New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH

  The Year’s Best, 2010

  Selected from U.S. magazines

  by AMY HEMPEL with

  KATHY PORIES

  with an introduction by Amy Hempel

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  In memory of Barry Hannah

  The Series Editor would like to thank Ana Alvarez, for her incredible devotion and long hours and eagle eyes, and Brunson Hoole, for his continued careful and precise shepherding of this series over the years.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Amy Hempel

  Adam Atlas, NEW YEAR’S WEEKEND ON THE HAND SURGERY WARD, OLD PILGRIMS’ HOSPITAL, NAPLES, ITALY

  From Narrative Magazine

  Rick Bass, FISH STORY

  From The Atlantic

  Brad Watson, NOON

  From The Idaho Review

  Danielle Evans, SOMEONE OUGHT TO TELL HER THERE’S NOWHERE TO GO

  From A Public Space

  Ron Rash, THE ASCENT

  From Tin House

  Ashleigh Pedersen, SMALL AND HEAVY WORLD

  From The Iowa Review

  Wendell Berry, A BURDEN

  From The Oxford American

  Megan Mayhew Bergman, THE COW THAT MILKED HERSELF

  From New South

  George Singleton, COLUMBARIUM

  From Appalachian Heritage

  Bret Anthony Johnston, CAIMAN

  From AGNI Magazine

  Ben Stroud, ERASER

  From One Story

  Kevin Wilson, HOUSEWARMING

  From The South Carolina Review

  Dorothy Allison, JASON WHO WILL BE FAMOUS

  From Tin House

  Ann Pancake, ARSONISTS

  From The Georgia Review

  Aaron Gwyn, DRIVE

  From The Gettysburg Review

  Emily Quinlan, THE GREEN BELT

  From Santa Monica Review

  Stephen Marion, THE COLDEST NIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  From Tin House

  Padgett Powell, CRY FOR HELP FROM FRANCE

  From Subtropics

  Kenneth Calhoun, NIGHT BLOOMING

  From The Paris Review

  Marjorie Kemper, DISCOVERED AMERICA

  From Southwest Review

  Elizabeth Spencer, RETURN TRIP

  From Five Points

  Tim Gautreaux, IDOLS

  From The New Yorker

  Laura Lee Smith, THIS TREMBLING EARTH

  From Natural Bridge

  Brad Watson, VISITATION

  From The New Yorker

  Wells Tower, RETREAT

  From McSweeney’s

  APPENDIX

  PREVIOUS VOLUMES

  Amy Hempel

  INTRODUCTION

  Today the Saints won the Super Bowl. So I was thinking of what New Orleans novelist Nancy Lemann once said about the South: “There’s a lot of human condition going around.” There is a lot of human condition in the twenty-five stories that make up this anthology, and the authors go at it in immensely powerful ways. The power of humor, power of horror.

  As series editor Kathy Pories and I read the stories that were up for consideration, I felt we were aligned in what we were looking for. What I wanted was, as Gary Lutz put it, “whatever I could never expect to get from anybody else.” After making my selections, I looked up past years’ contributors and found that thirteen of the writers here have been featured in the series before, and eleven of the writers are in New Stories from the South for the first time.

  In 1996, the Algonquin staff, in conjunction with McIntyre’s bookshop, threw a two-day party in Pittsboro, North Carolina, outside Chapel Hill, to celebrate Best of the South, a tenth-anniversary collection. I was the Yankee tagalong who took a train from New York City and justified her presence as a pal and fan of some of those being honored. The reading lists I have put together in nearly thirty years of teaching are top-heavy with writers from the South. Many of them were in Pittsboro that weekend. I remember asking Mary Hood what she was doing in the class she was teaching that year as writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. “Life lies,” she said. “What’s that?” I asked. “You know,” she said, “like, ‘I thought my prime would last.’” Rick Bass was there, and Mark Richard. Bob Shacochis and Patricia Lear.

  Rick Bass is back this year, his seventh appearance in the series, although other members of my personal pantheon, including Rick Barthelme, Allan Gurganus, and the late Barry Hannah, are not here, because they did not publish stories in 2009.

  There were stories I adored but could not include, because those stories had already appeared in books published last year. Yet I chose to include “Retreat” by Wells Tower, a story that had already come out in his widely praised debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. “Retreat” was first published in McSweeney’s in 2007; two years later it was published in McSweeney’s again; the magazine ran a small-print apologia by the author on the copyright page, and it is worth looking up for its honest account of what it is to be a writer who doesn’t feel a story is finished just because it has been published. I admire his attitude and what it says about revision. I have now read three different published versions of this story, and I felt the alterations from McSweeney’s to book to the second McSweeney’s incarnation were such that I could include it here. This anthology ends with “Retreat,” and it is a comic dazzler.

  Much of what I read from the contemporary South has a soundtrack. I hear Little Walter and Jimmy Reed and Carla Thomas, Ruby Johnson and Son Thomas. The blues legend I heard perform at the Hoka, in Oxford, Mississippi, when I was taken there by the late Barry Hannah and Willie Morris and Larry Brown. This was in another century (!), and in case I got too swoony over the scene, one of our party pointed out that he was “playing for his electric bill,” said, “His wife shot him in the stomach last year.”

  I hear recordings made in the field in Yazoo City by Bill Ferris, then director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. The album of these old bluesmen is titled Bothered All the Time. There are visuals that sometimes go with these stories: photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay in Mississippi, and her cousin William Eggleston up in Memphis, the photographs of sacred landscapes—churches and cemeteries in the Delta—by Tom Rankin.

  Then why is a story set in Italy the first in this year’s Table of Contents? The author, Adam Atlas, was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky; in “New Year’s Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims’ Hospital, Naples, Italy,” we learn that events in Kentucky propelled the narrator to flee not only his home but his homeland, and fetch up in Naples, teaching English. This is only the second story Adam Atlas has published, and it is a pleasure to get to spotlight such a strong new voice. There are other stories here that struck me as distinctly Southern in character, stance, or voice, though they take place somewhere else: Padgett Powell’s “Cry for Help from France,” Brad Watson’s “Visitation,” and Megan Mayhew-Bergman’s “The Cow that Milked Herself.”

  In addition to the human condition on display here, these stories have singular voices and striking language, the two things sure to win me over. The choices I made can be further understood this way: I don’t have much interest in causality in fiction, but I do want to see accountability. Cleverness doesn’t interest me, but humor—the darker the better—does. Menace is more interesting to me than violence. Blame doesn’t persuade me, but a deep sense of “Life’s like that” feels true. I prefer the natural world to the supernatural. I want effects, not just events. I look for stories that do not hide from real feeling behind irony, that are both of-the-moment and t
imeless, and that look at questions of loyalty, of what we owe one another. I want to see hard-barked people in retreat from the sweetness of their souls, and the collision of illusion and reality. I want yearning, not nostalgia. I want my breath to catch at a last line. I want “Not the surprise. The amazed understanding,” as the poet Jack Gilbert put it. I want something that I didn’t know I wanted.

  The people who are present in these stories include a child who robs the dead to help his parents (“The Ascent,” by Ron Rash); a true coward’s reaction to the phrase, “Go for it,” in Padgett Powell’s story; a kid who can’t wait to get where he’s going even if it’s not really any place he wants to go (Ben Stroud, “Eraser”); an Iraq War veteran whose good intentions back home backfire publicly (“Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go,” by Danielle Evans). There are men attracted to evil, and women repelled by goodness. There is a giant catfish that refuses to die even after being skinned for a feast; we hear of it from the boy entrusted to keep the fish “hosed down with a trickle of cool water, giving the fish life one silver gasp at a time” (Rick Bass, “Fish Story”). “The facts kept dodging us,” explains a woman in Elizabeth Spencer’s “Return Trip.”

  Marjorie Kemper died last year before “Discovered America” was published in Southwest Review. I’m glad to have her story here for the voice that tells you in the first paragraph that while “People warned us we might hit bad weather” on a road trip across the country, “most of the heavy weather turned out to be inside the car . . .” In Kenneth Calhoun’s “Nightblooming,” a “shady neighborhood” means “it’s leafy, not ghetto,” and a young man hears the words of an old musician “driving into my head like pennies dropped from eight miles up.” It’s prisoners we hear from in Stephen Marion’s ribald story, “The Coldest Night of the Twentieth Century,” as they break into the women’s cell block; later they will be “running from everything that could be run from.” Flirtations with death revive a couple’s erotic life in Aaron Gwyn’s “Drive”: “. . . and right before the truck coming toward them began flashing its lights, she glanced up, and then over.” In Emily Quinlan’s “The Green Belt,” “It was hard to be a triplet,” observes the father of a set; always there were “two copies of yourself who were doing correctly what you had just done wrong.” In Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Caiman,” a father wanting to provide his son with a pet says, “On the drive home, I’d seen the man under the causeway and pulled over for a look. Our ice chest was still in the bed of the truck from when we’d gone floundering . . . And he had only one left . . .” A boy yearns for victimization as the surest route to celebrity (and uses “Tarantino” as a verb) in “Jason Who Will Be Famous,” by Dorothy Allison. A man calls his father for help removing a dead deer from the pond in his yard (“House-warming,” by Kevin Wilson), though this is not the most pressing problem the son’s family faces. “Somebody started burning houses within a year after they blew up the first mountain,” writes Ann Pancake in “Arsonists,” set in West Virginia coal country. A sixty-three-year-old man inherits a grand but dilapidated mansion on his great-grandfather’s property, and sets out to bring it back to its glory—“It had shamed him to long for the house, and now he owned it” (“Idols,” by Tim Gautreaux). Laura Lee Smith gives us the Okefenokee Swamp as safe haven for a young man who “knows its secrets” (“This Trembling Earth”). “The swamp is a national preserve, but that doesn’t mean much to those of us who have always lived here.” In Ashleigh Pedersen’s “Small and Heavy World,” a community “moved up into the trees when the neighborhood flooded that April,” the folks looking down at water “the color of peanut butter.” The last two lines of Brad Watson’s “Noon.”

  There’s more. George Singleton’s “Columbarium” features a woman’s refrain, as recalled by her son: “For at least fifteen years she substituted ‘No,’ ‘Okay’ or ‘I’ll do it if I have to,’ with ‘I could have gone to the Rhode Island School of Design . . .” A veterinarian examines his pregnant wife with an ultrasound probe in his clinic, says, “I think we cleaned this after the Rottweiler” (“The Cow That Milked Herself”). In Wendell Berry’s “A Burden,” a friend of the elderly, drunken Uncle Peach recalls having seen him “drink all he could hold and then fill his mouth for later.”

  So. Why was a Chicago-born writer who grew up in Colorado and California and has lived in New York City for the past many years asked to select the stories for this important anthology of short fiction from the South? I was too thrilled at the invitation to ask!

  Though one’s sense of geography is keen, it’s hard to feel there is much that separates us after reading the stories collected here. And I don’t get tired of hearing one of the truest things I’ve ever heard about writing, about life—William Faulkner’s famous observation that “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” My sense of connection to the South has something to do with—not just being haunted, but as Jack Gilbert wrote, being “haunted importantly.”

  Nancy Lemann wrote that “a place is different when you love someone in it.”

  And when you read someone from it.

  Adam Atlas

  NEW YEAR’S WEEKEND ON THE HAND SURGERY WARD, OLD PILGRIMS’ HOSPITAL, NAPLES, ITALY

  (from Narrative Magazine)

  Outside, the neighbors were firing a pistol and setting off firecrackers in honor of the coming New Year. I decided to make a lasagna so I began chopping onions and I cut off the end of my thumb.

  In Italy the emergency number is different for police and ambulances. I couldn’t remember which emergency number was which so I called a pediatrician to whom I had been giving English lessons and she called the ambulance.

  The dispatcher started calling me, she kept asking me which building was mine and I kept telling her which one it was. I eventually realized the ambulance guys didn’t want to walk up all the stairs to my apartment, so I called my neighbor, Norma, to ask her to go down and meet them, but I accidentally called my ex-girlfriend on the speed dial. I don’t know if I hung up before it started to ring. The fourth time the dispatcher called, she said the ambulance guys were waiting at the bottom of the stairs. We began to argue. I told her I understood that they wanted me to go down but I was in one room and my thumb was in the kitchen. I kept saying, my thumb is on the cutting board! My thumb is on the cutting board with the onions in the kitchen!

  Shut up, the dispatcher told me, just shut up.

  When the ambulance guys finally came, they were put out and winded. They asked me if I had a plastic bag for the piece of thumb and they watched with their arms folded while I stumbled around and found them a plastic bag.

  In the emergency room, a doctor began cleaning the wound using a silver cauterizing pen to stop the bleeding. Two delinquents with tanning-salon tans and blood on their shirts wandered in and started to watch. Their skin around their eyes was white from the goggles they use in the tanning booths and they kept staring at me and the place where the end of my thumb used to be.

  While she was talking to a colleague about changing her clothes, the doctor pressed down into the wound with the pen. It felt like lightning going into my hand. Another doctor from the university where I teach English arrived, a pediatric allergist. He came in and put his hands behind his back and watched silently. The doctor cleaning the wound suddenly got serious and told the delinquents to go away. After she finished, the doctor said to come back the next day when there would be a hand surgeon on duty who could examine me. Then she said that the piece of thumb was useless. She pointed to a yellow trash can and told me to throw it away so I went over and threw it away.

  The hand surgeon on duty said they would need to operate, and that even though my surgery couldn’t be scheduled until New Year’s Eve, three days off, I should admit myself the following morning, since there would be an open bed: “A bed opens up and you stay in it until it’s your turn to be operated on, that’s the way it works around here.” On New Year’s Eve, he told me, the Hand Surgery Ward would fill u
p with the Neapolitan delinquents who buy boxes of contraband fireworks to celebrate.

  “Dozens of them will blow off their hands at midnight,” he said.

  When I checked into the hospital, there was a family in the room. Their boy, Giovanni, was there because of a large firecracker he’d found on the ground. He just picked it up and it exploded in his hand. His father was a little shorter than me, barrel-chested with thick hands, a strong, straight nose, balding with straight hair on the sides of his head. He was wearing a green plaid shirt and jeans, very neat and clean. Giovanni’s hand was wrapped in a gigantic bandage and there were no fingers poking out of it. He said his fore- and middle fingers were just bones underneath the bandages, they didn’t have any skin on them anymore. His thumb had been blown out of its socket, all the muscles shredded. His pinky and ring fingers were okay though. On Saturday, just me and Giovanni and his father were in the room (there were four blue linoleum beds in that room, and four blue linoleum chairs, and there was a blue linoleum table). Giovanni and I had to have the same pre-op exams, the blood work, EKG, anesthesiology exams, and so on, so we went to those together. When we saw the anesthesiologist, Giovanni went in first. I waited outside while the orderlies looked at his X-rays and shook their heads and said, “Mamma mia” and, “What a shame.”