The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [14]
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