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

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

  * * *

  —

  The corral’s feeder faced a passageway along the edge of Ward’s equipment barn. I checked on the buffalo every now and again when I came by to pick up or return an implement. It goes without saying that I kept my distance. The increasingly menacing demeanor of the pair discouraged me from getting too close, even while outside the corral, and from standing directly in front of them. Every time, they would move to the back of the corral, as if they knew I was going to watch them. Sometimes, if he was there, Ward came out and we would stand off to the side and discuss how much they had grown: Their knee joints were now more proportionate to the rest of their bodies. Their hair was luxurious and had begun to change to the straw color I remembered seeing on adults.

  After three months had passed, I was returning a disc I’d borrowed. I parked and unhooked it from my tractor, then walked over to the corral. Ward joined me. He was just back from Montana, as I would learn. We came up the alleyway that fronted the corral and surprised the buffalo as they ate out of the feeder. They turned their heads and pulled free, banging against the steel diagonals. The bigger one backed clear up to the rear of the corral, not taking its eyes off us. The other looped around and ended up standing next to the first one, facing us in the same posture and attitude. In this manner they may have granted us our position of dominance, but suddenly the bigger one whipped its head back and forth, giving notice that it could break away in a flash, trampling whatever stood in its way. The other was sure to follow. Instinctively, Ward and I moved to the side, increasing the angulation between us and them.

  A few weeks before, Ward had put a medicine ball in the corral. “To give them something to do,” he had said. At first, still mischievous on occasion, they would lapse into a playful mode, kicking or butting the ball, but soon they stopped doing that. Now the ball lay flattened in a corner.

  Irene, meanwhile, had come to fear the very sight of the buffalo. I heard her telling Ward that they darkened the whole yard, that their ominous presence overshadowed everything: the arena, the birthing corral, the haystacks, the fenced-off portion where the cows were to be kept when they returned, the repair shed, even where she parked the car at the back of the house.

  “The truth is,” Ward told me, “I’ve grown kind of fond of those buffalo. I wish I could keep them, but I’d have to build a fence that would hold them. If they broke loose, they’d probably run into a car, or vanish into the fires. Somebody could get hurt. And I’d be liable for any damage they caused. Like the Kalispels. I figure they ended up paying for all the destroyed fences and that barn.”

  I didn’t say anything, wondering whether Ward might be edging toward the same thrall that had sucked Leland in.

  The fires were rapaciously feeding on one another: the Okanogan Complex, the Chelan Complex, the Stevens County Complex, the Clark Fork Complex. There were more fires in Oregon, and it appeared that California was in the throes of suffocation, about to be wiped out. The Kalispel buffalo had run free for a month or so, but just as the media began to pay less attention to them, somebody reported that they’d been sighted way up north, vanishing into the smoke of the Okanogan Complex. Ten days later, four buffalo carcasses were found. Their feet had been burned clean off to the ankles and the bodies charred. The rest of the herd was never found, but it was hoped that they had made it to the border and tricked their way through the fancy gates and underpasses for elk, moose, sheep, and deer that the Canadians had constructed along their highways.

  Ward took out a pocketknife and began whittling a stick. He leaned forward and contemplated the buffalo. The bigger one lifted its head, though otherwise they both stood frozen in their spots, eyes filled with abject distrust.

  “Just look at the black pelage on their underbellies and the insides of their thighs. And the tail tufts,” Ward mused. “And the thighs themselves, how big they’ve become. The humps beginning to fill out, the spikes starting to curve inward.”

  * * *

  —

  He said he had traveled to Montana for Irene’s sake, to check on Jenna for her, to see whether Jenna and Leland needed bailing out yet. He said he guessed they didn’t. Leland still wanted the buffalo, but hadn’t done anything about getting a place ready to keep them. “I don’t understand it,” Ward said. “Does he really want them? He’ll have to feed them too, you know, and watch after them.”

  There were other people living there, what Ward said Leland called a coven. They all inhabited a large underground complex dug into a hill. “It seems to me that they are plain old survivalists,” he said, “but Jenna insists they have a new faith. She calls it Natural New Paganism. She showed me an altar with candles, a statue, and a set of buffalo horns.” Ward shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He described the underground complex that was meant to protect them from fallout, from anything but a direct nuclear hit. The entryways were built around ninety-degree corners with two scallop-shaped constructions engineered to deflect blast concussions. “I have to admit it’s impressive,” he said. “They’re pretty carefully installed.”

  He hunkered down and used his stick to draw a picture in the dust. “First you have a passage coming face-to-face with a large scallop, like an abalone shell placed on a smaller abalone shell. Then that one is placed on a smaller one yet, and on and on.” Ward drew it in the dust. “They’re beautiful in a way, made from cast steel coated with ceramic.” He stood up beside me and gazed down at his drawing.

  I saw that Ward was confused. He wasn’t sure how to pit his old-school perceptions against a meticulous installation that was to serve as a last line of defense against the end of the world.

  Ward gave a detailed account of how the group fed themselves. They hunted deer, antelope, elk, and chukar. But they had underground nurseries too, and grow lights powered by generators, which in turn were powered by a methane well, the whole business run by a computer system. Leland told him they were developing retractable antiaircraft guns, modifying them to shoot down the drones they believed were sure to come.

  “It’s their new thing,” Ward said. “The hill they built the compound on had piles of stones—they call them petroforms. Jenna says they align with celestial plotting. She was talkative for once, walking me around, showing me how the petroforms line up with constellations and stars: Beta Orionis, Alpha Orionis, the North Star, Ursa Minor. There are also circles of stones that the Blackfeet used in the old days to weigh down the skirts of their tepees. The Blackfoot people were chosen. They knew. That’s what Jenna says. She believes in what she calls the Rule of Three, or some such nonsense. The energy one puts into the world will be returned threefold. Whatever.”

  Ward gave me his characteristic squint. “I don’t know what it means. Then she says, ‘One can only hope.’ Hope! Can you believe it?”

  * * *

  —

  This is the seventh thing. I did not witness it, but was informed of it by Ward when I met him in his farmyard.

  A couple of weeks after his return from Montana, he got up one morning and went out to discover the two buffalo outside the pen, right there in the turnaround in his driveway. He saw the gate to the corral open behind them: not broken, he said, just jimmied open. He made an effort to shy them that way, shifting his weight and lifting his arms, but the two kept advancing toward him, and the one lowered its head again.

  He backed away and headed cautiously for the open bay door of his repair shed, where he kept his .30-06 rifle. The buffalo held their ground and turned with Ward as if he were a gudgeon and they the pins, or like a large fan, they the blades and he the nubbin. He remembered marveling at how smoothly they moved, supplely, as if they were lubricated. He slipped through the doorway, took up his gun, and saw the two had followed him to the doorway and stood in the opening. They were silent.

  Again, he made a last attempt to shy them in the direction of the corral, but they wouldn’
t budge. “I saw I had no choice,” he said. “First I shot the biggest one, the more aggressive. It went down, and the second turned tail up the driveway and toward the road. It reached the turnaround, right up there,” he said, gesturing. “It stopped to look back, and I shot it. It went down, too. I got my tractor with the loader, moved them next to each other, field-dressed them, then loaded them in my truck and took them to the butcher.”

  I looked up the driveway. A monolithic cloud of black smoke roiled in the sky and blotted out the sun beyond the trees. Dark, suddenly it was dark as twilight, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. Ward’s breath shuddered and I could have sworn that his eyes filled with tears. “I hated to do it. What other alternative did I have? I called Leland and Jenna to let them know.” He paused, then looked up at the smoke and laughed grimly. “Leland said he wishes I’d of checked with him first.”

  That was nearly a month ago, and here I sat at Ward and Irene’s kitchen table. Irene had got up to spoon the chunks and sauce from the buffalo tongues into jars, carefully place the jars inside the pressure cooker, and put the lid and the weight on. The cooker began to hiss. I imagined the pieces of buffalo tongue talking inside there, as if the chunks had recomposed to tell their version of the story.

  Irene spooned the last of the meat into the remaining jars. She would have to do two processes to finish. I finally came to recognize the ingredient I hadn’t been able to place: anise. It gave the meat an almost metallic scent. “Anise,” I said. “You put that in too.”

  Ward had pulled the manual back to him and was studying it. He said, “You’ll probably have to check the play in the spindle. Like most everything else, they didn’t think too hard about taking things apart when they first put them together. It seems to be the way of the world, organized just fine so long as it keeps on running.” He evinced a faint smile, as if he were being preyed on. “When something breaks and you have to stop and fix it, I guess you’re in all kinds of trouble anymore.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but fixing things is what you’re best at. I can tell it gives you pleasure.”

  Irene turned to me, running one hand across her apron.

  “Yes,” she said. “Anise. We’ll keep a few jars and give the rest to Jenna if she wants to come visit. Leland be damned, he can take what’s frozen if he wants. But buffalo tongues are a great delicacy, you know. Maybe that will make Jenna happy.”

  Moira McCavana

  No Spanish

  I

  WHEN I WAS TWELVE, when we still lived in that small, moldering farmhouse in the hills behind Guernica, my father outlawed Spanish from our household. Like a dictator, he stood at the head of our family table and yelled, “No Spanish, NO SPANISH!” waving his arms as though he were helming his own national uprising. “We will all forget about that language, is that clear?”

  These demands, of course, he had delivered in Spanish, though not one of us had rushed to correct him. It was evidence that he, like us, spoke nothing else. To abandon Spanish would be to abandon the language in which all of our well-intentioned but still tenuous relationships had been built. It was like removing our field of gravity, our established mode of relating to each other. Without Spanish, it seemed entirely possible that one of us might spin out into space. How were we supposed to tell each other practical things? Keep out of that corner; I’ve just spilled water and it’s slippery. Hold the door; I have too many things in my arms. Please, just leave me alone. Please, don’t even touch me.

  It’s obvious to me now that for my father, this impulsive vow to speak only in Basque functioned as a sort of double agent: a radical act of political defiance masquerading as farce. When his lips split in a wily smile and his eyes flickered, I felt as though he were signing us up for a ridiculous play. On that first evening I was already calculating how soon I might be able to drop out.

  Several days into our experiment, when he banished my brother to sleep outside for speaking Spanish offhandedly, we still didn’t really believe him. My mother and I watched in silence as he pulled my brother’s bedding from his mattress, and then we all followed him around to the back of the house. Until he set my brother’s comforter down on the grass, his pillow at the head of it, I had been sure that he’d been joking.

  Julen’s makeshift bed that night had been placed right beneath my window, and I remember sticking my head out over him when we had all gone off to bed. Because my parents’ bedroom was next to mine, we couldn’t risk speaking, so instead we exchanged a series of faces, beginning with Our father has gone crazy. Later, after we ran out of faces to make, and after a long period of just staring at each other, he fell asleep. At some point, the moon came across his face, and I watched for a while as all the lines of approaching adulthood became more pronounced. My brother was older than me by seven years and three months. Sometimes I wished that he were my father.

  My brother was allowed to sleep in the house the next night, but his slipup had signaled to my father that we would need to actually learn our new language if we were ever to abandon Spanish successfully. On Monday, he drove us all into Guernica to go to the market, and there he led us straight to a booth in the back where a pair of homely older women stood behind a table piled high with antique electronics. We were all embarrassed by the way my father, in his fledgling Basque, bartered with the women over the price of various old radios that he held up before them.

  “Three!” he proclaimed, with a rusted radio in hand, and one of the women responded with a sentence that sounded like pure static.

  My father deflated a little. “Four?” he asked, innocently.

  Eventually one of the women said to him, “Thank you, sir, for your efforts, but maybe we should stick to Spanish for the moment.” She gestured to the radio and the few coins I held in my hand to pay for it. “For doing this.”

  “Me cago en Dios,” my father had hissed without thinking about it, and immediately he brought his hands up to his mouth in embarrassment—not for the swear (“I shit on God”), but for his instinctive deference to our banned language. The light in his eyes sputtered out and he fled, walking hurriedly around all of the vendors, picking his feet up high to avoid crates of string beans and stacks of folded used clothing. We had to pay for the radio for him, choosing the most modern-looking one, and letting the woman pick through our change, until she had collected what she determined it cost.

  I think even my mother must have felt like an orphan standing before those women, disturbed as we were by the momentary loss of my father and what looked like the permanent loss of a language that we had never realized we might have loved.

  * * *

  —

  I should be clear about this: to speak Basque was against the law. Of course, in some towns it was flaunted freely, even in the street. There was a certain social capital attached to speaking Basque, and an additional bonus, which I’m sure would translate into any language, if you could do so without giving a fuck. But it was still, in the eyes of our ruthless leader, illegal. And how strictly the ban was reinforced varied with the ferocity of the local Civil Guard. In some towns, it was a hand to the throat. Elsewhere, your head into water. Across the river, near where my mother used to take us swimming, you stopped going to school, or work, then church, then disappeared. But I didn’t know much about that when we were back in the farmhouse. On the day of his big announcement, and in one of our last conversations together in Spanish, my father explained to me only the simple overarching facts: our ruthless leader was General Franco. Our Spain—and we—were his.

  “Franco doesn’t want us to speak our own language because he says that in Spain, everyone should speak Spanish,” my father had explained.

  “Well, that makes a little bit of sense,” I said. He recoiled. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Ana, we are our own people.”

  “Okay.”

  “A lot of peopl
e think that we should be our own country.”

  “Okay.” At this point he was no longer waving his arms. He was sitting down at his place at the head of the table and was crumpling and uncrumpling the napkin in front of him.

  “We can’t give our language over to them,” he said. He was bent over the table, all the earlier bravado drained from his body. My brother and my mother stayed, petrified, in their seats, but I went to my father and put my arms around him.

  After a while I said, “It’s just that it’s hard to feel like it’s my language since I’ve never spoken it, Papi.”

  My father kissed the crown of my head and thumbed his clumsy fingers through my hair. I watched my mother and Julen fidget nervously across the table, and in that moment I felt a little like a victor for the rest of us. Then my father brought his hand to the back of my neck and squeezed it, a sign of affection that I always pretended to hate. We had our routine: each time he did it I would bob my head furiously, attempting to free myself, while he would let out a series of squawks, transforming me into some kind of theatrical bird. If I was feeling generous, I would thrash around a bit more for his entertainment.