Great Short Stories by American Women (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Candace Ward

  Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

  “Not — just that way,” she said.

  “Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

  “I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

  “Oh — windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

  “We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer.

  Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again — for one final moment — the two women were alone in that kitchen.

  Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching.

  Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman — that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

  For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke — she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

  There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back.

  “Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to — what is it you call it, ladies?”

  Mrs. Hale’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

  “We call it — knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

  Djuna Barnes

  (1892—1982)

  BORN IN CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, New York, Djuna Barnes was the product of what would today be called a dysfunctional family. Barnes’s father was artistic and eccentric; her paternal grandmother, Zadel, was a dominant figure in her life, and biographers have noted their close, possibly sexual, relationship. Whatever the nature of the relationship, Barnes’s writings reflect the unconventionality of her childhood.

  From 1913 to 1919, Barnes earned her living as a writer for various New York newspapers. In addition to celebrity interviews and feature articles, Barnes’s newspaper writings included drama and short fiction, often accompanied by her own illustrations. In 1920, she moved to Europe and stayed there until 1941. Leading the life of an expatriate at the height of the modernist movement, Barnes assumed a respected place in avant-garde circles. A multidimensional artist herself (journalist, playwright, novelist and short-story writer), she counted James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy and Samuel Beckett among her friends. She also frequented the bohemian and lesbian salons of Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. Barnes’s long affair with sculptor Thelma Wood was the subject of her most famous novel, Nightwood (1936), considered by many her finest work.

  “Smoke” explores the effect of traditional family structures on the individual. The Fenkens, Zelka, her father and her husband Swart, are all fine specimens of strength and vitality. But the demands of living up to such strength — injunctions to keep “a little iron in the blood” — prove too much for Zelka’s son and his daughter, Little Lief. The Fenkens, as one character notes, “live themselves thin,” and eventually go “out like a puff of smoke.” Barnes’s story is full of such striking imagery, and her experimental prose style, evident even in the early newspaper pieces, marks her as one of this century’s most innovative writers.

  Smoke

  THERE WAS SWART with his bushy head and Fenken with the half shut eyes and the grayish beard, and there also was Zelka with her big earrings and her closely bound inky hair, who had often been told that “she was very beautiful in a black way.”

  Ah, what a fine strong creature she had been and what a fine strong creature her father Fenken had been before her, and what a specimen was her husband Swart, with his gentle melancholy mouth and his strange strong eyes and his brown neck.

  Fenken in his youth had loaded the cattle boats, and in his twilight of age he would sit in the round-backed chair by the open fireplace, his two trembling hands folded, and would talk of what he had been.

  “A bony man I was, Zelka — my two knees as hard as a pavement, so that I clapped them with great discomfort to my own hands; sometimes,” he would add, with a twinkle in his old eyes, “I’d put you between them and my hand; it hurt less.”

  Zelka would turn her eyes on him slowly — they moved around into sight from under her eyebrows like the barrel of a well-kept gun; they were hard like metal and strong, and she was always conscious of them even in sleep. When she would close her eyes before saying her prayers she would remark to Swart, “I draw the hood over the artillery.” And Swart would smile, nodding his large head.

  In the town these three were called the “Bullets” — when they came down the street little children sprang aside, not because they were afraid, but because they came so fast and brought with them something so healthy, something so potent, something unconquerable. Fenken could make his fingers snap against his palm like the crack of a cabby’s whip just by shutting his hand abruptly, and he did this often, watching the gamin and smiling.

  Swart, too, had his power, but there was a hint at something softer in him, something that made the lips kind when they were sternest, something that gave him a sad expression when he was thinking — something that had drawn Zelka to him in their first days of courting. “We Fenkens,” she would say, “have iron in our veins — in yours I fear there’s a little blood.”

  Zelka was cleanly; she washed her linen clean as though she were punishing the dirt. Had the linen been less durable there would have been holes in it from her knuckles in a six months’. Everything Zelka cooked was tender — she had bruised it with her preparations.

  And then Zelka’s baby had come. A healthy, fat, little crying thing, with eyes like its father’s and with its father’s mouth. In vain did Zelka look for something about it that would give it away as one of the Fenken blood — it had a maddeningly tender way of stroking her face, its hair was finer than blown gold, and it squinted up its pale blue eyes when it fell over its nose. Sometimes Zelka would turn the baby around in bed, placing its little feet against her side waiting for it to kick. And when it finally did, it was gently and without great strength and with much good humor. “Swart,” Zelka would say, “your child is entirely human. I’m afraid all his veins run blood,” and she would add to her father, “Sonny will never load the cattle ships.”

  When it was old enough to crawl Zelka would get down on hands and knees and chase it about the little ash-littered room. The baby would crawl ahead of her, giggling and driving Zelka mad with a desire to stop and hug him; but when she roared behind him like a lion to make him hurry, the baby would roll over slowly, struggle into a sitting posture, and putting his hand up would sit staring at her as though he would like to study out something that made this difference between them.

  When it was seven it would escape from the house and wander down to the shore, and stand for hours watching the boats coming in, being loaded and unloaded. Once one of the men put the cattle belt about him and lowered him into the boat. He went down sadly, his little golden head drooping and his feet hanging down. When they brought him back on shore again and dusted him off they were puzzled at him — he had
neither cried nor laughed. They said, “Didn’t you like that?” And he had only answered by looking at them fixedly.

  And when he grew up he was very tender to his mother, who had taken to shaking her head over him. Fenken had died the Summer of his grandchild’s thirtieth year, so that after the funeral Swart had taken the round-backed chair for his own. And now he sat there with folded hands, but he never said what a strong lad he had been. Sometimes he would say, “Do you remember how Fenken used to snap his fingers together like a whip?” and Zelka would answer, “I do.”

  And finally when her son married, Zelka was seen at the feast dressed in a short blue skirt leaning upon Swart’s arm, both of them still strong and handsome and capable of lifting the buckets of cider.

  Zelka’s son had chosen a strange woman for a wife. A thin little thing, with a tiny waistline and a narrow chest and a small, very lovely throat. She was the daughter of a ship owner and had a good deal of money in her own name. When she married Zelka’s son she brought him some ten thousand a year, and so he stopped the shipping of cattle and went in for exports and imports of Oriental silks and perfumes.

  When his mother and father died he moved a little inland away from the sea and hired clerks to do his bidding. Still, he never forgot what his mother had said to him:

  “There must always be a little iron in the blood, sonny.”

  He reflected on this when he looked at Lief, his wife. He was a silent, taciturn man as he grew older, and Lief had grown afraid of him, because of his very kindness and his melancholy.

  There was only one person to whom he was a bit stern, and this was his daughter, “Little Lief.” Toward her he showed a strange hostility, a touch even of that fierceness that had been his mother’s — once she had rushed shrieking from his room because he had suddenly roared behind her as his mother had done behind him. When she was gone he sat for a long time by his table, his hands stretched out in front of him, thinking.

  He had succeeded well; he had multiplied his wife’s money now into the many thousands — they had a house in the country and servants. They were spoken of in the town as a couple who had an existence that might be termed as “pretty soft,” and when the carriage drove by of a Sunday with baby Lief up front on her mother’s lap and Lief’s husband beside her in his gray cloth coat, they stood aside not to be trampled on by the swift legged, slender ankled “pacer” that Lief had bought that day when she had visited the “old home” — the beach that had known her and her husband when they were children. This horse was the very one that she had asked for when she saw how beautiful it was as they fastened the belt to it preparatory to lowering it over the side. It was then that she remembered how when her husband had been a little boy they had lowered him over into the boat with this same belting.

  During the Winter that followed, which was a very hard one, Lief took cold and resorted to hot water bottles and thin tea. She became very fretful, and annoyed at her husband’s constant questionings as to her health; even Little Lief was a nuisance because she was so noisy. She would steal into the room, and crawling under her mother’s bed would begin to sing in a high, thin treble, pushing the ticking with her patent leather boots to see them crinkle. Then the mother would cry out, the nurse would run in and take her away and Lief would spend a half hour in tears. Finally they would not allow Little Lief in the room, so she would steal by the door many times, walking noiselessly up and down the hall; but finally, her youth overcoming her, she would stretch her legs out into a straight goose step, and for this she was whipped because on the day that she had been caught her mother had died.

  And so the time passed and the years rolled on, taking their toll. It was now many Summers since that day that Zelka had walked into town with Swart — now many years since Fenken had snapped his fingers like a cabby’s whip. Little Lief had never even heard that her grandmother had been called a “beautiful woman in a black sort of way,” and she had only vaguely heard of the nickname that had once been given the family, the “Bullets.” She came to know that great strength had once been in the family, to such an extent indeed that somehow a phrase was known to her, “Remember always to keep a little iron in the blood.” And one night she had pricked her arm to see if there were iron in it, and she had cried because it hurt, and so she knew that there was none.

  With her this phrase ended. She never repeated it because of that night when she had made that discovery.

  Her father had taken to solitude and the study of sociology. Sometimes he would turn her about by the shoulder and look at her, breathing in a thick way he had with him of late, and once he told her she was a good girl but foolish, and left her alone.

  They had begun to lose money, and some of Little Lief’s tapestries, given her by her mother, were sold. Her heart broke, but she opened the windows oftener because she needed some kind of beauty. She made the mistake of loving tapestries best and nature second best. Somehow she had gotten the two things mixed — of course it was due to her bringing up. “If you are poor you live out of doors — but if you are rich you live in a lovely house.” So to her the greatest of calamities had befallen the house; it was beginning to go away by those imperceptible means, that at first leave a house looking unfamiliar and then bare.

  Finally she could stand it no longer and she married a thin, wiry man with a long thin nose and a nasty trick of rubbing it with a finger equally long and thin — man with a fair income and very refined sisters.

  This man Misha wanted to be a lawyer. He studied half the night and never seemed happy unless his head was in his palm. His sisters were like this also, only for another reason: they enjoyed weeping. If they could find nothing to cry about they cried for the annoyance of this dearth of destitution and worry. They held daily councils for future domestic trouble — one the gesture of emotional and one of mental desire.

  Sometimes Little Lief’s father would come to the big iron gate and ask to see her. He would never come in — why? He never explained. So Little Lief and he would talk over the gate top, and sometimes he was gentle and sometimes he was not. When he was harsh to her Little Lief wept, and when she wept he would look at her steadily from under his eyebrows and say nothing. Sometimes he asked her to take a walk with him. This would set Little Lief into a terrible flutter; the corners of her mouth would twitch and her nostrils tremble, but she always went.

  Misha worried little about his wife. He was a very selfish man, with that greatest capacity of a selfish nature, the ability to labor untiringly for some one thing that he wanted and that nature had placed beyond his reach. Some people called this quality excellent, pointing out what a great scholar Misha was, holding him up as an example in their own households, looking after him when he went hurriedly down the street with that show of nervous expectancy that a man always betrays when he knows within himself that he is deficient — a sort of peering in the face of life to see if it has discovered the flaw.

  Little Lief felt that her father was trying to be something that was not natural to him. What was it? As she grew older, she tried to puzzle it out. Now it happened more often that she would catch him looking at her in a strange way, and once she asked him half playfully if he wished she had been a boy — and he had answered abruptly, “Yes, I do.”

  Little Lief would stand for hours at the casement and, leaning her head against the glass, try to solve this thing about her father — and then she discovered it when he had said, “Yes, I do.” He was trying to be strong — what was it that was in the family? — oh, yes — iron in the blood — he feared there was no longer any iron left — well, perhaps there wasn’t — was that the reason he looked at her like this? No, he was worried about himself. Why? — wasn’t he satisfied with his own strength? He had been cruel enough very often. This shouldn’t have worried him.

  She asked him, and he answered, “Yes, but cruelty isn’t strength.” That was an admission — she was less afraid of him since that day when he had made that answer, but now she kept peering into hi
s face as he had done into hers and he seemed not to notice it. Well, he was getting to be a very old man.

  Then one day her two sisters-in-law pounced upon her so that her golden head shook on its thin, delicate neck.

  “Your father has come into the garden,” cried one.

  “Yes, yes,” pursued the elder. “He’s even sat himself upon the bench.”

  She hurried out to him. “What’s the matter, father?” Her head was aching.

  “Nothing.” He did not look up.

  She sat down beside him, stroking his hand, at first timidly, then with more courage.

  “Have you looked at the garden?”

  He nodded.

  She burst into tears.

  He took his hand away from her and began to laugh.

  “What’s the matter, child? A good dose of hog-killing would do you good.”

  “You have no right to speak to me in this way — take yourself off!” she cried sharply, holding her side, and her father rocked with laughter.

  She stretched her long, thin arms out, clenching her thin fingers together. The lace on her short sleeves trembled, her knuckles grew white.

  “A good pig-killing,” he repeated, watching her, and she grew sullen.

  “Eh?” He pinched her flesh a little and dropped it. She was passive; she made no murmur. He got up, walked to the gate, opened it and went out, closing it after him. He turned back a step and waved to her. She did not answer for a moment, then she waved back slowly with one of her thin, white hands.

  She would have liked to refuse to see him again, but she lacked the courage. She would say to herself, “If I am unkind to him now, perhaps later I shall regret it.” In this way she tried to excuse herself. The very next time he had sent word that he wished speech with her she had come.