by Laura Furman
“Quit your wailing,” the boy said, holding out his hand to the mud-smeared man who still wore a necktie. “Breathe deep. Scoot sideways.”
Cartwright popped free into a chapel of stone. The boy pulled a fresh pine knot from his bag, touched it off, and handed the hissing lantern to the drummer. The room soared overhead, massive wet ribbons of rock dripping in folds from the ceiling. The chemical burn of waste in his nostrils, a roof of rodents screeching above. In the old days the men said, The bats sow shit and we reap gunpowder.
They came to an opening, a single slur of light on the floor. Cartwright stuck his head inside and drank the sweet air. Covered crown to boot in coffee-colored mud, he asked, “Won’t that fire choke us in here?”
The boy ran his four fingers over the remains of abandoned saltpeter hoppers pegged to the wall, troughs of cucumber wood and oak. “Big window up top lets the fire out. Indian smoke-house. Funny thing, you walk through the field and a flock of bats just pop out the ground beneath you. You near piss yourself.”
They felt the earth settle and creak, the animals shuddering in waves overhead. A few squeaking kits fell from the ceiling, and they couldn’t help but tromp them under boot.
“What if the whole mountain falls down?”
“Been standing since Genesis,” the boy said. “Look, here we are.”
The ground was a carpet of fossilized dung. With their torches, they studied the wall scratchings of a lost people, charcoal men in positions of coupling and war. That’s when Cartwright saw the face glaring back at him. The maw of a cave bear jutted from the rock, trapped by flood long ago. The greasy pine fire burned against it with a contained fury, illuminating the hollows of its face. It was clearly no mean bruin, its skull gargantuan, with black canines dripping down the jaw. Cartwright put his hand to the wall and soft shale flaked and fell away. He took the clipping from his shirt pocket and read it aloud, taking a second go at the longer words.
REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE TO APPEAR AT ANTHEM CHAMBER OF COMMERCE—COMPENSATION FOR FOSSILS OF PREHISTORIC MEGAFAUNA. One of the state’s most famous visitors, Thomas Jefferson, found rare claw bones of a giant three-toed sloth in the Organ Cave, on the old Nat Hinkle farm in Greenbrier County in 1792. Dr. Charles Lands Burke, a young scholar from Washington, D.C., seeks to follow in his footsteps and is looking to local landowners for aid with this government initiative—with generous compensation.
“Sounds right to me,” the boy said. Could the boy have even read it? Did someone explain it to them? He took a hammer and a chisel from his bag and handed them to Cartwright. Turning his shoulder so the boy couldn’t see, Cartwright folded the newspaper clipping back into the sucker list, marrying the two documents together, and tucked them into his jacket.
Stepping forward, Cartwright ran his thumb against the sharp ring of the occipital bone and the worn points of fang, tracing the fissures of the skull that rippled like stitches under his touch. It thrilled him. He couldn’t wait to turn it over in his hands. He was amazed there were such things in the ground, waiting to be dug out like potatoes. Cupping them in his brown palm, Cartwright’s father used to show off the arrowheads he tilled out of the fields.
The boy said, “Something, ain’t it?”
A scene came drifting up from the lake bed of memory. When Cartwright was seven years old, his father had bought a gold locket for his wife’s birthday from a drummer passing through. A smile they hadn’t seen before took hold of her face, but a week later, his father stood clutching the doorframe, looking shamefully at where the false gold stained her pale skin, like gangrene. He tore it from her neck and threw it down the well. It was the one time his father cried in front of them. The frightened children fanned into the woods. That night, Cartwright’s father had to come looking for him with a lantern to fetch him back home.
Cartwright grooved the chisel’s tooth into the base of the skull, where the spine would fuse, and lifted the hammer. He let it fall. The chisel jumped in his hand and half the skull turned to silt. It cascaded down the rock wall with the faintest sigh. The boy let out a string of oaths so profane, so unparalleled, that surely they’d been inspired by a hell so near.
Cartwright was glad to have a hammer in hand.
Once again they waded the river, water sucking at their limbs. A pinprick of light appeared ahead. Neither spoke, even when a toothy rock tore Cartwright’s jacket with a startling rip. Soon, a delicate sun and then a javelin of light struck the drummer’s chest. They came to the mouth of the Sinks of Gandy. “I see them coming,” the boy said.
Indeed, McBride and the ten-fingered boy stood there with guns in hand, laughing, each with a fox draped over his shoulder. McBride held a double-barrel sixteen-gauge loaded with pumpkin-ball slugs, a gun the drummer hadn’t seen before. They lifted their bloody foxes to the sun. They were fresh, tongues still pink with the suggestion of life. The foxes couldn’t be eaten, only sold, because like all predators they reeked of the flesh they’d consumed. One was a black-socked vixen with a sleek coat, the other a gray fox, its face and limbs streaked with red, which had obviously been living in a briar patch. It could use a currycomb and wouldn’t bring as much, Cartwright mused miserably, but still a good price.
“You all get it?” McBride asked. “Them bones don’t look like much, but they say it’s money in the bank.”
“Ask your drummer here,” the nine-fingered boy said, cocking his head.
“That skull was too old! No one told me how old it was. That was damaged goods.”
McBride colored. “Good what now?”
“It’s in a thousand pieces,” the boy said. “You couldn’t broom it out of the dirt.”
Cartwright opened his hands. “That skull wasn’t worth a damn. You misled me. You violated our contract.”
“Misled you?”
“That’s the law. It’s a contract.”
“We shook hands,” the farmer said, looking to his boys. “Drummer, you said a man can’t do without it.”
“It’s the law. The legislature wrote it. We just got to live by it.”
“What? What are we going to do about that plow?”
“Hey now,” Cartwright said, “don’t bounty those foxes. Tan the hides and sell them. You’ll turn a better profit. You get a few more dozen and I’ll come back in the fall.”
“Know how long it’ll take to cure these hides?”
Cartwright said nothing.
“That’s right. You’ll be off down the road and we won’t see you for a year. Hell, two year. You’ll come back when you feel like it. Where will we be? I’m tired of this ground working me, I’m ready to work it. You said it yourself.”
The nine-fingered boy said, “What’s this?”
The boy knelt and picked up a folded piece of paper. Cartwright felt the world turn on a pivot. He grew light-headed and loose-limbed, as if he’d just been bled with leeches. The boy peeled the sucker list away from the newspaper clipping. His eyes scanned the lines. Cartwright thought about running, but he didn’t know the way back to the road.
The nine-fingered boy read the words aloud, which listed the name McBride among the county’s daft, drunken, gullible, and insane.
“Says we got an eye for any piece of metal, long as it’s shiny. Drills, reapers. Pine away for it, we will.”
“No better than rooks,” his brother said.
Cartwright opened his mouth, then let it shut with a click. He felt weary from the cave, and the years on the road, and his entire body was slick with mud, pant legs heavy as dragnets. He leaned against a sycamore lording over the Sinks of Gandy. He could retch. “Look,” he cried, “I know what it’s like! I’m from here!”
With a crack, the nine-fingered boy slapped a creeping armored caterpillar off his pant leg. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking down. It was a brilliant green, nearly five inches long. He looked back to Cartwright.
The slug punched Cartwright’s side like a party ballot. The drummer fell against the slippery
bark and the shot patch fluttered against his face, a sulfur burn in his nostrils. Once, when he was young, he’d tasted a bitter pinch of gunpowder and said it tasted like a chimney. His father laughed, clamping a loving paw on the boy’s shoulder, his palm rough as a file. Cartwright threw up a hand and the second shot took his forearm in a hail of bone and the third struck his chin, unhinging the mouth.
When Cartwright fell, he did it watching the light play through clouds on the face of the mountain.
McBride laid the shotgun on the ground and reached for a pipe of tobacco, hand shaking.
The ten-fingered boy asked, “What was that on your leg?”
“Hell if I know.”
The boys turned the dragon-like caterpillar on a stick, its orange spikes waving. They ran their thumbs across them. The spikes were hard as apple thorns. “That’s called a hickory devil,” McBride said, turning back to the drummer’s body. “Digs into the ground and turns into a big old red moth.”
“Kill it,” one said. “It’ll kill a dog if it eats it.”
Tartly, McBride said, “Don’t. That’s a myth. It won’t hurt nothing.”
It was a lonely place, and they merely covered the drummer in pine boughs, confident that no one would find him and no one would care. They should have known better, for the bears and the foxes broke him apart and scattered him a good ways. Rodents gnawed his belt and boot leather for their share of salt. Five years later, a hunter found Cartwright’s brass belt buckle in the leaves and slipped it into his pocket.
It says something of the quality of the buckle’s manufacture, as well as the hunter’s eye, for it was the fourth week of October and the leaves were a thousand shades of brown, mottled like the skin on a copperhead’s back. Later, some lost boys from Moatstown found part of him but paid it little mind, calling him a deer because they failed to check the long lithe bones for hooves or fingers. In twenty years, a bear hunter pried the gold tooth from his jaw and threw the husk to the ground. An old woman of Palatine German stock gave his rib cage a Christian burial after a dog dragged it behind her springhouse. She chanted the verses, murmuring, “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” But she was fading herself, near death, and troubled in her mind. Is only his torso in heaven? she wondered. Do his legs dance in hell? But she was too frail to go searching for the rest, though his pelvic bone rested near a prominent fork in the road, gathering dry leaves like a crock.
The three Irishmen painted Cartwright’s wagon black—“black as Mariah,” the neighbors said—and set the smart new plow behind the mule in its traces. With a searing poker, they smeared the blood bays with their own brand. Cartwright would have recognized the sound of crackling flesh, because it sounded like the red-hot horseshoes he dropped hissing into a water barrel in his days as a farrier’s apprentice.
After a day’s excitement, McBride and his boys eased back into the rhythms of planting and sowed their corn. They enjoyed a typical harvest, green spears coming up straight and tasseled in mean if nourishing numbers. They chewed the lining of their cheeks in wonder, but, then again, they’d merely completed their task with the Miracle Plow, a quarter of the fields. Next year would be the true test. The earth turned and cooled and they waited out the long winter like denned bears, wagering on next year’s harvest.
When next harvest came, they would have killed Cartwright all over again. The Miracle Plow had failed to increase their yield by any measure whatsoever, no better than the one it replaced. When Cartwright’s replacement came down the road three years later, they told him so. He urged on his horses with a grim flick of the traces.
As for the three men, they never roamed beyond the Sinks of Gandy, they waited each year for the trickle of passenger pigeons, they reposed in the ground with the cave bears. Leaning against the completed fence, each lit a clay pipe, savoring the ache of a day’s labor. McBride and his sons watched a lone red fox jumping in the hayfield, pouncing for mice with devilish glee. The people came to call this place McBride’s Slashings, after the acres they wrestled for dominion, but the names can be forgotten. Trees can reclaim the fields, maps can burn, courthouse deeds can be painted in the wondrous colors of mold.
In the distance, among the frailing waves of grain, the fox’s red tail flickered like the birth of a field fire. The two young men rose from their haunches, taking up their guns to go out and make it worth something, for from their visitors, they took their lessons.
Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Our jurors read the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in a blind manuscript in which each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors write their essays without knowledge of the author’s name or that of the magazine, but occasionally the name of the author is inserted into the essay later for the sake of clarity. —LF
A. M. Homes on “Sunshine” by Lynn Freed
I read the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories while on a long train ride and then reread them again on the way back. I then left them in a suitcase for a week or two as if to “cure” or define themselves further—which they did.
The short story has always seemed to me the perfect medium, the manageable masterpiece, its compact canvas sized for the reader in motion, perfect for when one finds oneself with a few moments to savor something rare and curiously other—and interestingly, I have always thought of the short story itself as a thing in motion.
When asked to describe the difference between a novel and a story, I often use the metaphor of a train; the novel is a crosscountry trip; one boards leisurely in Washington, D.C., prepared for the landscape to unfold as the train passes through Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, bound for Los Angeles’s Union Station. The short story is like hopping onto that same train already in motion in Chicago and riding it into Albuquerque with no time to waste. What makes a successful story is very different from what makes a successful novel—characters that are not sustainable for the duration of a novel, styles of telling, tones, narrative constructions that are perfect for a story but crumble or bore the reader if carried on for too long.
With this in mind, I noticed something about this year’s selection of stories—many expressed an outsider’s point of view, a discomfort, a sense of being between places, on the verge of being lost, and were rendered from the point of view of not belonging. I was struck by this sense of “otherness.”
The urge to be seen, identified, known to others as one is known to oneself seems to be a fundamental human urge—as though it takes another to confirm our experience of ourselves—i.e., we don’t exist in a vacuum.
And so it was that one of these wonderful stories had a strange effect on me; it seemed to escape the zippered suitcase and come calling, tapping me on the shoulder in the dead of night, demanding attention, as if to say, I’m not quite sure you understand—read it again. For this, among many other excellent qualities including being extremely challenging and persistently haunting, I chose “Sunshine.”
Initially one is deceived (or seduced) by the surface simplicity of “Sunshine,” the way in which it “un-says” things. There is something unusual and exceptionally artful in the way the author manages the balance between what is said and what is left unsaid. Enormously complex information and emotion is invisibly conveyed; this works because what is being said carries the fullness and weight of collective archetypical imagery, classical themes of mythological root, literary references, albeit barely spoken, and psychological theories—all adding up to the very essence of one’s moral life and responsibility. And in some ways I wish I were kidding, I wish I could go lighter here—after all, the story is called “Sunshine.” And while I am loathe to describe the story, which you’ll read for yourself, suffice to say, starts quite innocently: “They
told Grace they’d found her curled into a nest of leaves.” Hardly threatening, but that quickly and subtly changes; at first the hunter trackers don’t speak English and when they first spot the girl they’re not even sure what “it” is. The only named characters are Grace and Beauty whom one can assume were long ago “it” and Julian de Jong, the master, whom even the trackers don’t look in the eye. “It” is a wild child, her animal nature described by her sitting on her haunches and “baring her teeth in a dreadful high-pitched screech.” If the Master, Julian de Jong, simply tamed her it would be a rather pleasant echo of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in which Professor Henry Higgins trains Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl to speak “properly,” or François Truf-faut’s brilliant 1970 film, The Wild Child. But in this case, the Master seeks to more than tame his prize; after he pays the trackers for her, Grace and Beauty work to civilize her enough so that he can then rape her. It is the rape which throws the story into the stuff of mythology, psychological theory, and honestly creepy fiction. And here is the moral challenge in that everyone from the trackers, the doctor, the dentists, the missionary, and the townspeople are complicit—this isn’t the first time Julian de Jong has done this. The narrator notes, that in the past when the Master finally sent “them” home, “they seemed not to know where they’d rather be. And who was the worse for it then?”
The author’s deft summoning of the complexity of slave/master relationships, the struggle of women for legitimacy beyond man’s object or possession, and questions of economic power and domination—de Jong has more money than anyone else in the story—are part of what give this story its resonance. That and the added cruelty that the Master preys not just upon the very young, but the undefended abandoned “it” who lives outside of society. In the end it is that “it” not bound by social convention, who is free to act independently and who powerfully and heroically stands up to Julian de Jong.
