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

by Amy Hempel

  George Singleton

  COLUMBARIUM

  (from Appalachian Heritage)

  Not until my father walked into the post office—or perhaps it was a few days earlier at the bastardized crematorium—did I understand how much he despised my mother’s constant reminders. For at least fifteen years she substituted “No,” “Okay,” or “I’ll do it if I have to,” with “I could’ve gone to the Rhode Island School of Design” or “For this I gave up the chance to attend Pratt” or “When did God decide that I would be better off stuck with a man who sold rocks for a living, than continuing my education at Cooper Union?” I figured out later that my parents weren’t married but five months when I came out all healthy and above-average in weight, length, and lung capacity. To me she said things like, “I should’ve matriculated to the Kansas City Arts Institute, graduated, and begun my life working in an art studio of my own, but here I am driving you twenty miles to the closest Little League game,” or “I had a chance to go to the Chicago Art Institute on a full scholarship, but here I am trying to figure out why the hell x and y are so important in a math class,” or “Believe you me, I wouldn’t be adding pineapple chunks, green chiles, and tuna to a box of macaroni and cheese for supper had I gotten my wish and gone to the Ringling School of Art.”

  I went through all the times my mother offered up those blanket statements about her wonderful artistic talents—usually by the fireplace while she carved fake fossils into flat rocks dug out of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River—there at the post office while my dad and I waited in line. She sold these forgeries down at the Dixie Rock and Gem Shop, or to tourist traps at the foot of Caesar’s Head, way up near Clingman’s Dome, or on the outskirts of Helen, Georgia. My mother’s life could’ve been worthwhile and meaningful had she not been burdened with motherhood; had she not been forced to work as a bookkeeper/receptionist/part-time homemade dredge operator at the family river rock business; had she not met my father when her own family got forced to move from Worcester, Massachusetts, because her daddy was in the textile business and got transferred right before my mother’s senior year in high school. There were no art classes in the schools here; she could only take advanced home ec and learn how to make fabric and dye it, just as her father knew how to do at the cotton mill, more than likely.

  “I could’ve gone to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had I not been forced to take an English class that I’d already taken up in Massachusetts, and sit next to your father who cheated off my paper every time we took a multiple choice test on The Scarlet Letter. I blame all of this on The Scarlet Letter, and how your dad had to come over on more than one occasion for tutoring,” my mother said about once a week.

  I didn’t get the chance to ever point out to her how Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Massachusetts. A year after her death I figured out the math of their wedding date and my birth, and didn’t get to offer up anything about symbolism, or life mirroring art, et cetera.

  My mother died of flat-out boredom, disdain, crankiness, ennui, tendonitis from etching fake fossil ferns and fish bones into rocks, and a giant handful of sleeping pills. Her daily allotment of hemlock leaves boiled into a tea probably led to her demise, too, if not physiologically, at least spiritually.

  According to my father, the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association didn’t require normal embalming and/or crematorial procedures should the deceased have no brothers or sisters, and should said dead person’s parents both be dead. Looking back, I understand now that my father made all this up. At the time, though, I just sat on the bench seat of his flatbed, my mother in back wrapped up in her favorite quilt inside a pine coffin. “We’re going up to Pointy Henderson’s, and he’ll perform the cremation. Then we’ll scatter your mother down by the river so she can always be with us.”

  Mr. Henderson was a potter, and president of the local Democratic Party. About once a year he came down from the mountains and enlisted young democrats—and we all joined seeing as once a year, too, he held a giant shindig that included moonshine for everyone willing to either vote right or, if under aged, at least put yard signs up.

  “Cremation takes two to three hours at 1400 to 1800 degrees,” Mr. Henderson said when we got there. “I did the research long ago.” He got his two daughters to heft my mother off of the truck and carry the box to the groundhog kiln, which appeared to be dug into the side of an embankment. “My fire reaches near two thousand degrees on a good day,” he said. “After Mrs. Looper cools, I’ll go to ashing down the hard bones, if that’s all right.”

  My father nodded. He’d done his crying the night before, as had I. “We’ll come back in a couple days,” my father said.

  “You and me’s kind of in the same business, I guess,” Henderson said. “You take rock and sell it to people who want paths to their front doors and walls to keep them out, and I take clay and sell it to people who want bowls on their tables.”

  I didn’t get the connection. I guessed that clay was kind of like ground-down rocks, to a certain extent. I looked at Mr. Henderson’s daughters, who were my age, and were so inordinately beautiful that no one spoke to them in school. If Homer came back to Earth and met the potter’s daughters, he’d’ve had to rewrite the Siren section of The Odyssey. One of them said, “Sorry.”

  I said, “I’m a democrat,” for I could think of nothing else. “I’m thinking that some laws need changing.”

  The other daughter said, “Sorry.”

  My father and I drove back home, as they say, in silence. Right before my mother slumped over in her chair dead at the age of thirty-three, she had set her last pancake-sized rock, a fake millipede etched into it, down on the stool. For her carving tool she’d been using a brand-new single-diamond necklace my father bought her. I don’t know if her engagement ring, which she normally used for such forgeries, had worn out or not. My father had bought the necklace as a way to celebrate a new account he’d won—as the sole river rock supplier for an entire housing tract deal down in Greenville that would include a hundred patios, and driveway-to-front-door paths.

  I sat at the kitchen table reading a book about three out of the four ancient elements. My mother had just gotten up to go to the bathroom, I assumed. She said, “I could’ve gone to the Maryland Institute College of Art. Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time.”

  Those were her last words, as it ended up. “Mom’s last words were ‘Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time,’” I said. My father, without offering a reason, performed a U-turn in the middle of highway 108 and drove back to Mr. Henderson’s. I said, “I guess she didn’t know those would be her last words.”

  “Maybe she was a visionary. Maybe Heaven’s just one giant toilet, Stet. I don’t mean that in a bad way.” I knew that he did mean it that way, though. My father didn’t cotton to there even being a Heaven or Hell. In the past he had said, “If there was a Hell in the middle of the planet like some idiots believe, I think I’d’ve seen a flame or two shoot out from as deep as I’ve dug for rocks over the years.”

  We drove back up Mr. Henderson’s rocky driveway not two hours since we first arrived. He had already shoved my mother into the chamber. My father told me I could sit in the truck if I wanted, which I did at first until I realized that I had something important to say to the potter’s daughters, something that might prod them into seeing me as special, something that might cause both of them to be my dates at the prom in a few years. I got out and stood there. Mr. Henderson explained something about the firing process, about the wood he used, something about how he can perform cremations cheaper than making his own pots because there’s no glaze involved. His daughters walked up and stood with us twenty feet from the kiln door. I said, “My mother was an artist.”

  They said, in unison, “Sorry.”

  Smoke blew out of the kiln’s chimney, and my father said, “Well I don’t see any smoke rings going skyward. Which means I don’t see a halo. Come on, son.”

  Not
until I had graduated from college with a few degrees—my father had told me to get my fill of education before coming back to run the family river rock business—and married my wife did I understand the backtracking to Mr. Henderson’s makeshift crematorium: My father wanted a sign from the Otherworld, just in case his final plan bordered on meanness or immorality.

  I’m not sure what we spread down by the Unknown Branch of the Middle Saluda River. It’s not like I shadowed my father for two days. I imagine he flung plain hearth ash down on the ground. At the post office, though, my father told Randy the post office guy, “They all weigh the same. You can weigh one, and the postage will be the same on all of them.”

  There were six manila envelopes. Randy said, “Don’t you want return addresses on these?”

  “I trust y’all,” my father said. “I trust the postal service.”

  To me, Randy said, “You applying to all these colleges?” He sorted through the envelopes. “I guess you are, what with all these admissions departments.”

  I said, “Sorry,” like a fool, for the words of the Henderson girls rang in my ears still. I’d learned long before not to contradict my father. A man with a river rock business doesn’t keep many belts around. I could go throughout life saying my father never spanked me, but I couldn’t say that I’d never been stoned, in a couple of ways.

  Driving back home my father said, “She got her wish. She finally got to attend all those art schools.” Then he pulled off to the side of the road, past a short bridge. Beneath it ran a nameless creek. I got out, too, and together we took drywall buckets out of the back of the truck, trampled our way down the embankment, and scooped up smooth rounded mica-specked flagstone, each one the size of an ice cube, each one different in glint.

  George Singleton has published four collections of stories, two novels, and a book of advice. His fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and literary journals. This is his tenth appearance in New Stories from the South. He was a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, and he teaches fiction writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

  In the old days, one took the SAT test once, applied to two or three colleges, chose one of them, then went there and suffered through it all for four years. I have noticed lately that high school students’ parents make their kids take the SAT and ACT tests innumerable times, starting in about the third grade. Then the students apply to, say, forty colleges. They spend most of the first semester of their senior years writing various quirky and/or awe-inspiring essays of questionable validity. Come April, they have gotten into a few prestigious colleges, plus all of their “safety” schools.

  Then their parents say, “You know, we think you should go to any of those safety schools, because they’re free. Even with scholarships and loans and FAFSA paying half the costs, we can’t afford to come up with the other $30,000 per year.”

  Maybe if the parents hadn’t spent all that money on taking standardized tests, hiring tutors, et cetera . . .

  So then the student goes to a midlevel state university, remains bored, takes a year or two off, and maybe graduates with a degree, eventually, that he or she isn’t really interested in. These perpetually depressed individuals go around for the next fifty years saying to friends, relatives, and strangers alike, “I could’ve gone to NYU! I could’ve gone to USC film school! I could’ve gone to Brown! I could’ve gone to Duke!”

  And then they die.

  I thought of this while writing the story.

  Bret Anthony Johnston

  CAIMAN

  (from AGNI Magazine)

  Your mother wouldn’t let me bring the ice chest into the house, so I left it in the garage. Earlier, I’d knifed four holes into the styrofoam lid. One of them looked like half a star, which I remember liking. This was years ago, a windswept Sunday. This was Texas.

  When I returned to the kitchen, she pointed at the sink. She said, “Wash your hands. With soap.”

  She was breading flounder. She’d been listening to radio reports about that little girl who’d been abducted. So had I. Probably I pulled over and gave that man eighty dollars because I thought it would keep you safe. He was parked under the causeway, a hand-lettered sign propped against the tire of his van, as if he were just selling pecans.

  Your mother had flour dust on her neck. She’d already fried okra, boiled potatoes. Soon we would call you to the table and you, our little man, would bolt in like you’d heard a starter pistol. You were seven, a boy who liked bedtime stories with fantastic monsters and twisty, unexpected endings. You liked sneaking up on us. You hid behind closed doors and in the laundry hamper, then jumped out screaming and laughing. You loved the word “maybe.” (Maybe I’m a kid who’s a million years old. Maybe we should be a family with a pet. Maybe someday my eyes will turn blue.) Your mother swiped her forehead with her wrist. The kitchen was gummy with the day’s heat, the windows open. Before leaving that morning, I’d mowed the yard—you helped me rake, you wore your cowboy boots—and now, with dusk coming on, the cut-grass smell was rising and trying to cool everything off.

  “She’s still missing,” your mother said. “Now they think the uncle did something.”

  I nodded. I’d heard that, too, and if it was true, I thought he’d get killed in prison. But I didn’t want to talk about such things. Instead, I asked, “How’s our little man?”

  “Worn out,” your mother said. “He’s napping in his room.”

  I’d been all day at the job site, drawing overtime. 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. I took that as a sign. And he had only one left, which also seemed lucky. I was excited to surprise you, to hear what you’d name it.

  Now I said, “I wonder what he’ll name it.”

  “He asked for a dog.”

  “A pet,” I said. “He asked for a pet.”

  “Right, a dog. A cat. A goldfish. Pets have fur and show affection. Pets aren’t deadly.”

  “Goldfish don’t have fur,” I said. I didn’t think she was angry, not really. I took three glasses from the cabinet. “And it’s not deadly.”

  She fixed me with her eyes. “It’s an alligator.”

  “It’s a caiman. There’s a difference. It’s the size of a shoe.”

  “Not for long,” she said. She turned back to the stove. She laid one piece of fish in the skillet, then another. Grease started snapping.

  “They’re smart,” I said, repeating what the man had told me. “They won’t mate until the river is high. They make sure there’s enough water for their offspring. They build nests.”

  “They’re cold-blooded. They have scales.”

  “Danny can take it for show-and-tell.”

  “They bite. They escape. They escape into sewers and terrorize neighborhoods. They eat regular pets.”

  I laughed at that, but your mother said, “They do.”

  She flipped the fish in the skillet. The sound of frying started up again like distant applause. She blew hair from her eyes, stood with her hip cocked, holding the spatula. The applause quieted. She slipped the fish onto a plate she’d covered with a paper napkin to soak up grease. She put two more pieces in the pan and watched them sizzle.

  She said, “Why would that man take that little girl?”

  “We don’t know that he did.”

  “But you think he did?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I do.” “I do, too,” your mother said.

  “You know she’s Danny’s age.”

  “They could still find her.”

  “But you don’t think they will?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” I said.

  “I don’t think they will.”

  She lowered the flame on the stove and turned to stare out the window. She was touching her fingertips to her thumb, one after the other, something she did when she was concentrating. The air in the room shifted.


  “What would we do if something—”

  “It won’t,” I said. “Not to him.”

  She nodded, pressed the heel of her palm to her eyes. She said, “We’re still getting a dog.”

  “I know.”

  “And you owe me a new ice chest,” she said.

  I poured milk for you but returned our glasses to the cabinet and opened up two bottles of beer. The meal was starting to feel like a celebration, like one of us had gotten a raise or was having a birthday. I found some cocoa mix, stirred it into your glass.

  “An alligator,” your mother said, shaking her head.

  “Caiman,” I said.

  “You know some husbands bring home candy, right? Or roses or diamonds.”

  “Their poor wives,” I said. “They probably—”

  “Tell Danny you caught it,” she said. “Tell him you were fishing and you saw it and you caught it just for him.”

  “You want me to lie to our son.”

  “I want you to make up a story for him, something with a happy outcome,” she said and turned off the stove. She went to the refrigerator and took out the tartar sauce and a salad she’d been chilling. The wind lifted the curtains over the sink and sent a few paper napkins gliding off the counter. Your mother closed the window, and the kitchen went quiet as a secret.

  And then, with the wind shut out, we could hear your boots on the floor in the hallway. You were stalking toward us, planning one of your sneak attacks. Your mother sipped her beer. The flour was on her neck—it looked like snow, like a smeared galaxy—and she was smiling a little. I understood what she didn’t: you’d been awake the whole time, listening to us. You already knew about the caiman, about the flimsy hopeful story I’d tell, about everything else. The only surprise left was that I did believe they could still find that girl. I thought her uncle might prove everyone wrong. Maybe he cooked her favorite meals, played her favorite movies, never touched her. Maybe such extravagant misguided love was still possible. As a baby, you liked putting your feet in my mouth. You’d laugh until you got the hiccups and your toes would move behind my teeth as slow as growing coral, and sometimes, I swear, I wanted to bite down, to crush your perfect bones and swallow your body whole.