The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [31]
The boys took their mother to church at eleven and Coverly got vehemently to his knees but he was not halfway through his first prayer when the perfume of the woman in the pew ahead of him undid all his work of mortification and showed him that the literal body of Christ Church was no mighty fortress, for although the verger had shut the oak doors and the only windows open were not big enough for a child to enter by, the devil, so far as Coverly was concerned, came and went, sat on his shoulder, urged him to peer down the front of Mrs. Harper’s dress, to admire the ankles of the lady in front and to wonder if there was any truth in the rumors about the rector and the boy soprano. His mother nudged him with her elbow when it was time for communion but he looked at her palely and shook his head. The sermon was grueling and through it all Coverly’s mind turned over tirelessly the words of an obscene double limerick about a bishop.
Late in the day, when the family were drinking tea, Coverly went out to the back of the house. He smelled a clearing wind and heard it stir in the trees and saw the overcast rise, the miserableness of that day carried off and a band of yellow light spill out of the west. Then he knew what he had to do and he made his preparations; he washed his armpits and emptied his bank. He had enough money to pay for her favors. He would join the blessed company of men, so lightly screened by canvas from the lowing of cattle and the voices of children. He walked, he ran, he walked again, he took a short cut over the Waylands’ pasture to the dirt road to the fairgrounds, wondering why the simplicity of life had not appeared to him sooner.
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