The Stories of John Cheever

He wanted to have his breakfast in the kitchen with his five-year-old son, but Agnes had no intention of letting him pass from the front of the house into those quarters that were reserved for servants and children. He told her what he wanted to eat and went back through the dining room and out onto the terrace. The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn. It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Jim looked at the terrace, at the gardens, at the house, with a fatuous possessiveness. He could hear Mrs. Garrison—his widowed mother-in-law and the rightful owner of everything he saw—talking animatedly to herself in the distant cutting bed.

While Jim was eating his breakfast, Agnes said that Nils Lund wanted to see him. This information flattered Jim. He was in New Hampshire for only ten days and he was there merely as a guest, but he liked to be consulted by the gardener. Nils Lund had worked for Mrs. Garrison for many years. He lived in a cottage on the place and his wife, who was now dead, had worked in the kitchen. Nils resented the fact that none of Mrs. Garrison’s sons interested themselves in the place and he often told Jim how happy he was to have a man around with whom he could discuss his problems.

Nils’s gardens no longer bore any relationship to the needs of the house. Each spring he plowed and planted acres of vegetables and flowers. The coming up of the asparagus shoots was the signal for a hopeless race between the vegetables and Mrs. Garrison’s table. Nils, embittered by the waste that he himself was the author of, came each evening to the kitchen door to tell the cook that unless they ate more peas, more strawberries, more beans, more lettuce, more cabbages, the magnificent vegetables that he had watered with his sweat would rot.

When Jim had finished his breakfast, he went around to the back of the house and Nils told him, with a long face, that something was eating the corn, which had just begun to ripen. They had discussed the pest in the corn patch before. At first they had thought it was deer. Nils had changed his guess that morning to raccoons. He wanted Jim to come with him and view the damage that had been done.

“Those traps in the tool house ought to do the job for us if it’s raccoons,” Jim said. “And I think there’s a rifle around. I’ll set the traps tonight.”

They walked along a driveway that ran up the hill to the gardens. The fields at the edge of the drive were eroded with moss and spotted with juniper. From the fields came an indescribable perfume, pungent and soporific. “See,” Nils said when they reached the corn patch. “See, see…” Leaves, silk, and half-eaten ears were strewn and trampled into the dirt. “I plant it,” Nils said, like the husband of a shrew recounting instances of unrewarded patience. “Then there’s crows after the seed. I cultivate it. Now there’s no corn.”

They heard Greta, the cook, singing as she came up the drive, bringing garbage to the chickens. They turned to watch her. She was a big, strong woman with a magnificent voice and the breasts of an operatic contralto. A second after they heard Greta, the wind carried Mrs. Garrison’s voice to them from the cutting bed. Mrs. Garrison talked to herself continually. Her cultivated and emphatic words sounded across that clear morning like the notes of a trumpet. “Why does he plant this hideous purple verbena every year? He knows I can’t use purple. Why does he plant this loathsome purple verbena?… And I’m going to have him move the arums again. I’m going to have the lilies down by the pool again.”

Nils spat in the dirt. “God damn that woman!” he said. “God damn her!” Greta had reminded him of his dead wife and Mrs. Garrison’s rich voice had reminded him of that other binding marriage, between mistress and gardener, which would last until death dissolved it. He made no effort to contain his anger, and Jim was caught in the cross fire of his mother-in-law’s soliloquy and her gardener’s rage. He said he would go and take a look at the traps.

He found the traps in the tool house and a rifle in the cellar. As he was crossing the lawn, he met Mrs. Garrison. She was a thin, white-haired woman, and she was dressed in a torn maid’s uniform and a broken straw hat. Her arms were full of flowers. She and her son-in-law wished one another good morning, exclaimed on the beauty of the day, and went on in opposite directions. Jim carried the traps and the rifle behind the house. His son, Timmy, was there, playing hospital with Ingrid, the cook’s daughter, a pale, skinny girl of eleven. The children watched him briefly and then went back to their game.