was some applause. Then he groaned and fell. Louise ran to his side. His clothes were soaked with sweat and he gasped for breath. She knelt down beside him and took his head in her lap and stroked his thin hair.
CASH had a terrible hangover on Sunday, and Louise let him sleep until it was nearly time for church. The family went off to Christ Church together at eleven, as they always did. Cash sang, prayed, and got to his knees, but the most he ever felt in church was that he stood outside the realm of God’s infinite mercy, and, to tell the truth, he no more believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than does my bull terrier. They returned home at one to eat the overcooked meat and stony potatoes that were their customary Sunday lunch. At around five, the Parminters called up and asked them over for a drink. Louise didn’t want to go, so Cash went alone. (Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those post-mortems and pickup suppers!) It was sultry and overcast. The dog days were beginning. He drank gin with the Parminters for an hour or two and then went over to the Townsends’ for a drink. The Farquarsons called up the Townsends and asked them to come over and bring Cash with them, and at the Farquarsons’ they had some more drinks and ate the leftover party food. The Farquarsons were glad to see that Cash seemed like himself again. It was half past ten or eleven when he got home. Louise was upstairs, cutting out of the current copy of Life those scenes of mayhem, disaster, and violent death that she felt might corrupt her children. She always did this. Cash came upstairs and spoke to her and then went down again. In a little while, she heard him moving the living-room furniture around. Then he called to her, and when she went down, he was standing at the foot of the stairs in his stocking feet, holding the pistol out to her. She had never fired it before, and the directions he gave her were not much help.
“Hurry up,” he said, “I can’t wait all night.”
He had forgotten to tell her about the safety, and when she pulled the trigger nothing happened.
“It’s that little lever,” he said. “Press that little lever.” Then, in his impatience, he hurdled the sofa anyhow.
The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.
THE DAY THE PIG FELL INTO THE WELL
In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” Then, as if the opening note of a sextet had been sounded, the others would all rush in to take their familiar parts, like those families who sing Gilbert and Sullivan, and the recital would go on for an hour or more. The perfect days?and there had been hundreds of them?seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.
The famous pig had belonged to Randy Nudd. He had won it at the fair in Lanchester and brought it home, and he was planning to build a pen for it, but Pamela Blaisdell telephoned, and he put the pig in the tool shed and drove over to the Blaisdell place in the old Cadillac. Russell Young was playing tennis with Esther Nudd. An Irishwoman named Nora Quinn was the cook that year. Mrs. Nudd’s sister, Aunt Martha, had gone to the village of Macabit to get some cuttings from a friend, and Mr. Nudd was planning to take the launch across to Polett’s Landing and bring her back after lunch. A Miss Coolidge was expected for dinner and the weekend. Mrs. Nudd had known her at school in Switzerland thirty years earlier. Miss Coolidge had written Mrs. Nudd to say that she was staying with friends in Glens Falls and could she pay a visit to her old schoolmate? Mrs. Nudd hardly remembered her and did not care about seeing her at all, but she wrote and asked her for the weekend. Though it was the middle of July, from daybreak a blustering northwest wind had been upsetting everything in the house and roaring in the trees like a storm. When you got out of the wind, if you could, the sun was hot.
In these events of the day the pig fell into the well, there was one other principal who was not a member of the family?Russell Young. Russell’s father owned the hardware store in Macabit, and the Youngs were a respected native family. Mrs. Young worked as a cleaning woman for a month each spring, opening the summer houses, but her position was not menial. Russell met the Nudds through the boys?Hartley and Randall?and when he was quite young, he began to spend a lot of time at their camp. He was a year or two older than the Nudd boys, and in a way Mrs. Nudd entrusted the care of her sons to him. Russell was the same age as Esther Nudd and a year younger than Joan. Esther Nudd, at the beginning of this friendship, was a very fat girl. Joan was pretty and spent most of her time in front of the mirror. Esther and Joan adored Randy and gave him money from their allowances to buy paint for his boat, but otherwise there was not much rapport between the sexes. Hartley Nudd was disgusted with his sisters. “I saw Esther yesterday in the bathhouse, naked,” he would tell anyone, “and she’s got these big rolls of fat around her stomach like I don’t know what. She’s an awful-looking thing. And Joan is dirty. You ought to see her room. I don’t see why anyone wants to take a dirty person like that to a dance.”
But they were all much older than this on the day they liked to remember. Russell had graduated from the local high school and gone off to college in Albany, and in the summer of his freshman year he had worked for the Nudds, doing odd jobs around the place. The fact that he was paid a salary did not change his relationship to the family, and he remained good friends with Randall and Hartley. In a way, Russell’s character and background seemed to be the dominant ones, and the Nudd boys returned to New York imitating his north-country accent. On the other hand, Russell went with the children on all their picnics to Hewitt’s Point, he climbed the mountains and went fishing with them, he went to the square dances at the Town Hall with them, and in doing these things he learned from the Nudds an interpretation of the summer months that he would not have known as a native. He had no misgivings about so ingenuous and pleasing an influence, and he drove with the Nudds over the mountain roads in the old Cadillac, and shared with them the feeling that the clear light of July and August was imparting something rare to all their minds and careers. If the Nudds never referred to the difference between Russell’s social position and theirs, it was because the very real barriers that they otherwise observed had been let down for the summer months?because the country, with the sky pouring its glare over the mountains onto the lake, seemed a seasonal paradise in which the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, lived together peaceably.
