The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  What is a rabbit without a haunch?

  A dancer without joints.

  A wingless bird.

  A fish out of water.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s me,” she said into the telephone.

  Karl remained silent at the other end of the line.

  “Gretel Varney,” she offered helpfully.

  “Right,” he said, sounding far away. “The vice principal’s daughter.” Then swinging back, his voice solid, round: “Hi, you.” He was doing something else as he spoke. He always would be. Drying his hands of the barn muck or getting ready to do the afternoon milking, his voice growing rich and full and fading out the next second as if the wind were always plucking him away right when you thought you were going to capture him.

  “What are you doing right now?” she said.

  “Oh, lots, Gretel Varney, and then again—nothing much.”

  She had not expected him to say something like, Hi, you, or to repeat her name that way, as if he not only remembered her now, but understood her maybe better than she could even hope to understand herself.

  “Out of milk, are you?”

  Burying herself between the staircase and the telephone table, the cord pulled tight enough to choke her finger, Gretel shook her head. “I’ve got something that needs putting out of its misery.”

  An hour later Karl Olson was standing in the front hall, chewing a wad of mint gum. His hair at its lightest parts was the color of hay, his jeans worn to white in the knees. Looking down, he froze. His boots! Suddenly, he crept back in his own footprints, knelt and untied the laces, then placed them by the door in a gesture she wanted to take as the gentlest intimacy, though it was only that the soles had manure in their grooves, that the toes had been soaked in cow piddle. Rising, he handed her a bottle of milk still warm from the udder. She opened the cap right there and drank the quart down in seven long swallows.

  “Thought you didn’t need milk,” Karl said.

  “Then why did you bring it?” she answered.

  “Farmer’s job to know what needs what without ’em having to ask for it,” Karl said, and with his hands in his pockets, he followed her from room to room, past the clock that chimed once for the half hour. He stopped and ran his finger up a groove in the wood, as if he had caused the hand to shift, the pendulum to swing; as if Karl Olson was in control of everything.

  The rabbit lay in one of her mother’s hatboxes on the parlor table, next to a lamp fringed in tassels. Old books crowded the shelves, stacked sideways where they didn’t fit. “Who does all the reading?” Karl said.

  “My father sells rare books,” Gretel said.

  “Rare, huh?” Karl smiled. “Woulda thought he’d go for well done or something.”

  She laughed and covered her mouth with her wrist. “You know, first editions—signed, deckle edges. That kind of thing. He goes through dead people’s stuff beside all the old biddies hunting for samplers and memory boxes. Says people don’t know what they have half the time.”

  “Forty-two Herefords,” Karl said, counting fingers on fingers as if he could not fathom a person who did not know at all times precisely what was in his possession. “Sixteen Plymouth Rock and four New Hampshire chickens. Two potbellied pigs, one Morgan horse, one draft. Two American quarter horses. The only kind of books at the farm are the cooked kind. Know what that means, cooking books?”

  Gretel just stood there.

  “Fudging numbers.” Karl looked into the box. Once it had been home to her mother’s Easter bonnet, and a piece of floral tape was hanging from the rabbit’s whisker.

  “You know, when you said misery to me, I thought you were talking about yourself.” He lowered his hand, touching his knuckle to the rabbit’s nose.

  “Do I look that miserable?” Gretel said.

  “I dunno. Bored, maybe.”

  “I’m so bored.”

  “Misery loves company,” Karl told her, and picking up the rabbit, he snapped its neck.

  * * *

  —

  She had never skinned anything before, but he talked to her as if she had, or might want to practice on this rabbit. The secret to skinning, he told her, was to slip the nozzle of a bicycle pump under the hide and blow it full of air, inflating it like a balloon so the pelt would come away without a tear from the rest of the body.

  He told her how you could dig up a lilac bush and leave its roots exposed in the hot sun and when you planted it again, even after a whole season like that, it might still take if you were lucky.

  Last night a calf had been born feet first.

  When cows eat dandelions, it makes the milk taste bitter. That’s why he had to go home straightaway to spray weeds before the ladies were turned out into the east pasture.

  Maybe she was like that. Maybe she was a lilac that had been dug up and left in the hot sun and when Karl put her back in the ground he would press the soil around her feet and she would rise up, standing tall, and bloom because he’d watered her.

  * * *

  —

  Only it doesn’t feel like a blooming. More like a skinning, a pumping full of air that leaves Gretel raw and wanting. One afternoon that week when her mother takes a turn for the worse, Gretel finds herself walking up to the edge of the cornfield, the wood looming like the shadow of some giant hand just over her left shoulder. Things are moving in the wood, things she wouldn’t want to know or have explained to her. Birds of prey keen in the snags. The owl sleeps, surrounded by pellets spat from her hollow tree, each one a piece of young rabbit or vole, a mouse with its bones and fur curled around itself the way her mother’s infirm body cages her rapid thinking.

  She reaches the pasture with her heart beating in her mouth, every inch of her tingling. Indian summer now. Insects surprised from dead leaves weave dizzy arcs on the edge of the shadows. She stands behind the barbed wire, watching Karl Olson crouch in the grass, one elbow on his knee, as he pulls up weeds to keep the cows from eating them.

  In time, she will come to feel that a weed is a weed only when it grows where you don’t want it to be—and who are we, besides, to judge the taste of a cow’s milk? If a cow wants to eat a dandelion, why deny her the pleasure? Many years from now, these questions will bubble up from a place in herself she hadn’t known existed. A voice will confront her as she stands over the stove in the predawn making Karl’s breakfast, washing the supper dishes, or leading a bawling calf back home through a broken fence on the edge of the lot where her parents’ house once stood. A voice will speak in her mother’s tone, dazzled by mystery, and Gretel, pregnant and soaking owl pellets in water to reconstitute mouse skeletons, will wander into the pasture and press her cheek to a cow’s velvet nose, shivering in ecstasy as the grassy breath tickles her. When she tries to explain to Karl why she can no longer cook him ruminants, he will rise slowly from the creaky chair and say, “A what?”

  “Steak, Karl.”

  “Oh, I see. So you’re a kook, now, hunh?—an intellectual.”

  * * *

  —

  But all this is waiting in the wings. Just a shadow haunting the trees, on the very periphery of the moment when Karl Olson catches sight of her and smiles, smiles as if he already knows everything.

  “Hi, you,” he says, wiping his brow with a cloth and sticking it in his breast pocket.

  She presses the tip of her finger to the barbed wire, stealing a glance back over her shoulder.

  “What’s the misery?” Karl says, squinting past her into the distance.

  The peak of her house rises behind the cornfield. Why has it always felt so lonely? No brothers and sisters. No chores. Not enough responsibility, maybe.

  “They know where you are?”

  Gretel shakes her head. “They don’t know much of anything.”

  “Awful lot of books
for not much, then,” Karl says, doubtfully. He parts the wire for her to step through, and a barb catches her sleeve. He looks away. Pressing a thumb to the tear in her best blouse, she follows him across a pasture pocked with cow patties all the way to the windbreak, where old maples and oaks reach over a tangle of raspberry bushes to snatch scraps of the town and drag them into wildness.

  Come back with me, she was going to say. And what would you do then, Karl Olson? If you plant a woman in the ground like a lilac, will her ghost rise up and dance again?

  But the light shifts into a point of no return. She reaches for Karl’s hand as charred leaves lift from the branches, stirring and twittering. A wave of blackbirds surges out over the wood, breaking around trunks and bracken to strand themselves high in the trees, each red wing as it spreads calling to that ill-fated robin.

  In time, she will come to think it was the blackbirds that stole whatever crumbs she might have dropped to find her way out of Karl. She will remember being swept up in this destiny, the birds tumbling her dark blond hair out of its ribbon, untying the cravat at her neck, picking at her stockings, fluttering their red wings against her cheeks, marooning her on their way south in a middle-aged wintering. Not that any of this is here yet. Only the wood knows what is coming.

  The wood, with its primeval stands of maples and oaks. Hemlocks. Poplars into which the Norse gods breathed souls to populate the emptiness. The tallest ash, bearing its scar to mark the year the milk ran blue, and Karl’s grandfather trapped six mice and crushed each with a boot until he caught the shrew, then bored a hole in the wood with an auger, and immured her in the heart of the trunk to chew and scratch until she suffocated.

  And do you know, Karl will say, standing over her one night with a branch in his hand after she has threatened to leave him, that if you strike a lady with a switch made out of ash, they say your violence will never leave a mark on her?

  What will you do to me? the wood whispers inside Gretel, lifting her chin from her neck to expose the artery. She squares her shoulders and turns to face him under a bower of late September leaves so suffused in gold, it’s as if she has come to stand beside Karl Olson in the belly of the sun.

  “You weren’t in English,” she says.

  Karl shrugs. “Don’t go telling the vice principal.” He slips his hand into his back pocket and offers her a stick of gum.

  “He always knows,” Gretel says, taking the gum, unwrapping it, letting the silver paper fall into the crevice of an old root ball. “Not that it matters any. What’s he going to do about it? Whip you? Probably won’t even give you detention.” She leans into a trunk, sliding to the earth, strands of her hair combed up by the bark. “He’ll be off reading a book and raccoons are breeding in the attic. Off writing a poem about the death of an insect.”

  She laughs at her own joke, covering her mouth with the back of her hand even as a shadow drops through her chest, taking root across her groin. For a moment, it feels like something is living inside the tree. Deep inside the rings, something is waiting for her, deep in the wooden heart of all things, trapped and restless.

  “So there’s the misery,” Karl murmurs, as if feeling down a horse’s leg to detect some hidden injury. When he says misery it sounds like mystery. And what then? Of course the horse will have to be put down.

  On this particular day, she has no suspicion of Karl’s own misery—that his father is drinking again, that his mother complains, as she hurls bread crumbs to the birds, that in thirty years of marriage the only Paris she’s been to is the amusement park three towns over, with all the fountains and that fancy antique carousel. Gretel doesn’t know that Karl’s older brother is running away to the army, that the farm is tightening itself around Karl’s neck, that English class makes him feel insignificant, because nobody gives a hey what he answers. That when the fence caught Gretel’s sleeve and his eyes passed over the scratch, he had to stop himself from reaching for a hole in his own fabric to slip through.

  He waves to a depression in the earth where fallen leaves have collected and started to brown. “We made it to the boneyard,” Karl says, as Gretel searches the gray trunks and golden leaves for gravestones. “It’s where we lead the ladies that can’t be sold.”

  “Oh,” she says, “it just looked so pretty.”

  “Pretty’s a waste on a farm, Gretel Varney.”

  Nothing wasted. Not a word. Not even a quarter acre for a flower garden. What she mistakes for quaint from a distance will prove run-down once she’s living inside it. What seems practical will become a poverty of imagination. For example, when one of the two oxen in the team goes south, the other ox is thought to be as good as useless.

  She takes Karl’s hand, which feels more like the one-winged robin than anything capable of crushing it with a stone. Tears well in his eyes and she hopes he is about to profess his love, but he just coughs, leans past her, spits out a wad of mint gum. Can’t say I didn’t warn you, Karl will tell her, the morning after their wedding, when he rises before dawn because the ladies will be aching.

  Now a breeze moves through the wood, hurrying all creatures toward their final destination. Dried leaves blow over Gretel and Karl, bits of their clothes swept up, the buttons of her silk blouse clicking against his belt buckle. His body parts from hers and rolls lightly into the dirt. The sun drops behind the farm. A chill gathers in the wood. Hurry up! Be quick about it! Picking the leaves from their clothes, they turn away from each other, buttoning and buckling, and pulling up stockings snagged by twigs and thorns. Milking time. Time of the lady-aches. And what about Gretel? High time she placed Karl Olson at the center of everything.

  “See you,” he says.

  “Will I?”

  “Misery loves company, doesn’t it?”

  “I won’t be if you aren’t.”

  Karl stops and looks back at her over his shoulder. “That so?”

  If she should lose herself in the wood alone, how would she ever find her way out? No bread crumbs. No pocket of moonstones, and leaves falling faster by the second to obscure every footstep. Karl would point to lichen growing on the north face of the trunk, or trails carved by errant calves, faces matted in burdock. Gretel, though, cannot tell north from south, or a spruce from a hemlock. Can’t find your way out of a paper bag, Karl might say. Until he names it for her, she won’t know a thing. An ash merely a tree. A shrew just a mouse.

  Doua Thao

  Flowers for America

  ALWAYS ALONG RUE LABEOTTADOK, during unguarded moments. This time on my way home from Mrs. Kethavong’s sister. It was almost dusk. But still enough light to see her face was not among the orchid sellers crowding the street, calling for customers—Sweetest smelling! Softest in all of Laos! For you, the flower Asian! Her face was not among the merchants by their doors. Inviting, the way they stand. But always their looks suspicious. Her face was not among the vegetable ladies, their voices like a twenty-year smoker’s from haggling. Her face was not among the peddlers of jade animal figurines and combs and full-belly Buddhas, always the whites buy and ask be wrapped in paper. Gossip pieces for their walls and tables at home, their vanities, about how they had visited Laos. Nor among the food-cart cooks, whose grills scented the air, filling and cramping the empty stomachs of the hungry. The cooks’ loud voices, too, clashing with the orchid sellers—food and flowers, flowers and food. On Labeottadok they are one, a singsong of distorted echoes, flower’s food, food’s flower. But right before the Royal Tea House, when Houa, my old friend, stepped out from the alleyway, empty-handed, instantly, I knew her.

  “Why are you running—so quickly, Hnuhlee’s Mother?” she called to me. So I stopped, of course, for an old friend. Her long hair folded and softly held on her head with a bright purple scarf. “You work too hard,” she said, seeing the rice sack in my hand, after she had pushed her way through the crowd. In the sack were four fish wrapped in paper. One was a calf
-sized frogfish, my favorite, and I was planning to steam it for dinner.

  “Are you well, Shengcua’s Mother?” I said, ignoring her question, walking still. Lushest! Moistest! In all of Laos. The top two buttons of her yellow blouse were undone, showing her pale, bony chest. Her red sarong covered her feet, stuttering her steps.

  “Doing like yesterday. Hoping to do the same tomorrow,” she said. Houa and I grew up in Fi Kha before the war. She had lived four huts over and is a sister by our Vue clan name. Forty-one years since our births, and here we were. On the same street. In the same town. Smiling at each other, each knowing the path of how the other got here, as if the other’s was our own. Orchids! For you the flower Asian! “What happened to your leg?” she said, looking me over. On my right thigh, above my knee, was a bandage. A mean catfish had snapped back and stung me that morning as I untangled it from a net. “It’s hard work and it’s dangerous?”

  “Every job has dangers,” I said. “But I’m lucky to have this.” Come see Yellow Pearl Orchid! Slowly I walked so she could keep up, and searched the oncoming faces. “You must be doing a little better,” I said to my friend, speaking the way old Hmong women speak, which is to strike at the heart of the matter with the vaguest comment possible. The vagueness gives you space not to seem nosy, and space also for the other person to tell you what you truly want to know if she chooses.

  “For a few months maybe,” she said.

  “A few months’ calm of heart is worth it,” I said. The sweetest smelling.

  “You believe so?” she said, the left dimple marking her beauty emptied and filled before a stranger could notice it.

  “For the heart to be calm, however short, is worth it. Even for thirty minutes. For the belly to stay quiet.” Knowing I had a little more than my friend, I offered her my frogfish.

  “Maiker,” she said, feeling young again and comfortable, “you keep it. We will be okay for a few months.”