The Stories of John Cheever

To get the facts out of the way: Artemis drilled with an old Smith & Mathewson chain-concussion rig that struck the planet sixty blows a minute. It made a terrible racket and there had been two complaints. One was from a very nervous housewife and the other from a homosexual poet who said that the concussion was ruining his meter. Artemis rather liked the noise. He lived with his widowed mother at the edge of town in one of those little conclaves of white houses that are distinguished by their displays of the American flag. You find them on outlying roads—six or seven small houses gathered together for no particular reason. There is no store, no church, nothing central. The lawns on which dogs sleep are well trimmed and everything is neat, but every house flies its Old Glory. This patriotic zeal cannot be traced back to the fact that these people have received an abundance of their country’s riches. They haven’t. These are hard-working people who lead frugal lives and worry about money. People who have profited splendidly from our economy seem to have no such passion for the Stars and Stripes. Artemis’ mother, for example—a hard-working woman—had a flagpole, five little flags stuck into a window box, and a seventh flag hanging from the porch. His father had chosen his name, thinking that it referred to artesian wells. It wasn’t until Artemis was a grown man that he discovered he had been named for the chaste goddess of the hunt. He didn’t seem to mind and, anyhow, everybody called him Art. He wore work clothes and in the winter a seaman’s knitted cap. His manner with strangers was rustic and shy and something of an affectation, since he read a good deal and had an alert and inquisitive intelligence. His father had learned his trade as an apprentice and had not graduated from high school. He regretted not having an education and was very anxious that his son should go to college. Artemis went to a small college called Laketon in the north of the state and got an engineering degree. He was also exposed to literature through an unusually inspiring professor named Lytle. Physically, there was nothing remarkable about Lytle, but he was the sort of teacher in whose presence students had for many years felt an irresistible desire to read books, write themes, and discuss their most intimate feelings about the history of mankind. Lytle singled out Artemis and encouraged him to read Swift, Donne, and Conrad. He wrote four themes for this course, which Lytle charitably graded A. His ear for prose was damaged by an incurable fascination for words like “cacophony,” “percussion,” “throbbingly,” and “thumpingly.” This may have had something to do with his profession.

Lytle suggested that he get an editorial job on an engineering journal and he seriously thought about this, but he chose instead to be a well driller. He made his decision one Saturday when he and his father took their rig to the south of the county, where a large house—an estate—had been built. There was a swimming pool and seven baths and the well produced three gallons a minute. Artemis contracted to go down another hundred feet, but even then the take was only six gallons a minute. The enormous, costly, and useless house impressed him with the importance of his trade. Water, water. (What happened in the end was that the owner demolished six upstairs bedrooms to make room for a storage tank, which the local fire department filled twice a week.)

Artemis’ knowledge of ecology was confined to water. Going fishing on the first of April, he found the falls of the South Branch foaming with soapsuds. Some of this was bound to leach down to where he worked. Later in the month, he caught a five-pound trout in the stream at Lakeside. This was a phenomenal fish for that part of the world and he stopped to show his catch to the game warden and ask him how it should be cooked. “Don’t bother to cook that fish,” said the warden, “It’s got enough DDT to put you in the hospital. You can’t eat these fish any more. The government sprayed the banks with DDT about four years ago and the stuff all washed into the brook.” Artemis had once dug a well and found DDT, and another had traces of fuel oil. His sense of a declining environment was keen and intensely practical. He contracted to find potable water and if he failed he lost his shirt. A polluted environment meant for him both sadness at human stupidity and rapaciousness and also a hole in his pocket. He had failed only twice, but the odds were running against him and everybody else.