The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [87]
He was up at five and drove north to the river, as anxious to be the first fisherman out as Leander had been anxious to be the first man in the woods. The sky was just beginning to fill with light. He was disappointed and perplexed then when a car ahead of him turned off and parked on the road shoulder that led to the stream. Then the driver of the car ahead hurried out of his car and looked over his shoulder at Moses in such agony and panic that Moses wondered—so soon after dawn—if he had crossed the path of a murderer. Then the stranger unbuckled his belt, dropped his trousers and relieved himself in full view of the morning. Moses gathered up his tackle and smiled at the stranger, happy to see that he was not another trout fisherman. The stranger smiled at Moses for his own reasons; and he took the path to the water and didn’t see another fisherman that day.
Lakanana Pond emptied into the river and the water, regulated by a dam, was deep and turbulent and in many places over a man’s head. The sharp fall of the land and the granite bed of the stream made it a place where there was nowhere a respite from the loud noise of water. Moses caught one trout in the morning and two more late in the day. Here and there a bridle path from the Lakanana Inn ran parallel to the stream and a few riders hacked by but it was not until late in the day that any of them stopped to ask Moses what he had caught.
The sun by then was below the trees and the early dark seemed to deepen the resonance of the stream. It was time for Moses to go and he was taking in his line and putting away his flies when he heard the hoofs and the creaking leather of some riders. A middle-aged couple stopped to ask about his luck while he was pulling off his boots. It was the urbanity of the couple that struck Moses—they looked so terribly out of place. They were both of them heavy and gray-headed—the woman dumpy and the man choleric, short-winded and obese. It had been a warm day but they were dressed correctly in dark riding clothes—bowlers, sticks, tattersalls and so forth. All of this must have been very uncomfortable. “Well, good luck,” the woman said in the cheerful, cracked voice of middle age, and turned her horse away from the stream. Out of the corner of his eye Moses saw the horse rear but by the time he turned his head so much dust had been raised by the scuffle of hoofs that he didn’t see how she fell. He ran up the bank and got the fractious horse by the bridle as her husband began to roar: “Help, help. She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s been killed.” The horse reared again while Moses’ hand was on the bridle. He let go and the hack galloped off. “I’ll go for help, I’ll go for help,” the husband roared. “There’s a farm back there.” He cantered off to the north and the dust settled, leaving Moses with what seemed to be a dead stranger.
She was on her knees, face downward in the dirt, the tails of her coat parted over the broad, worn seat of her britches and her boots toed in like a child’s, so stripped of her humanity, so defeated—Moses remembered the earnest notes of her voice—in her attempt to enjoy the early summer day, that he felt a flash of repugnance. Then he went to her and more out of consideration for his own feelings than anything else—more out of his desire to return to her the form of a woman than to save her life—he straightened out her legs and she rolled with a thump onto her back. He rolled up his coat and put it under her head. A cut in her forehead, over the eye, was bleeding and Moses got some water and washed the cut, pleased to be occupied. She was breathing, he noticed, but this exhausted his medical knowledge. He knelt beside her wondering in what form and when help would come. He lighted a cigarette and looked at the stranger’s face—pasty and round and worn it seemed with such anxieties as cooking, catching trains and buying useful presents at Christmas. It was a face that seemed to state its history plainly—she was one of