The Stories of John Cheever

“I got too much to do. Move the lilies. Move the roses. Cut the grass. Every day you want something different. Why is it? Why are you better than me? You don’t know how to do anything but kill flowers. I grow the flowers. You kill them. If a fuse burns out, you don’t know how to do it. If something leaks, you don’t know how to do it. You kill flowers. That’s all you know how to do. For seventeen years I wait for you all winter,” he shouted. “You write me, ‘Is it warm? Are the flowers pretty?’ Then you come. You sit here. You drink. God damn you people. You killed my wife. Now you want to kill me. You—”

“Shut up, Nils,” Jim said.

Nils turned quickly and retreated across the lawn, so stricken with self-consciousness that he seemed to limp. None of them spoke, for they had the feeling, after he had disappeared behind the hedge, that he might be hiding there, waiting to hear what they would say. Then Ingrid and Greta came up the lawn from their evening walk, overburdened with the stones and wild flowers that they brought back from these excursions to decorate their rooms above the garage. Greta told Jim that something was caught in a trap in the corn patch. She thought it was a cat.

Jim got the rifle and a flashlight and went up the hill to the gardens. As he approached the corn patch, he could hear a wild, thin crying. Then the animal, whatever it was, began to pound the dirt. The stroke was strong, as regular as a heartbeat, and accompanied by the small rattling of the trap chain. When Jim reached the patch, he turned his light into the broken stalks. The animal hissed, sprang in the direction of the light; but it could not escape the chain. It was a fat, humpbacked coon. Now it hid from the light in the ruined corn. Jim waited. Against the starlight he could see the high, ragged stand of corn and when a breeze passed through the leaves they rattled like sticks. The coon, driven by pain, began to strike the ground convulsively and Jim held the light against the barrel of the rifle and fired twice. When the coon was dead, he unstaked the trap and carried it and the carcass out of the garden.