The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [26]
There was nothing at Langely but a post office and a store. It was late; it would be dark soon. The post-office windows were lighted but the shores of the lake were uninhabited and dark. Moses looked at the old launch, tied up at the wharf, her long bow and her helm shaped like a steering wheel. He recognized in the length of her mahogany bow, with its brass funnel and brass-bound bulkhead, that she was one of those boats built years ago, for the leisurely comings and goings of another generation of summer people. Four wicker chairs stood side by side on her deep stern deck. Weathered and raveled and threadbare, they had carried—how long ago?—women in summer dresses and men in flannels out to see the sun go down. Now her paint was dirty and her varnish was dim and she bemoaned her dereliction by rubbing the wharf in the northerly wind.
His father came down the path with the groceries and an old man followed him. It was the old man who took off the lines and pushed the boat into deep water with a hook. He must have been eighty. His teeth were gone and his mouth had sunk, accentuating the little thrust of his chin. He blinked his eyes behind a pair of dirty glasses and poked his tongue out between his lips and when he got her into forward and full speed ahead he settled himself very stiffly. It was a seven-mile voyage to the camp. They carried their things up to a ramshackle place with a chimney made of soup cans and they lighted a fire and a lamp. Squirrels had gotten into the mattress. Mice and rats and porcupines had come and gone. Below them Moses heard the old man start the motor of his Cygnet and head back for the post office. The icy light of the afterglow, the noise of the launch as it faded and the smells of the stove all were so unlike their beginnings that morning in St. Botolphs that the world seemed to fall into two pieces or halves.
Here on this half were the deep lake, the old man with his superannuated Cygnet and the dirty camp. Here were salt and catsup and patched blankets and canned spaghetti and dirty socks. Here was a pile of rusted tin cans around the steps; here were Saturday Evening Post covers fixed with roofing nails to the bare walls beside the Fisherman’s Prayer, the Fisherman’s Lexicon, the Lament of the Fisherman’s Widow, the Fisherman’s Crying Towel and all the other inane and semicomic trash that has been published about fishing. Here was the smell of earthworms and gut, kerosene and burned pancakes, the smell of unaired blankets, trapped smoke, wet shoes, lye and strangeness. On the table near where he stood someone had stuck a candle into a root and beside this was a detective story, its first chapters eaten by mice.
On the other half was the farm at St. Botolphs, the gentle valley and the impuissant river and the rooms that smelled now of lilac and hyacinth and the colored engraving of San Marco and all the furniture with claw feet. There were the Canton bowls full of forget-me-nots, the damp linen sheets, the silver on the sideboard and the loud ticking of the clock in the hall. The difference seemed more strenuous than if he had crossed the border from one mountain country into another, more strenuous he guessed because he had not realized how deep his commitment to the gentle parochialism of the valley was—the east wind and the shawls from India—and had never seen how securely conquered that country was by his good mother and her kind—the iron women in their summer dresses. He stood, for the first time in his life, in a place where their absence was conspicuous and he smiled, thinking of how they would have attacked the camp;