The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  We can brush away the past, as we like to do and feel superior in doing, but the nightmare of Andy’s old age is to know, wide awake, the destruction of many and of much not only pleasing and desirable, but of lasting value if they had lasted, and, for all we can yet know, necessary.

  And suppose, to elaborate the nightmare, that we had decided even as late as 1950 to grant a proper stewardship and husbandry to the natural world. Suppose we had refused to countenance the industrialization of everything from agriculture to medicine to education to religion. Suppose we had not tolerated the transformation, in the official and then the public mind, of vocation to “a job,” which is to say the transformation of the farmer, the tradesman, even the sharecropper (all subsistence-based) to an “employee” helplessly dependent on an employer and “the economy” and interchangeable with any other employee. Suppose we had not stood for the displacement of people who once functioned as parts of the creaturely world, working members of their places—the quality of their work always, of course, in question—to the “labor pool” and the placelessness of modern life.

  Andy by now has lived and watched long enough to know the reality of the ongoing human destruction of the world. He knows that he himself is involved inescapably in its destruction. But he can remember, to further elaborate his nightmare, wandering in the woods or working in the fields early in the year, when he drank from wet-weather springs, the water cool and tasting of the ground, with no thought of chemical contamination. His experience of that time was decisive for him. It was luck, perhaps a blessing. It was an unaccountable gift, for the place and the way of life he learned then was in fact a sort of island: a small, fragile, threatened order in the midst of a world war and all its dire portent.

  Freedom, then, existed. Andy knew so from his early travels and his early work in his home country. Along the way he learned too that freedom, when it happened, was an interval with responsibilities at either end. He knew long before he understood, or could choose to act on the knowledge, that neither freedom nor responsibility existed alone, or could exist alone very long, but that each depended on the other.

  He was late in acting on that interdependability, partly maybe because of school, but certainly because he would remain a boy for a long time, a boy either in deference to the authority of grownups or in rebellion against it. His early experience of freedom, anyhow, prepared him poorly for school, and for prolonged enclosure of any kind. School, before it had taught him much else, taught him to be a critic, though it did not intend to do so, and though “critic” was not even a word he knew. He was in school when he made his first conscious objection to something he read in a book.

  He read in a book (maybe it was a reader; maybe it was from the small library the teacher kept in her classroom) a story of two children, brother and sister, who visited their grandparents’ farm where there was a wonderful woodland. The children played happily among the trees. They had a pet crow and a pet squirrel that accompanied them on their visits to the woods—and this, to Andy, was a charming thought, as was the thought of the beautiful woodland itself, as was the thought of the woodlands around Port William.

  And then, without explaining why, the story told how the grandparents sold the trees to a logger, who cut them down. The logger cut them all down, every one of them. In proof there was a picture of the boy and girl standing in a field of stumps, and the crow and the squirrel perched on a stump apiece. The story then explained that, though the children and the crow and the squirrel would miss the woods, this was really not too sad because the woods would grow back again.

  Until then, Andy had thought that anything printed in a book was true. And so it was a considerable shock to him when he realized that he knew—though he could not then have said how he knew: he knew from intuition and experience; maybe he knew, Heaven help us, by premonition—that the story had told a lie. The story was in fact too sad, it was a story of great loss and sorrow, and it could say nothing to make itself happy. To know that grownups, even writers and teachers, were questionable did not smooth Andy’s way through his formal education.

  III. A TIME OUT OF TIME

  The old man, Andy Catlett, does not believe that the mind of any young creature is a blank slate. But he knows without doubt that young Andy Catlett, in the years of his boyhood, was being formed. He was being in-formed. He was being shaped, and this was his dearest education, as a creature of his home place, his home country, by his growing knowledge of it. He was sometimes deliberately taught by his grandparents, his father, and the other elders who in one way or another were gathered around him. He was learning by their example, instruction, and insistence the ways of livestock, of handwork, of all in the life of farming that would make him, beyond anything else he might become, a countryman. But he was also shaping himself, in-forming himself, by knowledge of the country that he got for himself or that the country itself impressed upon him.

  In the winter of 1947, after Grandpa Catlett died, Grandma Catlett wintered in a room in the Broadfield Hotel down in Hargrave. And then, early in April, when Elton Penn came in his truck to load her and her spool bed and her bureau and her rocking chair to take her home, Andy loaded himself and his bundle of clothes and books and went home with her. Now, as Andy thought, as she allowed and maybe encouraged him to think, her ability to live at home depended on him. He took a deep pleasure in the sense of responsibility that filled him then, and he was steadily dutiful and industrious. Grandma was cooking as always on the woodstove, and in the mornings, sometimes all day, they still needed fires for warmth. Andy kept the kitchen supplied with firewood, and carried in coal for the stove in the living room. When the cow freshened, Andy did the milking, night and morning. Later, Grandma said, they would need a garden, of course, and Andy would need to help with that.

  On school day mornings, after he had done his chores and eaten breakfast, he got himself out to the road in time to catch the school bus. But he had a little initiative in this. Because he was considered an occasional or temporary rider of the bus, he apparently was not officially expected by the driver. And so if he got to the road ahead of the bus, he would put up his thumb. If he failed to catch a ride for himself, then he rode to school on the bus. This was a freedom he cherished, and he told nobody about it. The people who gave him rides also apparently kept his secret. He shirked his lessons, antagonized his teachers, stored up trouble for himself. On days of no school, as long as he showed up for meals and did his chores, and as soon as he was out of sight of the house, he was free.

  One warm spring Saturday afternoon, when he had fished his way from pool to pool down Bird’s Branch and had caught nothing, he came to a large, dry, flat rock. He propped his fishing pole against a tree and lay down on the rock. The rock was unusually large and flat and smooth, and he felt that something should be done about it. And so he stretched out on it for some time, looking up into the treetops of the woods. He was no longer on the home place then, but had crossed onto the more or less abandoned back end of a farm that fronted in the river valley. He was at the mouth of a tributary dell known as Steep Hollow, whose slopes you could not climb standing up. The woods there was an old stand of big trees. Whether because of the steepness of the ground or the dubious benevolence of neglect, the stand had never been cut. But now, remembering it, he is obliged to remember also that a few years later it was cut, and is forever gone.

  The woods floor was covered with flowers, and the tree leaves were just coming out. Andy’s eyes were quick in those days, and he could see everything that was happening among the little branches at the top of the woods. He saw after a while, by some motion it made way up in a white oak and not far from the leafy globe of its nest, a young gray squirrel that, except for its tail, appeared to be no bigger than a chipmunk.

  The squirrel was just loitering about, in no hurry, and Andy studied it carefully. The thought of catching and having something so beautiful, so small, so cunningly made, possessed him entirely. He wanted it as much as he had
ever wanted anything in his life. He knew perfectly that he could not catch a mature squirrel. But this one being so young and inexperienced, he thought he had half a chance.

  The tree was one of the original inhabitants of the place. It had contained a fair sawlog in the time of Boone and the Long Hunters. By now it was far too big to be embraced and shinned up by a boy, or a man either, and its first limb was unthinkably high. But well up the slope from the old tree was a young hickory whose first branch Andy could shinny up to, and whose top reached well into the lower branches of the oak. Andy was maybe a better than average climber, and he had spent a fair portion of his life in trees. He was small for his age, and was secure on branches too flimsy for a bigger boy.

  He went up the hickory and then into the heavy lower limbs of the oak. The climbing was harder after that. Sometimes he could step from one thick limb to another up the trunk. Sometimes he had to make his way out to the smaller branches of one limb, from there into the smaller branches of the one above, and from there back to the trunk again. Finally he was in the top of the tree, a hundred or so feet from the ground. Just above him was the little squirrel, more beautiful, more perfect, up close than it had looked from the ground. The fur of its back and sides was gray but touched, brushed over, with tones of yellowish red and reddish yellow, so that against the light it seemed surrounded with a small glow, and the fur of its underside was immaculately white. Its finest features were its large, dark eyes alight with intelligence and the graceful plume of its tail as long as its body.

  Andy knew with a sort of anticipatory ache in the inward skin of his hands and fingers what it would feel like to catch and hold this lovely creature and look as closely at it as he wished. He climbed silently, and slowly from one handhold and foothold to another, up and out the little branches that held him springily and strongly until he was within an easy arm’s reach of the squirrel. He reached almost unmovingly out, and at the approach of his hand, the squirrel leapt suddenly and easily to another branch. It did not go far, but the small branch it was now on belonged to a different limb from the one Andy was on. And so he had to go back to the trunk and start again.

  About the same thing happened for a second time. The almost-catchable little squirrel waited, watching Andy with a curiosity of its own, until it was almost caught. This time it ran a little farther out on its limb and leapt onto a branch of another tree, another oak. Now Andy had to climb a long way down to find a limb that crossed to the second tree, make his way out to limbs still affording handholds and footholds, limber enough to lean under his weight until he could catch a limb as strong in the other tree, swing over, go to the trunk of that tree and up and out to the highest branches, where again he almost caught the squirrel.

  That was the way it happened so many times he lost count. The squirrel seemed to wait for him, watching him with interest, imaginably even with amusement, taking its rest while Andy laboriously made his approach, and then at the last second, without apparent fear, seemingly at its leisure, leaping beyond reach, never far, but always too far to be easily approached again. In fact, Andy and the squirrel must have been at about the same stage of their respective lives: undoubting, ignorant, fearless, curious, happy in the secret altitudes of the treetops and the little branches, neither of them at all intimidated by the blank blue sky above the highest branches, the outer boundary of both their lives.

  It was a time out of time, when time was suspended in constant presence, without past or future. It began to move again only when the squirrel finally leapt onto the snag of a dead tree and disappeared into an old woodpecker hole.

  And then it was late in the day, past sundown, and Andy was still high up among the tall trees. He had not thought of getting back to the ground for a long time, and from where he had got to he was a long time finding a way. The trunks were too large to grip securely and were limbless from too high up. He finally made his way to a grapevine, and slid down it slowly to ease the friction on his hands and legs. When he stood finally on the ground again, it seemed at first to rock a little as if he had stepped down into a boat. He was sweating, his hands and arms and legs bark-burnt and stinging, and he was a long way from home. He recovered his fishing pole, now deprived of its charm and the sense of adventure he usually invested in it, and started back.

  When the screen door slammed behind him and he stepped into the back porch, his grandma opened the kitchen door.

  “Where,” she said, drawing the word out, “on God’s green earth have you been?”

  “Fishing,” he said, which was true as far as it went.

  But he was late. He was too late. It was getting dark. In coming back so late he had betrayed not only her trust but his own best justification for staying out there in the free country with her and not in town.

  “Oh,” he said, “I’ll go milk right now. I’ll hurry. I won’t be long.”

  She said, “I did it.”

  So while he had been up in the treetops with the squirrel, forgetful of the time of day and where he was, she alone had done the evening chores and milked the cow. She said no more. She left him, as she would have put it, to stew in his own juice, which he did. He would not forget again, and he would not forget the lesson either.

  Nor would he forget for the rest of his life his happiness of that afternoon. What would stay with him would not be his frustration, his failure to catch the squirrel, but the beauty of it and its aerial life, and of his aerial life while he tried to catch it among the small, supple branches that sprang with his weight as if almost but not quite he might have leapt from one to another like the squirrel, almost but not quite flying.

  He had not wondered how, if he had caught the squirrel, he would have made his way back to the ground. It would take him several days to get around to thinking of that. The heights of that afternoon he had achieved as a quadruped. From where he had got to he could not have climbed down with his two feet and only one hand. If he had caught the squirrel, he would have had to turn it loose.

  Christine Sneed

  The First Wife

  1.

  The famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics—refinements or corporeal variations—that allow their projected images, if not their bodies themselves, to dominate the rest of us.

  If you are married to a man whom thousands, possibly millions of women believe themselves to be in love with, some of them, inevitably, more beautiful and charming than you are, it is not a question of if but of when. When will he be unfaithful, if he hasn’t been already? It isn’t easy, nor is it as romantic as the magazine photographers make it look, to be the wife of a very famous, memorably handsome man. There are very few nights, even when you are together, when you don’t wonder what secrets he is keeping from you, or how long he will be at home before he leaves for another shoot or another meeting in a glamorous city across one ocean or the other, with some director or producer who rarely remembers your name. Marriage is a liability in the movie business, despite the public’s stubborn, contradictory desire to believe that this particular marriage is different, in that it will endure, even prosper, with children and house-beautiful photo essays in Vogue.

  There were always so many others lurking about, hoping to take my place, if only for a few days or hours. It was like being married to the president of an enormous country where nearly everyone was offering him sexual favors, ones he really wasn’t scorned by anyone but me for accepting.

  2.

  He married me in part because I wasn’t famous, not as famous as he was, in any case. He was the beauty in our household, and I was not the beast but the brains. I wasn’t ugly or plain, and I remain neither ugly nor plain, but in college, when for a while I fantasized strenuously about becoming an actress, it soon became clear to me that I liked making up the characters more than playing them. I also realized early on that men age much better in Hollywood than women do. My husband will never be old in the same way th
at I will be. Even if my fame were as great as his, I would be called an old woman much sooner than he an old man. But I will never be as famous as he is, and although he can be blamed for many things, this isn’t one of them.

  How did it end? Before I say what it was like to be courted by him, to fall in love, however briefly or genuinely, I prefer to talk about the end because it is rarely ever given its due. It is the filmmaker’s and the writer’s most reliable trick to seduce us with the details of a marvelous and improbable coupling while hinting darkly that things did not end well, that some tragedy or tragic character flaw in one or both of the principals brought on a heartbreaking collapse. And when the collapse comes, it is rarely given more than a few pages, a few sodden minutes at the end of the film.

  My husband was Anders Gregory, and this is and has always been his real name. It is regal-sounding, I suppose, a name that demands our attention or at least a moment’s pause. His father was French, his mother Swedish, he their only son, the one masculine bloom raised in a garden of sisters. He and his sisters got along well enough most of the time, but he was the favorite—a fact their parents did little to disguise, despite the three daughters’ spectacular scholastic and athletic achievements. Anders was bookish, quiet and sheltered during early adolescence, but then he became handsome and, in time, the best-looking man in the room. He attracted the heated attention of his sisters’ friends and, in time, the attention of one of their fathers who was a film producer.

  “If I’d met Anna’s father even a couple of years earlier than I did, I bet I wouldn’t have become an actor,” Anders told me not long after we met. “If I’d been seventeen instead of nineteen, I probably would have rolled my eyes and been a sarcastic jerk to him. I was the kind of dork who smoked alone in his room with his Doors albums and Kerouac novels. I used to spend a lot of time wondering if Jim Morrison and I would have been friends.”