The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  I came down the stairs and opened the screen door. I did not mind taking my time before I spoke. They understood they were to wait until I did. The red-haired boy, about twelve, had no shirt on. I could see the shirt, though, stuffed into the pocket of his trousers, as if to make a show of his good intentions, as if admitting that he had a shirt was the same as putting one on. Against his body, he held a pie covered in cloth. His neck was very white like it was recently scrubbed. By contrast, his freckle-splattered face looked filthy, as if underneath a film of orange dust.

  The other two were brothers. Both had dark, curly hair. The younger one, who looked a little older than the red-haired boy, wore a straw hat and held a basket of corn bread already cut. The older brother, about sixteen, stood with his head hung back a little, so that it seemed he was looking at me not with his eyes but with his slightly open, bored-looking mouth. He held, awkwardly, a bowl of cherries, at such a precarious slant that with one small movement of his wrist, the cherries would come pouring out.

  I said, looking at this older brother, “You can leave those things on the porch and thank your mothers.”

  But he spoke back to me. “We came to see her.” I was so startled by his audacity that I did not respond.

  The younger brother, in the straw hat, in a softer voice, said, “We brought her some things.”

  “It was an accident,” said the red-haired child.

  Then again, from the older brother: “Where is she?”

  “No,” was all I said.

  One of the skulls appeared then, uncharacteristically unafraid. It rubbed against the leg of the red-haired child, who held the pie against himself. The boy looked down at the cat with what seemed, inexplicably, to be longing. As startling as it was that someone other than my wife could look at the beasts with anything other than disgust, I saw in the boy’s eyes a yearning to touch it and I myself was touched by that. It was respectful the way he stood so still, knowing this was not the time to pet a cat, even such a friendly, stupid one, and that show of self-restraint softened me a little. Tired as I was, I began to feel like I owed something to these boys. Some gesture of forgiveness. So I said, as gently as I could manage, “You can bring those to the table.”

  They came in all at once. Suddenly there was movement everywhere and I felt dizzy. I had not slept since the accident three nights before, and I was beginning to realize, as the breeze outside caught the smell of the food, that I had not eaten in that time either. I was so overcome with my exhaustion right then that I had to put my hand on the rail to steady myself. But the boys didn’t notice. They bumped into one another, looking around the entryway, at the coats hanging on their hooks and the shoes lined up below them.

  “Those are hers,” whispered the red-haired one, pointing at Jane’s boots.

  “Is she up there?” This from the oldest. The sunlight he’d stepped into revealed a single, white, glossy hair on his Adam’s apple. He was standing right in front of me, looking over my shoulder, up the stairs, at the bedroom door.

  By this time, I’d got a handle on myself. “No,” I said. “She isn’t.” He looked right at me, and shifted the bowl of cherries from one hand to another. “You can put that on the table over there,” I said, forcing some pleasantry into my voice for Jane’s sake, in case she could hear me. She was sentimental about boys. She would want me to forgive them. Even so, it came out harsh, so I added, “Smells good,” but that too was in a strange voice not like my own.

  They filed into the kitchen and I followed them. The house felt cramped and oppressive with the boys inside. They had a smell to them, a mix of soap and filth. They laid their dishes on the table where the boiled cat food was cooling in the pan. A few flies had landed and gotten stuck on the grainy skin forming on top of the cornmeal. The red-haired boy was watching them. He had a bright red mark on his bare side from having held the pie so tightly against himself.

  “It’s good of you,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that, but it’s good of you.”

  “Why can’t we see her?” asked the oldest one. He was holding his head back once more, with his lips parted, waiting for my answer. He rolled a cherry pit against his teeth with his tongue.

  “I said ‘No.’ ”

  I felt on the verge of losing my temper. Even the sight of that cherry pit annoyed me. He had brought those for my wife. He had brought those to make an apology. And yet he thought it fine to help himself along the way.

  I was tired of looking at them, so I lifted the cloth off the top of the pie and I looked at that instead. There were slits cut into the crust and thick yellow juice had leaked up through them and was hardening on the top now, shining.

  The boys were shifting, delaying their departure. I might have yelled, I felt so fed up by that point. But instead I said something that surprised me. “The one who shot her”—and the spoken admission that this was who they were felt vulgar, even to me. “The one who shot her,” I went on, “we understand it was an accident. I’m not coming for him. You can pass that on.”

  But when I caught the glance that moved among them, I felt for the first time the presence of the boy in question, the boy who fired the gun, there in the kitchen among the rest. Of course, it wasn’t so. But he seemed to emerge on their faces. Why else did they look at me like that? As if they knew what I was searching for, and wanted to harden their faces against my recognition? They each wore an expression of an almost bored obedience, their eyes glazed over, even the little one. Underneath that expression was something else, some twitch of disrespect. Any other day I would have hit the oldest on the side of his head to make an example of him. But standing there in the kitchen something came over me and I did not have the strength to raise my hand. I couldn’t speak. All I could do, looking at them, was strain my mind to picture the boy who shot her, the fourth boy, the one not there. The boy who ate the sausage in the barn. Peter.

  But again, just his body and his hair, just that clothed darkness. The gun lying in the weeds beside my wife.

  I realized then that the boys were waiting for my dismissal. They were standing in a half circle around the table, their mouths firmly shut. And I remembered then the way they stood in a half circle around Jane that night. At first it had been a full circle, all around her. At first all I had seen from the doorway were the backs of their bodies, bent over her, shoving each other. I knew, without seeing, that she lay at their feet, like the center of a flower or the pupil of an eye. They turned their heads when they heard me come out the door. They stepped away from her.

  The rifle in the grass, fallen like an eyelash.

  “Go home, then,” I said, this time with anger. Their bodies jumped to life. They went past me without another word. All the awkwardness was gone. They were freed of their dishes and their careful displays of their acceptance of blame, and they moved like boys again. They jammed their fists into the screen door to keep it open for each other.

  That same skull meowed as they went past and this time the red-haired boy stopped to pet her. I stood at the doorway for a long time after they left and finally heard shouting by the river. Their voices faded, then became loud again, and I could picture them crossing the water to the other side of the woods.

  My hunger struck me then suddenly and sharply. I could not wait a second longer. I grabbed a fork and gouged out a bite of pie. Before I had time to swallow, I stuffed my mouth with bread, and I ate so fast I tasted nothing. Then I went outside and set the cornmeal down and I watched the skulls eat too.

  —

  It had taken a long time for the boys to admit what they’d been hunting. They had spoken of it as if it was something complicated, something they could not put into words. That first night, with the doctor and Julie Bennett bent over Jane in her bed, bickering, and Jane crying for help even as they gave it, I found myself standing by the window, looking out. There was nothing else for me to do. The window was open. A warm night. The sheriff was down in the yard with the boys. Though the cool room blocked the
ir bodies from my view, I could hear their voices clearly.

  “But what?” the sheriff kept asking them. “What did you think she was?”

  In the end they answered, and though I could not see the boy who said it, I can still hear the answer spoken flatly and with a shrug. “An owl.” None of the other boys protested this or tried to add anything to it, but there had been—I noticed it even then, in the midst of everything—an air of disappointment and disbelief that that was all it ever was.

  —

  The day after the boys visited, Jane again gave elaborate instructions for her cats, in greater detail than she had the day before. She told me the time of day that I should feed them; she described the placement of the pan; she said to mix in bacon grease, to make them want it more; she insisted the two scared ones had to be fed from a separate bowl, in a separate place.

  “For God’s sake,” I said to her. Shell-shocked in our bed, she took this as my refusal. She turned away and wept.

  “Jane, stop, of course I’ll do it right,” I said.

  And so I fed the skulls. I sat and watched. It made my stomach turn, the way their demented bodies jerked, as if throwing up the food instead of eating it. It was against every one of my instincts to waste our cornmeal sustaining so perverse a race. But even so I did it. They all got fed, including the scared two. A separate bowl. A separate place. For Christ’s sake, I did it.

  And afterward I went up to report it all to Jane.

  “The scared ones ate?” She was skeptical.

  “They’re bloated and asleep.”

  She smiled. “Skulls,” she said. She held my hand awhile. Her wounds were healing; the blood from both wounds had stopped traveling through the gauze, the muted stains remained as they had been, no larger, no deeper of color. She fell asleep and so did I, hunched there in my chair. For the first time in a while, a bit of peace. Except for the fact of the fourth boy. The absence of his face took on a sort of presence in my dream, a darkness in the edges.

  I woke up to Jane’s fingernails digging in my hand. She moaned, and put her free hand over her eyes. It took a while for me to understand that a terrible headache had seized her.

  “It’s the shock,” I said.

  She cried with fury. There was nothing I could do. It lasted through the rest of that day and into the night. The following morning, when she still had had no relief, I decided then to do as the doctor had directed me if such a case arose, which was to go into town for medicine.

  In the misery of those long hours before I decided to go, there had been moments of relief for my poor wife, sudden clearings in her pain from which she looked out at the world as if she’d been a long time gone from it. The moment before I left for town was one of them. I was standing at the top of the stairs, about to go down. From lack of sleep, I felt shaky, not myself. I felt the darkness of that fourth boy’s face growing larger and larger in my mind. I stood at the top of the stairs, trying to blink it away, to get back the energy I needed to go into town for help.

  Then I heard her voice. Very faint, as if from very far away. “This is a nice house,” she said.

  I am not a sentimental man, but in that moment I was deeply touched, so much that I could not even turn around to face her. I have thought of this many times since. Why, of all the moments in my life, is that the only one that when I think back on it now, I can still feel the ache that I felt then? As if no time has passed at all, I can still feel that rail beneath my hand. I can still feel the way that pervasive darkness, my secret question, seemed to soften at its edges then, seemed to dim at the sound of her voice. I can even still see the light that fell across my feet, which I stared down at when I might have turned to her.

  “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I said. I hoped the tone of my voice, and the fact I could not face her, conveyed to my dear wife that her quiet admission was not lost on me, that this was, of all the moments of my life, the main one.

  —

  I knew Jane’s father before I knew Jane. He was a sheep farmer in Helena. When I came to him for work, I was eighteen years old, South Dakota raised, the son of a lazy man. The one-room house of my childhood had finally fallen down, just months after my mother lost her battle with the dust.

  The floors of my mother’s house were made of dirt. My father had built the pitiful place on a piece of over-farmed soil. The more we beat it down with our feet, the finer the dirt became. The dust rose with every step, with every gust, with every turn in the night of our bodies in our beds. It settled in our sheets, on our clothes, in our hair, and finally in my mother’s lungs, where it lingered for years before it turned into the infection that turned her, with a bit of time, into dust herself. Sometimes, I think, a little bit of lumber could have saved her. A few boards. Well. Phrases come from somewhere and “dirt-poor” came from a life like ours, one you couldn’t afford to put a board over. Around the time the infection set in, my mother discovered coffee grounds.

  She spread them wet across the dirt. It was the only thing that ever worked to keep the dust down, her one triumph in all those years as housewife in a house without floors, and she began to drink so much coffee, as a side effect of using it on the floor, that deep down I wonder if it wasn’t her lungs that let her down but her heart. Just before I closed the lid of her coffin, which I did alone, my father having long since left, I smelled the coffee that had replaced the dust on her body and her clothes, and I thought what a shame it was to bury someone whose essence was still so much alive.

  I think of that often, even still, the coffee smell of my mother’s corpse. I was thinking of it then, a few months later, when I met Jane’s father and saw what a good man he was, what nice floorboards he provided even me, in the dim little shed where I slept.

  In the weeks that I worked shearing on his farm, I became close to him, though I saw nothing of his family. I barely knew that they were there, somewhere inside that looming house. A wife and two daughters.

  Until one day a letter came. It informed me that in the time since he’d left my mother and me, with nothing in his pockets but a barely weaned kitten, my lazy, sentimental father had pulled himself together enough to own some land in the northern part of what just that year became the state of Idaho. The land, the letter said, was mine. My father had passed on.

  I left a note at Jane’s father’s door, letting him know of my inheritance. I let him know that I planned to leave, that that night was my last in Helena.

  And it was. But in the middle of the night, very late, a knock on the door woke me up. I opened it. There they all stood: the man, his wife, a girl of maybe ten, all still dressed, all with their hands on the older daughter.

  “Please,” the good man begged. They had been up all night discussing it. He put both his hands on Jane’s shoulders, and he shook her at me, as if my eyes weren’t bound to land there on their own. That was the first time I saw her. Stunned-looking, red-faced Jane. She was fifteen years old.

  We stood facing each other, she and I, in a nearly empty church the following morning.

  “You don’t have to if you really don’t want to,” I said, interrupting the reverend.

  “It’s not your fault,” she wept.

  And there, at the altar, I took her chilly hands in mine. It was the first time we ever touched.

  The boy whose child she carried was not from Helena. He had cut across her father’s property one night and she had seen him from her window. Inexplicably, she went outside. They spoke for a few minutes, and then she helped him catch a piglet so that he could steal it. He came back the following night for another one, and on the third night what she gave him was herself. Willingly, knowingly, and with—she spat at her father the following morning—all her love. He was fifteen too. She promised to kill herself if they kept him away.

  But as it happened, her boy stabbed another boy. Her boy was beaten, then arrested for murder, then taken to jail.

  Even Jane’s young sister pleaded with me that final night. “You have to
take her now. It’s the only thing to do.”

  Well, I guess it was. I didn’t have time to give it much thought.

  She was polite to me, my Jane. She thanked me in the church through her tears. But when it was time to get into the buggy her father provided us, Jane fought him like a child. She kicked and screamed so hard that her father, a man I respected, had to tie her wrists behind her back to get her in. Then he gave me a startling amount of money that he pulled clumsily out of his pockets, some of which fell from his shaking hands. He said thank you, and added, after what seemed to be a very panicked moment, “Son.”

  I drove in a state of shock, the money fallen at my feet. After several miles, I looked over at my new wife, slumped in her seat, her hands tied behind her, her head bobbing to the rhythm of the horse’s hooves, her eyes cast out at the prairies.

  I stopped the buggy. I untied her wrists. She smiled at me, weakly.

  She did not speak until we reached Bonner’s Ferry two very long days later. What she said then, when I told her we were nearly there, was that if it had to be anyone but the father of her child who took her away, then she was glad that it was me. Well, all right. I took her into my father’s house. One room. Dirt floors. She slept there and I in the barn. I carved her a tiny swaddled baby out of wood, but she lost the real baby early on in her pregnancy, and in some unspoken way that felt more like the start of a marriage than our wedding had been. We shared a bed after that. Soon I had built a good, sturdy house, with boards across the floor. She tended to the twenty, thirty cats that inhabited the land, at first, I think, as a way of teasing me, and later as the task she took most seriously of her daily chores. Early on, when she got pneumonia, and I was scared to death of losing her, I went outside and I fed the little beasts myself. Calling to them in a tender, desperate way I cannot have meant, reaching to pet their coarse fur. I was still a boy more or less. I had not been struck so hard by anything as I was by the thought of losing her.