The Stories of John Cheever

They were driving upland. From the Junction north, one never quite lost the sense of a gradual climb. Hills blocked off the delicate, the vitiated New Hampshire landscape, with its omnipresence of ruin, but every few miles a tributary of the Merrimack opened a broad valley, with elms, farms, and stone fences. “It’s along here,” Virginia said. Paul didn’t know what she meant until she reminded him of the rabbits. “If you’ll slow down here… Here, Paul, here.” He bumped the car over the shoulder of the road and stopped. On the lawn of a white, neat house, darkened by rock maples, there was a rabbit cage. “Hello,” Paul shouted, “hello,” and a man in overalls came out of a side door, chewing on something, as if he had been interrupted at a meal. White rabbits were two dollars, he said. Browns and grays were a dollar and a half. He swallowed, and wiped his mouth with his fist. He spoke uneasily, as if he had wanted to keep the simple transaction from someone, and after Paul had picked a brown and a gray, he ran to the barn for a box. As Paul turned the car back onto the road, they heard behind them a heartbroken shout. A boy ran from the house to the rabbit cage, and they saw the source of the farmer’s uneasiness.

The cash market and the antique store, the Civil War cannon and the post office of Hiems fell behind them, and Paul accelerated the car happily when they escaped from the narrow streets of the village and drove into the fresh lake winds. The road brought them, first, along the unfashionable, or gregarious, end of the lake; then the houses thinned and gave way to pine groves and empty fields as they drove north. The sense of homecoming—of returning to a place where he had summered all his life—became for Paul so violent that the difference between the pace of his imagination and the speed of the car annoyed him until they turned off the road onto grass ruts and saw, literally at the road’s end, their farm.

The gentle shadow of a cloud was passing the face of the Hollis house. At the edge of the lawn, there was an upside-down piece of porch furniture that had been abandoned in a thundershower and that seemed to have been drying there since Paul’s youth. The light and heat increased and the shade deepened as the moving shadow of the cloud darkened the barn and the clothes-yard and vanished into the woods.