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

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

  * * *

  —

  I did see Richard one last time, later that year, in October. It was at Daniel’s funeral. Richard was there, with Eve, supporting her, holding her, like a partner. It seemed strange to me to have done the things people who loved each other did, so often, and for it to seem now like they had never happened. And it seemed strange to me to see him go back to her, to want so little. And what kind of person was Eve to see someone else’s love and agree to see it wasn’t there. But after a while, it didn’t matter to think about it.

  I looked over at the closed casket and thought of Daniel, how he died. He was a strong swimmer, in excellent shape, but it was very cold, he got a cramp, and he drowned. I thought of him and his whole life, how short it was. Forty. That isn’t much time. I was there with him when he loved someone, and he was willing to wait it out. I wondered whether, in life, you get one big role, some message you need to deliver to someone, and when it’s done, it’s time to go. I thought of what Daniel said about tornadoes. He was wrong about me. What he said wasn’t true. We weren’t the same. I did not wait. I am not the kind of person who watches something happen in the distance.

  Daniel’s family and friends stood up and told stories about him. I did not tell mine. It was for no one to know, and I left. I looked back at the black everyone was wearing. I could not tell which one in the crowd was Richard. I was beginning to forget his face.

  * * *

  —

  Once, walking down the street in front of my old building, Richard called out to me. I must have been closing in on eighty then. I looked through him and spun around. I wanted to be in the distance, beautiful and dark, spinning all by myself, in the clear. I didn’t want him to come close. Nothing, not even the call of my name, could make me stop.

  Liza Ward

  The Shrew Tree

  GRETEL’S FATHER did not want her to marry a farmer, but she thought she knew better what was good for her. Anyway, he was an older father who kept to his books, vice principal of the high school in Pattapan County. He had a paunch that draped over his belt and a beard from which flakes of sandwich bread sometimes fluttered away as he spoke, and after he chaperoned the school dance, he would come home with the tip of his necktie soaked in cafeteria punch. Going through her own awkward moments, she found these defects—results of cerebral distractions—especially embarrassing. In the time when her body began to change, strange hairs cropping up, her breasts aching, knocky foal legs starting to fatten, she felt it was some sort of physical betrayal she had committed against herself, coming closer to this humanness.

  Then the boys would pinch her, shoulder her up against the lockers, drop things under her skirt to see how far they could get just a hundred feet from the vice principal’s office as she walked the gauntlet, hugging the line of lockers so close, the locks clocking the metal doors. Nobody feared Vice Principal Varney. Had he administered the willow switch, he might not have been passed over so many times for a promotion. But there it sat, for his whole tenure, in the corner of his sparsely furnished office, untouched, because he could not bring himself to act violently toward anyone.

  Instead, he flushed and stuttered, unsure of his viewpoint, and the troublemakers—young degenerates with questionable futures, he would call them later at the dinner table—always came away with the upper hand. Greasers racing hot rods at the fairground, he meant, or the sons of hired hands who’d spent so much time drifting from town to town, a lack of accountability had been bred right into them. And if, by young degenerate, he did not mean Karl Olson, that did not mean he believed the son of a farmer had a promising future, either.

  Karl wasn’t the kind of boy you noticed. Not at first. He didn’t talk much in class and when he was called on, answered off the cuff, never exactly right nor wrong. He had a sense of what should be said even if he hadn’t done the reading, and he always couched his half answers in “ma’am,” doing just well enough to skate above the line beyond which nobody pushed him. He didn’t have time for reading, or the football squad, either. There were chores after school, and by the time he arrived at the eight o’clock bell, he’d have burned off the fumes of breakfast a long time ago and moved on to a wad of mint gum. He’d been up since five, milking the cows and feeding the horses. You could read industriousness in the faded blue knees of his jeans, in his callused hands so unlike her father’s. Hay and manure, leather harnesses and mint chewing gum. That was the smell of Karl Olson, and sitting in the close bright classroom smudged with chalk dust and the radiator clanking, she tricked herself into thinking those who had no time to think were maybe nobler, that she was closer to the rhythm of something truer and purer whenever Karl Olson was around.

  * * *

  —

  It began that autumn her mother became so ill her father had to lift her from bed and carry her to a hot bath every morning just so she could straighten her knees and uncurl her fists. One September afternoon, Gretel and her father were walking home from school when a robin hopped onto the sidewalk and began fluttering in circles, flapping one wing because the other was gone. Something had torn it off—a high wind, or a hawk, or one of the cats that prowled the widows’ porches in town. There was a seam of blood where the red breast met the brown shoulder feathers, coagulated around a nub of exposed bone. The bird kept trying to launch itself into the air, managing only to lift on the left, the wingless side holding it earthbound. Eyes shining like beads of mercury, it chirped the same note over and over again, a broken wind-up toy of persistence, as if all it had to do was keep trying to fly and eventually the situation would rectify itself.

  “Do you remember that rhyme you were read as a child?” her father said, staring down at the wounded bird just as Karl Olson, who must have been walking ten paces behind them, caught up and stopped on the edge of the curb. “It was in that collection—deckle-edge first edition. Very fine illustrations.” He raised his finger to his larynx and began, in a reedy voice, “Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow—”

  But before he could go on, Karl Olson dropped down to the bird and crushed it with a stone.

  Something surfaced like a swimmer in Gretel at the sound of that smacking, as a single rusty feather fluttered into the street and all the birds in the crack willows stopped chirping in the same instant. Everything shifted, and the word now came into her mind. Now—like wind sweeping through the caverns in her body. Everything slowed except for the sky and the clouds drifting east toward the town green.

  With Karl Olson bent over the stone on one knee in an attitude almost of supplication, she could see how violence had been the only course of action. What had they been thinking they would do with a one-winged bird anyway? Recite a poem over it? Place Cock Robin in a strawberry box and bring him home?

  “No more to see here, Mr. Varney,” Karl said, rising from his knees, dusting the thighs of his blue jeans. “No use in the suffering.”

  * * *

  —

  Mercy killing. That’s what Karl called it. When an animal was suffering the best thing to do was put it out of its misery, but when it came to humans, you had to ferry the invalid through every unendurable moment.

  Before the illness, her mother had enjoyed parties and dressing in clothes that elevated her beyond her station as vice principal’s wife. Her nails were always painted bright colors to match the flowers on her clothes, and she brought Jell-O squares to picnics in which tiny bits of canned fruits were suspended like dark corruptions in perfect jewels. At high school dances, she had been known for taking a misfit’s hands and leading him in a thin-wristed waltz under the streamers as the vice principal smiled wanly from the baseline.

  Now she slept on the couch, knees drawn up, arms crossed over her chest, her body curled around her feverish thinking. She spent the day reading books or staring out the window, past the town and the cornfield, into her own thoughts floating somew
here out over the wood that flanked the west edge of the Olson Dairy Farm.

  * * *

  —

  It was cold in the living room. The windows were open and the long white curtains swelled inward, before being sucked back against the sills, like the lungs of heaven expanding and contracting. They lived in one of those Victorian houses with high ceilings and rooms that opened onto each other, always so impractical to heat. Her father went to close the windows, but her mother stopped him. The high dry air did her joints good. “Besides,” she said. “Do you want to know a secret?”

  They came close to listen to what she had to say.

  “I was sailing,” she whispered, patting her hand on the Atlas of Obscure Islands. Her breath smelled sour for not having had a glass of water in hours. Instead she drank oceans of brine, marooned somewhere inside the atlas. It was a leather-bound book with thin, translucent pages. Her father had purchased it at an estate sale and it was worth quite a lot, but because it had given them so much pleasure, he could not bring himself to sell it. All the maps inside were blue with white spots for islands so accidental, smack-dab in the middle of vast oceans, they had only ever been discovered on the way to some other big discovery or scientific experiment, which was the human condition, wasn’t it? her father had once told her—the winds blowing a person where he did not mean to go and wrecking him on the edge of a cornfield.

  She took the atlas from under her mother’s hand and opened it to an infinitesimal hunk of volcanic rock poking up from the middle of the South Pacific. “Pitcairn,” she said, thinking of the stone Karl had used to crush the bird in mid-chirp.

  “You must be sailing on the Bounty,” her mother said.

  “Then I guess it won’t be long before we burn the ship and turn on each other,” said Gretel.

  “Oh, let’s not,” her mother said. “Not just yet. Let’s keep our options open a little bit longer, shall we?—see where we end up. We might go to Easter Island from Pitcairn and then from Easter to Possession. Or Charles Island!—where they wear no clothes.”

  What would her mother look like nude, in the hard-boiled sun? A piece of driftwood, Gretel decided. As she thought of that body nudged and tossed by the sand-crashing waves, a hollow feeling came into her chest. Had someone tapped on her heart just then, it would only have been able to answer, Nobody.

  “Tell me about your day,” Gretel’s mother said, patting the cushion beside her.

  So Gretel sat there and told her, leaving out the crushing of the bird and the strange new matter-of-factness that had come over her.

  Stepping toward the window, her father looked out into the long shadows falling across the sidewalk. “Who killed Cock Robin,” he murmured,

  I, said Karl Olson,

  With my granite stone, I stoned him.

  And all the birds of the air

  Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

  When they heard the bell toll

  For poor Cock Robin.

  The evening was cool, the stars bright, and after dinner they went out onto the porch to hear the birds grieving in the crack willows. For that was what they were doing, grieving the death of the robin. Or was it the end of daylight? Or the woman carried out of the house and placed on the porch swing with a cream blanket over her shoulders?

  Just last season, she had been able to come and go as she pleased. Years before that, she had danced in the ballet studio downtown, pirouetting and pliéing, holding the bar and staring into the mirror at what she imagined to be certain fame as the clouds raced across the blue sky behind her. Then came the day when a fierce wind tore into town and slammed Larkin Varney up against the studio window.

  * * *

  —

  There are things the dusk illuminates that nothing else will. The lines sharpen, wrinkles smooth into alabaster, the sidewalk’s fissures deepening as the dropping sun steers the house on Vine Street right up against the end of everything. Gretel steps off the porch. She walks down the path toward the place where the town falls away and the cornfield starts, running to the wood, which arches its back against all cultivation. Closing your eyes, you might imagine you were on a ship, might imagine the rustling husks to be wind snapping the sails, and you, bound for that island of trees off the starboard bow. Pasture to windbreak to the farm where Karl Olson is bringing the cows back from the edge of twilight. Sea of swaybacks and paintbrush tails flick in the darkness. Pod of whales, her mother would imagine. Gretel, though, prefers things as they are. With seas of grass like this, who needs oceans?

  She is prettier than either of her parents ever were, and it worries them, the way gifts like that can get girls who are unsure of themselves into trouble. Farther and farther away from the porch she strays, her steps no longer clacking on the macadam, until she stands frozen at the spot where the town’s pavement surrenders to dirt and funnels into the cornfield. Pointing her toe, she brushes it back and forth across the tip of a weed, tempting a greaser out of the darkness. She turns her head and scrapes her chin along her shoulder, the side of her face nestled into her collar in an almost coy gesture. A conspiratorial little wind gathers out of the wood now, chattering in the corn before it dies, and then the night comes down hard, smothering every last glimpse of her.

  * * *

  —

  Her father turns on the porch light to guide her back to them. Back from the degenerates standing behind the school, smoking like overgrown man-children. Back from the dangers that lie in wait for girls named after characters in fairy tales. The moths come fluttering in and the cat slinks up on the rail and bats them between her paws as the season’s last crickets thrum in desperation. “A trail of bread crumbs,” murmurs her father. “Rather poorly considered, I’d say, bread crumbs in bird country. Though of the pair, Gretel was always the industrious one.”

  Or was it Gretel who went into the oven—the first to pick candy from the house and bring the witch down on them? He moves his hand to his throat to choke out the idea of such an inauspicious beginning. A bit of dinner roll whispers out of his beard as the breeze kicks up and then the stillness sets in again.

  “My, it was such a long time ago,” the mother says, her wide eyes catching the glow of the porch light. “And it feels just like yesterday afternoon. Do you remember when she was a baby? How she used to cry and cry until we picked her up—and she always stopped right away. We’d never mattered that much to anyone. Who ever thought she could be so angry at us?”

  “Too many books and blunders,” the father says. “Books and blunders.”

  “And what blunders would those be?”

  “Mine, my dear. All mine. One can’t be forced into Melville and Shelley. And with all the resources allocated to home ec. and football, is it any wonder we’ve never had a matriculation to the Ivies?”

  “Not yet! It isn’t over, Larkin. It can’t all have been decided,” the mother says, lifting her eyes to the place where the cornfield drops off and the wood whittles away the black horizon. “She’ll find she’s more like us than she realizes. She can’t help it. That’s how come she’s so angry. It’s the things we can’t help about ourselves we see reflected in other natures.”

  “You always knew more about her than I.”

  “See, I didn’t feel that I knew anything, though—that’s the thing—not until just recently.”

  “You could fill a book with all you know,” the father says, staring out into the stars winking over the cornfield that seems to be playing a joke on him.

  * * *

  —

  It’s the loss of motion the bird grieves when it sings. Mourning dove. Barn swallow. Catbird. Thrush. Sparrow and starling. Sunrise bleeds into aimless afternoon. Gretel throws a ball in the air and swings a stick, the suck of missed contact whispering of disconnection. Sometimes the owl flaps up from her crook in the dead ash and floats out of the wood to haunt the g
arden. Other times she spreads her wings and flies over the cornfield, picking up mice as they scurry between the rows, bearing them back to the wood in her talons. From the wood to the cornfield and back again, she swoops and dives, snatches and soars, over and over again. The creatures struggle and writhe as she searches for gaps in the crowns of trees through which to thread herself and gulp down her quarry. Her eyes are deep black notches in a wooden face, her wings like a geisha’s fan, ribbed and unbending. Those times she misjudges, her prey too heavy or her talons not sinking in far enough, the animal twists out of her grasp midair, hitting the earth at the edge of the cornfield with the lightness of a heartbeat to scurry into the crack willows where the cat lies in wait.

  This is what must have befallen the rabbit: the cat hunted it, or the owl stole it and dropped it into the garden. A young rabbit playing dead in the middle of the first flagstone on an otherwise uneventful Saturday. When Gretel touched it with her foot, it leapt up and sat there puffing, trying to appear bigger than it was. How still the eyes were, like big glass beads catching the sunlight. Only the nose betrayed the fear, twitching to the rhythm of the creature’s racing heart, its ears crunched tight against the head like flower petals. There was a deep gash in its side and one of the hind legs appeared nearly severed.