About Storywriting
One Take on the Short Story
It’s been said that the short story form is closer to the poem than to the novel. The Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor called it “the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry.” Compact, aimed at a single impression, readable in one sitting, it leans away from the digressions and byroads of a much longer piece of fiction and towards impressionistic implication and inference. It is not made to occupy the reader for a week’s reading on the beach. It is more a window onto a world than a door to walk through and inhabit. Further, the short story, like the poem, lends itself to frequent revisits. How many times can we go back to savor Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” or any of Jean Toomer? Many, many, many times, and they will reward us for doing so more economically than most novels.
One story I especially enjoy revisiting, and believe is among the greatest of American short stories, is Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man.” That’s right. One of the greatest American short stories is a poem. In perhaps a ten-minute reading, it presents quickly drawn characters, an impression of a man’s life with an absolute minimum of action or exposition, all the classical elements of drama, and a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.
The action starts with Mary studying the lamp flame on the kitchen table. She’s waiting to intercept Warren, her husband, as he returns with the “market things.” When she hears him, she runs “on tip-toe” to “put him on his guard,” pushing him back out the door and sitting him down on the porch. The first words she says are “Silas is back” and “Be kind.” The obvious inference we draw is that Silas being back is, if not an outright problem, at least an unwelcome occurrence. Warren is defensive. “When was I anything but kind to him? But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he says. Warren lays out his case against having Silas back, quoting the usual arguments Mary offers in defense of the old man, and then his usual refutation of them. Clearly, they have been over this ground many times, and his attitude has hardened.
It’s a simple story: A broken down old farm hand returns to a place where he knows at least one person, Mary, will be sympathetic, and goes to sleep in the place she has given him by the stove. The farmer comes home to be told the old boy has returned and looks awful. Husband and wife toss their feelings and impressions of the sleeping old man back and forth. The husband goes into the house to see him and comes back to announce that he is dead. Those are the bare bones of the “story.” Said that way, it’s hardly worth reading. But a story is more that its bones and is supposed to have some sort of “movement.” What “moves” in this story? It certainly isn’t Silas.
He is one of those landless, rootless men who did the hard seasonal work on farms and the railroads before mechanization replaced them. Look at any collection of photographs of rural life of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and you’ll find him posing lined up outside a dinner wagon in a Midwest wheat field during the reaping, or pausing, scythe in hand, at his work. Where I live now, in Minneapolis, that era of photographs shows idle men of this class congregating in the city’s Skid Row when the weather has turned cold. Silas belongs to that expendable class of men.
He’s a ne’er-do-well, a no count. Both Mary and Warren consider him useless as a worker. Though we don’t know what happened between himself and his brother, a nearby bank president who Silas says little or nothing about, we know it must not have been good. No other family is mentioned. Silas has come to Mary and Warren rather than to his brother. This blank in his biography is left for us to consider. How Silas became what he is remains a mystery, and readers are left to imagine the possibilities of the falling out from the libraries of their own experience. Who hasn’t seen a family member drift away? Who hasn’t wondered at the rare sightings of the seldom spoken of uncle?
And, like that lost uncle, he has plans for the great things he will do. The ne’er-do-well is known universally for his plans and promises. He tells Mary that he’s going to “ditch the meadow” for Warren, and we easily infer from Warren’s dialogue that this is some old, laughable, unfulfilled promise. Mary knows he’s said it yet again only to salvage a bit of self-respect. She adds that he’s also said that he means ”to clear the upper pasture, too.” Never mind his past undependability, going off when he’s most needed. In his present condition there is no chance that he will do any of what he is promising.
The ne’re-do-well keeps the world at arm’s length with his plans, as if he almost believes his listeners can count on him. Though apparently weak, easily “coaxed” away for “pocket money,” prone to making empty promises like to ditch the meadow, Silas apparently has some redeeming qualities. Mary, for one, has a soft spot for him. She knows that his arguments with young Harold Wilson, in the years they worked as a team in the fields, “trouble Silas like a dream.” He keeps thinking of what he should have said but didn’t think of at the time. She knows how that feels and sympathizes.
And, in my reading, it’s not exactly true that he has “nothing to look backward to with pride.” He has the “one accomplishment” of how he builds the hay pile on the cart so that it is more easily unloaded in the barn. “He bundles every forkful,” says Warren, “in its place, and tags and numbers it for further reference, so he can find and easily dislodge it in the unloading. Silas does that well,” he concedes. “He takes it out in bunches like bird’s nests, you never see him standing on the hay he’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.” Unrealistically, Silas wants to teach the Wilson boy how he does that. But Harold Wilson has gone on to graduate from his college and is even teaching there now.
It’s a small thing, Silas’ technique. Nevertheless, it was damned clever. I can say that because I have been the worker on the wagon piling the hay. In his youth, and mine, my brother farmed with a yoke of oxen and antique equipment. A hippie farm, you might call it. A couple haying times while I was in college I helped him. My brother trotted alongside Andy and Ivor, his oxen, steering them with gees and haws as they pulled the rotary elevator that lifted the rows of raked hay up to me. I balanced on the rocking wagon and caught the hay, then set it down in piles of fives—four corners and a center overlapping—making sure to overlap the sets of five with each other, too. How Silas did what Warren described him doing escapes me. In the world Silas inhabited, this was indeed an accomplishment, though as greater technology replaces the sort of farm worker he is, it will soon become irrelevant.
We cannot know the cause of Silas’ failure and are not meant to know. Flannery O’Connor wrote that what makes a story work is some gesture that is totally unexpected but just as true to the character who performs it, “one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies.” Further, “It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” In “The Death of the Hired Man,” Mary is the vehicle for that gesture. She is the vehicle for bringing out the empathy in Warren.
As they talk on the porch, the partly-seen moon is falling in the west and Mary spreads her apron to gather in its light. Then she reaches out a hand to feel the dewy “harp-like morning-glory strings” that “played unheard the tenderness that wrought on him beside her in the night.” Warren needn’t worry that Silas will walk away from the work this time, she tells him, because, “he has come home to die.”
Warren’s response is mocking. “Whatever you mean by home,” he says.
And this is where we get the line we all like to remember. Warren says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” It’s a contemptuous dart aimed straight at the ne’re-do-well’s shame. But we too often forget Mary’s response: “I should have called it something you somehow hadn’t to deserve.” Mary’s spirit, perhaps that bit of moonlight gathered up in her lap, is what makes this story sail. Without it, the story would simply be the recounting of a broken down old fool’s return and a farmer’s disgust at him.
Warren stands, picking up a stick, breaking it, and tossing it away. This is where we learn about the brother, thirteen short miles distant. Warren’s not ready to give in to Mary’s sympathies, but there is a crack in his facade. “I wonder what’s between them,” he says.
She knows: Silas is what he is. But she adds, “He never did a thing so very bad.”
This is where Warren turns: “I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”
The italicized I and the Si instead of Silas are significant. Mary’s empathy has softened Warren’s initial response to Silas’ return. The conversation continues for a time, but in this new vein. With the admonition to not laugh at him, Mary encourages Warren to go inside to see for himself. “I’ll sit,” she says. “and see if that small sailing cloud will hit or miss the moon.”
It does hit the moon, “making a dim row, the moon, the little silver cloud, and she.”
I don’t know what that line means, though I’m sure that generations of scholars have pondered the mystery that is Mary’s power in it, whatever that power is.
A story’s climax is action, however subtle, toward change. A resolution is change in action. Warren returns with the news of Si’s death and, acknowledging the nere-do-well’s humanity, sits down beside Mary and takes up her hand. This gesture touches the heart of the story. It’s why the story is told.
A story singing like a poem is the goal of every serious short story writer. Sometimes our little cloud hits the moon. Sometimes it doesn’t, but when it does, it sings.