Short Story Masterpieces by American Women Writers

Clarence C. Strowbridge

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780486499949
• eBook ISBN: 9780486783383
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Fourteen short works of fiction by noteworthy American women authors offer entrancing tales of redemption, betrayal, tradition, and rebellion. Dating from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, these narratives range in mood from "Heat," Joyce Carol Oates's chilling tale of murder, to "Why I Live at the P.O.," Eudora Welty's comic monologue in the Southern Gothic tradition.
Other contributors include Flannery O'Connor, Kate Chopin, and Edna Ferber as well as lesser-known, newly rediscovered writers. Edith Wharton examines the issue of divorce and remarriage in "The Other Two," and Willa Cather explores life among Greenwich Village artists at the turn of the twentieth century in "Coming, Aphrodite!" Stories with modern settings include Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," an insightful look at the role of heritage in African-American culture, and Louise Erdrich's "The Shawl," a meditation on memory and the transformation of old stories into new ones. Together, the tales offer a revealing panorama of perspectives on women's ongoing struggles for dignity and self-sufficiency.

GAL YOUNG UN

A STORY IN TWO PARTS

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918, Marjorie Kinnan spent ten years trying to write fiction while supporting herself as a professional journalist. In 1928 she moved to backwoods Florida and devoted herself to creative writing. “Gal Young Un,” her first successful story, was published in Harper’s in 1932 and was awarded the O. Henry Memorial Prize the following year. In 1939 her novel The Yearling received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

PART I

THE HOUSE WAS invisible from the road which wound, almost untraveled, through the flat-woods. Once every five days a turpentine wagon creaked down the ruts, and negroes moved like shadows among the pines. A few hunters in season came upon them chipping boxes, scraping aromatic gum from red pots into encrusted buckets; inquired the way and whether quail or squirrel or turkey had been seen. Then hunters and turpentiners moved again along the road, stepping on violets and yellow pitcher-plants that rimmed the edges.

The negroes were aware of the house. It stood a few hundred yards away, hidden behind two live oaks, isolated and remote in a patch of hammock. It was a tall square two-stories. The woman who gave them water from her well when the nearby branch was dry looked to them like the house, tall and bare and lonely, weathered gray, like its unpainted cypress. She seemed forgotten.

The two white men, hunting lazily down the road, did not remember—if they had ever known—that a dwelling stood here. Flushing a covey of quail that flung themselves like feathered bronze discs at the cover of the hammock, their first shots flicked through the twin oaks. They followed their pointer dog on the trail of single birds and stopped short in amazement. Entering the north fringe of the hammock, they had come out on a sandy open yard. A woman was watching them from the back stoop of an old house.

“Shootin’ mighty close, men,” she called.

Her voice sounded unused, like a rusty iron hinge.

The older man whistled in the dog, ranging feverishly in the low palmettos. The younger swaggered to the porch. He pushed back the black slouch hat from his brazen eyes.

“Never knowed nobody lived in six miles o’ here.”

His tone was insolent. He drew a flattened package of cigarettes from his corduroy hunting jacket, lighted one, and waited for her to begin scolding. Women always quarreled with him. Middle-aged women, like this one, quarreled earnestly; young ones snapped at him playfully.

“It’s a long ways from anybody, ain’t it?” she agreed.

He stared at her between puffs.

“Jesus, yes.”

“I don’t keer about you shootin’,” she said. “It’s purely sociable, hearin’ men-folks acrost the woods. A shot come thu a winder jest now, that’s all the reason I spoke.”

The intruders shifted their shotguns uneasily. The older man touched his finger to his cap.

“That’s all right, ma’am.”

His companion strolled to the stone curbing of an open well. He peered into its depths, shimmering where the sun of high noon struck vertically.

“Good water?”

“The finest ever. Leave me fetch you a clean cup.”

She turned into the house for a white china coffee cup. The men wound up a bucket of water on creaking ropes. The older man drank politely from the proffered cup. The other guzzled directly from the bucket. He reared back his head like a satisfied hound, dripping a stream of crystal drops from his red mouth.

“Ain’t your dog thirsty? Here—reckon my ol’ cat won’t fuss if he drinks outen his dish.” The woman stroked the animal’s flanks as he lapped. “Ain’t he a fine feller.”

The hunters began to edge away.

“Men, I jest got common rations, bacon an’ biscuit an’ coffee, but you’re plumb welcome to set down with me.”

“No, thank you, ma’am.” They looked at the sun. “Got to be moseyin’ home.”

The younger man was already on his way, sucking a straw. The other fumbled in his game-pocket.

“Sorry we come so clost up on you, lady. How ’bout a bird fer your dinner?”

She reached out a large hand for the quail.

‘’I’d shore thank you fer it. I’m a good shot on squirrel, an’ turkeys when I git ’em roosted. Birds is hard without no dog to point ’em. I gits hungry fer quail . . .”

Her voice trailed off as the hunters walked through the pines toward the road. She waved her hand in case they should turn around. They did not look back.

* * *

The man was hunting alone because he had been laughed at. His cronies in the Florida village, to which he had returned after a few years’ wandering, knew that he detested solitude. It was alien to him, a silent void into which he sank as into quicksand. He had stopped at the general store to pick up a hunting partner. The men lounging there hours at a time were usually willing to go with him. This time none was ready.

“Come go with me, Willy,” he insisted. “I cain’t go by myself.”

The storekeeper called over his shoulder, weighing out a quarter’s worth of water-ground meal for a negro.

“You’ll git ketched out alone in the woods sometime, Trax, an’ nobody won’t know who ’tis.”

The men guffawed.

“Trax always got to git him a buddy.”

His smoldering eyes flared at them. He spat furiously across the rough pine floor of the store.

“I ain’t got to git me none o’ these sorry catbirds.”

He had clattered down the wooden steps, spitting angrily every few feet. They were jealous, he thought, because he had been over on the east coast. He had turned instinctively down the south road out of the village. Old man Blaine had brought him this way last week. He hunted carelessly for two or three hours, taking pot shots at several coveys that rose under his feet. His anger made him miss the birds widely. It was poor sport without a companion and a dog.

Now he realized that he was lost. As a boy he had hunted these woods, but always with other boys and men. He had gone through them unseeing, stretching his young muscles luxuriously, absorbing lazily the rich Florida sun, cooling his face at every running branch. His shooting had been careless, avid. He liked to see the brown birds tumble in midair. He liked to hunt with the pack, to gorge on the game dinners they cooked by lake shores under oak trees. When the group turned homeward, he followed, thinking of supper; of the ’shine his old man kept hidden in the smokehouse; of the girls he knew. Someone else knew north and south, and the cross patterns of the piney-woods roads. The lonely region was now as unfamiliar as though he had been a stranger.

It was an hour or two past noon. He leaned his 12-gauge shotgun against a pine and looked about him nervously. He knew by the sun that he had come continuously south. He had crossed and recrossed the road, and could not decide whether it now lay to the right or left. If he missed it to the right, he would come to cypress swamp. He licked his lips. If he picked the wrong road to the left, it would bring him out a couple of miles above the village. That would be better. He could always get a lift back. He picked up his gun and began to walk.

In a few minutes a flat gray surface flashed suddenly from a patch of hammock. He stopped short. Pleasure swept over him, cooling his hot irritation. He recognized the house where he and Blaine had drawn water. He had cursed Blaine for giving a quail to the woman. He wiped the sweat from his face. The woman would feed him and direct him out of the flat-woods. Instinctively he changed his gait from a shuffling drag to his customary swagger.

He rapped loudly on the smooth cypress front door. It had a halfmoon fanlight over it. The house was old but it was capacious and good. There was, for all its bareness, an air of prosperity. Clean white curtains hung at the windows. A striped cat startled him by rearing against his legs. He kicked it away. The woman must be gone. A twig cracked in the yard beyond the high piazza. He turned. The woman was stalking around the side of the house to see before she was seen. Her gray face lightened as she recognized him. She laughed.

“Mister, if you knowed how long it’s been since I heerd a rap. Don’t nobody knock on my front door. The turpentine niggers calls so’s I won’t shoot, and the hunters comes a-talkin’ to the well.”

She climbed the front steps with the awkwardness of middle age. She dried a hand on her flour-sacking apron and held it out to him. He took it limply, interrupting the talk that began to flow from her. He was ugly with hunger and fatigue and boredom.

“How ’bout a mess o’ them rations you was offerin’ me last week?”

His impatience was tempered with the tone of casual intimacy in which he spoke to all women. It bridged time and space. The woman flushed.

“I’d be mighty well pleased—”

She opened the front door. It stuck at the sill, and she threw a strong body against it. He did not offer to help. He strolled in ahead of her. As she apologized for the moments it would take to fry bacon and make coffee, he was already staring about him at the large room. When she came to him from the kitchen half an hour later, her face red with her hurry, the room had made an impress on his mind, as roads and forests could not do. The size of the room, of the clay fireplace, the adequacy of chairs and tables of a frontier period, the luxury of a Brussels carpet, although ancient, over wood, the plenitude of polished, unused kerosene lamps—the details lay snugly in his mind like hoarded money.

Hungry, with the smell of hot food filling his breath, he took time to smooth his sleek black hair at a walnut-framed mirror on the varnished matchboard wall. He made his toilet boldly in front of the woman. A close watching of his dark face, of the quickness of his hands moving over his affectation of clipped side-burns, could only show her that he was good to look at. He walked to the kitchen with a roll, sprawling his long legs under the table.

With the first few mouthfuls of food good humor returned to him. He indulged himself in graciousness. The woman served him lavishly with fried cornbread and syrup, coffee, white bacon in thick slices, and fruits and vegetables of her own canning. His gluttony delighted her. His mouth was full, bent low over his heaped plate.

“You live fine, ma’am, for anyone lives plumb alone.”

She sat down opposite him, wiping back the wet gray hair from her forehead, and poured herself a convivial cup of coffee.

“Jim—that was my husband—an’ Pa always did say if they was good rations in the house they’d orter be on the table. I ain’t got over the habit.”

“You been livin’ alone quite some time?”

“Jim’s fifteen year dead. Pa ’bout six.”

“Don’t you never go nowheres?”

“I got no way to go. I kep’ up stock fer two-three year after Pa died, but ’twa’n’t wuth the worry. They’s a family lives two mile closer to town than me, has a horse an’ wagon. I take ’em my list o’ things ’bout oncet a month. Seems like . . .”

He scarcely listened.

A change of atmosphere in her narrative indicated suddenly to him that she was asking him about himself.

“You a stranger?”

She was eager, leaning on the table waiting for his answer.

He finished a saucer of preserved figs, scraping at the rich syrup with relish. He tilted back in his chair luxuriously and threw the match from his cigarette in the general direction of the wood stove. He was entirely at home. His belly well filled with good food, his spirit touched with the unfailing intoxication to him of a woman’s interest, he teetered and smoked and talked of his life, of his deeds, his dangers.

“You ever heard the name o’ Trax Colton?”

She shook her head. He tapped his chest significantly, nodding at her.

“That’s me. You’ve heard tell, if you on’y remembered, o’ me leavin’ here a few years back on account of a little cuttin’ fuss. I been on the east coast—Daytona, Melbourne, all them places. The fuss blowed over an’ I come back. Fixin’ to take up business here.”

He frowned importantly. He tapped a fresh cigarette on the table, as he had learned to do from his companions of the past years. He thought with pleasure of all that he had learned, of the sophistication that lay over his Cracker speech and ways like a cheap bright coat.

‘’I’m an A-1 bootlegger, ma’am.”

For the time being he was a big operator from the east coast. He told her of small sturdy boats from Cuba, of signal flares on the St. Augustine beach at midnight, of the stream of swift automobiles moving in and out just before high tide. Her eyes shone. She plucked at the throat of her brown-checked gingham dress, breathing quickly. It was fitting that this dark glamorous young man should belong to the rocket-lit world of danger. It was ecstasy painful in its sharpness, that he should be tilted back at her table, flicking his fragrant ashes on her clean, lonely floor.

He was entirely amiable as he left her. Pleased with himself, he was for a moment pleased with her. She was a good woman. He laid his hand patronizingly on her shoulder. He stroked the striped cat on his way down the steps. This time he turned to lift his hand to her. Sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note
• Acknowledgements
• Miss Grief
• The Revolt of “Mother”
• Désirée’s Baby
• The Other Two
• Roast Beef, Medium
• England to America
• Coming, Aphrodite!
• The Shadowy Third
• Gal Young Un
• Why I Live at the P.O.
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own
• Everyday Use
• Heat
• The Shawl