Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 123
churches where a bereft woman with a hidden face stood grieving.
But in his darling snowy forest there would be an everlasting
newness in the air, and here there was nothing but the bestial goat
smell of old Farragut and the gall of having been gulled. They had
been gulled. They had gulled themselves. The word from The Wall
—and it was known to most of them—had promised them the
thrust, the strength of change, and this had been sapped by
quarrels about clap and prayerbooks and wrist-watch straps.
Farragut felt impotent. No girl, no ass, no mouth could get him
up, but he felt no gratitude for this cessation of his horniness. The
last light of that sweaty day was whitish, the white afterglow you
see in the windows of Tuscan paintings, an ending light but one
that seems to bring the optical nerve, the powers of discernment,
to a climax. Naked, utterly unbeautiful, malodorous and
humiliated by a clown in a dirty suit and a dirty hat, they seemed
to Farragut, in this climax of the light, to be criminals. None of the
cruelties of their early lives—hunger, thirst and beatings—could
account for their brutality, their self-destructive thefts and their
consuming and perverse addictions. They were souls who could
not be redeemed, and while penance was a clumsy and a cruel
answer, it was some measure of the mysteriousness of their fall. In
the white light they seemed to Farragut to be fallen men.
They dressed. It was dark. Chicken began to scream, “Chow.
Chow. Chow.” Most of the others joined in on the chant. “No
chow,” said Tiny. “Kitchen’s closed for repairs.” “Three squares a
day is our constitutional right,” screamed Chicken. “We’ll get a
writ of habeas corpus. We’ll get twenty writs….” Then he began to
shout: “TV. TV. TV.” Almost everyone joined in on this. “TV’s
broken,” said Tiny. This lie increased the loudness of the chanting
and Farragut, weary with hunger and everything else, found
himself sinking, with no resistance at all, into a torpor that was the
worst of his positions of retreat. Down he seemed to go, his
shoulders rounded and his neck bent, down into a lewd and
putrescent nothingness. He breathed, but that seemed to be all he