PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  “Duck,” Will said, handing the cup back to me. “That would be something. I haven’t had one in some time.” His hand wandered over Sadie’s ears.

  My job was simple then: introduce a ram, double the heartbeats every year, then reduce. That might be the story of the living. Pull a fish from the sea. Take milk from a cow. Cut peat from the ground. Shoot a duck from the sky. Take a little bit of everything from everywhere. At the end of the year I’d pray I’d added more than all we’d taken to stay alive. In the winter, if a late flock of geese landed on the pond, I shot as many as I could and kept them frozen on the laundry lines between the shed and house.

  Rivkah still hadn’t moved. I stepped between the two fresh sets of footprints, going the other way.

  Mallards slid across the black-watered marsh. An egret’s oversize wings gulped air across the grass. Laurel’s teals were rafted by the far edge, just below the small windmill of the saltworks, the drying vats of which I’d covered in the past week because of the storms. Coots, buffleheads, and redheads landed on the sandbar. More circling overhead.

  I sat in the grass, waiting for one to paddle close enough so that I wouldn’t waste a shot. Toward Wauwinet, two hay staddles stood like wardens over the marsh. Paul’s dog barked in the distance.

  Weather painted the horizon. There was the smell of rain like wet stone, and of the marsh. Bits of quahogs and seaweed spread over the sandbar, which would soon sink under the incoming tide. This could be the day that the tide didn’t stop, when it washed through the spartina, lifted and toppled the cut hay from the staddles, when it crept through the bayberry, pushed wavelets onto the dunes, touched our floor, mixed our fire’s ashes, rose through the chimney, and over our house. One hurricane, I saw an upright barn float lazily through the marsh, hay paying out from its loft.

  I put my gun under my knees and tented my body with my jacket as the rain began to fall.

  There had been unexpected arrivals in the past. After the war, packs of dogs roamed the island looking for food. That was one bounty, for dogs’ heads. Then there was the half-wit who lived in the dunes for a week, until my father walked him to town. There was Maggie’s former husband, whom I’d seen walking past our house, near running past our house, to, I found out later, try to talk her into moving back in with him. There was the shipwreck carrying horses down at Great Point. The captain, gun in hand, sat in the sand, beside two dead horses with broken legs. Paul had put a blanket over him. At least I could figure out the scene when I came upon it. The storm, the man, the gun, broken legs, the dead horses. Cause, effect, and the blanket to finish it.

  Nothing like this, though. Nobody either of us knew.

  I looked up, and there was a duck, right overhead. When I shot, it folded from the sky and slapped the water beside me. I was an animal then, I suppose, smelling the wind, logging details. The tide. The arrangement of ducks on the water. The grasses. The weather. I cut the bird’s neck and started home by way of the beach. A dead animal’s heat makes me uneasy.

  I stood in the sand to watch the wind draw a thread of shorebirds between waves. Everyone was migrating. Soon it’d be summer, and then winter. And then a year would have passed. In the pond, a swan struggled to lift into flight, leaving a long white track. I cut handfuls of rushes from the shore.

  

  The rain had passed, and the clouds over the house looked like pieces of the sun. Sparks washed out the chimney.

  When I passed through the gate, I saw Rivkah in my bedroom window, bent beside a candle on the windowsill. When she saw me, she lifted the candle from the windowsill and sank back into the room. I went around to the peat shed and tucked a few bricks under my arm.

  Laurel’s feet were in Will’s lap when I opened the door. There they were by the fire, she in her chair, he in mine, which he’d moved so it was opposite hers. A stack of driftwood was violently aflame beside them. She kicked her feet up, sat up straight, and touched her hairline.

  Dad had carved a clock into the floorboards just inside the door—an arc of numerals. During the day, the doorframe’s shadow kept time on the floor. At night, the numbers were caught useless in the wood.

  “The hunter returns!” Will said, reaching down for a bottle of cider on the floor.

  “Any luck?” Laurel said. She rose and touched the fire with a poker. Sunlight leaving the wood, my father said of fire.

  I held up the duck, shut the door, and then hung my coat on a peg beside Will’s satchel.

  The cat Will had brought was flattened by the fire, ticking its tail.

  “Why are you using the wood?” I said to Laurel, nodding at the fire. In the summer, we used only peat.

  She said, “We’re celebrating.”

  “Bit of a chill in the air tonight, isn’t there?” Will said. “You’d think the sky was wrung by now.”

  Laurel picked out a hazelnut from the basket, peeled it, and threw the husk into the fire.

  “Was that her upstairs?” I asked.

  “Rivkah?” Will said. “Yes. Tired.” He cracked a hazelnut with his teeth and spat the shell into his hand. “Bed.”

  “I thought you could sleep in my room tonight,” Laurel said quickly. “For a few nights. Will said he’d sleep in the storeroom.”

  “With a sack of flour for a pillow,” he said.

  I filled the kettle and put it to heat on the chimney crane. I put the duck in a pot, twisted its neck so the whole thing fit, and then poured in the water. It braided and parted on the duck’s feathers.

  When the duck floated, I pushed it down with a spoon.

  “If you save some of those nuts, I’ll make a cake,” I said to Laurel.

  “Oh, yes!” Will said. “I hear you’re a cook.” He reached around his seat and into his coat pocket. “I found these in town,” he said, holding out a small pile of peppercorns.

  “Thank you,” I said to him, and then put the peppercorns in my pocket.

  I hung the duck on the chimney crane and singed off the rest of the feathers. A skin of fire stretched over the body.

  “What a painting that would make,” Will said.

  “Are you planning on painting?” Laurel asked.

  “Yes. I wanted to make landscapes. I love those huge stacks of salt hay in the marshes. Maybe you can help me, Edwin.”

  I nodded. Untied the duck, and laid it on the hearthstone.

  “Is that what you’re doing here?” I said. “Painting?”

  “In a way,” he said. “And I haven’t visited Laurel, well, ever.”

  My presence had locked some silence over their conversation. Laurel produced stitching. Will went to his satchel for his sketchbook, and with a nub of charcoal from the fireplace began drawing. The only other sound was the occasional creaking of floorboards upstairs.

  Cooking is a funeral. Most of the recipes I know I learned from Laurel, before she stopped cooking. The butter and grapes I rubbed on the duck that night was its rite. I wrapped cubes of potato in bacon, stuffed cornmeal into the cavity of the duck. In the kitchen, rosemary, thyme, garlic, hyssop, yellow docks, mint, drying on the ceiling like an inverted, withered garden. On the counter, pickled vegetables, cucumber, beans, beets, and onions. I crushed one peppercorn, and sprinkled it on the duck. I piled the pot with embers, and waited. The smell of the duck filled the room.

  “Why is it that you do all the cooking here?” Will said.

  Because my father had started lining up his fingernail clippings on the mantel. Because he’d sometimes walk outside without shoes. Because he’d leave me and Laurel alone for hours while he walked. I’d followed him a few times. Mostly he’d just go until he found a spot out of the wind, sit down, and do nothing, miss dinner. She, at first, had gone looking for him. But then, one night, she said to me when I returned from the saltworks, “I don’t care what you eat, but I’m not cooking anymore.” She put her mother’s cook
book for me on the table. She might have a pickled beet for dinner. Or a boiled egg. A handful of nuts.

  So I started cooking. In Dad’s long disappearances, I improved my recipes. Under the storms battering the house, cooking was the one thing I could control. Everything changes for the better with heat and time: onions go sweet with butter; potatoes soften. Of the raking, mucking, harrowing, it was the hours inside, out of the wind, in the kitchen, where I felt the weight lift away. Under our feet, in the cellar, with blocks of ice from the pond, I kept cheese, a bushel of quinces, apples, dried cherries, pears, a side of dried venison. Turnips and potatoes. And, depending on the season, I put berries into pies: gooseberries, strawberries, meal plums, cranberries, beach plums. When Laurel retreated to the bedroom early, I improved my dessert recipes. I made custards, cranberry tarts, ginger and treacle cakes, pound cakes, bread pudding, and hazelnut cake. I’d leave Dad a plate on the table for when he returned.

  “Because I like the warm kitchen,” I said to Will then.

  “I’ve never heard of a boy your age spending so much time over the fire,” Will said. “But I won’t complain.”

  If cooking is the funeral, eating is its burial. Grace, the eulogy. I served the duck onto three plates. Laurel and I always ate in our chairs by the fire.

  “Should I tell Rivkah to come downstairs?” I asked.

  “No,” Will said. “Let her sleep.”

  “I’ll leave a plate for her,” I said.

  We sat in silence, eating slowly. Will shifted in his chair, grunted.

  “I should tell you—” he said. “I should tell you two about her.”

  “Tell us if you want,” Laurel said. “Some things are best left alone.”

  He smiled, nodded at her. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Paul’s wife, Sarah, has delivered babies,” she said. “She used to do that in town. She can help. Edwin, you can tell her?”

  “Paul?” Will said.

  “The lighthouse keeper,” Laurel said. She pointed out the window.

  Will nodded. “How do you get this thing out?” he said, holding up the bottle and flicking it. His fingernail pinged on the glass. He was referring to the pear in the bottle.

  “You have to break it,” I said. “But that cider needed another year to mature—I’d like to refill it.”

  “We’ll do everything we can to make her comfortable,” Laurel said.

  “She’ll be fine,” Will said.

  My father said that every story is a confession if you listen closely enough. Will had done nothing but confess, in some way or another, since he arrived—but somehow I still didn’t know him.

  Even without Will there, Laurel would have stayed up to watch the fire go out, until the logs broke to ash. Sometimes I found her still in her seat by the fire in the morning.

  “Good night,” I said, after dinner. I packed my pipe and walked into my parents’ room.

  How familiar, a house. I knew every mark on the floor, the color of each stone of the chimney that I’d stared at for years. But a parent’s bed is a private, unknowable thing. I took off only my shoes. I sat up in bed, smoking, watching the ceiling. I heard the poker touching the firedogs as Laurel snuffed the fire. Banking it up, covering it with its own ash to insulate a heart of embers ready to light the next morning. Closing up the night. How long had that fire been going? If we tended it correctly, weeks—the last ember of the night to light the peat of the morning’s fire. In the winter, it could be a month before we used the tinderbox. Somewhere, spread in the field, were the ashes of hundreds of fires. Maybe sucked up by a root, added to a vegetable, cooked again.

  They stood just outside the bedroom door, telling each other “Good night,” back and forth.

  “Good night, Laurel.”

  “Good night, Will.”

  “Good night, Laurel.”

  I concentrated on the bowl of my pipe. I inhaled, and held in the smoke.

  “You’re still up?” she said, closing the door behind her.

  She’d undone her braid. All these daily rituals I never saw. Her standing there, pulling her hair out of its braid, getting ready for bed. And then braiding it back up before starting the day. Her hair was longer than I expected, far past her shoulders. It made her look younger.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I did, and heard her change into her nightgown. She got under the covers, as far away from me as possible.

  “Have you always done that?” she said. “Puffing away up there?”

  “Some nights,” I said.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t suffocate yourself.”

  I closed my eyes and let the back of my head rest on the wall. The sand in my hair crunched as I turned it from side to side, massaging my scalp on the knots in the wood.

  “Who is he?” I said.

  At first, she didn’t say anything from under the covers.

  “I knew him before I knew your father,” she said.

  “In Concord?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t say any more, and I didn’t know what else to ask.

  “How long is he staying?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But some time. And I don’t know what we’re going to do about the girl.”

  I doused the tobacco with my thumb. Out the door, a still-warm fire. Around the house, sand dunes shifted one grain at a time.

  

  Rain crackling on the roof woke me. Wide awake. Pure awake. The wind punched the windows. The bed shrieked when Laurel moved. Rain gurgled through the shingles. Waterfalls pounded the ground in a constant whine. A wet wind had found our roof and was gnawing at it.

  I hadn’t been sleeping much anyway. It started the summer before, when I’d wake in the night and stay up nearly until sunrise. I might make tea and walk down the beach. In the summer I weeded the gardens. On my hands and knees under the stars, picking grasses. It made me feel good, to wake in the morning to a pile of uprooted weeds by a patch of cucumbers, for instance. It was like I had gained a short, dark day nested in the night. I sometimes fell asleep in the garden, in the barn, or against the side of the house.

  I left the bed. The fireplace still glowed from under the ash. From the cellar, cider barrels plugged with cloth bungs hissed. When winter came, I’d roll a keg outside to freeze out layers of ice, night by night, until all that was left was the alcohol that coldness couldn’t pull any ice from.

  I lit a rushlight and took Will’s satchel from the peg by the door to my chair by the fire. The bottle with its trapped pear was still at the foot of Will’s chair.

  I laid out the contents: a shirt, string, a razor blade, paintbrushes. I piled them on the floor. Under that, small glass jars. One was a jar of sticky brown substance, almost like beeswax. Under the bottles was a notebook. Not the one he’d been using earlier that night. It had a soft leather cover with a worn, peeling spine. Overstuffed with papers. I lit another rushlight and opened it on my lap.

  Stretching across two pages was a drawing of a breaking wave. Then, a juniper branch full of berries. A cloud passing over the landscape. A shadowy copse of trees. A woman floating in the water, her hair fanning from her head. And scattered throughout, pages of the same woman. Then one of a man hanging from the gallows. And finally, near the end, before the book’s gasp of blank pages continuing to the back cover, a stack of loose papers. Letters.

  They were in Laurel’s handwriting. The first one I read was about wanting to see him again, that she missed him. The next one was blunter. The final letter confirmed what I knew in her sweat and her eyes. “I am unwell,” she wrote. “Edwin is fine—so it’s deep in me somewhere. You will not be sick if you come. When you come.”

  I held those two letters side by side. One dated a few weeks after the other. Like two sides of a scale. I am unwell. Come. Please, she’
d ended one letter. Please. Comma. Laurel. As if she were pleading with herself. The date, on the upper corner, two months after Dad drowned.

  We rarely sent out the post—mostly to my grandparents in Concord who came twice a year. When we did, we gave the letters to Paul, who would row his and our parcels to town. I wondered when she’d given the letters to him. Or if Paul had kept the responses hidden from me. She might have walked down Coatue, hailed a boat, and handed them off herself.

  I stacked the letters neatly in the back of the notebook and retied the twine. I waited for the flame to finish its path down the rush while I listened to the rain. Our roof was a drumhead.

  I replaced the notebook in the satchel. Footsteps scraped sand on the floorboards upstairs.

  ______________

  Ben Shattuck is a writer and painter from coastal Massachusetts. A graduate and former Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is now the director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency and the curator of the Dedee Shattuck Gallery. His writ-

  ing has appeared in the Harvard Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, Salon.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Lit Hub. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries, including the Steven Amedee Gallery in New York, the New Bedford Art Museum and Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston, and the Greylock Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” is part of a novel he is currently writing.

  Editor’s Note

  Truths and fictions, the lies we spin and make ourselves believe, the unrest and confusion of a warring world in all its chaos: Ruth Serven ties all this together with an infectious energy in her story “A Message,” published in our Fall 2016 issue. Serven has created a narrator who is at once agile, playful, conversational, and completely engaging. It’s a story that manages—impressively, in fewer than 1,400 words—to involve us on a personal, political, and universal level.

  This is a short and slippery story, and that is what we loved about it: the narrative voice, to say the least, is unexpected. It circles around the ongoing pursuit of an unknown and enigmatic father, whose identity and lack of contact are a mystery. The narrator’s approach is the equivalent of drawing a piece of puzzle and seeing if it might fit.