Until last year, August had assisted with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it.
“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” she asked one evening as they cleaned up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. The announcer spat hoarsely, A hard line drive—he’s going, he’s going, he’s going.
“I don’t mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”
“Huh, well, that’s a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You’ll be in high school soon, you know. And then there’ll be girls. They’re going to find you so handsome. And then there’ll be college, and then there’ll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie, and if you hate it, you should know that soon you’ll be making your own way.”
“But I said I don’t hate it, Mom.”
“Jesus. I really hope you don’t mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”
“What about it?”
“My God, Augie, look at me and tell me you don’t hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand and her cigarette trembled, and August tried but couldn’t tell if she was serious and about to cry or joking and about to laugh.
“I don’t hate anything. It’s fine. I like everything fine.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m disappointed in you,” she said, turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it’s my fault, for letting it go on. I’m going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I’ll finish up here. Go and listen to the game with your dad.”
On the porch, his father was in the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded at August as he sat on the step.
We’re going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification. You’re not going to want to miss this. The radio crackled and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it all for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.
“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.
His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.
Later, his parents’ arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father didn’t roust him for the day’s milking, and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn’t come back to make breakfast, and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.
August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one’s back with a quick chop of the wrench and stunned the other with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling with two more sharp blows from the wrench, and then gave chase to a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.
August didn’t curse much. His father always said that no one took a man who cursed too much seriously and it was better to be the type of man who, when he did curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.
Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face and the cats twitching and bristling out of reach above him, he cursed.
“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddam, fucking cats.”
It was the most curse words he’d ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling in fear at the rain of fire that was about to be visited upon their mangy heads.
At the old house, his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends trailed across the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn it was dark, and she had lit an old kerosene lamp. The flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.
“You want some lunch?” she said, after she had settled in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I’m finished. You can have the rest.” She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn’t been touched.
He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick-fried in butter and finished in the oven. That was how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn’t know how to do this, he thought. Perhaps his father would get so fed up with Lisa’s tough, dried-out pork chops that he would send her away and his mother would come back to the new house and he’d start helping his dad with the barn chores again.
“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone, where the best-tasting meat was.
“Augie, that’s a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good Lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward her, and then took a quick hiccuping breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That’s something city people probably don’t understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal, and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor—I’m sure there’s a word for it in another language.”
She pulled the quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain, because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”
August was fairly certain that his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”
“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names, the world is just populated by spooks and monsters.”
“Giving something a name doesn’t change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”
“What about it?”
“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”
“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating a concept of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, owing to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understan
d why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will someday come to a grinding halt, because nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”
“No.”
“Huh. Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”
She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and shush into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of the cards and thinking, knowing that she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.
“How’s the job coming?”
“Not great.”
“Motivational issues?”
“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”
Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split into two distinct pieces. There was the part where Skyler was alive, where his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now there was this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that all of his life up to this very point existed only in the past, which meant that it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture, next to Skyler.
It was dark and cool in the barn, and August switched on the radio for company. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d risen early, before Lisa, even, and he hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. He could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.
The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms—tabbies, calicos, some night-black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spat, slightly awed, thinking about the night before and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish-white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked toward the rafters, where there was a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist, so that it dangled there like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.
He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked, the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.
Just think about it. All things considered, is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story.
August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. As he worked he pushed the cats into the conveyor trough, and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look, but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow, or the next day, his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.
It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and, as he pounded, the last one was already stiffening. Dawn struck as August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom, he stopped and listened. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, but he knew that his father and Lisa would be up soon. He leaned the board against the coat rack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.
August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He’d never got the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch, he wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move, but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.
Contributors’ Notes
DANIEL ALARCÓN is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio, which won the 2009 International Literature Prize. He was named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 in 2010, and his new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, will be published in October 2013.
• I’ve spent the last seven or so years working on a novel, so most every story I’ve published in that time began the same way: it was meant to be part of the bigger book, but somehow outgrew its confines.
I think of these as sketches for the novel, and in the case of “The Provincials,” there’s quite a lot of overlap: this piece and the novel share a protagonist (Nelson), an obsession (acting), a troubled relationship, a father, an absent brother, a dreary coastal town. When the play began I knew it wouldn’t be part of the book, but I wanted to follow the story and see where it went.
CHARLES BAXTER is the author of five novels and five books of short stories, most recently Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. He has also written two books of literary essays, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext, published by Graywolf. He was the editor for the Library of America edition of Sherwood Anderson’s stories. He teaches at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis.
• The city of Prague is haunted by the armies that have invaded it, by Catholicism, and by Franz Kafka, among other presences. I visited the city three years ago and in one of its chapels had a jolting experience that led directly to this story. That memory found itself grafted onto a scene I had already witnessed in downtown Palo Alto, where some teenage girls riding in a car were taunting some boys standing together at a street corner. But the core of the story grew out of a quarrel I had thirty-four years ago with my wife about who would feed the baby. I never forgot that quarrel because it seemed telling to me. Everything else in the story is the essential brick-and-mortar of invention, the imaginary, and the possible.
MICHAEL BYERS is the author of a book of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, and two novels, Long for This World and Percival’s Planet. He directs the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
• As tends to be the way with my stories, I set out to write one thing and ended up with something seriously unrelated, which may be why “Malaria” didn’t quite come together for a long time. I had most of it in hand, including the ending, but was stymied by what should happen after George went crazy and before Orlando and Nora went back to visit him again. I tried a dozen avenues, none that went anywhere.
Sometimes when I’m late in a story that’s dead-ended like this, I’ll poke around in the story’s bag of emotions to see what I’ve got along with me—joy, envy, sorrow? Sometimes I can actually burrow under to the originating impulse of the material—the Platonic thing the story was before it got linted-up with particulars of character, setting, and so on—and tug something useful out into the light. In this case, I finally flashed that the story wasn’t about Orlando and Nora as a couple but about Orlando himself. Once I got him alone, then put him on the tennis court with a bunch of strangers, I knew I had it right. Like most simple things the fix seems stupidly obvious in retrospect, but it took forever to discover.
JUNOT DÍAZ was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Cr
itics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize—and This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Díaz is a recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize. A Rutgers University graduate, he is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and a founding member of the Voices Writers Workshop (http://voicesat vona.org/Home.html). The Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he splits his time between Cambridge and New York City.
• I’d been trying to write “Miss Lora” for nearly seven years. As is usually the case with me, the story just wouldn’t come together. I tried it in first person and in third person, as a journal, a series of letters, a confession, but nada. Nevertheless I stayed on it, producing lame draft after lame draft. What made the difference finally was a trip that I took with some of my boys, and one night in a club in Bayahibe some of them started opening up about how their first sexual relationships were with these older women in the neighborhood and that just broke the last pinion, gave me the permission I needed to get it done.