs. Bronson in Reno, Agnes had no rivals, but she was in continual torment lest something happen to Carlotta. She would not let her wear a scarf around her neck for fear it would catch on a nail or in some door and strangle the child. Every steep staircase, every deep body of water, the distant barking of every watchdog frightened Agnes. She dreamed at night that the house caught fire and, unable to save Carlotta, she threw herself into the flames. Now, added to her other anxieties, were the steel traps and the rifle. She could see Jim from the nursery window. The traps were not set, but that didn't make them any less dangerous, lying there on the ground where anyone could step on them. He had the rifle apart and was cleaning it with a rag, but Agnes felt as if the rifle were loaded and aimed at Carlotta's heart.
Jim heard his wife's voice, and he carried the parts of the rifle around to the terrace, where Ellen was sitting in a deck chair, having her breakfast from a tray. He kissed her, and thought how young, slender, and pretty she looked. They had spent very little of their married life in the country, and to be together on a bright, still morning made them both feel as if they had recaptured the excitement of their first meetings. The warmth of the sun, like a state of continuous and intense desire, blinded them to each other's imperfections.
They had planned to drive up Black Hill and see the Emerson place that morning. Ellen liked to visit abandoned farms with the idea of someday buying a house in the country. Jim humored her in this, although he wasn't really interested; and she, in turn, thought that she was deceiving him and that someday, somewhere, on some dismal hill they would find a farmhouse that would strike directly at his heart.
They drove up Black Hill as soon as Ellen had finished her breakfast. These excursions to abandoned homesteads had taken them over many neglected back roads, but the one up Black Hill was as bad as anything Jim had seen yet. It would be impassable between October and May.
When they reached the Emerson place, Ellen looked from the modest, weathered farmhouse to Jim's face, to see what his reaction would be. Neither of them spoke. Where she saw charm and security, he saw advanced dilapidation and imprisonment.
The farm lay high on the hill but in a fold of the land, and Jim noticed that while the contour sheltered the house from the lake winds, it also deprived it of any view of the water or the mountains. He noticed, too, that every fair-sized tree within a thousand yards of the granite doorstep had been felled. The sun beat on the tin roof. In one of the front windows, like a talisman, he thought, of the meager rural life he detested, was a faded Red Cross sticker.
They left the car and walked across the dooryard. The grass there was waist high and filled with sweet clover. Briars tore at Jim's pants. The rusted latch came off in his hands when he tried the door. He followed Ellen impatiently through the dark, smelly rooms as he had followed her through rooms in a similar state of dilapidation in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland. Ellen was a woman with many inexpressible fears—of traffic, of poverty, and, particularly, of war—and these remote, improbable houses represented safety and security to her.
"Of course, if we bought the place," she said, "we'd have to put at least ten thousand dollars into it. We'd just be buying the land. I realize that."
"Well, I'll admit six thousand is a good price for that much land," he said tactfully. He lit a cigarette and looked through a broken window at a pile of rusted farm machinery.
"You see, we could tear down all these partitions," she