The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  His life would have been simple if he had been only lazy—or, as he himself might have said if he had thought to say it, only a lover of freedom. But along with the wish to avoid work, his mental development brought him also to the wish to be useful to his parents and to work well, especially if an adult dignity attached to the work. And so he was a two-minded boy.

  And so he grew up into usefulness and a growing and lasting pride in being useful, but also into a more or less parallel love of adventure and a talent for shirking. Throughout his youth he remained, with approximate willingness, under the governance of his father, a man famously humorous and much smarter than he allowed his children to know. He managed Billy by demand, by challenge, and by pretending not to know what he knew he could not prevent.

  If there were times when Grover kept Billy pretty steadily busy, there were also times when he did not. When Billy was not at work, he would be out of sight and free, as Grover expected and more or less intended. And so Billy got around. He hunted and fished and trapped mostly by himself, and with his friends he roamed about. There were few acres within a walk of his house that Billy had not put his foot on by the time he was twelve years old. His mind was free and alert in those days. He saw many things then that education and ambition would teach him to overlook. By the time he was fourteen he knew familiarly every aspect, prospect, and place in the neighborhood of Port William.

  He knew, for example, that the Birds Branch road curves down the hill past the old Levers place, where his family were tenants for many years, and goes on down and becomes fairly level and straight where the bottomland along the branch begins to widen and open into the river valley. In the summer of 1935, the year Billy would become fourteen at the end of September, an extremely brushy fencerow ran along the side of the road, and in this fencerow there was a gate, never shut, that led into a pasture abandoned just long enough to be covered with tall weeds and blackberry briars and so far just a scattering of seedling trees. If a gentleman from down at Hargrave wanted to conduct some business strictly private, he could turn his car through that gate, drive a hundred or so feet parallel to the inside of that fencerow, and become almost magically invisible to anybody driving a car or a team and wagon or even walking along the road on the outside.

  He could be somewhat less invisible to a boy who would be across the road, fishing in the Blue Hole on Birds Branch, would hear the car slow down, turn in at the gate, and presently stop.

  Now who could have a reason to drive into that forsaken place in a car? And what might be the reason? And, to boot, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Billy of course wanted to know. He stuck the end of his fishing pole firmly into the ground and ventured across the road and through the gate. From there he could see the top of the car shining between the lowest leaves of the trees in the fencerow and the tops of the tallest weeds. He thought he could hear voices, perhaps a laugh, but a breeze was stirring the foliage and he was not sure. His feet were itching to creep up close enough to become informed. But the same itch made him cautious, even a little afraid. The business at hand, whatever it was, was strictly for grownups. And William Franklin Gibbs, among the several other things he was, was a mannerly boy, accustomed to granting respect, not invariably sincere, to grownups. The place, moreover, did not belong to him, nor he to it, a matter that concerned him only after he had become cautious. And he was enough of a hunter by then to know that he could not make his way secretly through the hard-stemmed weeds of the old pasture in broad daylight.

  When he got back to the Blue Hole he saw from the bobbing and darting about of his cork that he had come into good fortune. Presently he drew out a nice sunfish, and for a good while after that his attention was entirely diverted from the mysterious car to the mysterious undersurface of the Blue Hole where sunfish the size of his hand and bigger were expressing their approval of his worms. But when the car’s engine started, quietly enough but loud enough to hear, of course he heard it.

  This time he went no farther than the sort of hedge of leafy bushes and weeds along the roadside. As the car, a nice, new-looking blue car with a long hood, paused before pulling out onto the road, Billy could see the driver plainly through the windshield and then more plainly through the open side window. The man was important-looking, and intentionally so. He wore a dark jacket, white shirt and tie, a perfectly adjusted gray felt hat, eyeglasses, and a neat little mustache. Beside him but well away there was a lady, perhaps also important-looking, whom Billy could see even better. She too was well-dressed. She wore a nice little straw hat and a pair of dark-lensed glasses such as Billy had never seen worn by any woman he knew.

  Billy did not then, nor did he ever, know who the woman was. But he instantly recognized the man as Mr. Forrest La Vere of the Hargrave upper crust, then running for public office. To make sure, as he really did not need to do, Billy waited until the car was well out of sight and then walked not many steps up the road to look at Mr. La Vere’s picture on his campaign poster that was tacked to a big sycamore.

  Billy Gibbs, who did not know what a cynic was, was not a cynic. But he had lived almost fourteen years within the farm life, social life, conversation, influence, and atmosphere of the Port William neighborhood, and he did not know when he had not known, and always a little more, of the ways of the world.

  And so it happened, maybe as a mere coincidence but maybe not, that on the next Sunday afternoon he was again fishing in the Blue Hole. Again he heard the big, quiet car turn in at the open gate into the abandoned field, and this time he did not get up to look.

  Or he did not go to look until the car had again spent its interval behind the bushy fencerow and driven away. And then, having again planted his fishing pole firmly in the earth of the creek bank, he followed the car’s two tracks along the inside of the fencerow to the place where he could see that it had stopped before, and several times more than twice. He saw furthermore that just at the place where the car always stopped there was a stout tree, a box elder, that had grown leaning away from the fencerow into the open sunlight of the old pasture, as such trees do. It was a tree climbable enough, at least for Billy, who aspired to heights and was, if not yet avian as he would become in seven years, at least arboreal.

  Toward the middle of the following Sunday afternoon, and certainly now by no coincidence, the young Mr. Gibbs—Billy Frank to his mother, of whom at the moment he was not thinking—was perched somewhat comfortably on a branch above the lowest branches of the box elder, which would position him, screened by the wider-spreading branch below, just about exactly over the roof of the big blue car. And when it came time for the car to arrive, here it came, and it stopped where it always had stopped before.

  Mr. La Vere stepped out, took off his jacket and placed it, neatly folded, on the hood of the car. He then went around and removed the back seat, placing it with some care on the ground and within the car’s shadow. He and the lady sat down side by side upon it.

  What followed Billy had seen enacted by cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, dogs, housecats, chickens, turkeys, guineas, ducks, geese, pigeons, sparrows, and, by great good fortune he was sure, a pair of snakes. And so he was not surprised but only astonished to be confirmed in his suspicion that the same ceremony could be performed by humans.

  And he certainly was getting his eyes full, except that the roof of the car was a little in the way, and there was yet a detail or two that he needed to study in case he might himself some day be called upon to assume the role of Mr. La Vere. He ooched therefore several more inches out along the limb and leaned ever so carefully a few more inches still farther out. And then he heard a crack that entirely distracted his attention from the drama below.

  It was not a warning crack. The box elder being a brittle, humorless, unforgiving tree, the branch Billy was sitting on had no sooner cracked than it broke off near the trunk. Billy redoubled his hold on the branch above, which, with utter indifference to his great need and with a crack of its own, came loose in his hands, letti
ng him down with some force upon the branch below, which, with the loudest and most eloquent of the three cracks, also broke and went down. To the Honorable Forrest La Vere, thus rudely interrupted in his devotion, it must have seemed that he had been assaulted by a flying brushpile, fully leafed and unwilted, with a boy inside it in a hurry to get out.

  Billy came down perhaps a dozen feet in more or less the posture of an airborne flying squirrel, and landed squarely on top of Mr. La Vere. He lost no time in disentangling himself from the various limbs, and he was on his feet, running hard, no doubt before Mr. La Vere could complete the necessary change of mind.

  But the force of Billy’s descent had been considerably mitigated by the intervening small branches and foliage. The damage suffered by Mr. La Vere having thus been about entirely limited to his dignity and peace of mind, he too was very soon up and running. Although he had reached the far side of midlife, Mr. La Vere was lean, evidently in good condition, well warmed up, clearly unresigned to second place, and his legs were longer by several inches than those of Billy Gibbs, who was after all still a growing boy.

  Never before had Billy been obliged to think while running. But he thought then, surprised that he could do it, and he thought well. Like a hard-pressed rabbit, he had at first run for the nearest cover, heading up the hill toward the woods, but then, like a clever fox, he turned along the slope toward a thriving blackberry patch that had laid its tangles across the old pasture from one side to the other. This decision was costly to Billy, for without much damaging his clothes the barbed thorns, that snatched at his sleeves and pant legs only momentarily, clawed long bloody scratches onto his skin, but they touched Mr. La Vere’s imagination several seconds before he reached them. He was not dressed for briars. Taking care never to look back, Billy sped freely out of sight.

  For three whole years, while Billy grew into wholehearted envy, not of Mr. La Vere’s ladyfriend, but of his automobile, and while he watched the tops of young cedars and walnuts and wild plums and redbuds emerge from the weeds and briars of the abandoned field, he alone of all the people in Port William and the country round about knew the story which, after Wheeler Catlett came to know it, would be known as The Great Interruption. And likewise no doubt, of all in the urbs and suburbs of Hargrave, the only people who knew that story were the Honorable Forrest la Vere and the Unknown Lady.

  The story must have laid on Billy Gibbs’s mind with some weight, the more as he grew into the sophistication truly to appreciate it. He came to see it, or to imagine it, both as himself involved and as himself watching as from a higher limb. As it became more coherently a story in his mind, sometimes when he was at work alone he would tell it over to himself, beginning with the leaning box elder and how he climbed it and took his seat, and he would laugh out loud, and would laugh more as he elaborated the details and again made them visible to himself.

  One mind, and a boy’s mind at that, finally could not contain such a story. But such a story, a story of such high excellence and so rare, could be turned loose in Port William only with some caution beforehand, as one might release an especially exuberant big dog. Billy found that he was not able to tell the story to anybody unworthy of it, which eliminated forthwith all the boys more or less of his own generation.

  A part of the culture of Port William in those days was a curious division between the men and the boys. The men in their talk of sexual matters were fairly unguarded in the presence at least of the bigger boys. Their conversation did not as a rule include the bigger boys, but it went on without regard or respect to them, leaving them to understand what and as they could. But the boys never talked of what they knew in the presence of the men, though all of them knew the same things. Port William big boys and young men did not want to be caught presuming to be more grown up than they were. It would have been extremely irregular for a boy under twenty, or even twenty-five, to offer a sexual joke or a bit of sexual gossip to an older man. This was, in short, a boundary trespassed by the men regardlessly and often, but never by the boys except by accident, as when Orvie Galingale and Worth Berlew crawled under the hootchy-kootchy tent at the county fair to confront, not, as expected, the intimate revelations of the lady known as Bubbles, but their own fathers, who had paid already, as they thought, to get in.

  Billy was balked also by the fastidiousness of a true critic. The boys he knew were just about uniformly no good as storytellers, which suggested that they would not know a really good story from a pretty good one, and Billy knew he had a really good one. He wanted to tell it to a real storyteller who would recognize its worth. And so he told it to Burley Coulter.

  Burley was a good friend and an old running mate of Billy’s father. Burley and Grover Gibbs were not exactly like-minded, but they knew a lot of the same things, understood each other, and in essential ways depended on each other. And so Burley was in all but blood an uncle to Billy Gibbs. Since before Billy could remember, they had been on good terms. They trusted each other. And so if it should happen one winter night, as it did happen, that just the two of them, Burley Coulter and Billy Gibbs, should be coon hunting on the bluffs along Katy’s Branch, that would be merely in the order of things.

  As a coon hunter, Burley was easily pleased. If it was a good night for hunting and the dogs hunted well, he would be delighted to spend the necessary energy. If for whatever reason the hunting was poor, he would be about equally content to build a fire, sit staring at the blaze, and talk the unhurried talk possible at such times.

  He and Billy had passed maybe an hour, now and again adding a stick or two to a fire large enough to give them its cheerful light and warmth but not too demanding of fuel. They had made the fire beside a large pile of rocks at the edge of a long overgrown tobacco patch. The ground was damp, and the rock pile offered a dry place to sit. They sat somewhat apart so as to face each other. Their talk had lapsed comfortably into silence and revived again two or three times, and finally Billy’s silence was overpowered by the need to tell his story.

  He said, “I’ll tell you something.” And then he said, “But now I don’t want you to tell this to anybody else.”

  “Well,” Burley said, “maybe I won’t.”

  Billy in fact had not expected a better reply. If Burley had been another boy, Billy might have made him swear never to tell. But Burley was a man forty-three years old and Billy only a boy of seventeen. It may have been that Billy didn’t mind much one way or the other. He was after all a two-minded boy.

  Anyhow, he started into his story. Burley listened with what might have been respectful attention until Billy got to the part where he climbed into the box elder and took his seat on the second from the bottom limb and steadied himself by holding to the limb above, and then the big blue car followed its own tracks in from the road and stopped just where it had before, and then Mr. La Vere removed the back seat and situated it on the ground. And that was when Burley leaned back onto the rock pile with his fingers laced behind his head. “Oh good lord!” he said and started laughing.

  If Billy told his story well, and he did tell it very well, that may have owed a good deal to the excellence of his audience. As Billy laid out the details just as he had done when he told the story to himself, and as the details accumulated, Burley’s delight increased and he stopped laughing quietly only to laugh out loud.

  When the story had been told, Burley sat up, thought a while, gazing into the fire, and from time to time laughing again to himself.

  And then he said, “Well!”

  In another little while he said, “Well, you knew the great man by face and name. Did he know you?”

  “I never showed him my face. I had some sense.”

  “A little, I reckon. But you had as much as you needed, and you used it.”

  “Maybe I had even a little bit more than I used.”

  Burley ignored that. He said, “Hang on a minute. If I’ve figured this right, I’m now the fourth person in all creation that knows this story.”

  “
Well, till I told you, I never told it, and I doubt if they ever did. Now don’t you tell anybody else.”

  “You ain’t got a thing to worry about. I ain’t going to tell a soul but your daddy.”

  They both laughed then, for they knew equally that to tell Grover would be to tell Port William. He could have held such a story just about as long as he could hold his breath. And Billy was comfortable enough with that. He was too happy with Burley’s pleasure in the story to want to deny it to others. He was a two-minded boy but purely and truly generous.

  Billy never told the story again. He never needed to. It would be told from then on mainly by Grover and Burley. They were acknowledged storytellers, long practiced, and as they told it they adhered to the outline of Billy’s recital to Burley in the nighttime woods, but they added ever more artistry to the details.

  “He done it, she done it, they done it,” said Grover, who loved grammar mainly for its comedy. “They got entirely incorporated. Yes in-deedy.”

  “They never even shook hands,” Burley said. “They got right into business with their hats on.”

  “Aw yeah,” Grover said, “they went straight to the hemale and the shemale, conjugating that old verb to who’d a thought it.”