The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  That was the time I didn’t know to let the cornmeal cool, and of course that’s all she remembers of the whole hellish thing.

  What I felt for her, easily enough, was love.

  Though sometimes, when I think back on it, I start to wonder if what I felt more than my own love was the presence of her patience. It wore on me a little, her feminine resolve. Her endless glances out of windows. I felt, even as I moved inside of her, that her submission to me was so deep that there was no way of ever reaching who she really was, so far down inside. I tried and tried to reach her that way, and I wonder now if the reason we never could conceive had to do with the fact I never made it far enough.

  But enough time passed—years and years—that this patient woman became not only who she really was, but who she had always been. I began to think that the intensity I saw in her when we first met was nothing more than the phase of a spoiled child, a brief period of adolescent insanity that would have passed no matter what, with or without me or my father’s land.

  She never contacted her own father again, but every six months or so, she went into town alone to send, she said, a letter to her sister, that ten-year-old child I had seen only once. She always came back from these town trips looking refreshed and satisfied, with packages under her arms of dress material or other much-needed feminine things. But her satisfaction seemed to have little to do with the letter she sent, and more to do with a day in town. I say this because only once did she mention her sister writing back. I did not see the letter in her hand, but saw from our window that she was holding something close to her as she led the horse into the barn, and that she remained in the barn a long time, presumably to be alone with this piece of home a little while longer. I remember wondering what the child could possibly have to say to her sister, whom she had known only for that brief time in her life that all of us eventually forget. It made me sad for Jane, I remember, thinking of the way she cherished it. When she came out of the barn finally, there was no letter at all, only a certain warmth that she carried inside the house afterward. “She must have written back,” I said to her, and at first she looked startled, but then she smiled. “Yes,” she said, “she did.”

  But I don’t remember Jane having any more correspondence after that. I don’t remember her sending any other letters at all.

  —

  When I came back from Bonner’s Ferry with the medicine, the door to the house was open. I saw it from the tree where I tied my horse. Carefully, I set the medicine down, then I loaded my gun, and I went closer. I stopped and listened.

  There was a sound that rang out like something new—laughter. Jane’s. When I stepped inside, there was another sound that was actually the silencing of many sounds I didn’t realize I’d been hearing. A stillness in the room upstairs.

  My heart racing, I went up. Our bedroom door was half open and I opened it all the way with the barrel of my gun.

  The three boys. Sitting around her bed in chairs brought up from the kitchen. Jane was propped up against her pillows.

  I shouted. What, I don’t remember, but I pointed my rifle at the oldest boy.

  But Jane cried out. Please, please! All three boys, terrified to silence. The red-haired boy, the brothers with their dark and reeking curls. The fear for my wife that I had felt at seeing the open door was replaced by a rage I didn’t recognize in myself, one that took all of my effort to control.

  “They brought me flowers,” said Jane, her voice shaking, and with her good arm motioned to the skunk flowers in the vase of greenish water on the windowsill.

  Skunk flowers. Well. I didn’t lower my gun.

  More meekly, she said, “They want me to get well.”

  “They should not have shot you, then,” was what I said, and, turning to the boys, “You don’t come into a woman’s room. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Please,” whimpered Jane, in a voice I’d never heard from her. I looked at her, startled. Did she think I was going to shoot them? Is that what she thought of me?

  The tears rolled down her cheeks. I was taken aback. “I asked them to tell me,” she cried. “They were telling me about Peter.” She looked at them. “He was the one who said I was an owl.”

  I admit that my conviction faltered. The prospect of learning anything at all about that boy whose face I couldn’t see outweighed at that moment my anger. It had been five days since Jane was shot and still I had not been able to recall the boy at all. The darkness pounded in my head. I lowered the gun and I looked right into their faces, giving them permission to speak.

  “We’re sorry, sir,” said the red-haired boy.

  “What do you have to say about the other one?” I said.

  “Just that he’s sorry, sir. We’re all very sorry, sir.”

  The oldest stood, and then his brother. And then the red-haired one.

  “You like us to take these chairs down?” The older of the brothers, no longer afraid.

  “Leave them,” I said.

  They went past me one by one, and down the stairs. I stared hard at Jane’s face while we listened to their footsteps.

  She stared hard back at me. When I heard the screen door bang shut against the house, I went to the window and watched the boys disappear into the woods.

  “Your head is better,” I said to her, as an accusation.

  But she only sighed. Her body was still trembling. “It is. It’s much better.”

  “I don’t want them coming back.”

  “They won’t.” Her certainty startled me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  She was lying down again.

  “How could they?” she said, then she turned her head away from me, and gazed for a long time out the window.

  —

  The days went on and I kept busy. In addition to setting and checking traps, and preparing the pelts for sale, there were Jane’s chores for me to do too—milking, collecting eggs, washing our clothes in the river, and of course the boiling and cooling of the cornmeal. Some nights I was up so late catching up on my work that I did not want to disturb her by getting into bed; I unfolded the blankets in the barn and spread them out over the hay. I woke almost daily to the puking of a skull, somewhere down by my feet. It purred defensively when it saw me see it, though it heaved still, above its slick and grainy, undigested little pile.

  Which always, by the afternoon, was gone.

  Very early one morning, I watched the light open into the barn. It was the earliest light; it spread on the ground with a sort of wetness, and like wetness it seemed to soak into the leather of my boot, dampening with warmth my sock and skin, so that I felt a heaviness in that foot—the other foot in shadow—and did not know, for an instant, if I could ever lift so great a weight.

  And then, anchored there by the greatness of that warmth, unable to move, I saw in that light, that melted light, a vision of my wife. The expression on her face was half-amused and half-appalled, wide-eyed but only slightly smiling. She was somewhere she shouldn’t be, and I sensed in her a strange delight. What was she watching? What was she waiting for? She stood there, looking down, holding, inexplicably, a glass of milk.

  Then a white plate was handed up to her, through the light, and seemingly—though I did not sit up or move my hands—from me. She took the plate, then handed down the glass of milk, which, the closer it came to me, became a glass of light, a liquid white light that made me flinch my eyes. Then I woke fully, and out of breath. What disturbed me right away was the fact I was disturbed, that the image of my wife with a glass of milk, standing in that golden light, feeding breakfast to a child, could cause my heart such panic. I could not help but throw the blankets off myself, so filled was I with loathing for the thought of that boy, Peter, sleeping here in this hay, beneath these same blankets.

  I had to get out of the barn. I had to see her.

  But I still felt the heaviness in my foot. With my hand, I moved it out of the light, and it wasn’t warmth it was heavy wit
h; it was a deadness. My heel had fallen into a hole beneath the hay, and its cramped position the whole night had left it numb. When I pulled, the dead boot caught on a small board.

  At first I tossed this board aside but then, seeing the deep and crudely dug hole it was meant to cover, I picked it up again. I held this board in my hand, to consider. Then I examined the hole it had hidden, about six inches deep, and wide enough to hold—what? What had he hidden there?

  I got up. I went inside. I found Jane already sitting up in bed, looking out the window.

  “Are you missing anything?” I demanded.

  “Good morning,” she said, not looking at me.

  “I need to know. Not recently, but a long time ago. Did anything of yours go missing?”

  She looked at me, finally, her expression blank. “What are you asking?”

  It took a moment to decide to articulate the ugliness of what I had in mind. As overcome as I was that morning, I did not want to put into her mind anything she wasn’t ready for, anything that could offend her femininity or her frail health.

  Still, the image had grown more clearly, even in the moment since she turned her head, and what I saw down in that hole was a bit of thin female cotton, stale and filthy, rolled around in the sickness of the night between fourteen-year-old fingers still dirty from the digging.

  “Underthings,” I managed, barely a whisper.

  Jane gave a laugh of shock.

  But then—inexplicably—before I even let her answer, I thought of something else. It made no sense, much less sense than underthings—that smell of her body, a secret worthy of the little hole and the sly board that covered it—and yet I could not get this other thing out of my mind. Before I meant to, I said it aloud, to my own bewilderment: “The baby.”

  I saw in her then a flash of what I had not seen since she was placed, thrashing, in my buggy, her father’s money sticking to her damp and dirty feet as she kicked and screamed for her release. I saw in her face shock at my audacity at having so suddenly crossed that line into her past. “Not the real baby,” I qualified quickly, so startled was I by her expression. “The wooden one I carved you. Where is it?”

  At first I thought the shock on her face was born out of my insane idea that a fourteen-year-old boy would find any meaning at all in the theft and subsequent hoarding of an effigy of a never-born child. But it wasn’t that—I remembered in the same instant I had not yet told her of the hole. What it was instead was shock at my having divined, for the first time since she came into my bed, her secret. Because, to my astonishment—and to her own—my wife Jane opened up her hand and I saw the little swaddled bit of blank-faced wood, which I had not seen since the day I carved it, shining from the sweat of her palm.

  —

  We did not speak of it again. None of it. Not ever. The baby in her hand was a kind of admission I could not bear, of what she still held on to. I never mentioned the hole in the barn, which I filled immediately with soil. She did not ask what I had meant about her underthings.

  The only signs that the boys were ever in our lives were the wounds on her shoulder and leg, which, following that queer morning, she began to keep covered, hidden—from me. As if the sight of the wounds was embarrassing to us, vulgar, a reminder of what I had not yet found the courage to ask.

  A strangeness grew between my wife and me from that morning on. Though we were not cold to one another, we hardly spoke, even after she healed and was outside again. I saw her once from the edge of the woods, as the empty traps hung over my shoulder. She was scraping cornmeal out of the pan and beckoning, with a smile that always disappeared when she sensed I had seen it, the scared skulls toward their separate bowls, lined up in the dust near the barn.

  We never discussed the moment she opened up her hand and revealed to me the very object that had come into my mind. Such a coincidence unsettled me—the baby in her hand, at the very moment I should ask for it, after all those years of forgetting it was there. It unsettled me so deeply that I took to bed for a day, once Jane was well and I could allow myself, sweating out what must have been a fever but felt, truly, like something else, like some presence or knowledge I wanted to wring from myself like a rag of blood.

  —

  At any rate, what had been a drowsy, warm summer turned into a hot, dry one. The river ran low; the sun baked the hides of the cattle. Jane recovered fully, though she walked a little different, and I noticed a habit she developed whenever she was deep in thought, of resting her hand on the shoulder of the same side, the one that had been hurt. I often saw her standing that way in her garden, looking down at the dry rows, considering.

  At some point, she washed the pie pan and the other dishes that held the food the boys had brought, and she set them out on the porch in case they ever returned. The dishes remained on the porch the rest of the summer. I got so used to seeing them there that I stopped seeing them at all. Soon they held no associations; they collected the same dust as everything else.

  Then one evening, early in the fall, I came home from a hunt just after sunset and saw that the dishes were gone.

  “Jane,” I called, as I opened the door, “did they come for their dishes?” But she didn’t answer. I went inside, where there was a fresh vase of flowers on the table. “Jane,” I called again. The house felt very peaceful. There was a fresh smell, like cold weeds carried in on someone’s hair.

  I went upstairs, but our bedroom was empty, our bed made, some linens folded on the top of the dresser. On the night table, I saw one of her novels, opened facedown, beside a plate with a half-eaten piece of toast, shining with butter. The window was open.

  Looking out that window briefly, I felt for an instant what my wife must have felt all these years—that someone was standing just inside those trees, standing and waiting. And at that moment, I became aware of the heavy emptiness of the room and also of a presence. How can I possibly describe it? It was almost as if someone else had left his shadow there.

  I got my gun and I went outside to search the barn. Jane’s horse was tied up and eating. The cats, cold grains of cornmeal stuck in their nostrils and the corners of their eyes, followed me at a distance, blinking back the grains.

  I checked the garden. I checked the fields. Thinking it likely she had gone into the woods, maybe after a wounded skull, I followed our usual trail down, calling out her name.

  But there was no Jane.

  I will admit what came into my mind, standing down there by the river: That the boys had come back to finish what they started. To kill my wife, to shoot her down. But I knew it was not possible; I knew it had to be dismissed. I kept reminding myself of the skunk flowers. You don’t bring a woman skunk flowers if you plan to shoot her down. You don’t point at her shoes in the entryway and say with awe, “Those must be hers.” If anything, they had seemed to love my wife; there had seemed a sort of reverence among them, almost a possessiveness for having been part of something I was not—for having seen her fall at the sound of the gun, just she and they, alone.

  This knowledge carried with it its own suspicion. Not that they had shot her—but that they took her. That they put her down in some crudely dug hole in some secret, decrepit shed, to keep, and feed, and touch, and love.

  Dear God, there was that feeling. That old pneumonia feeling. The one I could not face.

  I stumbled down the shallow river, against the current, my own dread getting the better of me. It occurred to me they would have been waiting a long time for me to leave. They would have been waiting inside the trees just at the edge of the woods, watching and waiting, like they had been the night they shot her.

  Did she hear something from her bed, through that open window, as she had before? Did she put down her book, her piece of toast, and go outside to see?

  It was as if she was expecting them all along, all those years she lay waiting beside me in our bed.

  I staggered through the woods, and as the woods got darker, so too did the edges of my mind, where the e
mpty face of the fourth boy, which had abated somewhat the last few weeks, was pressing against my vision now with all its force. I could barely think. I stopped and leaned my hand against a tree, as if some secret door might open and reveal her.

  “Think,” I said aloud. “Dear God, please think.”

  The closest house belonged to a fellow trapper, Clyde Moor, a short red-haired drunk prone to cruelty and theft. On two occasions I had found several of the traps I had set on my land empty and bloody, and I knew, from the difference in our methods—Clyde Moor’s and mine—that they’d been sprung and reset, the pelt and all the rest of it, stolen.

  I had passed onto his land. I was careful only to walk in the water, for in my panic I had neglected to bring a lantern, and thus would not be able to detect, as I would in daylight, his traps set beneath the leaves.

  He was the father of the red-haired boy, the young one, who pet the skull and held the pie tight against himself. It was a long way to his house, as no road connected our properties. They had no association with town. Only the boy brought the pelts to sell. I had seen his father only once. We had met on the line between our lands.

  Soon I saw the light in the window of the trapper’s house. Out of breath, I paused and looked inside, where husband, wife, son, and baby ate a late dinner of potatoes and broth. Their dirt floor was nearly black with what looked to be coffee grounds.

  I knocked. And when they did not answer, I opened the door. “I’m looking for my wife,” I said. Clyde Moor, drunk, jumped up from the table, ready to fight.

  “She isn’t here,” he said.

  “Ask your boy if she is,” I said to him, then both of us looked at the child, who at that moment set down his spoon and widened his eyes beneath that cap of blazing hair.

  “What’s he got to do with it,” said Clyde, coming toward me.

  I stood my ground. “Ask him,” I said, and to my surprise, that’s what Clyde did.

  “What have you got to do with this man’s wife?”

  The boy shook his head. “Nothing!”

  “Except that you shot her,” I said.