The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [25]
Leander would never take his sons aside and speak to them about the facts of life, even although the continuation of Honora’s numerous charities depended upon their virility. If they looked out of the window for a minute they could see the drift of things. It was his feeling that love, death and fornication extracted from the rich green soup of life were no better than half-truths, and his course of instruction was general. He would like them to grasp that the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and the continuousness of things. He went skating on Christmas Day—drunk or sober, ill or well—feeling that it was his responsibility to the village to appear on Parson’s Pond. “There goes old Leander Wapshot,” people said—he could hear them—a splendid figure of continuous and innocent sport that he hoped his sons would carry on. The cold bath that he took each morning was ceremonious—it was sometimes nothing else since he almost never used soap and got out of the tub smelling powerfully of the sea salts in the old sponges that he used. The coat he wore at dinner, the grace he said at table, the fishing trip he took each spring, the bourbon he drank at dark and the flower in his buttonhole were all forms that he hoped his sons might understand and perhaps copy. He had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc.
He was not surprised to find his ways crossed and contested by his wife, who had her own arcane rites such as arranging flowers and cleaning closets. He did not always see eye to eye with Sarah but this seemed to him most natural, and life itself appeared to regulate their differences. He was impulsive and difficult to follow—there was no telling when he would decide that it was time for the boys to swim the river or carve the roast. He went trout fishing each spring at a camp in the wilderness near the Canadian border and decided one spring that the time had come for Moses to accompany him. For once Sarah was angry and stubborn. She didn’t want Moses to go north with his father and on the evening before they were to leave she said that Moses was sick. Her manner was seraphic.
“That poor boy is too ill to go anywhere.”
“We’re going fishing tomorrow morning,” Leander said.
“Leander, if you take this poor boy out of a sickbed and up to the north woods I’ll never forgive you.”
“There won’t be anything to forgive.”
“Leander, come here.”
They continued their discussion or quarrel behind the closed doors of Sarah’s bedroom but the boys—and Lulu—could hear their angry and bitter voices. Leander got Moses out of bed before dawn on the next day. He had already packed the bait and fishing tackle and they started for the Langely ponds in the starlight while Sarah was still asleep.
It was May when they left—the valley of the West River was all in bloom—and they had had a brace or more of those days when the earth smells like a farmer’s britches—all timothy, manure and sweet grass. They were north of Concord when the sun came up and they stopped in some town in New Hampshire for lunch. They were far north of the lush river valley by then. The trees were bare and the inn where they stopped still seemd to be in the throes of a cold winter. The place smelled of kerosene and the waitress had a runny nose.
They were in the mountains then, the stony rivers full of black water—melted snow—and the sheen of reflected blue from the sky didn’t much soften the impression of cold. Coming up into a pass Moses raised his head cheerfully to the voluptuous line of the mountains, the illusory blue, thunderous and deep, but the loud noise of wind in the bare trees reminded him of the gentle valley they had left that morning—shadbush and lilac and already some arbutus underfoot. They had then got to the approaches of French Canada—those farms and towns that seem, from the winter’s cold and tedium,