100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  At an early age, Jude learned to keep a calm heart when touching fanged things. He was barely walking when his mother came into the kitchen to find a coral snake chasing its red and yellow tail around his wrist. His father was watching from across the room, laughing.

  His mother was a Yankee, a Presbyterian. She was always weary; she battled the house’s mold and humidity and devilish reek of snakes without help. His father wouldn’t allow a black person through his doors, and they didn’t have the money to hire a white woman. Jude’s mother was afraid of scaly creatures and sang hymns in the attempt to keep them out. When she was pregnant with his sister one August night, she came into the bathroom to take a cool bath and, without her glasses, missed the three-foot albino alligator her husband had stored in the bathtub. The next morning, she was gone. She returned a week later. And after Jude’s sister was born dead, a perfect petal of a baby, his mother never stopped singing under her breath.

  Noise of the war grew louder. At last, it became impossible to ignore. Jude was two. His mother pressed his father’s new khaki suit and then Jude’s father’s absence filled the house with a kind of cool breeze. He was flying cargo planes in France. Jude thought of scaly creatures flapping great wings midair, his father angrily riding.

  While Jude napped the first day they were alone in the house, his mother tossed all of the jars of dead snakes into the swamp and neatly beheaded the living ones with a hoe. She bobbed her hair with gardening shears. Within a week, she had moved them ninety miles to the beach. When she thought he was asleep on the first night in the new house, she went down to the water’s edge in the moonlight and screwed her feet into the sand. It seemed that the glossed edge of the ocean was chewing her up to her knees. Jude held his breath, anguished. One big wave rolled past her shoulders, and when it receded, she was whole again.

  This was a new world, full of dolphins that slid up the coastline in shining arcs. Jude loved the wedges of pelicans ghosting overhead, the mad dig after periwinkles that disappeared deeper into the wet sand. He kept count in his head when they hunted for them, and when they came home, he told his mother that they had dug up 461. She looked at him unblinking behind her glasses and counted the creatures aloud.

  When she finished, she washed her hands for a long time at the sink. “You like numbers,” she said at last, turning around.

  “Yes,” he said. And she smiled and a kind of gentle shine came from her that startled him. He felt it seep into him, settle in his bones. She kissed him on the crown and put him to bed, and when he woke in the middle of the night to find her next to him, he tucked his hand under her chin where it stayed until morning.

  He began to sense that the world worked in ways beyond him, that he was only grasping at threads of a far greater fabric. Jude’s mother started a bookstore. Because women couldn’t buy land in Florida for themselves, his uncle, a roly-poly little man who looked nothing like Jude’s father, bought the store with her money and signed the place over to her. His mother began wearing suits that showed her décolletage and taking her glasses off before boarding the streetcars, so that the eyes she turned to the public were soft and somewhat misty. Instead of singing Jude to sleep as she had in the snake house, she read to him. She read Shakespeare, Hopkins, Donne, Rilke, and he fell asleep with their cadences and the sea’s slow rhythm entwined in his head.

  Jude loved the bookstore; it was a bright place that smelled of new paper. Lonely war brides came with their prams and left with an armful of Modern Library classics, sailors on leave wandered in only to exit, charmed, with sacks of books pressed to their chest. After hours, his mother would turn off the lights and open the back door to the black folks who waited patiently there, the dignified man in his watch cap who loved Galsworthy, the fat woman who worked as a maid and read a novel every day. “Your father would squeal. Well, foo on him,” his mother said to Jude, looking so fierce she erased the last traces in his mind of the tremulous woman she’d been.

  One morning just before dawn, he was alone on the beach when he saw a vast metallic breaching a hundred yards offshore. The submarine looked at him with its single periscope eye and slipped silently under again. Jude told nobody. He kept this dangerous knowledge inside him where it tightened and squeezed, but where it couldn’t menace the greater world.

  Jude’s mother brought in a black woman named Sandy to help her with housework and to watch Jude while she was at the store. Sandy and his mother became friends, and some nights he would awaken to laughter from the veranda and come out to find his mother and Sandy in the night breeze off the ocean. They drank sloe gin fizzes and ate lemon cake, which Sandy was careful to keep on hand, even though by then sugar was getting scarce. They let him have a slice, and he’d fall asleep on Sandy’s broad lap, sweetness souring on his tongue and in his ears the exhalation of the ocean, the sound of women’s voices.

  At six, he discovered multiplication all by himself, crouched over an anthill in the hot sun. If twelve ants left the anthill per minute, he thought, that meant 720 departures per hour, an immensity of leaving, of return. He ran into the bookstore, wordless with happiness. When he buried his head in his mother’s lap, the women chatting with her at the counter mistook his sobbing for sadness. “I’m sure the boy misses his father,” one lady said, intending to be kind.

  “No,” his mother said. She alone understood his bursting heart and scratched his scalp gently. But something shifted in Jude; and he thought with wonder of his father, of whom his mother had spoken so rarely in all these years that the man himself had faded. Jude could barely recall the rasp of scale on scale and the darkness of the cracker house in the swamp, curtains closed to keep out the hot, stinking sun.

  But it was as if the well-meaning lady had summoned him, and Jude’s father came home. He sat, immense and rough-cheeked, in the middle of the sunroom. Jude’s mother sat nervously opposite him on the divan, angling her knees away from his. The boy played quietly with his wooden train on the floor. Sandy came in with fresh cookies, and when she went back into the kitchen, his father said something so softly Jude couldn’t catch it. His mother stared at his father for a long time, then got up and went to the kitchen, and the screen door slapped, and the boy never saw Sandy again.

  While his mother was gone, Jude’s father said, “We’re going home.”

  Jude couldn’t look at his father. The space in the air where he existed was too heavy and dark. He pushed his train around the ankle of a chair. “Come here,” his father said, and slowly the boy stood and went to his father’s knee.

  A big hand flicked out, and Jude’s face burned from ear to mouth. He fell down but didn’t cry out. He sucked in blood from his nose and felt it pool behind his throat.

  His mother ran in and picked him up. “What happened?” she shouted, and his father said in his cold voice, “Boy’s timid. Something’s wrong with him.”

  “He keeps things in. He’s shy,” said his mother, and carried Jude away. He could feel her trembling as she washed the blood from his face. His father came into the bathroom and she said through her teeth, “Don’t you ever touch him again.”

  He said, “I won’t have to.”

  His mother lay beside Jude until he fell asleep, but he woke to the moon through the automobile’s windshield and his parents’ jagged profiles staring ahead into the tunnel of the dark road.

  The house by the swamp filled with snakes again. The uncle who had helped his mother with the bookstore was no longer welcome, although he was the only family his father had. Jude’s mother cooked a steak and potatoes every night but wouldn’t eat. She became a bone, a blade. She sat in her housedress on the porch rocker, her hair slick with sweat. He stood near her and spoke the old sonnets into her ear. She pulled him to her side and put her face between his shoulder and neck and when she blinked, her wet eyelashes tickled him, and he knew not to move away.

  His father had begun, on the side, selling snakes to zoos and universities. He vanished for two, three nights in a row, an
d returned with clothes full of smoke and sacks of rattlers and blacksnakes. He’d been gone for two nights when his mother packed her blue cardboard suitcase with Jude’s things on one side and hers on the other. She said nothing, but gave herself away with humming. They walked together over the dark roads and sat waiting for the train for a long time. The platform was empty; theirs was the last train before the weekend. She handed him caramels to suck, and he felt her whole body tremble through the thigh he pressed hard against hers.

  So much had built up in him while they waited that it was almost a relief when the train came sighing into the station. His mother stood and reached for Jude, and he smiled into her soft answering smile. Then Jude’s father stepped into the lights and scooped him up. His body under Jude’s was taut.

  His mother did not look at her husband or her son. She seemed a statue, thin and pale. At last, when the conductor said “All aboard!” she gave an awful strangled sound and rushed through the train’s door. The train hooted and slowly moved off. Though Jude shouted, it vanished his mother into the darkness without stopping.

  Then they were alone, Jude’s father and he, in the house by the swamp.

  Language wilted between them. Jude was the one who took up the sweeping and scrubbing, who made their sandwiches for supper. When his father was gone, he’d open the windows to let out some of the reptile rot. His father ripped up his mother’s lilies and roses and planted mandarins and blueberries, saying that fruit brought birds and birds brought snakes. The boy walked three miles to school where he told nobody he already knew numbers better than the teachers. He was small, but nobody messed with him. On his first day, when a big ten-year-old tried to sneer at his clothes, he leapt at him with a viciousness he’d learned from watching rattlesnakes and made the big boy’s head bleed. The others avoided him. He was an in-between creature, motherless but not fatherless, stunted and ratty-clothed like a poor boy but a professor’s son, always correct with answers when the teachers called on him, but never offering a word on his own. The others kept their distance. Jude played by himself, or with one of the succession of puppies that his father brought home. Inevitably, the dogs would run down to the edge of the swamp, and one of the fourteen- or fifteen-foot alligators would get them.

  Jude’s loneliness grew, became a living creature that shadowed him and wandered off only when he was in the company of his numbers. More than marbles or tin soldiers, they were his playthings. More than sticks of candy or plums, they made his mouth water. As messy as the world was, the numbers, predictable and polite, brought order.

  When he was ten, a short, round man that the boy found vaguely familiar stopped him on the street and pushed a brown-paper package into his arms. The man pressed a finger to his lips, minced away. At home in his room at night, Jude unwrapped the books. One was a collection of Frost’s poems. The other was a book of geometry, the world whittled down until it became a series of lines and angles.

  He looked up and morning was sunshot through the laurel oaks. More than the feeling that the book had taught him geometry was the feeling that it had showed the boy something that had been living inside him, undetected until now.

  There was also a letter. It was addressed to him in his mother’s round hand. When he sat in school dividing the hours until he could be free, when he made the supper of tuna sandwiches, when he ate with his father who conducted to Benny Goodman on the radio, when he brushed his teeth and put on pajamas far too small for him, the four perfect right angles of the letter called to him. He put it under his pillow, unopened. For a week, the letter burned under everything, the way the sun on a hot, overcast day was hidden but always present.

  At last, having squeezed everything to know out of the geometry book, he put the still-sealed envelope inside and taped up the covers and hid it between his mattress and box springs. He checked it every night after saying his prayers and was comforted into sleep. When, one night, he saw the book was untaped and the letter gone, he knew his father had found it and nothing could be done.

  The next time he saw the little round man on the street, he stopped him. “Who are you?” he asked, and the man blinked and said, “Your uncle.” When Jude said nothing, the man threw his arms up and said, “Oh, honey!” and made as if to hug him, but Jude had already turned away.

  Inexorably, the university grew. It swelled and expanded under a steady supply of air conditioning, swallowing the land between it and the swamp until the university’s roads were built snug against his father’s land. Dinners, now, were full of his father’s invective: did the university not know that his snakes needed a home, that this expanse of sandy acres was one of the richest reptile havens in North America? He would never sell, never. He would kill to keep it. Safe and whole.

  While his father spoke, the traitor in Jude dreamed of the sums his father had been offered. So simple, it seemed, to make the money grow. Unlike other kinds of numbers, money was already self-fertilized; it would double and double again until at last it made a roiling mass. If you had enough of it, Jude knew, nobody would ever have to worry again.

  When Jude was thirteen, he discovered the university library. One summer day, he looked up from the pile of books where he’d been contentedly digging—trigonometry, statistics, calculus, whatever he could find—to see his father opposite him. Jude didn’t know how long he’d been there. It was a humid morning, and even in the library the air was stifling, but his father looked leathered, cool in his sunbeaten shirt and red neckerchief.

  “Come on, then,” he said. Jude followed, feeling ill. They rode in the pickup for two hours before Jude understood that they were going snaking together. This was his first time. When he was smaller, he’d begged to go, but every time, his father had said no, it was too dangerous, and Jude never argued that letting a boy live for a week alone in a house full of venom and guns and questionable wiring was equally unsafe.

  His father pitched the tent and they ate beans from a can in the darkness. They lay side by side in their sleeping bags until his father said, “You’re good at math.”

  Jude said, “I am,” though with such understatement that it felt like a lie. Something shifted between them, and they fell asleep to a silence that was softer at its edges.

  His father woke Jude before dawn and he stumbled out of the tent to grainy coffee with condensed milk and hot hush puppies. His father was after moccasins, and he gave Jude his waders and himself trudged through the swamp, protected only by jeans and boots. He’d been bitten so often, he said, he no longer brought antivenom. He didn’t need it. When he handed his son the stick and gestured at a black slash sunning on a rock, the boy had to imagine the snake as a line in space, only connecting point to point, to be able to grasp it. The snake spun from the number one to the number eight to a defeated three and he deposited it in the sack.

  They worked in silence all day, and when Jude climbed back up into the truck at the end of the day, his legs shook from the effort it took him to be brave. “So now you know,” his father said in a strange holy voice, and Jude was too tired to take the steps necessary, then, and ever afterward until he was his father’s own age, to understand.

  His father began storing the fodder mice in Jude’s closet, and to avoid the doomed squeaks, Jude joined the high school track team. He found his talent in the two-hundred-meter hurdles. When he came home with a trophy from the State Games, his father held the trophy for a moment, then put it down.

  “Different if Negroes were allowed to run,” he said.

  Jude said nothing, and his father said, “Lord knows I’m no lover of the race, but your average Negro could outrun any white boy I know.”

  Jude again said nothing but avoided his father and didn’t make him an extra steak when he cooked himself dinner. He still wasn’t talking to him when his father went on an overnight trip and didn’t come back for a week. Jude was used to it and didn’t get alarmed until the money ran out and his father still didn’t come home.

  He alerted the secreta
ry at the university who sent out a group of graduate students to where Jude’s father had been seen. They found the old man in his tent, bloated, his tongue protruding from a face turned black; and Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you.

  At the funeral, out of a twisted loyalty for his father, he avoided his uncle. He didn’t know if his mother knew she’d been widowed; he thought probably not. He told nobody at school that his father had died. He thought of himself as an island in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of seeing another island in the distance, or even a ship passing by.

  He lived alone in the house. He let the mice die, then tossed the snakes in high twisting parabolas into the swamp. He scrubbed the house until it gleamed and the stench of reptiles was gone, then applied beeswax, paint, polish until it was a house fit for his mother. He waited. She didn’t come.

  The day he graduated from high school, he packed his clothes and sealed up the house and took the train to Boston. He’d heard from his uncle that his mother lived there and so he’d applied and been accepted to college in the city. She owned a bookstore on a small, dark street. It took Jude a month of slow passing to gather the courage to go in. She was either in the back, or shelving books, or smiling in conversation with somebody, and he’d have a swim of darkness in his gut and know that it was fate telling him that today was not the day. When he went in, it was only because she was alone at the register, and her face—pouchy, waxy—was so sad in repose that the sight of it washed all thought from his head.

  She rose with a wordless cry and flew to him. He held her stoically. She smelled like cats, and her clothes flopped on her as if she’d lost a lot of weight quickly. He told her about his father dying and she nodded and said, “I know. I dreamed it.”