The trouble began one afternoon when Coverly Wapshot swung down off the slow train, the only south-bound train that still stopped at the village of St. Botolphs. It was in the late winter, just before dark. The snow was gone but the grass was dead and the place seemed not to have rallied from the February storms. He shook hands with Mr. Jowett and asked about his family. He waved to the bartender in the Viaduct House, waved to Barry Freeman in the feed store and called hello to Miles Howland, who was coming out of the bank. The late sky was brilliant and turbulent but it shed none of its operatic lights and fires onto the darkness of the green. This awesome performance was contained within the air. Between the buildings he could see the West River with its, for him, enormous cargo of pleasant memory and he took away from this brightness the unlikely impression that the river’s long history had been a purifying force, leaving the water fit to drink. He turned right at Boat Street. Mrs. Williams was sitting in her parlor, reading the paper. The only light at the Brattles’ was in the kitchen. The Dummers’ house was dark. Mrs. Bretaigne, who was saying good-bye to a caller, welcomed him home. Then he turned up the walk to Cousin Honora’s.
Maggie answered the door and he gave her a kiss. “They ain’t nothing but dried beef,” Maggie said. “You’ll have to kill a chicken.” He went down the long hall past the seven views of Rome into the library, where he found his old cousin with an open book on her lap. Here was home-sweet-home, the polished brass, the applewood fire. “Coverly dear,” Honora said in an impulse of love and kissed him on the lips. “Honora,” Coverly said, taking her in his arms. Then they separated and scrutinized one another cannily to see what changes had been made.
Her white hair was still full, her face leonine, but her new false teeth were not well fitted and they made her look like a cannibal. This hinted savagery reminded Coverly of the fact that his cousin had never been photographed. In all the family albums she appeared either with her back to the camera as she ran away or with her face concealed by her hands, her handbag, her hat or a newspaper. Any stranger looking at the albums would have thought she was wanted for murder. Honora thought Coverly looked underfed and she said so. “You’re skinny,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ll have Maggie bring you some port.”
“I’d rather have a whisky.”
“You don’t drink whisky,” Honora said.
“I didn’t used to,” Coverly said, “but I do now.”
“Will wonders never cease?” Honora asked.
“If you’re going to kill a chicken,” Maggie said from the doorway, “you’d better kill it now or you won’t get supper much before midnight.”
“I’ll kill the chicken now,” Coverly said.
“You’ll have to speak louder,” Honora said. “She can’t hear.”
Coverly followed Maggie back through the house to the kitchen. “She’s crazier than ever,” Maggie said. “Now she claims she can’t sleep. She claims she ain’t slept for years. Well, so I come into the parlor one afternoon with her tea and there she is. Sound asleep. Snoring. So I say, ‘Wake up, Miss Wapshot. Here’s your tea.’ She says, ‘What do you mean, wake up? I wasn’t asleep,’ she says. ‘I was just lost in deep meditation.’ And now she’s thinking of buying an automobile. Dear Jesus, it would be like setting a hungry lion loose in the streets. She’ll be running over and killing innocent little children if she don’t kill herself first.”
The relationship between the old women stood foursquare on a brand of larcenous backbiting that appeared to contain so little in the way of truth that it could be passed off as comical. Maggie’s hearing was perfect but for some years Honora had told everyone she was deaf. Honora was eccentric but Maggie told everyone in the village that she was mad. The physical and mental infirmities they invented for one another had a pristine quality that made it nearly impossible to believe there was any grimness in the contest.
Coverly found a hatchet in the back pantry and went down the wooden steps to the garden. Somewhere in the distance he could hear children’s voices, distinctly accented with the catarrhal pronunciations of that part of the world. There was a gaggle of sound from the hen house beyond the hedge. He felt uncommonly happy in this sparsely populated place; felt some marked loosening of his discontents. It was the hour, he knew, when the pinochle players would be drifting across the green to the firehouse and when the yearnings of adolescence, exacerbated by the smallness of the village, would be approaching a climax. He could remember sitting himself on the back steps of the house on River Street, racked with a yearning for love, for friendship and renown, that had made him howl.
