Where I'm coming from, by way of explanation, is that we all know - since he has shared such insight so transparently - that writing to publish short stories in The Ne Yorker or elsewhere, or writing towards completing his 'Lincoln in the Bardo' or 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain' is but a fraction (albeit significant, and I'll even say big) of what his succeeding talents are called upon to service.
I'll dare to go further, venturing to think that 'sympathies' are misplaced, George just writes to have fun?
Open to any and all to post reply, but any riposte from Michael or comment from George would be welcome . . . but never, never expected.
Let's keep it 😎 dear Peer Participating 😹. Sincerely, thanks to George, Michael, One 'n All
Well, without getting into the weeds, from what I understand of George's method, it's pretty much sail into the unknown and see what he finds. Some of his videos say he's got unfinished drafts several years old that he's put aside because they weren't "working" and revisits occasionally to see if they now click. I don't know about "Bardo" but I'm guessing it was "we're interested in a novel when you write one" so that was probably written without a solid deadline until he could give an approximate date when it would be finished so they could schedule it. Novelists usually try to hit the mark in time for a book to be published during the fall when it can be given as a present for the holidays; although I understand "Bardo" didn't hit until Febuary.
So anyway, my point is that George's method doesn't seem condusive to the "Be Creative on Schedule" school of writing. No knock against him. A lot of writers are I'll Get it Done when I Get it Done, much to the annoyance of their agents and publishers. That's why I was a little surprised to hear him announce it. That why I also have sympathy for him. I've never written fiction on deadline, but was a newspaper and magazine journalist, and it's never fun to write with the clock ticking down on you. I wish him luck and hope he'll actually write about it one day. It would be interesting to hear how he handled it, and if it actually made him work differently and how.
Before I comment on the story, I just want to say how much of a relief it was to have the comments disabled at the start and to be able to just focus on the story. So, thanks!
I agree. I know George said that that was a one-time-only thing, but I hope its not. Nice to have a bit of time to sit with it, without feeling that I was falling behind on the discussion.
Agreed--the stillness is part of the power GB creates. Eugie is as still as can be, lying on his face, his back to us, i.e. we don't see his features, nothing grisly like an open mouth, no expression.
And yes Lanie I agree, though was certainly busy enough in 'The Pause' . . . and Paul, just so you know, the Comment I have posted is the fruit of reference to and reflection on my own reading(s) and reflecting(s) on a Gina's story.
My first Comment will I hope ne of sufficient interest to be of some reward to those who, may, coming this was make the effort to read it. It will not, all being well be my last post on 'The Stone Boy'.
If what I've written should strike you, or indeed anyone, as 'bollocks' do not, please do not, refrain from saying so . . . nicely 😊
I like how you draw attention to the story in two parts. Eugie there/Eugie not there.
Eugie has to die for this story. How can we not accept it when we know this. In a way, his death creates a shortcut to get to the varying human natures in the characters’ responses to grief and shame.
But I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves. There’s much more to discuss.
There is Lanie. George indeed asks not one but several questions, all to do with but part of the opening, operatic act that is the Alpha nad Omega of the story. Would ‘Eugène Must Die’ be an alternative title? Or, perhaps ‘Wild Ducks at . . . ‘?
I think The Stone Boy is perfect. This is how others see him that he has no feelings. And in order to handle the intense emotions of the trauma he has had to shut down all systems. That's what trauma can do.
Eugene has to die, but it’s just the catalyst to reveal other truths. I think those alternative titles don’t quite fit the story. The mood is set with The Stone Boy as it’s title. It could refer to Eugie at first (being dead) but when we see the processes of grief played out, we see that the stone boy is how others interpret Arnold’s actions and emotions after the tragic incident.
No Lanie, again I agree with you, ‘The Stone Boy’ is the right title not least because until the moment that, seeing ‘a slow rising of bright blood’ at the nape of the neck, Arnold realises life has irreparably departed Eugène the younger sibling is - as far as the evidence of the words on the pages go - is himself about as lively and as loving as a normal morning burbling 9 year boy should be.
He’s anything but ‘stone’ but is turned to stone by a fatal incident as surely as if he was put under a cursed spell by an evil witch in Act 1 of a tragic opera ...
... so like that rifle, which is surely a Chekovian gun, the title does play a big part in the way Gina Berriault makes her story work.
I'm sure that there is room for both our views on when the turning to stone comes in the story to be true.
We may even find ourselves moving, like players on a tennis court or teams on a cricket pitch or other sports in which changing ends occurs, to look at this and other timelines in the story from alternative viewpoints.
Indeed I sense we might come to reconsidering if it is the boy alone who is, in some way, turned to stone? Time will tell.
Totally agree. I really appreciated that. Hoping we do that going forward with other stories. It just gives us time to sit with our own reactions to a story.
I was shocked when Eugie was shot. Then I thought, “you idiot, if there’s a gun on the wall in act 1…” But I had been worrying about the ducks. I was at that moment climbing through that barbed wire fence with them (as I often did as a kid; having gotten a lot of things snagged, including flesh, I didn’t doubt that the gun hung up) and wondering if Eugie was really and truly going to go fetch the duck Arnold was to shoot. I was so very much there in that moment.
In 2006 my husband’s 8-year-old nephew killed his six-year-old sister. (It wasn’t a firearm accident, but at ATV.) Now the boy is 21, and not easy to know. A stone boy? I always wonder what’s going on inside his head. Lovely young man, but quiet, private, introverted. How much of that is simply his nature and how much is a result of that trauma? His family is country-folk, in rural Kansas. The way Arnold’s family functions after the death strikes me as completely true. You gotta eat, you gotta feed the chickens… Life goes on. (Contrast with Lincoln…)
It occurs to me that perhaps I don’t want as much freedom and agency as Berriault gives her reader. I don’t want to be hit upside the head with a 2x4, but I do want more than what’s here. Maybe because I didn’t want to leave the story, to leave Arnold, or the other characters either. I wanted to go with Arnold up the mountain to find the cow and calf.
And maybe my wanting more is simply my wanting to know more about our nephew and how he survived that—what it cost him, how it changed him.
Nancy, many years ago as a boy of seventeen I was working with another boy 16. It was stupid Industrail accident that killed the 16 year old. Not a week or day goes by that I do not think of that boy, although it is sixty years ago. The Stone Boy brought back memories for me, also.
What happens in 'The Stone Boy' readily resonates for many with some of what has happened, in various ways at various points. in the unfolding of our life stories. The depth of such resonance - maybe, for example, because we recall a moment that equates to when 'the air was rocked by the sound of the shot' - is surely, for those who 'like' and 'buy' the story, vital to this story's power?
I am sorry for what you went through. Tragedy seems to be everywhere. It's easy to assume that people are okay when we are all in fact carrying some burden that doesn't show on the outside. Thank you for sharing.
*hugs* That must have been hard at the time because you were so close in age. Young men still die or become seriously injured on the job, because of lack of training, experience and people taking short cuts. I worked in a coal mine and petrochemicals for almost a decade.
Navigating between barb wire fences while hunting in my home state of Kansas is also part of my growing up years. The only similarity that I recall was crossing a draw in a pasture when I was fifteen. I had the path that was steepest while my dad went across on one side where the footing was even and my uncle was on my other side where the footing was also even. The slope though, was mud, and as I slipped, I laid my shotgun on the bank so I could catch myself, and scramble up the side. When my dad saw that I shot gun was laying on the bank close to the mud, he came over to me and told me to unload the gun. Then we inspected he barrel and saw that the barrel was plugged with mud even though I could not recall the gun barrel ever being below the top of the slope. Had we not checked that, the barrel would have exploded had I tried to shoot with the barrel plugged.
Thank you for posting this memory, Greg. It's like the story in that it reminds us of how fragile life is. And how "small" interactions—accidents of fate, or of not-noticing or noticing—how these each shape our particular life trajectories. Thankful for your Dad!
Nancy, thank you for telling us your own personal, and still painful story. My husband's family is rural North Irish, and I recognise the same kind of wordlessness when it comes to understanding and expressing feelings - which was usually done through action. I so agree with you about wanting desperately to go with Arnold and find the calf, I thought maybe it might be a kind of redemption for him. I also thought it was impressive how quickly he works out a practical solution to the problem of getting the calf home, given he knows e's not strong enough to hoist it over his shoulders like Eugie. Instead, Berriault gives us his heart-breaking failure to respond to his mother's attempt to remedy her rejection in the night. That's when not only he, but I too, as a reader, turn to stone. All the time it seems Arnie's looking to the adults for an explanation, and they're looking to each other, and then outwards to the higher authoriity of the sheriff. Nobody has the words - because they're all 'reasonable' like Arnie - they might also have just on with the practicalities.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Nancy, I appreciate it and my heart goes out to your family and to the young man. You made "The Stone Boy" even more real, more heart breaking, and more needed.
*Hugs* to you and your family. Thank you sharing. I hope you are able to connect with your nephew over this story. Sending love and being present are best things aunt's can do. We're like parents but not, so my wish is that he opens up a little to you.
Oh Nancy, I am sorry. Sorry for all that family, but especially for your nephew. As you say below, tragically accidents like this do happen all too often. That random-ness of life keeps me up at night sometimes.
I bought it on the first read. I remember immediately feeling a deep pit in my stomach when the gun went off, before I even moved on to the next page. On re-reading, I found two things that helped sell the incident for me:
One, she specifically described the way Eugie's hair tapered down to a point on his neck, and then after being shot, that's the spot with Arnold sees the blood. For me it created a sense of familiarity. I had already been asked to visualize that spot on his neck, making it all the easier to see it wounded.
What really struck me though was her description of their morning walk through the fields. I can almost hear the kind of country quiet she describes. She does an incredible job painting a picture of the world in a grounded way, then interrupts it with a gunshot. I was lulled into a sense of peace and calm, and then had it ripped away from me. That feels more real than some sort of playing with the pathetic fallacy, trying to create a sense of foreboding in the landscape, weather, etc. The normalcy of the morning being shattered by the accident feels very true to life.
Also that description of their morning walk highlights the birds, "the Kildeer with their white markings flashing...crying their shrill, sweet cry" and ending with the "four wild ducks, swimming out from the willows into the open water." At this point you can't help but think of the gun and Arnold's wish to kill the ducks out of season. And when Eugie is killed and Arnold contrasts Eugie dead with Eugie sleeping and can't process it, my mind went back to the initial scuffle when "Arnold felt his brother twist away and saw the blankets lifted in a great wing". What a powerful image: with more breadcrumbs (the loading of the gun no-one wants, the duck hunting out of season, then the powerful scene where we see the birds, leading up to the accidental death.
Yes, the birds are part of what sell it for me - after Eugie is shot and falls, "the ducks rose up crying from the lake." Why wouldn't I believe the ducks?
The way that Arnold looks up to his brother, ready to be berated for the gun going off sold me on the reality of Eugie’a death. Because it’s so unlikely that even Arnold wasn’t worried about the shot hitting his brother. That somehow makes it more realistic that it did happen.
I thought that image was a great contrast too with the "alarm clock's rusty ring" in the first paragraph. That sound image was so vivid it made me believe in the reality of the story-a nice counterpoint to the more abstract images. All through the story, the sounds are described with precision, making me feel the impact so much more when the "air was rocked by the sound of the shot."
I think what put me most on alert in the beginning was " . . . in the confusion of medicines for man and beast and found a small yellow box of .22 cartridges." The word "confusion" set off alarm bells for me, not only about what might happen but about the family, how they did things, how they were careful or not with "man and beast." I see Arnold's small, nine year old hand blindly groping for the cartridges, and I felt 'country customs' aside, he's too young to be handling that gun, that he's unprotected, somehow.
I agree with your assessment of the medicines (childproof caps?) linking to the big boy gun he probably shouldn’t have been handling. Then I think of all the parents who gave guns to school shooters. Argh.
There's something very disturbing too about the image of the wing in the earlier scene: it's dual. Eugie could be the bird or an angel. And while he's dying it's like he's climbing vertically (to heaven?) while Arnold after telling his family that Eugie's dead goes to the loft in the barn with the animals. It's like the brothers are no longer human, Eugie is spirit, while Arnold, feels he belongs with the animals, taking whatever his family will leave him to eat or drink. In the loft, Arnold's above like Eugie is but there's a big difference.
This tie between waking up together and Arnold being left alone like he was in the morning but having a different result is what clinched the death of Eugie for me. At first I was sure it was a misdirect and Arnold was going to be reprimanded for misfiring the gun but my realization that this was the crux - this was the point of the story where the boy begins his transformation to stone.
Oh yes, Sam. For me, as Arnold watches his brother die, there's so much that harks back to that early morning scene: the same dismay at the unwanted sense of power he has over his unconscious brother, the way his brother the throws him so easily out of the bed so he ends up wrapped in the blanket 'like a baby'. But out in the fields, Eugie doesn't get up - he seems to be scrabbling upwards when the ground is either flat or, as someone else suggests, going downhill. The echoes between the two sections of the story are loud and detailed. I think they give a strong sense of the size of the emptiness that's left by E's death. E (shown mainly through A's perception) is beautiful, assured and constantly putting down his brother who is totally subordinate to him - and this is summed up for us later when the sheriff asks Arnie whether he and his brother were good friends, and Arnie thinks about the difference between what he feels for a friends and for his brother: 'Eugie had had a way of looking at him, slyly and mockingly and yet confidentially, that had summed up how they both felt about being brothers. Arnold had wanted to be with Eugie more than with anybody else, but he couldn’t say they had been good friends'.
Thank you. After doing the assignment, I did a little research on the author and came across this quote by Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:
"For more than twenty years now, Gina Berriault has
been writing remarkably sensitive and powerful fiction. Her
style is lucid, lyrical and very much her own, and she seems to
have any number of strategies for breaking your heart." The article is in Ploughshares and it's called "The Achievement of Gina Berriault."
Although I remembered the great description of how Eugie's hair tapered down to a point on his neck, I hadn't made this connection. You're right, of course. Also about the 'country quiet' - the sky, the mountains, the orange mist, the still cold and colourless valley - Berriault's description draws me right in, so when the accident happens I'm sort of without protection or defence. Also, everything's changed (in the human sense) and yet nothing has (the sky, the mountains).
The neck thing is such an interesting choice. It's not a cliched in the middle of back etc. And it's such a small space - if he'd been aiming it would have been incredibly hard to pull off. It so nearly didn't happen. I think the intimacy and - god if only it had been an inch either way - makes it so heartbreakingly believable.
I too was struck by the description of the walk. It's action/movement but not spectacular. Just what you'd expect. And then sudden something unexpected, which hits so hard, because there's no sense of feeling that the writer is leading you to it. It just happens.
I agree... the details she provides leading up to the shooting...the door at the bottom of the stairs, bolting down the stairs, the hills surrounding the farm and valley, the shimmer as the wind moves the reeds, the barbed wire fence...are what made it all believable for me, even at the first reading. Our extended family experienced an incident similar to what is described here. The story was painful to read, but also did a beautiful job examining the shooting's aftermath in the near and long-term. I loved the way she stayed with nine-year-old Arnold as he began to realize the adults were judging him, turning against him. Heartbreaking.
It was painful to read, which was, in part, why I liked it so much. It was awful and painful and I didn't want any of it to happen, but I kept reading, she kept pulling me along. Willingly. That's great writing in my view.
I think familiarity and normalcy are important here too. Right before the shooting, they are heading down a slope. When Arnold reached his brother, "Eugie seemed to be climbing the earth, as if the earth ran up and down." So it almost looks like Eugie is facing uphill? That could only be if Eugie had turned around. Otherwise, his feet should be uphill and his body/head further downhill. His figure laying still in the grass is anything but normal, so I think the description defies the normality of the rest of the scene as well.
The normalcy of the morning being shattered by the accident, a great comment, and true! I actually didn’t want to believe he had shot his brother and felt that hesitation just before his brother slumps over.
It really was a shock, wasn't it? And I also bought it on the first read - never a doubt in my mind. I drifted away in that pastoral scene, thinking about the ducks and the mountain and how peaceful it seemed, which made the gunshot such a shock. I also picked up on Eugie's hair and also the way she'd described the rifle and it's old lever, so when it caught on the fence it seemed plausible that could happen.
Yes, of course the description of the nape of Eugie’s neck had impressed itself. Unlike you, I had not realized how skillfully and why. That I had seen that part of him for years and this time it looks woefully different. Amazing.
Part of the reason I bought it—other than the old Chekhov saw about guns in Act I—is because Arnold’s initial reaction to the gun going off is, “Oh man, Eugie is going to roast me for this,” which is what would’ve happened if the extraordinary event hadn’t have occurred. So Berriault initially walks you down an alternative, more quotidian timeline of reality, but then yanks it away, through absence, or by something expected to occur that does not happen. The dashed expectation made me feel the violent disjunction and shock of Eugie’s death more acutely.
Definitely! Arnold's first reaction is so good! If instead we’d seen him immediately worrying he’d shot his brother, it would’ve rung false, given the unlikelihood of Eugie getting shot, and given Eugie’s role in Arnold’s life. I can imagine Arnold’s assumptions: Of course Eugie is fine, as always. Of course I don’t have the power to hurt him. Neither assumption turns out to be true.
It strikes me that the initial impulse in writing such a story could very well be Arnold "freaking out" and running away in terror and dismay back to his family. The fact that he doesn't, seem all the more...believeable for me.
This reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison's "Sula" where two young girls take a younger brother, a toddler, with them when they play by a creek. After playing a while, the two girls take the little boy by his hands to swing him, only they lose their grip and the boy goes into the creek and is swept under and away. The two girls, like Arnold, are struck by the event in such a way that they do not know what to do, so they do nothing and simply return home.
I would have to agree with you, Hannah, though I would not have seen it without your insightful comment. I couldn't understand why Arnold didn't run away freaking out, yet, since Barriault has other places to take us, "...stranger and more profound" - this is a brilliant move on her part.
Julia Kristeva, a French philosopher and novelist, wrote a lot about the Abject, which is the existential dismay that certain unexpected images or situations can throw you in--something that shows you the inescapability of death, and so induces horror. I've never read a story that induced this abject horror in me as well as this one.
As a father, there's only one thing I fear more than fatally hurting one of my children, and that's one of my children fatally hurting the other. Arnold's accidental killing of Eugie is my greatest fear put into the flesh. From that point on, this turned into a horror story for me. I sank deep into that emotion, and my rational mind took a back seat.
But, like the best works of horror, Berriault maintained a sort of horrifying internal logic beyond the "scary bits". Placing the death so early in the story, and the way Arnold deals with it, drops us into a stew of horror, but the simmer comes after, when we see how everyone else reacts to Arnold's reaction to the death. The people around him comment on how they think he should be behaving while behaving in the same way themselves. They all know the outward signs that he *should* be showing, but they're so focused on him that they express none of these themselves. In fact, every action they take contradicts with the words they speak.
At one point, someone mentions how, after the shooting, Arnold should have run home crying like a baby. The "like a baby" phrase expresses an underlying derision, that even though the crying is what they think Arnold should have been doing, they would still would have thought less of him for it. But *no one* in the story is crying. Everyone else's reaction to the death is the same as Arnold's, strangely detached, carefully focused on not letting it interrupt the flow of regular life.
There's no catharsis in this story, just dread and more dread as the characters on the page refuse to give expression to the roiling horror that's twisting our, the readers', guts.
That's an excellent point about the hypocrisy of the adults around him, particularly the uncle. It's much easier to express anger than sadness sometimes, and looking for a scapegoat when confronted with an unimaginable tragedy is all too predictable. The horror story comparison is interesting, as that's a genre that depends on escalation to an extreme degree (I'm reminded of rewatching The Quiet Place recently). In my notes on this story, it occurred to me that, if you read it and conclude that Arnold is a monster, a "stone boy," then it doesn't really provide the same kind of escalation as Arnold having the trauma of his accidental killing of his brother compounded by his family's and community's demonization of him for it. That is, if he was bad to begin with, that's one thing, but if he's a good kid (which I think he is), what happens after Eugie's death is even worse.
This is exactly what I wanted to say, and it's this, for me, that gives that last line such a terrifying punch. The loss of his brother is one thing, but there's this deep loss at the heart of Arnold that he knows will endure because it's there in all these other men around him, and this rings so true.
This is how I felt on my first read--just gutted, as you said twisted up inside, without hope. But on my second read I see some hope in the fact that the parents seem to have awakened a bit to their own cruelty...and that Arnold himself is frightened by the coldness of his reply to his mother. When I first read it, I felt all but certain these adults were turning him into the monster the sheriff and his uncle seem convinced he is. But if he's still able to be frightened when he himself lashes out, there is hope for him.
Yes. The horror of story is first, the death, but as horrific are the actions and words of the adults. They are stunted; they are stone, and perhaps the only thing left to them is to turn Arnold into stone too. The father and mother show a modicum of love to him -- the father giving him the pitcher, the mother asking if he had come to her room. It is the uncle (who Eugene resembled) who is the real monster in the story to me.
Do you think catharsis comes when Arnold's father places the milk pitcher in front of him, after his sister won't? That pierced me deeply but I was relieved Arnold was no longer excised from the family.
This is a brilliant summary, Tony, of what I've been feeling towards in my comments here and there. But yours is grounded in direct experience which makes it so powerful
The killing is out of balance with the rest of the binaries in the story, and that is one of the things that makes it feel so real to me. There is a shock, the killing, and then the emotional consequences are invisible. The sheriff, uncle and visitors all feel they deserve a specific reaction from Arnold. They are hungry for it. And I think, because of the rest of those binaries (artfully described by others in comments) we feel we are denied the satisfying reaction — hysteria — and this puts a little bit of us on the side of those who are ready to write off the child as a “moron” or a cruel “reasonable”. GB does this, while we are simultaneously with Arnold, hoping for him. Wow GB.
We don’t see it coming, and it happens so quietly, so subtly, we believe it. No pyrotechnics in the language, no bells and whistles. And as most of us know, this is often how accidents happen. You are driving along and out of nowhere a car skids out of control and hits you. Or you stand up too quickly and whack your head. This is what makes the accident here so completely credible. Genius, and a fantastic writing lesson.
Agreed. The cool, calm way it unfolds is what really struck me, really made it impactful. That is how accidents and tragedies often happen. Without fanfare or "pyrotechnics". Just like that, the world will never be the same. Haunting.
Yes Sandra, the quietness of the language is so powerful . Eugie’s final moments: ‘climbing the earth, as if the earth ran up and down’ made me stop the first time to re-read the whole scene. Those dying moments, seen by Arnold - how vivid and terrible.
Totally!! I was really struck by the lack of violence in Eugie’s death, and how firmly Berriault locates us in Arnold’s moment-to-moment experience (struggling with the fence > annoyance > embarrassed by how he thinks Eugie will react > seeing that Eugie is dying) instead of losing us with big, necessarily more vague experiences like murder, dying, etc.
She stays behind Arnold’s eyes and allows us his experience with no folderol. She stays close to what we may have experienced as a freeze trauma response. Arnold immediately disassociates. We can tell by how she says—“ his hands were strange to him.”
I had the same reaction to that line. As an adult I know that it is shock that does this. But the child knew what the adults did not care to know. He knew he was exiled. The 'restless green eyes' of the sheriff.
Yes, Patty. Such an authentic manifestation of abject shock, horror, confusion. Not even grief yet, really. That's something that tends to come later. He's not himself anymore.
I feel like he’s in shock. Classical, physical shock. All those stories about people being accused of terrible crimes and the accusation being believed because they acted in odd ways after. The portrayal of shock in this story felt especially believable. Just. Pick. The peas.
God, yes, Doug. Just. Pick. The peas. Love this! You kinda go into auto pilot, the shock is so hard to describe. I was visiting my son last December and we were talking about his sister's death on Christmas night in 2008. He had spent the weekend with me and we both got the news at the same time. He told me what I did in the immediate aftermath of this, and I had no memory, and I mean zero memory of what he was telling me. He said I stood in the hallway for about 4 hours, staring at a spot on the wall, with my arms around myself, and my legs spread wide. I told him I thought I was doing something entirely different. It wasn't till that conversation that I realized there were all these "stories" in our lives -- the story he told himself, the story I told myself, and then the actual stream of factual events. It's such a surreal experience, nearly impossible (but not totally impossible) to describe. But you are so correct about the portrayal of shock -- and we're talking about a child, 9 years old. What is that? Fourth grade? Jesus.
Wow, so you’ve been through this. The story must have had so much resonance for you. Thanks for sharing this, Nancy. That’s a powerful, moving thing to hear.
Maybe Arnold’s story hit me hard because losing a child is the always-on parental nightmare, in a way losing a sibling isn’t.
As a parent, somewhere down there, I rehearse the loss of a child over and over. I allow myself to loosen the reins of imagination just enough to inhabit the feeling, then slam the scene shut and shake it off.
But I do that far less about my brothers (more now that we’re old men and… in the lottery). And at nine years old? I think I rehearsed the death of a parent but I don’t think I could ever do that about my three older brothers. They defined my world.
Having now lost one, I’ve experienced that discombobulation. The confusion of a piece of our Calder mobile being snipped off. The scramble to somehow rebalance the family. Thankfully, our family was well-equipped for this (and none of us was ‘responsible’ for it the way Arnold is taken to be). That family was not equipped, so he was sacrificed. Heartbreaking. And, back to George’s question, so real.
I too have lost a child in an accident. He was 18...and what I do recall.was the actions that I took in the 'denial' stage. I drove around and around looking for him...not talking to anybody but desperately seeking some kind of answer..a rewind of life. It's like knowing but not knowing.
I'm sorry, Rod. Apparently we belong to the same tribe. Your post reminded me of a man I met who said when his brother died, his father went out to mow the lawn. When he came back inside, the brother went out to look at the job. His father had carved "Bryan" into the grass, completely unwittingly. He had no idea he was doing it. Like knowing, but not knowing.
Well, yes, maybe. Our modern sensibilities say shock. But getting to the whole question of whether it's shock or something else - getting ahead here. I think one way to read it is as shock. Another way is in what actually gets discussed in the story - moron? or reasonable? It reminds me so much of Camus' The Stranger.
I thought of moron, but Arnold is not moronic or seriously debilitated until he tries to cope with the event. He has mixed feelings about his brother but not, seemingly, about the family behavioral patterns in general. So I'd say he has gone into deep shock. turned to stone. In the kind of time and place the writer has set this story, there was really no attention or significance given to emotional states. Disturbed and shocked people were not "analyzed," they were often sent to institutions, and not infrequently, given literal shock treatment. Even children, too.
The scene in The Stranger where the protagonist shoots and kills, is one of the most beautifully powerful and disturbing things I have ever read. "For two hours the day had stood still; for two hours it had been anchored in a sea of molten lead." "It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire."
He may not know what he feels in the immediate aftermath, but I would say he is feeling something powerful. If you read the passage where he is knocking on his mother's door, he is aching to sob into her breast, to unload his grief and horror. And he's also 9 years old. At that age (maybe at any age, actually), it's so hard to find the words to describe such overwhelming and terrifying feelings.
Yes, he pushed his feelings down and was made to push his feelings down. The sheriff indicted him and then the men indicted him and then the women at breakfast do--no milk for you. He is forced to carry so much of others' stoning, before he even has words to express his own feelings about Eugie that are complex, ambivalent, and hard to unknot even without his brother's death.
But what if he was taught Boys don't cry? What could he do?
And when he saw everyone's reaction, he knew he wasn't being 'seen.' They were 'looking' at him... with an expectation. Then judging, labeling, condemning him when he didn't meet their expectation.
They did not SEE a traumatized little boy who needed to be embraced the moment they realized he wasn't joking. The moment he told them what had happened, where was the compassion, the fiercely loving embraces assuraning him that, "This was not your fault."
I'm not sure if your reply was in response to my comment alone. I agree that he was probably taught that 'boys don't cry'. The community was in shock too and maybe the cultural habitus was is to blame others to ward off their own feelings of vulnerability, sadness, grief, guilt, helplessness. I agree that Arnold is wanting to be seen and recognized for himself and is quite sensitive to who sees him more accurately and who doesn't.
Toward the end of the story, the father demonstrates compassion and care for the boy--he passes him the milk. The mother also reaches out to him, just as he's going out the door to go to the mountain to rescue the calf and the cow. Not all hope is lost.
Part of the difficulty as I read the story is that Arnold feels guilty about his love for his brother and desire to be like him and his aggression toward him, because he wants to be big too like Eugie, perhaps even to replace/best him. Because Arnold feels in some way 'at fault' for Eugie's death, he wouldn't believe anyone reassuring him that it wasn't his fault. This is part of the ethical beauty of GB's story and its impact on us.
I agree about him not knowing what he feels - and nor do any of the adults. They all do practical things first, like his Dad going off to find the coroner and the undertaker. And they ask him for an explanation, as if he ought to know. Then they defer, with some relief, to the sheriff's explanation that he's 'reasonable', which actually mean he's 'mean' - and from then that influences how they treat him. They're even slightly sellf-satisfied that they are, therefore, 'unreasonable'. Everyone's passing the buck of explanation to everyone else, till it all lands on Arnold: "Arnold gazed over his shoulder at his father, expecting his father
to have an answer for this also. But his father’s eyes, larger and even
lighter blue than usual, were fixed upon him curiously."; "Andy paused as he was getting into the front seat and gazed back
at Arnold, and Arnold saw that his uncle’s eyes had absorbed the
knowingness from the sheriff’s eyes. Andy and his father and the sheriff had discovered what made him go down into the garden. It was
because he was cruel, the sheriff had said, and didn’t care about his
brother. Arnold lowered his eyelids meekly against his uncle’s stare." So gradually he seems to believe their view of him. As Nancy says here, when he goes to find his mother, he's going to grieve with her, but she can't accept him, it seems. It's not until breakfast next day that he feels his parents are beginning to see him 'as himself', and it's so marvellous the way Berriault puts this: 'relief rained over his shoulders at the thought that his parents recognized him again. They must have lain awake after his father had come in from the yard: had they realized together why he had come down the stairs and knocked at their door?" It seems like it when his mother asks him 'humbly' what he wanted - but the moment of hope is cut off by Arnold's reply, which is like a dagger to the heart - of us all.
Loved this response so much, Jane. I thought of this, too, though -- you write that they must have lain awake after his father came back in from the yard. They are lying in bed together. Couples talk in bed before falling to sleep. And this day has been unlike any other day in their lives, so it's reasonable to assume they did speak of Arnold's coming to the room. I am fantasizing here, but his dad might have asked, "did you invite him in?" She'd have said "no." And then there might have been an exchange of questions about what might have motivated him to come in. I keep hoping they are going to try to reach out to him, because one thing is certain, and that's that he won't be trying again himself, anytime soon.
Nancy, thank you for this comment - and your others - on my contribution. Exactly right - you can imagine them lying in bed mulling over the inexplicable thing that seems to have happened to their son. I'm puzzled at why she didn't let him come in at first: is she shocked in a similar way to him? afraid her husband will come in and not sure of his reaction? the 'is it at night that you're afraid?' question seems very harsh. She surely seems to feel she wished she had when she asks him about it next day.
Nancy, I found it curious that he was waiting for his mother's permission to enter to express his grief, his terror. Why was he waiting? Why wasn't he barging into the room ready to throw himself on his mother sobbing uncontrollably?
This made me think that perhaps expressing vulnerable emotions had been discouraged in his family. Not considered important. Not valued. Especially in boys. Boys don't cry.
These are fantastic questions you're asking, Min. Arnold is 9 years old, he's just killed his brother, albeit accidentally. But the thing is, it wasn't duck season, Eugie even admonished him briefly about this before they left the house, meaning he really did do something wrong. Some respondents have said it wasn't his fault, but strictly speaking, it was his fault. And here's the rub -- he knows this. Which is why that moment is so absolutely heart wrenching. Which one of us has never done something to be ashamed for, to feel guilty for, to feel responsible for, and we can never ever take it back? And here he is, yes a boy, but also a child who is in the throes of abject shock. To have had the characterologic strength to have barged into his mother's bedroom in this moment, would have been necessary. But Arnold is a boy, he doesn't have it, she rejects this single attempt, and now he suffers.
That idea, that is wasn't his fault, once posted, once released into the ethers, kept gnawing at me. It must've been this comment of yours, Nancy. Your words were already speaking to me... especially in the shower... hmmm, maybe that's when you 'released' them? ... I thought, how could I say it wasn't his fault?
I struggled with this. Why did I want to say this to Arnold? I think it was the child in me remembering how awful I felt when I was lashed, whipped, made to feel worthless, with 'It was your fault.' Saying that was not helpful to anyone. Just an excuse to be cruel and unforgiving. Apologies, after that, are not well-received. As if the only act that would satisfy the tormentors would be an act of self-harm, self-destruction, self-cruxificion. And it's so commonly heard in childhood.
As I showered I imagined his mother embracing Arnold, sobbing, "It wasn't your fault." For she knew he was thinking, But it was my fault. And he knew she was thinking, But, it was his fault.
I suppose, for me, his mother's act, the one I imagined, held the promise of...'Despite what happened, we want you to know, to feel, to believe... that we still love you.'
What a gorgeous response, Min. Thank you for this. And I had to crack up over the shower. I do my very best thinking -- and revising -- in the shower, or sometimes in the car if I'm driving alone and it's a longer trip. Something about that shower. Maybe water really is not only healing, but somehow inspirational. And we must have had similar parents. I was lashed, whipped, made to feel worthless, too. I think some of this was the era -- spare the rod and spoil the child -- no, it didn't work out too well, now, did it. I so wanted Arnold's mother to take him in her arms and comfort him, knowing full well it would never be enough, but at least he'd know he had his family behind him. But then, maybe the story would not have been as powerful -- or (sadly) as authentic. Your last sentence really does say it all, though. We want to know as readers -- as people -- that he is still loved. Since that's what each one of us really wants at the heart of things. I do hope that the following morning, when his father passes him the milk and acknowledges his existence, that after some time, they will try to reach out to him. But one thing for sure -- I don't believe Arnold will make another effort. His guilt and shame and grief and horror is just too much. It's too much for him to carry. If there is any redemption here, his parents need to make the next move. The story ends here, though. We are then left wondering whether Arnold will ever feel loved, forgiven. This story will be with me till the day I die. I can tell you that.
Nancy, I was hesitant to mention the shower as the setting for ‘revisiting’ my “It’s not your fault’ comment. When I read your response, I looked at the time you posted it. I swear it was while I was showering. OMG, I was channeling Nancy Miller! 😆
I want to say ‘thank you’ for sharing about your parents. 🤗
Min and Nancy, I find this discussion of yours really speaks to me. I'm struck, in the section where Arnold tries to go to his mother, by the way he's thinking in another time-scale altogether. He imagines how he'll go to her and tell her that Eugie is dead - which she doesn't yet know! 'He had expected her to realize that he wanted to go down on his knees by her bed and tell her that Eugie was dead. She did not know it yet, nobody knew it, and yet she was sitting up in bed, waiting to be told. He had expected her to tell him to come in and allow him to dig his head into her blankets and tell her about the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother.' It's as though he's gone back in time to do what everyone expected him to do right away, to express his feelings of terror and to grieve. Thing is, are these ideas his own, or has he got them from the pressure of what other people say should have happened? Because at the same time, he's aware (and yet she was sitting up waiting for him to tell her) that she does know. Does all this help in some way to explain why he rejects her when she makes overtures to him in the morning, as he's going out to find the calf? Or is it rather that he's being tugged this way and that by all the conflict of feelings - his own and the ones other people seem to impose on him - so he can't find his way to himself? I don't know, and this not knowing creates in me something like Arnold's own confusion, I think.
Beautiful, Jane. And I don't know, either. I think this is by design. By nature, Arnold seems to be the kind of child who is obedient most of the time (sans the duck season violation, which is big), but he's respectful, he picks peas on time when his mother asks him to, etc. So what's happened is he's believing (as children believe adults; they always know what's best, they're smarter, etc.) what he's been told. He's cruel, reasonable, and didn't care about his brother. He can't even answer whether he and Eugie were best friends because in his mind (he's a purist), it's not at all the same relationship. No one is seeing this child. No one. And so therefore, he really can't find his way to himself. And it's very likely, unless his parents reach out, he never will. Grief is a very heavy weight to carry, especially for a 9 year old.
Well put, Nancy. Arnold is not himself anymore. He's not even sure who he is, I would say. Or ever was. He's almost ghost-like. Temporarily? Permantly?
Well, I have found you are really never "the same" again. People say this, but it is true, or at least consistent with my experience. It's very permanent, but that being said, Chris, I don't think it necessarily has to be purgatory. One chooses how one is going to work it out, find a way to carry the grief suitcase, as I have come to call it.
Quite right. It doesn't have to be purgatory. Perhaps at first, but even "purgatory" becomes familiar I guess, or the weight of the grief suitcase not impossible to carry. I like that term very much
Well, the suitcase doesn't get lighter, but it does get easier to carry. Like going to the gym and working out to gain strength, the more you carry it, the stronger you get, so it seems easier. In reality, it is we who get stronger and more able to carry it. Once in a great while, miraculously, and after much time, you might even forget it's there. Till the next time you get knocked to the ground.
This was the exact thing I landed on when considering how Berriault is able to bring us along and make us believe this unlikely accident. She stays behind Arnold's eyes. I think the simplicity of the language is, in essence, an outgrowth of that move. Arnold, who has grown up watching his older brother so closely, admiring him, and noticing all those very specific details of his body (the way "his brown curls grew thick and matted, close around his ears and down his neck, tapering there to a small whorl," or the "neat dip above his buttocks his thick-soled logger’s boots gave him.") is, of course, going to focus on the physical details of his brother in this moment, too. There is no realm where I can imagine the Arnold that has been established to this point in the story suddenly thinking, "I can't believe I shot him," or even "How could Eugie be dead?" Not only would that change the timbre of this whole scene, it would, as others have mentioned, rung out as deeply untrue.
Yes. She brings it all through Arnold's eyes. And "stays close" the entire time. It is almost claustrophobic, but precisely what you would want to go for in a story, right.
I bought it because up until that point, Berriault focuses almost entirely on the dynamic relationship between these two brothers, and that relationship is deep and real. So we have no reason not to believe it by the time we get there. Berriault is masterful at setting up this relationship. Right away we get their age difference, and Arnold feeling subordinate. Although Eugie is annoyed with Arnold waking him up as he did, Eugie nonetheless gets up to help him pick peas - he doesn't say no. (Berriault gives us the incredible sentence about the kitchen being cold that morning, but it will be "unbearable" with heat later in the day.) Then we have the wonderful physical descriptions of the boys - Eugie tall and strong, with curly hair. He has status and admirable attributes. He likes himself. Arnold is "enthralled" with him. Then we have Arnold: undersized and with straight hair. He is, in many ways, the lesser of the two. Finally, I loved the sentence, "Arnold followed Eugie down the slope, stealing, as his brother did. from one shock of wheat to another." Arnold is mimicking Eugie's gestures, running his hand along the stalks of wheat. He wants to be like Eugie. This is such an honest and rich description of a relationship between two brothers - six years apart. I am able to hold onto the tension between their annoyances and admiration at the same time. Again, we have no reason not to believe what comes next.
Perfectly described! I also felt strong foreshadowing in that initial moment when Arnold admires Eugie sleeping and is discomfited by their role-reversal in that moment, making Eugie immediately a vulnerable character in the story. Then you add in a gun and, well.
I understand the question George poses, but, through no fault of my own, I am at a disadvantage in answering it. Unfortunately, in south Louisiana where I live, this sort of gun accident isn't as rare as it should be. I personally know people involved in the same or similar accidents. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries used to run PSAs warning against such things as going through fences with a loaded gun, getting in or out of boats with a loaded gun, etc. So, I bought the incident in the story because it was familiar. I am profoundly sorry for this, and don't mean to kill a literary buzz.
On the other hand, I can detach myself enough to consider the question from a "normal" person's perspective. I bought it (or bought it slightly used) because the writer conveyed what shock is really like. i.e. out-of-body, incomprehensible. And, if an incident registers as incomprehensible, then the witness, especially a child, might "choose" to ignore it and go about his business. This is familiar in child abuse and rape cases.
This is one of the greatest stories I have ever read. I wrote six pages in my SC notebook about it. Thank you for this.
I live in rural Indiana. Tragic farm accidents are so common. Everybody knows somebody who was hurt or killed in an accident with a gun, machine, tool, animal, etc. Seemed to me the author had known that life or researched it well. The only completely unbelievable part was people coming over to their house to talk about it. Rural Hoosiers don’t talk about it, they just deliver tons of food while the family has no appetite to eat.
Your comments remind me of Harry Crews's A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He writes about growing up rural south Georgia, and (this is long ago memory so I apologize) writes about how everyone he knows, everyone around him is missing a limb or appendage or is injured in some way, and so he and his brother are in awe when they look at the Sears, Roebuck catalog because everyone in the catalog, in contrast to his world, is in one piece.
Quite a book, "A Childhood...." Now, there's a memoir with such stunning (or should I say "compelling"?) initial pages that a reader might be gripped by the throat and have to read on, or toss it across the room in rage.
I don't think you've killed the literary buzz. If you bought it because it's the sort of incident you're familiar with then that's a valid reaction, IMHO. We all bring something of ourselves to these readings and when a piece of fiction mirrors real life it can be a very powerful – and emotive – thing.
I live in the UK, so these sorts of accidents are exceptionally rare. But I bought it without hesitation because I've read about such incidents in the news, and everything in the description made it feel unquestionably real to me.
I came at it from a similar place. I grew up with a boy who had accidentally shot his younger brother. He lived his entire life like he was trying to escape that moment.
Interesting. I bought the story because it was so familiar, and it was not about guns. These comments are very helpful, thank you. The incomprehensibility of it. This story took me two weeks to read. I got to the killing and after that it was sometimes a line a day.
I was thrilled to see this story be included. It is one of my all-time favorites. So it was hard for me to read it as if I hadn't read it before, but I slowed down and tried. It is a crushing story of guilt and shame. And grief and misunderstanding and judgment. This time, I focused on how she both stays inside the boy's thoughts to show what he doesn't know, can't understand, but also stood outside him to show how his family and the townspeople judge him. The POV is really interesting because she straddles that line between close third and omniscient. As soon as I saw the gun, I was on alert. A child with a gun, in the world where I live, is a dangerous thing. I completely buy the killing of Eugie. It's just that kind of fluke that can happen in life. I didn't question it at all. Again, since I've read it so many times, it is hard to gauge my resistance, but I don't think I felt any. This story worked so beautifully and tragically. What stays with me every time I read it is Arnold's childlike adherence to the rules (pick the peas early) and then his acceptance of his family's and the town's judgment of him as a bad person, someone who would kill his brother and not show any remorse or grief. We see what the characters can't see. Thank you, George, for including this wonderful story.
Straddling that line between close third and omniscient, is exactly right in my mind. Such a deft balancing act. It amazes and baffles and aggravates me, how well done it is.
This narration shift, inside of Arnold's perspective, and then distanced from himself by shock after the tragic event, is not something I noticed as well as you did! I'm eager to go back now and read it all line by line attending to this the way Mark said he did. What a great tool to emply in order to represent the dissociation Arnold experienced. Also, that you noticed his childlike adherance to the rules, is important because we need to reflect later so much on his level of intention. He was following rules, following elders, noticing but not determining, still being guided and told. Had his brother balked at shooting ducks out of season, what do we believe Arnold would have done with the gun? Exactly. That's a critical place the story could have taken a turn and did not, so we ended up uncomfortable instead, because we felt where the story was headed then, if not why.
Yes, do a line by line analysis! It really enriched my understanding of the story and taught me how much GS has put into my silo and how brilliant GB is!
I am reverberating with multiple intersecting views of the story and can hardly find a way to put my thoughts together right now, except to respond to others' comments. It's like being on literary LSD. Phew! The one word that keeps coming up is 'BALANCE'.
Hopefully, once I come down from tripping I can write something coherent.
Thank you for detailing how the narrator straddles different POVs. I was tracking that and couldn't put words to it. It introduced a quiet confusion for me that underlined the unfolding of the story. An utterly heartbreaking story of a 'boy and a group' struggling to locate a senseless death into a matrix of reasonableness.
Same Mark, I thought Chekov right away. But now I am not sure if I was surprised by its early use. I do know that I thought that maybe the author was going to toy with the gun and our expectations.
I think I bought it because from the moment Arnold picked up the gun, I dreaded what would surely happen - someone was going to get shot. I was invested, even before it became clear that Eugie was coming with him.
Me too. As soon as Arnold picked up the gun, I knew Eugene would be shot. It had to happen. When it did, I was grateful that the author didn’t make the actual incident bear all the dramatic weight of the story (if that makes sense). The starkness of the shooting, Eugie’s death, made it all the more tragic. Arnold’s reaction, the reactions of the people around him were agonizing.
I honestly don’t know what to do with it, because, initially, when he went on to pick peas, I was also stunned. I also wanted/expected a more “typical” response (from nine-year-old Arnold). Slowly, as I saw what was happening to him, I lost my uncharitable view, and I suffered along with him. When his mother relents (ever so slightly) and it seems too late, I could howl.
Now that I think about it, it NOT being duck season seems like a serious tell. Arnold is starting out not doing the RIGHT thing. So it only stands to reason, within the context of the story, that he will continue in that direction until he's gone so far there is no return.
It seems to speak to his disassociating from what happened and leaving to pick the peas anyway
Yes, it not being duck season somehow made the lead-up more ominous and the accident more believable--maybe because it emphasized his immaturity and added a reason not to bring the gun.
But could somebody tell me what is actually the implication of it 'not being duck season'? On first read I assumed it meant simply that there wouldn't be any game...'Don't be silly, Arnold, you won't find any ducks in (whichever month it is)'. And the fear of being derided or made to feel small/foolish is significant in Arnold from early in the story. But then it turns out there ARE ducks on the lake...So is 'out of season' the time when it is considered wrong to shoot ducks? (When they are mating??) Did Arnold and Eugie know that Arnold was intending something forbidden? (If so, Eugene offers to become complicit in the misdeed.)
Without elaborating an answer too far while I'm still working out all the facets of this part myself, Rachel, it's important to understanding the psychology and the culture surrounding Arnold that not only did Eugie not stop Arnold from bringing the gun to pick peas, as they often did, nor stop him from shooting at Ducks out of season, upon entering the house to announce the tragedy to his family, Arnold is greeted by his father expecting a lot of peas picked for the long time they took, and also asked if Arnold had success shooting a duck. His father valued the needed food higher than the poaching law, even when broken by his very young son, and there's a lot to flesh out about that. I'm still thinking through it, myself. Arnold was simply doing right by the priorities placed upon him by his family, his culture, his elders, and especially his beloved older brother (if not the law) in each way he was shown and allowed.
That makes a whole lot of difference to how I interpret the story. So Arnold is transgressing from the beginning, and knows it, and so does Eugene. The risk-taking is part of Arnold's excitement in going out with his older brother. But the accident wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been transgressing.
Yes, I agree about 'it's not being duck season' made it inevitable that tragedy was going to happen, but when Eugie was shot DEAD, I went into shock and wanted to undo it. I had to reread the several grafs before the shot and after to get back to the reality of the story. The accidental brutality of accidents. It's unbelievable how Berriault had me live through what Eugie and all members of the family and community were having to live through.
Yes, exactly. I think it's because we've been trained by reading--and writing--fiction to know that something bad will happen with the gun. The Tolstoy thing: The gun on the wall has to go off.
I believed it because this is the way tragedy occurs. Quickly and unexpectedly, in the most ordinary of circumstances. Arnold's entire mistake takes place in a single line: "His rifle caught on the wire and he jerked at it." It's sparse and devoid of excuses. And those moments after--in which he's quietly confused--I felt those viscerally because I've been there. Standing outside a neighbor's home, it suddenly exploded into flames when I rang the bell. You're trying to make the leap from mundanity to enormity and your brain won't catch up. A very deftly written scene.
Reminds me of the Auden poem, The Old Masters. Starts with “About suffering, they were never wrong” and talks about the old master paintings where tragedy occurs almost in the background of mundane life. One reference is to a painting of Icarus falling in the background while a farmer ploughs a field. (Forget who painted that).
Bruegel...I love this poem. And I know EXACTLY what you mean...thank you for pointing it out. If you can bear to read my response to George's exercise, you'll see how my point is that we are primed right from the beginning to expect death to walk in and take Eugie. Just as Auden's analepsis (ooh...fancy!) pushes us on to the inevitable, so Berriault's does the same. By the way, isn't that a masterful opening line, "About suffering" (YES? YES?"), "they were never wrong" (WHO?! WHO?!), "the Old Masters" (Ahhhhhhhh!). It seems to me that Berriault does exactly the same.
Oh my word, TJ. Chills are running down my backside with this scene you created with 'it suddenly exploded into flames when I rang the bell'. And you actually lived with this reality and are living it. Words escape me...It's like the shock of knowing Eugie's dead, really dead, though I the foreshadowing of great tragedy was in the story from the beginning.
That did it for me. An achingly sad line. Combined with the description of Eugie climbing the earth... I almost couldn't finish the story. The death of children, even accidental, is something I have such a hard time with in stories. I knew this was a powerful piece, but the dread was too much. Maybe I experienced the shock that Arnold did (if he in fast did.)
This story has a lot of resonance, and that matters a lot to me - but ultimately, I'm not sure I like it. I imagine the late great John Gardner saying, "Well, you better read it again."
Stories aren’t real. But they can be really triggering. I avowed never to read Steig Larson again after Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. That dude was too vested in female sexual torture.
With these ducks now combining in my head with Tony Soprano's ducks, I'm now beginning to think that there must be a PhD in all of this: "An ontological examination of the anatine in twentieth century American literature."
In answer to the question re: why I bought the accidental killing, I think it's partly because Berriault began with such an ordinary, utterly relatable first scene. The exchange between the brothers felt so real that I immediately fell into a state of mind where suspension of disbelief was a given.
Agreed. My reading of that scene, though, is that it underscores the family dynamic - the dominant son, the subservient son. The fearless (and rather unpleasant) older son and the fearful, dominated, routine-driven younger one. Arnold, in my reading, is lost from the beginning.
Well put. This makes me think of some others' comments about Arnold's discomfort with Eugie's vulnerability when sleeping at the beginning. He can't tolerate the idea of the world being any other way than with Eugie as the powerful one, which makes his later denial of Eugie's ultimate vulnerability so believable.
Absolutely. The very pointed word "subordinate" as applied to Arnold occurs in paragraph 1. That's extreme economy in writing, there. The larger family dynamic, as you say, points to more than this one tragic event, and then I gain more empathy for Arnold.
I also became extremely empathic towards Arnold as I reread the story line by line. Is Arnold a 'stone' boy or as I would argue is he 'stoned' by the community? His father seems to be the only one who may appreciate what's happened to his youngest son and his mother, though extremely shut off, may have some burgeoning curiosity/concern about/for him.
Yeah, it’s funny how quickly we sense we’re in the hands of a master, so we give ourself to them. We get off that fence that makes us keeps asking, “Is this a special one? An average, flawed one? A dog?”
This one is easy for me to answer because I’ve seen it. The whole scenario. The siblings, the gun, the death, the wait, the shut down, the utterly horrible response by family and friends.
I’ve been an RN 42 years. We see a lot. I will say that her telling of this story gutted me. The set up was beautiful. I could feel and smell the farm, the pond, everything. I was angry at the mom’s response, I was horrified by the police response, I was understanding of the young brother’s anguish. I felt grief. The emotional response is truly something magical that only gifted writers can induce.
Yep AI. I once took a 35mm slide picture on a high street. It was of a warning sign on a barrier put around a open man-hole cover in the depths of which gas or maybe electricity were working. It simply read, in big red capital letters, BEWARE PARENTS - GREAT DANGER TO CHILDREN. Yikes!
I relish your attention to the sensory dimension of Gina Berriault's 'telling' Janice.
I also think that signalling your emotional responses, that is responses plural not singular, to the way different characters react to what is an overwhelmingly tragic - notwithstanding however often 'seen' in your 42 years of caring professional experience as an RN - incident points us towards the fact this story is about more than its eponymous 'Stone Boy'.
Do 9 year olds, in rural agricultural families and communities in the Disunited States of Americ, get to possess hand-me-down .22 caliber lever action rifles to this day I find myself wondering? Do they 'graduate' to handling and firing off Kalashinovs by the time they turn 15?
I'm responding above to your having 'seen it', so many times, and saying you find the question 'an easy one . . . to answer' Janice . . . and also to you sharing your tracking along the path through 'the siblings, the gun, the death, the wait, the shut down, the utterly horrible response by family and friends' . . . Arnold, his kin and his kith are realists . . . taking the hit of bad luck on the chin and, stoically, moving on . . . we've seen what we've seen, enough, nothing more to see, move on . . . in young Arnold's case stepping up and into the breach in his the front line of his farming family's eke-a-meagre-living way of life.
In regard to the hand-me-down gun in rural America, I would say that it is common, but rare for a child that young being able to get it down and take it out. In my later post, I point out that at fifteen, Eugie should be familiar with gun safety, but because Berriault tells us that Arnold's father gave it to him after no one else was using it anymore, perhaps Eugie did not consider it a dangerous thing any more, it was Arnold's. In this situation, the shooting of a duck was not a sporting moment, but a matter of bringing home food, just as picking the peas was a matter of supplying food.
Thanks Greg. Arnold is, in one way I'm seeing it, a young boy apprenticed in the subsistence family's activities of farming-hunting-fishing-foraging-gathering-preserving. He's been put to work, of necessity, and contributing for some time: his overalls and calloused hands, that turn off the rusty alarm each morning tell the tale.
I think there is actually more subtlety to what GB is suggesting. Both Arnold and Eugie know it's not 'duck season' to my way of reading the story. Eugie confronts Arnold with this fact and Arnold sniggers and says, 'No, I don't know [that]'. Arnold is tired of being the younger brother under Eugie's dominance and wants to become bigger--through the use of the rifle, to gain his older brother's respect and become more of an equal. He also wants to dominate Eugie--it's exhausting always being the runt of the family with cast off rifle, which creates great ambivalence and 'discomfort' in him.
I read that exchange about ducks not being in season to hunt as their inside joke about being able to shoot ducks when they wanted or needed to without getting caught because they are largely out of view from other people. Additionally, when they get to the wheat field, Eugie grabs the head of wheat and pulls the kernels, which are quite chewy when harvest time is near, and Arnold does the same. The younger brother follows the lead of the older brother, which could indicate that Eugie has also shot a duck out of season.
"Why I agree, without reservation" he, Rob, went on to say aloud, yet again and, as always, rather too loudly, for some.
"Sorry," said Blaze, on realising she was being spoken to, "Is it me your lookin' for, or is it someone else you thought you were set to be speaking to?"
"It's Arnold I'm thinkin' of" said Rob. "I'm wonderin' if, as he and sleepy Eugie were headin' out to pick cool mornin' peas, Arnold might have been replaying a song he'd recently heard played over, ag'in and ag'in, on the radio?"
"Wha'ssa song Rob?"
"Not sure I know the title Blaze but here's how it goes . . .
[Coughs to clear throat]
"When I was young times were bad
'n money was hard to find,
world that I knew was my backyard,
my folks were poor, 'n in debt.
Of all us three kids I was the youngest one
so always the last in line. Toys I got 'n
clothes I wore, were there's
before they ever were mine."
"Guess you could be right Rob."
"'Bout what Blaze?"
"Why 'bout Arnold havin' a motive, course. What else?"
"I'd like to say no Blaze but you might have hit the nail on the head . . . "
"Go on Rob, spit what you're thinking right out."
"Well. If Arnold was whistlin' what we think he might have been , and what's maybe more not just whistlin' a merry tune but singin' the words along with it stands up plain as a pikestaff that Arnold, some fancy lawyer might argue, had motive to murder his older brother. Stands to reason Blaze, don't it."
"Surely does Rob, surely does."
"All points bulletin then?"
"Yes . . . of course, only way to go . . . though given the stack of evidence that's piling up,; high as the sky, against my old mucka' I'm finding all this, what's happened way before lunch. is turnin' my blood a little cold."
Great riff, Rob, in which you manage to get me to agree with you about Arnold being motivated to murder Eugie. You even have me say, 'Sorry'!
I do agree with you that there is a background veiled threat on Arnold's part towards his older brother. If we don't think literally-concretely but think literarily-metaphorically-unconsciously, I wholeheartedly agree that fratricide is in the air. Having a motive to murder someone doesn't mean when that someone dies, we murdered them. And for a 9-yo boy who so admires and loves his older brother and wants to emulate him, Arnold would be horrified to think he planned and executed the murder of Eugie. He felt rivalrous as most siblings do.
I see hate and love as two sides of the same thin coin for all of us. Hate means here all the petty and not so petty ways we feel negatively aggrieved towards those that we love. It's roses and thorns, bad body order and the sexual pheronomes, etc. What's so beautiful about GB's writing is her balancing these aspects so delicately and with nuance.
Words are wonderful when it comes to exploring aren't they Blaze?
By now I'm quite familiar, no more than 'quite' mind, with the words which, in their sequence, comprise the text of 'The Stone Boy' but still working on which story they add up to. I expect to continue to be doing so, not just until I come to some final resolution as to what is the 'best' way of seeing what the story that the words set down on the page add up to but more likely when I come back to read this story. That's why, in my book, it is a 'great' short story.
As you put it, so well, 'what's so beautiful about GB's writing is her balancing . . . aspects so delicately and with nuance'. I'm glad you've enjoyed my 'riff Blaze. I was partly trying on a coat - one styled to make the case that 'Arnold had Motive, and that morning matched it up with Means and Opportunity' - to see how it fits. I was also, in part and simultaneously, trying to get within a fiction making mindset to explore what it might feel like to write the case against Arnold in the way court room prosecutors have to in order to get the jurors to believe their take on what happened.
On balance, the majority verdict (maybe as close to 11 to 1, with the 1 fretting that she might be making the wrong call) with me is that "Arnold is just a normal nine year old, no way was this incident other than a tragic accident, so please dismiss Your Honour and let Death by Misadventure be recorded here in Court and in the Coroner's Office." ⚖
I did see this 9 y.o. tried in court both through your words, in the sheriff's office and in the living room with by the men. The community as a whole has indicted him as being without feeling and destined to a life of crime. You put that scene into a formal courtroom and added motive.
This raises an important point. Words are powerful and one of the main ways we play with and work out ideas which you were doing--a kind of word play to test out possible other narratives, but when do we so play with an author's or another's words that we distort the truth?
I don't have too much fear that for all the 'overthinking' and 'over-commenting' (referencing my recollection of an entirely reasonable observation made by someone elsewhere, earlier, in this thread of conversation) that there is a danger of 'distorting the truth' in relation Gina Berriault's short story 'The Stone Boy'.
For me it stands, like any original, great work of art: inviolate as finalised by published by its creator but also a cultural artefact which invites us to enjoy reading as a story and as a route to engaging our creative minds with the challenges of comprehending what meaning(s) the story may have for its readers and also what gaining enhanced insights into the way that such a story is made.
Looked at one way the volume and diversity of posts in response 'The Stone Boy' is, already, past overwhelming but seen another way, I'm asking rhetorically, have reached or passed the point where diminishing returns have set in? No way from where I'm perched diving and dipping into the flow of comments that are being freely shared.
Each of us who are opting to post comment and are open to converse a little online are bringing who and what we are - ourselves and our baggage might be another way of putting it - to this latest, amazing, word party here in Story Club. Personally I'm delighting in the diversity of the thoughts being shared and thoroughly enjoying enjoying have my old bones being rattled about and shaken up so purposefully.
It's, for me, brilliant to able to 'shoot the breeze' and 'chew the fat' about 'The Stone Boy' with mindful folks like your self Blaze. It's like being, Hemingway style, not just being a reader but being a crew member aboard a significant literary endeavour, an enterprise in which such investment as I am able to make has a potential (or perhaps, more accurately, is already realising its potential) to return significant 'writerly dividends'.
I'm not, metaphorically, thinking of Captain Cook's 'Endeavour' or Captain Kirk's 'Enterprise' but A.E. van Vogt's 'Voyage of the Space Beagle'. Have you ever read this sci-fi novel Blaze? It's years since I happened to but its premise that, rather like Noah's Ark, the crew were comprised of leading experts, even Laureates I dare say, in their fields - chemists, sociologists, botanists, psychologists, meteorologists, artists, linguists, writers etcetera, etcetera . . . - has always stick with because of the one crew member who was different. This individual was labelled a Nexialist, whose special talent was for being able (a) to hold the ring on creative team working across specialisms and (b) to keep the lid on disruptive discordance breaking out between specialists. The thing that strikes me about this voyage of adventure that we are crewing on board the 'SS Story Club' is that we are all encouraged to be Nexialists: fielding and making sense of the rich river of diverse, considered commentary that we are not just watching flow past but trying to navigate.
Nothing I or Thou may think or write is going to damage Gina's great short story Blaze, but such thinking and writing may just, under George's genial provocation, nudge us a a notch or two further up the road to enhancing our capacity to write cogent and compelling short fiction.
I wanted to respond to your comment. When I said I have seen this, remember, I’ve seen a lot in 42 years of being a nurse. Mentioning the gun in my response was a bit metaphorical; with “gun” standing in for many unintentional, accidental deaths. And the responses are similar. It was not a comment about guns in general.
Nothing wrong, in my book, with being 'a bit metaphorical' in reaching for words with which to make sense and share our thoughts on what's going on in terms of the story being told and the way the fiction has been fabricated. Most, if not all accidental deaths are, in hindsight, avoidable . . . which is what, I'm thinking as I type, makes them tragic, Murder implies motive, means and opportunity but only means features in an accidental death. In this story the rifle is, or at least at present seems to be, the means by which the writer chooses to effect the fatality. It could, conceivably, be the case that Gina Berriault considered a knife or a farm tool or a fire started getting out of control as the means by which Eugie would die; though, if she did so, probably not for long because generally hunters don't knife or spear or ignite ducks: they shoot them.
Thanks for you response to my comment Janice, makes me think a bit further.
So many great comments here - thank you all. Am on a deadline so am not replying much but am reading (and admiring) your comments. THANK YOU.
Considering your writing process, I'm surprised you got roped into a deadline. Must be fun. Sympathies...
Surprised Michael? If I may ask, why?
Where I'm coming from, by way of explanation, is that we all know - since he has shared such insight so transparently - that writing to publish short stories in The Ne Yorker or elsewhere, or writing towards completing his 'Lincoln in the Bardo' or 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain' is but a fraction (albeit significant, and I'll even say big) of what his succeeding talents are called upon to service.
I'll dare to go further, venturing to think that 'sympathies' are misplaced, George just writes to have fun?
Open to any and all to post reply, but any riposte from Michael or comment from George would be welcome . . . but never, never expected.
Let's keep it 😎 dear Peer Participating 😹. Sincerely, thanks to George, Michael, One 'n All
Well, without getting into the weeds, from what I understand of George's method, it's pretty much sail into the unknown and see what he finds. Some of his videos say he's got unfinished drafts several years old that he's put aside because they weren't "working" and revisits occasionally to see if they now click. I don't know about "Bardo" but I'm guessing it was "we're interested in a novel when you write one" so that was probably written without a solid deadline until he could give an approximate date when it would be finished so they could schedule it. Novelists usually try to hit the mark in time for a book to be published during the fall when it can be given as a present for the holidays; although I understand "Bardo" didn't hit until Febuary.
So anyway, my point is that George's method doesn't seem condusive to the "Be Creative on Schedule" school of writing. No knock against him. A lot of writers are I'll Get it Done when I Get it Done, much to the annoyance of their agents and publishers. That's why I was a little surprised to hear him announce it. That why I also have sympathy for him. I've never written fiction on deadline, but was a newspaper and magazine journalist, and it's never fun to write with the clock ticking down on you. I wish him luck and hope he'll actually write about it one day. It would be interesting to hear how he handled it, and if it actually made him work differently and how.
-30-
Before I comment on the story, I just want to say how much of a relief it was to have the comments disabled at the start and to be able to just focus on the story. So, thanks!
I agree. I know George said that that was a one-time-only thing, but I hope its not. Nice to have a bit of time to sit with it, without feeling that I was falling behind on the discussion.
Yes! I felt a stillness as I read. I could let the story sink in.
Agreed--the stillness is part of the power GB creates. Eugie is as still as can be, lying on his face, his back to us, i.e. we don't see his features, nothing grisly like an open mouth, no expression.
Yes, GB does create a powerful sense of stillness. Everything stops -- except the story.
A quiet few days not resisting reading comments. Lovely.
And yes Lanie I agree, though was certainly busy enough in 'The Pause' . . . and Paul, just so you know, the Comment I have posted is the fruit of reference to and reflection on my own reading(s) and reflecting(s) on a Gina's story.
My first Comment will I hope ne of sufficient interest to be of some reward to those who, may, coming this was make the effort to read it. It will not, all being well be my last post on 'The Stone Boy'.
If what I've written should strike you, or indeed anyone, as 'bollocks' do not, please do not, refrain from saying so . . . nicely 😊
I like how you draw attention to the story in two parts. Eugie there/Eugie not there.
Eugie has to die for this story. How can we not accept it when we know this. In a way, his death creates a shortcut to get to the varying human natures in the characters’ responses to grief and shame.
But I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves. There’s much more to discuss.
There is Lanie. George indeed asks not one but several questions, all to do with but part of the opening, operatic act that is the Alpha nad Omega of the story. Would ‘Eugène Must Die’ be an alternative title? Or, perhaps ‘Wild Ducks at . . . ‘?
I think The Stone Boy is perfect. This is how others see him that he has no feelings. And in order to handle the intense emotions of the trauma he has had to shut down all systems. That's what trauma can do.
Eugene has to die, but it’s just the catalyst to reveal other truths. I think those alternative titles don’t quite fit the story. The mood is set with The Stone Boy as it’s title. It could refer to Eugie at first (being dead) but when we see the processes of grief played out, we see that the stone boy is how others interpret Arnold’s actions and emotions after the tragic incident.
No Lanie, again I agree with you, ‘The Stone Boy’ is the right title not least because until the moment that, seeing ‘a slow rising of bright blood’ at the nape of the neck, Arnold realises life has irreparably departed Eugène the younger sibling is - as far as the evidence of the words on the pages go - is himself about as lively and as loving as a normal morning burbling 9 year boy should be.
He’s anything but ‘stone’ but is turned to stone by a fatal incident as surely as if he was put under a cursed spell by an evil witch in Act 1 of a tragic opera ...
... so like that rifle, which is surely a Chekovian gun, the title does play a big part in the way Gina Berriault makes her story work.
For me, the turning to stone comes later. But there is room for both to be true.
I'm sure that there is room for both our views on when the turning to stone comes in the story to be true.
We may even find ourselves moving, like players on a tennis court or teams on a cricket pitch or other sports in which changing ends occurs, to look at this and other timelines in the story from alternative viewpoints.
Indeed I sense we might come to reconsidering if it is the boy alone who is, in some way, turned to stone? Time will tell.
It was surprisingly nice. And to suspect we'd all come roaring back in due time.
Totally agree. I really appreciated that. Hoping we do that going forward with other stories. It just gives us time to sit with our own reactions to a story.
Agree!
Yes! It really gave me the space I needed to think this through. Much as I love these comments :-)
Indeed.
Agreed
I was shocked when Eugie was shot. Then I thought, “you idiot, if there’s a gun on the wall in act 1…” But I had been worrying about the ducks. I was at that moment climbing through that barbed wire fence with them (as I often did as a kid; having gotten a lot of things snagged, including flesh, I didn’t doubt that the gun hung up) and wondering if Eugie was really and truly going to go fetch the duck Arnold was to shoot. I was so very much there in that moment.
In 2006 my husband’s 8-year-old nephew killed his six-year-old sister. (It wasn’t a firearm accident, but at ATV.) Now the boy is 21, and not easy to know. A stone boy? I always wonder what’s going on inside his head. Lovely young man, but quiet, private, introverted. How much of that is simply his nature and how much is a result of that trauma? His family is country-folk, in rural Kansas. The way Arnold’s family functions after the death strikes me as completely true. You gotta eat, you gotta feed the chickens… Life goes on. (Contrast with Lincoln…)
It occurs to me that perhaps I don’t want as much freedom and agency as Berriault gives her reader. I don’t want to be hit upside the head with a 2x4, but I do want more than what’s here. Maybe because I didn’t want to leave the story, to leave Arnold, or the other characters either. I wanted to go with Arnold up the mountain to find the cow and calf.
And maybe my wanting more is simply my wanting to know more about our nephew and how he survived that—what it cost him, how it changed him.
This story will stay with me forever.
Nancy, many years ago as a boy of seventeen I was working with another boy 16. It was stupid Industrail accident that killed the 16 year old. Not a week or day goes by that I do not think of that boy, although it is sixty years ago. The Stone Boy brought back memories for me, also.
What happens in 'The Stone Boy' readily resonates for many with some of what has happened, in various ways at various points. in the unfolding of our life stories. The depth of such resonance - maybe, for example, because we recall a moment that equates to when 'the air was rocked by the sound of the shot' - is surely, for those who 'like' and 'buy' the story, vital to this story's power?
I am sorry for what you went through. Tragedy seems to be everywhere. It's easy to assume that people are okay when we are all in fact carrying some burden that doesn't show on the outside. Thank you for sharing.
Ciaran, I’m so sorry for the loss of that boy.
*hugs* That must have been hard at the time because you were so close in age. Young men still die or become seriously injured on the job, because of lack of training, experience and people taking short cuts. I worked in a coal mine and petrochemicals for almost a decade.
Hi, Sima, sadly imagine you have important stories to tell about these young men, lack of training, shortcuts. Tell them....
I'm so sorry.
Navigating between barb wire fences while hunting in my home state of Kansas is also part of my growing up years. The only similarity that I recall was crossing a draw in a pasture when I was fifteen. I had the path that was steepest while my dad went across on one side where the footing was even and my uncle was on my other side where the footing was also even. The slope though, was mud, and as I slipped, I laid my shotgun on the bank so I could catch myself, and scramble up the side. When my dad saw that I shot gun was laying on the bank close to the mud, he came over to me and told me to unload the gun. Then we inspected he barrel and saw that the barrel was plugged with mud even though I could not recall the gun barrel ever being below the top of the slope. Had we not checked that, the barrel would have exploded had I tried to shoot with the barrel plugged.
Thank you for posting this memory, Greg. It's like the story in that it reminds us of how fragile life is. And how "small" interactions—accidents of fate, or of not-noticing or noticing—how these each shape our particular life trajectories. Thankful for your Dad!
Nancy, thank you for telling us your own personal, and still painful story. My husband's family is rural North Irish, and I recognise the same kind of wordlessness when it comes to understanding and expressing feelings - which was usually done through action. I so agree with you about wanting desperately to go with Arnold and find the calf, I thought maybe it might be a kind of redemption for him. I also thought it was impressive how quickly he works out a practical solution to the problem of getting the calf home, given he knows e's not strong enough to hoist it over his shoulders like Eugie. Instead, Berriault gives us his heart-breaking failure to respond to his mother's attempt to remedy her rejection in the night. That's when not only he, but I too, as a reader, turn to stone. All the time it seems Arnie's looking to the adults for an explanation, and they're looking to each other, and then outwards to the higher authoriity of the sheriff. Nobody has the words - because they're all 'reasonable' like Arnie - they might also have just on with the practicalities.
Oh, Nancy, I too am so sorry, but thank you for generously sharing your family's story. Literature, art, is some solace when it seems there is none.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Nancy, I appreciate it and my heart goes out to your family and to the young man. You made "The Stone Boy" even more real, more heart breaking, and more needed.
*Hugs* to you and your family. Thank you sharing. I hope you are able to connect with your nephew over this story. Sending love and being present are best things aunt's can do. We're like parents but not, so my wish is that he opens up a little to you.
Thank you.
Nancy, I’m so sorry. I completely understand why you wanted more.
I had to google ATV
Me too!
Oh Nancy, I am sorry. Sorry for all that family, but especially for your nephew. As you say below, tragically accidents like this do happen all too often. That random-ness of life keeps me up at night sometimes.
Oh, Nancy, I'm so sorry to hear your story. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Im so sorry Nancy.
oh that's such an awful real thing for your family to have carried. I'm so sorry.
Thank you. Unfortunately many families suffer these accidents.
I bought it on the first read. I remember immediately feeling a deep pit in my stomach when the gun went off, before I even moved on to the next page. On re-reading, I found two things that helped sell the incident for me:
One, she specifically described the way Eugie's hair tapered down to a point on his neck, and then after being shot, that's the spot with Arnold sees the blood. For me it created a sense of familiarity. I had already been asked to visualize that spot on his neck, making it all the easier to see it wounded.
What really struck me though was her description of their morning walk through the fields. I can almost hear the kind of country quiet she describes. She does an incredible job painting a picture of the world in a grounded way, then interrupts it with a gunshot. I was lulled into a sense of peace and calm, and then had it ripped away from me. That feels more real than some sort of playing with the pathetic fallacy, trying to create a sense of foreboding in the landscape, weather, etc. The normalcy of the morning being shattered by the accident feels very true to life.
Also that description of their morning walk highlights the birds, "the Kildeer with their white markings flashing...crying their shrill, sweet cry" and ending with the "four wild ducks, swimming out from the willows into the open water." At this point you can't help but think of the gun and Arnold's wish to kill the ducks out of season. And when Eugie is killed and Arnold contrasts Eugie dead with Eugie sleeping and can't process it, my mind went back to the initial scuffle when "Arnold felt his brother twist away and saw the blankets lifted in a great wing". What a powerful image: with more breadcrumbs (the loading of the gun no-one wants, the duck hunting out of season, then the powerful scene where we see the birds, leading up to the accidental death.
Yes, the birds are part of what sell it for me - after Eugie is shot and falls, "the ducks rose up crying from the lake." Why wouldn't I believe the ducks?
We always believe animals. Wonderful. Thank you for pointing it out
The way that Arnold looks up to his brother, ready to be berated for the gun going off sold me on the reality of Eugie’a death. Because it’s so unlikely that even Arnold wasn’t worried about the shot hitting his brother. That somehow makes it more realistic that it did happen.
yes those blankets lifting "in a great wing" made the first image that lept out at me
I thought that image was a great contrast too with the "alarm clock's rusty ring" in the first paragraph. That sound image was so vivid it made me believe in the reality of the story-a nice counterpoint to the more abstract images. All through the story, the sounds are described with precision, making me feel the impact so much more when the "air was rocked by the sound of the shot."
And the courthouse 'clock with its loudly clucking pendulum' that made me pause to wonder. Here's sound surrounding A in his isolation.
The blanket wing and the ducks- hadn't connected those dots- pow. So good. Thank you!
Oh that's good. Even more threads tied between the opening scene and Eugie's death.
I think what put me most on alert in the beginning was " . . . in the confusion of medicines for man and beast and found a small yellow box of .22 cartridges." The word "confusion" set off alarm bells for me, not only about what might happen but about the family, how they did things, how they were careful or not with "man and beast." I see Arnold's small, nine year old hand blindly groping for the cartridges, and I felt 'country customs' aside, he's too young to be handling that gun, that he's unprotected, somehow.
I agree with your assessment of the medicines (childproof caps?) linking to the big boy gun he probably shouldn’t have been handling. Then I think of all the parents who gave guns to school shooters. Argh.
I too worried about that confusion; it created a sense that something would go wrong.
There's something very disturbing too about the image of the wing in the earlier scene: it's dual. Eugie could be the bird or an angel. And while he's dying it's like he's climbing vertically (to heaven?) while Arnold after telling his family that Eugie's dead goes to the loft in the barn with the animals. It's like the brothers are no longer human, Eugie is spirit, while Arnold, feels he belongs with the animals, taking whatever his family will leave him to eat or drink. In the loft, Arnold's above like Eugie is but there's a big difference.
This tie between waking up together and Arnold being left alone like he was in the morning but having a different result is what clinched the death of Eugie for me. At first I was sure it was a misdirect and Arnold was going to be reprimanded for misfiring the gun but my realization that this was the crux - this was the point of the story where the boy begins his transformation to stone.
Oh yes, Sam. For me, as Arnold watches his brother die, there's so much that harks back to that early morning scene: the same dismay at the unwanted sense of power he has over his unconscious brother, the way his brother the throws him so easily out of the bed so he ends up wrapped in the blanket 'like a baby'. But out in the fields, Eugie doesn't get up - he seems to be scrabbling upwards when the ground is either flat or, as someone else suggests, going downhill. The echoes between the two sections of the story are loud and detailed. I think they give a strong sense of the size of the emptiness that's left by E's death. E (shown mainly through A's perception) is beautiful, assured and constantly putting down his brother who is totally subordinate to him - and this is summed up for us later when the sheriff asks Arnie whether he and his brother were good friends, and Arnie thinks about the difference between what he feels for a friends and for his brother: 'Eugie had had a way of looking at him, slyly and mockingly and yet confidentially, that had summed up how they both felt about being brothers. Arnold had wanted to be with Eugie more than with anybody else, but he couldn’t say they had been good friends'.
Love your analysis
Thank you. After doing the assignment, I did a little research on the author and came across this quote by Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:
"For more than twenty years now, Gina Berriault has
been writing remarkably sensitive and powerful fiction. Her
style is lucid, lyrical and very much her own, and she seems to
have any number of strategies for breaking your heart." The article is in Ploughshares and it's called "The Achievement of Gina Berriault."
Ahhh...the ability to break one's heart through writing...is a skill indeed
Although I remembered the great description of how Eugie's hair tapered down to a point on his neck, I hadn't made this connection. You're right, of course. Also about the 'country quiet' - the sky, the mountains, the orange mist, the still cold and colourless valley - Berriault's description draws me right in, so when the accident happens I'm sort of without protection or defence. Also, everything's changed (in the human sense) and yet nothing has (the sky, the mountains).
"Without protection or defence" is a great way to put it.
I agree. It’s startling when the gun goes off and the brother slumps forward.
The neck thing is such an interesting choice. It's not a cliched in the middle of back etc. And it's such a small space - if he'd been aiming it would have been incredibly hard to pull off. It so nearly didn't happen. I think the intimacy and - god if only it had been an inch either way - makes it so heartbreakingly believable.
I kept saying to myself, "if only Eugie hadn't been crouching!"
I too was struck by the description of the walk. It's action/movement but not spectacular. Just what you'd expect. And then sudden something unexpected, which hits so hard, because there's no sense of feeling that the writer is leading you to it. It just happens.
Your reminding me of Eugie's hair tapering to that point just gave me chills. I hadn't connected...
I agree... the details she provides leading up to the shooting...the door at the bottom of the stairs, bolting down the stairs, the hills surrounding the farm and valley, the shimmer as the wind moves the reeds, the barbed wire fence...are what made it all believable for me, even at the first reading. Our extended family experienced an incident similar to what is described here. The story was painful to read, but also did a beautiful job examining the shooting's aftermath in the near and long-term. I loved the way she stayed with nine-year-old Arnold as he began to realize the adults were judging him, turning against him. Heartbreaking.
It was painful to read, which was, in part, why I liked it so much. It was awful and painful and I didn't want any of it to happen, but I kept reading, she kept pulling me along. Willingly. That's great writing in my view.
I think familiarity and normalcy are important here too. Right before the shooting, they are heading down a slope. When Arnold reached his brother, "Eugie seemed to be climbing the earth, as if the earth ran up and down." So it almost looks like Eugie is facing uphill? That could only be if Eugie had turned around. Otherwise, his feet should be uphill and his body/head further downhill. His figure laying still in the grass is anything but normal, so I think the description defies the normality of the rest of the scene as well.
The normalcy of the morning being shattered by the accident, a great comment, and true! I actually didn’t want to believe he had shot his brother and felt that hesitation just before his brother slumps over.
It really was a shock, wasn't it? And I also bought it on the first read - never a doubt in my mind. I drifted away in that pastoral scene, thinking about the ducks and the mountain and how peaceful it seemed, which made the gunshot such a shock. I also picked up on Eugie's hair and also the way she'd described the rifle and it's old lever, so when it caught on the fence it seemed plausible that could happen.
Yes, of course the description of the nape of Eugie’s neck had impressed itself. Unlike you, I had not realized how skillfully and why. That I had seen that part of him for years and this time it looks woefully different. Amazing.
Yes, that's brilliant observation about Barriault already having described the back of Eugie's neck!
Part of the reason I bought it—other than the old Chekhov saw about guns in Act I—is because Arnold’s initial reaction to the gun going off is, “Oh man, Eugie is going to roast me for this,” which is what would’ve happened if the extraordinary event hadn’t have occurred. So Berriault initially walks you down an alternative, more quotidian timeline of reality, but then yanks it away, through absence, or by something expected to occur that does not happen. The dashed expectation made me feel the violent disjunction and shock of Eugie’s death more acutely.
Definitely! Arnold's first reaction is so good! If instead we’d seen him immediately worrying he’d shot his brother, it would’ve rung false, given the unlikelihood of Eugie getting shot, and given Eugie’s role in Arnold’s life. I can imagine Arnold’s assumptions: Of course Eugie is fine, as always. Of course I don’t have the power to hurt him. Neither assumption turns out to be true.
It strikes me that the initial impulse in writing such a story could very well be Arnold "freaking out" and running away in terror and dismay back to his family. The fact that he doesn't, seem all the more...believeable for me.
This reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison's "Sula" where two young girls take a younger brother, a toddler, with them when they play by a creek. After playing a while, the two girls take the little boy by his hands to swing him, only they lose their grip and the boy goes into the creek and is swept under and away. The two girls, like Arnold, are struck by the event in such a way that they do not know what to do, so they do nothing and simply return home.
Believable and much more interesting. The story takes us to a stranger, more profound place, I feel, by having Arnold react as he did.
I would have to agree with you, Hannah, though I would not have seen it without your insightful comment. I couldn't understand why Arnold didn't run away freaking out, yet, since Barriault has other places to take us, "...stranger and more profound" - this is a brilliant move on her part.
"yanks" is so apt a descriptor. That is precisely how I felt -- yanked, emotionally
I agree
Julia Kristeva, a French philosopher and novelist, wrote a lot about the Abject, which is the existential dismay that certain unexpected images or situations can throw you in--something that shows you the inescapability of death, and so induces horror. I've never read a story that induced this abject horror in me as well as this one.
As a father, there's only one thing I fear more than fatally hurting one of my children, and that's one of my children fatally hurting the other. Arnold's accidental killing of Eugie is my greatest fear put into the flesh. From that point on, this turned into a horror story for me. I sank deep into that emotion, and my rational mind took a back seat.
But, like the best works of horror, Berriault maintained a sort of horrifying internal logic beyond the "scary bits". Placing the death so early in the story, and the way Arnold deals with it, drops us into a stew of horror, but the simmer comes after, when we see how everyone else reacts to Arnold's reaction to the death. The people around him comment on how they think he should be behaving while behaving in the same way themselves. They all know the outward signs that he *should* be showing, but they're so focused on him that they express none of these themselves. In fact, every action they take contradicts with the words they speak.
At one point, someone mentions how, after the shooting, Arnold should have run home crying like a baby. The "like a baby" phrase expresses an underlying derision, that even though the crying is what they think Arnold should have been doing, they would still would have thought less of him for it. But *no one* in the story is crying. Everyone else's reaction to the death is the same as Arnold's, strangely detached, carefully focused on not letting it interrupt the flow of regular life.
There's no catharsis in this story, just dread and more dread as the characters on the page refuse to give expression to the roiling horror that's twisting our, the readers', guts.
That's an excellent point about the hypocrisy of the adults around him, particularly the uncle. It's much easier to express anger than sadness sometimes, and looking for a scapegoat when confronted with an unimaginable tragedy is all too predictable. The horror story comparison is interesting, as that's a genre that depends on escalation to an extreme degree (I'm reminded of rewatching The Quiet Place recently). In my notes on this story, it occurred to me that, if you read it and conclude that Arnold is a monster, a "stone boy," then it doesn't really provide the same kind of escalation as Arnold having the trauma of his accidental killing of his brother compounded by his family's and community's demonization of him for it. That is, if he was bad to begin with, that's one thing, but if he's a good kid (which I think he is), what happens after Eugie's death is even worse.
“It’s much easier to express anger than sadness sometimes.” Yes. This.
This is exactly what I wanted to say, and it's this, for me, that gives that last line such a terrifying punch. The loss of his brother is one thing, but there's this deep loss at the heart of Arnold that he knows will endure because it's there in all these other men around him, and this rings so true.
Even the mother, who does express emotion right after it happens, still cans the peas.
This is how I felt on my first read--just gutted, as you said twisted up inside, without hope. But on my second read I see some hope in the fact that the parents seem to have awakened a bit to their own cruelty...and that Arnold himself is frightened by the coldness of his reply to his mother. When I first read it, I felt all but certain these adults were turning him into the monster the sheriff and his uncle seem convinced he is. But if he's still able to be frightened when he himself lashes out, there is hope for him.
Yes. The horror of story is first, the death, but as horrific are the actions and words of the adults. They are stunted; they are stone, and perhaps the only thing left to them is to turn Arnold into stone too. The father and mother show a modicum of love to him -- the father giving him the pitcher, the mother asking if he had come to her room. It is the uncle (who Eugene resembled) who is the real monster in the story to me.
Do you think catharsis comes when Arnold's father places the milk pitcher in front of him, after his sister won't? That pierced me deeply but I was relieved Arnold was no longer excised from the family.
This is a brilliant summary, Tony, of what I've been feeling towards in my comments here and there. But yours is grounded in direct experience which makes it so powerful
The killing is out of balance with the rest of the binaries in the story, and that is one of the things that makes it feel so real to me. There is a shock, the killing, and then the emotional consequences are invisible. The sheriff, uncle and visitors all feel they deserve a specific reaction from Arnold. They are hungry for it. And I think, because of the rest of those binaries (artfully described by others in comments) we feel we are denied the satisfying reaction — hysteria — and this puts a little bit of us on the side of those who are ready to write off the child as a “moron” or a cruel “reasonable”. GB does this, while we are simultaneously with Arnold, hoping for him. Wow GB.
Great point! The adults are behaving the same way--no expression of emotion, only recoiling because Arnold doesn't show any. WoW!
We don’t see it coming, and it happens so quietly, so subtly, we believe it. No pyrotechnics in the language, no bells and whistles. And as most of us know, this is often how accidents happen. You are driving along and out of nowhere a car skids out of control and hits you. Or you stand up too quickly and whack your head. This is what makes the accident here so completely credible. Genius, and a fantastic writing lesson.
This exactly. It’s surrounded by such small moments.
Agreed. The cool, calm way it unfolds is what really struck me, really made it impactful. That is how accidents and tragedies often happen. Without fanfare or "pyrotechnics". Just like that, the world will never be the same. Haunting.
Yes Sandra, the quietness of the language is so powerful . Eugie’s final moments: ‘climbing the earth, as if the earth ran up and down’ made me stop the first time to re-read the whole scene. Those dying moments, seen by Arnold - how vivid and terrible.
Totally!! I was really struck by the lack of violence in Eugie’s death, and how firmly Berriault locates us in Arnold’s moment-to-moment experience (struggling with the fence > annoyance > embarrassed by how he thinks Eugie will react > seeing that Eugie is dying) instead of losing us with big, necessarily more vague experiences like murder, dying, etc.
Yes!
She stays behind Arnold’s eyes and allows us his experience with no folderol. She stays close to what we may have experienced as a freeze trauma response. Arnold immediately disassociates. We can tell by how she says—“ his hands were strange to him.”
I loved that small phrase "his hands were strange to him" that simply and perfectly captures what shock Arnold is in.
I had the same reaction to that line. As an adult I know that it is shock that does this. But the child knew what the adults did not care to know. He knew he was exiled. The 'restless green eyes' of the sheriff.
Yes, Patty. Such an authentic manifestation of abject shock, horror, confusion. Not even grief yet, really. That's something that tends to come later. He's not himself anymore.
I feel like he’s in shock. Classical, physical shock. All those stories about people being accused of terrible crimes and the accusation being believed because they acted in odd ways after. The portrayal of shock in this story felt especially believable. Just. Pick. The peas.
God, yes, Doug. Just. Pick. The peas. Love this! You kinda go into auto pilot, the shock is so hard to describe. I was visiting my son last December and we were talking about his sister's death on Christmas night in 2008. He had spent the weekend with me and we both got the news at the same time. He told me what I did in the immediate aftermath of this, and I had no memory, and I mean zero memory of what he was telling me. He said I stood in the hallway for about 4 hours, staring at a spot on the wall, with my arms around myself, and my legs spread wide. I told him I thought I was doing something entirely different. It wasn't till that conversation that I realized there were all these "stories" in our lives -- the story he told himself, the story I told myself, and then the actual stream of factual events. It's such a surreal experience, nearly impossible (but not totally impossible) to describe. But you are so correct about the portrayal of shock -- and we're talking about a child, 9 years old. What is that? Fourth grade? Jesus.
Wow, so you’ve been through this. The story must have had so much resonance for you. Thanks for sharing this, Nancy. That’s a powerful, moving thing to hear.
Maybe Arnold’s story hit me hard because losing a child is the always-on parental nightmare, in a way losing a sibling isn’t.
As a parent, somewhere down there, I rehearse the loss of a child over and over. I allow myself to loosen the reins of imagination just enough to inhabit the feeling, then slam the scene shut and shake it off.
But I do that far less about my brothers (more now that we’re old men and… in the lottery). And at nine years old? I think I rehearsed the death of a parent but I don’t think I could ever do that about my three older brothers. They defined my world.
Having now lost one, I’ve experienced that discombobulation. The confusion of a piece of our Calder mobile being snipped off. The scramble to somehow rebalance the family. Thankfully, our family was well-equipped for this (and none of us was ‘responsible’ for it the way Arnold is taken to be). That family was not equipped, so he was sacrificed. Heartbreaking. And, back to George’s question, so real.
"That family was not equipped, so he was sacrificed." Wow, so accurate. Thank you.
I too have lost a child in an accident. He was 18...and what I do recall.was the actions that I took in the 'denial' stage. I drove around and around looking for him...not talking to anybody but desperately seeking some kind of answer..a rewind of life. It's like knowing but not knowing.
I'm sorry, Rod. Apparently we belong to the same tribe. Your post reminded me of a man I met who said when his brother died, his father went out to mow the lawn. When he came back inside, the brother went out to look at the job. His father had carved "Bryan" into the grass, completely unwittingly. He had no idea he was doing it. Like knowing, but not knowing.
Well, yes, maybe. Our modern sensibilities say shock. But getting to the whole question of whether it's shock or something else - getting ahead here. I think one way to read it is as shock. Another way is in what actually gets discussed in the story - moron? or reasonable? It reminds me so much of Camus' The Stranger.
I thought of moron, but Arnold is not moronic or seriously debilitated until he tries to cope with the event. He has mixed feelings about his brother but not, seemingly, about the family behavioral patterns in general. So I'd say he has gone into deep shock. turned to stone. In the kind of time and place the writer has set this story, there was really no attention or significance given to emotional states. Disturbed and shocked people were not "analyzed," they were often sent to institutions, and not infrequently, given literal shock treatment. Even children, too.
The scene in The Stranger where the protagonist shoots and kills, is one of the most beautifully powerful and disturbing things I have ever read. "For two hours the day had stood still; for two hours it had been anchored in a sea of molten lead." "It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire."
Ah! Camus! Such a good point.
But I found later in the story some sense that it's not just shock. He really doesn't seem to feel much; almost, but pushed down.
He may not know what he feels in the immediate aftermath, but I would say he is feeling something powerful. If you read the passage where he is knocking on his mother's door, he is aching to sob into her breast, to unload his grief and horror. And he's also 9 years old. At that age (maybe at any age, actually), it's so hard to find the words to describe such overwhelming and terrifying feelings.
Yes, he pushed his feelings down and was made to push his feelings down. The sheriff indicted him and then the men indicted him and then the women at breakfast do--no milk for you. He is forced to carry so much of others' stoning, before he even has words to express his own feelings about Eugie that are complex, ambivalent, and hard to unknot even without his brother's death.
But what if he was taught Boys don't cry? What could he do?
And when he saw everyone's reaction, he knew he wasn't being 'seen.' They were 'looking' at him... with an expectation. Then judging, labeling, condemning him when he didn't meet their expectation.
They did not SEE a traumatized little boy who needed to be embraced the moment they realized he wasn't joking. The moment he told them what had happened, where was the compassion, the fiercely loving embraces assuraning him that, "This was not your fault."
I'm not sure if your reply was in response to my comment alone. I agree that he was probably taught that 'boys don't cry'. The community was in shock too and maybe the cultural habitus was is to blame others to ward off their own feelings of vulnerability, sadness, grief, guilt, helplessness. I agree that Arnold is wanting to be seen and recognized for himself and is quite sensitive to who sees him more accurately and who doesn't.
Toward the end of the story, the father demonstrates compassion and care for the boy--he passes him the milk. The mother also reaches out to him, just as he's going out the door to go to the mountain to rescue the calf and the cow. Not all hope is lost.
Part of the difficulty as I read the story is that Arnold feels guilty about his love for his brother and desire to be like him and his aggression toward him, because he wants to be big too like Eugie, perhaps even to replace/best him. Because Arnold feels in some way 'at fault' for Eugie's death, he wouldn't believe anyone reassuring him that it wasn't his fault. This is part of the ethical beauty of GB's story and its impact on us.
Beautifully stated.
Thanks, Nancy!
Yes, that was his window of feeling, but he pushed it down.
I agree about him not knowing what he feels - and nor do any of the adults. They all do practical things first, like his Dad going off to find the coroner and the undertaker. And they ask him for an explanation, as if he ought to know. Then they defer, with some relief, to the sheriff's explanation that he's 'reasonable', which actually mean he's 'mean' - and from then that influences how they treat him. They're even slightly sellf-satisfied that they are, therefore, 'unreasonable'. Everyone's passing the buck of explanation to everyone else, till it all lands on Arnold: "Arnold gazed over his shoulder at his father, expecting his father
to have an answer for this also. But his father’s eyes, larger and even
lighter blue than usual, were fixed upon him curiously."; "Andy paused as he was getting into the front seat and gazed back
at Arnold, and Arnold saw that his uncle’s eyes had absorbed the
knowingness from the sheriff’s eyes. Andy and his father and the sheriff had discovered what made him go down into the garden. It was
because he was cruel, the sheriff had said, and didn’t care about his
brother. Arnold lowered his eyelids meekly against his uncle’s stare." So gradually he seems to believe their view of him. As Nancy says here, when he goes to find his mother, he's going to grieve with her, but she can't accept him, it seems. It's not until breakfast next day that he feels his parents are beginning to see him 'as himself', and it's so marvellous the way Berriault puts this: 'relief rained over his shoulders at the thought that his parents recognized him again. They must have lain awake after his father had come in from the yard: had they realized together why he had come down the stairs and knocked at their door?" It seems like it when his mother asks him 'humbly' what he wanted - but the moment of hope is cut off by Arnold's reply, which is like a dagger to the heart - of us all.
Loved this response so much, Jane. I thought of this, too, though -- you write that they must have lain awake after his father came back in from the yard. They are lying in bed together. Couples talk in bed before falling to sleep. And this day has been unlike any other day in their lives, so it's reasonable to assume they did speak of Arnold's coming to the room. I am fantasizing here, but his dad might have asked, "did you invite him in?" She'd have said "no." And then there might have been an exchange of questions about what might have motivated him to come in. I keep hoping they are going to try to reach out to him, because one thing is certain, and that's that he won't be trying again himself, anytime soon.
Nancy, thank you for this comment - and your others - on my contribution. Exactly right - you can imagine them lying in bed mulling over the inexplicable thing that seems to have happened to their son. I'm puzzled at why she didn't let him come in at first: is she shocked in a similar way to him? afraid her husband will come in and not sure of his reaction? the 'is it at night that you're afraid?' question seems very harsh. She surely seems to feel she wished she had when she asks him about it next day.
Nancy, I found it curious that he was waiting for his mother's permission to enter to express his grief, his terror. Why was he waiting? Why wasn't he barging into the room ready to throw himself on his mother sobbing uncontrollably?
This made me think that perhaps expressing vulnerable emotions had been discouraged in his family. Not considered important. Not valued. Especially in boys. Boys don't cry.
These are fantastic questions you're asking, Min. Arnold is 9 years old, he's just killed his brother, albeit accidentally. But the thing is, it wasn't duck season, Eugie even admonished him briefly about this before they left the house, meaning he really did do something wrong. Some respondents have said it wasn't his fault, but strictly speaking, it was his fault. And here's the rub -- he knows this. Which is why that moment is so absolutely heart wrenching. Which one of us has never done something to be ashamed for, to feel guilty for, to feel responsible for, and we can never ever take it back? And here he is, yes a boy, but also a child who is in the throes of abject shock. To have had the characterologic strength to have barged into his mother's bedroom in this moment, would have been necessary. But Arnold is a boy, he doesn't have it, she rejects this single attempt, and now he suffers.
That idea, that is wasn't his fault, once posted, once released into the ethers, kept gnawing at me. It must've been this comment of yours, Nancy. Your words were already speaking to me... especially in the shower... hmmm, maybe that's when you 'released' them? ... I thought, how could I say it wasn't his fault?
I struggled with this. Why did I want to say this to Arnold? I think it was the child in me remembering how awful I felt when I was lashed, whipped, made to feel worthless, with 'It was your fault.' Saying that was not helpful to anyone. Just an excuse to be cruel and unforgiving. Apologies, after that, are not well-received. As if the only act that would satisfy the tormentors would be an act of self-harm, self-destruction, self-cruxificion. And it's so commonly heard in childhood.
As I showered I imagined his mother embracing Arnold, sobbing, "It wasn't your fault." For she knew he was thinking, But it was my fault. And he knew she was thinking, But, it was his fault.
I suppose, for me, his mother's act, the one I imagined, held the promise of...'Despite what happened, we want you to know, to feel, to believe... that we still love you.'
What a gorgeous response, Min. Thank you for this. And I had to crack up over the shower. I do my very best thinking -- and revising -- in the shower, or sometimes in the car if I'm driving alone and it's a longer trip. Something about that shower. Maybe water really is not only healing, but somehow inspirational. And we must have had similar parents. I was lashed, whipped, made to feel worthless, too. I think some of this was the era -- spare the rod and spoil the child -- no, it didn't work out too well, now, did it. I so wanted Arnold's mother to take him in her arms and comfort him, knowing full well it would never be enough, but at least he'd know he had his family behind him. But then, maybe the story would not have been as powerful -- or (sadly) as authentic. Your last sentence really does say it all, though. We want to know as readers -- as people -- that he is still loved. Since that's what each one of us really wants at the heart of things. I do hope that the following morning, when his father passes him the milk and acknowledges his existence, that after some time, they will try to reach out to him. But one thing for sure -- I don't believe Arnold will make another effort. His guilt and shame and grief and horror is just too much. It's too much for him to carry. If there is any redemption here, his parents need to make the next move. The story ends here, though. We are then left wondering whether Arnold will ever feel loved, forgiven. This story will be with me till the day I die. I can tell you that.
Nancy, I was hesitant to mention the shower as the setting for ‘revisiting’ my “It’s not your fault’ comment. When I read your response, I looked at the time you posted it. I swear it was while I was showering. OMG, I was channeling Nancy Miller! 😆
I want to say ‘thank you’ for sharing about your parents. 🤗
Min and Nancy, I find this discussion of yours really speaks to me. I'm struck, in the section where Arnold tries to go to his mother, by the way he's thinking in another time-scale altogether. He imagines how he'll go to her and tell her that Eugie is dead - which she doesn't yet know! 'He had expected her to realize that he wanted to go down on his knees by her bed and tell her that Eugie was dead. She did not know it yet, nobody knew it, and yet she was sitting up in bed, waiting to be told. He had expected her to tell him to come in and allow him to dig his head into her blankets and tell her about the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother.' It's as though he's gone back in time to do what everyone expected him to do right away, to express his feelings of terror and to grieve. Thing is, are these ideas his own, or has he got them from the pressure of what other people say should have happened? Because at the same time, he's aware (and yet she was sitting up waiting for him to tell her) that she does know. Does all this help in some way to explain why he rejects her when she makes overtures to him in the morning, as he's going out to find the calf? Or is it rather that he's being tugged this way and that by all the conflict of feelings - his own and the ones other people seem to impose on him - so he can't find his way to himself? I don't know, and this not knowing creates in me something like Arnold's own confusion, I think.
Beautiful, Jane. And I don't know, either. I think this is by design. By nature, Arnold seems to be the kind of child who is obedient most of the time (sans the duck season violation, which is big), but he's respectful, he picks peas on time when his mother asks him to, etc. So what's happened is he's believing (as children believe adults; they always know what's best, they're smarter, etc.) what he's been told. He's cruel, reasonable, and didn't care about his brother. He can't even answer whether he and Eugie were best friends because in his mind (he's a purist), it's not at all the same relationship. No one is seeing this child. No one. And so therefore, he really can't find his way to himself. And it's very likely, unless his parents reach out, he never will. Grief is a very heavy weight to carry, especially for a 9 year old.
Oh yes, I do agree with you about the obedience, which I hadn't seen in quite that way
Yes Min, Nancy, Jane, these are terrific questions and exchanges. Thank you for helping to smooth a few more furrows.
But so many more furrows in my mind, too, Paul, don't you think, as it gets clearer and so we go deeper into it
To depths unplumbed, Jane!
Well put, Nancy. Arnold is not himself anymore. He's not even sure who he is, I would say. Or ever was. He's almost ghost-like. Temporarily? Permantly?
Well, I have found you are really never "the same" again. People say this, but it is true, or at least consistent with my experience. It's very permanent, but that being said, Chris, I don't think it necessarily has to be purgatory. One chooses how one is going to work it out, find a way to carry the grief suitcase, as I have come to call it.
the grief suitcase - thanks for that image. We all carry one or two around - how heavy it is, well, maybe that can change.
Fantastic expression, the grief suitcase
Quite right. It doesn't have to be purgatory. Perhaps at first, but even "purgatory" becomes familiar I guess, or the weight of the grief suitcase not impossible to carry. I like that term very much
Well, the suitcase doesn't get lighter, but it does get easier to carry. Like going to the gym and working out to gain strength, the more you carry it, the stronger you get, so it seems easier. In reality, it is we who get stronger and more able to carry it. Once in a great while, miraculously, and after much time, you might even forget it's there. Till the next time you get knocked to the ground.
"The suitcase doesn't get lighter, but it does get easier to carry." This is so beautifully worded. Thank you, Nancy.
This was the exact thing I landed on when considering how Berriault is able to bring us along and make us believe this unlikely accident. She stays behind Arnold's eyes. I think the simplicity of the language is, in essence, an outgrowth of that move. Arnold, who has grown up watching his older brother so closely, admiring him, and noticing all those very specific details of his body (the way "his brown curls grew thick and matted, close around his ears and down his neck, tapering there to a small whorl," or the "neat dip above his buttocks his thick-soled logger’s boots gave him.") is, of course, going to focus on the physical details of his brother in this moment, too. There is no realm where I can imagine the Arnold that has been established to this point in the story suddenly thinking, "I can't believe I shot him," or even "How could Eugie be dead?" Not only would that change the timbre of this whole scene, it would, as others have mentioned, rung out as deeply untrue.
well put. She puts us inside Arnold's shock.
Yes. She brings it all through Arnold's eyes. And "stays close" the entire time. It is almost claustrophobic, but precisely what you would want to go for in a story, right.
Exactly.
I bought it because up until that point, Berriault focuses almost entirely on the dynamic relationship between these two brothers, and that relationship is deep and real. So we have no reason not to believe it by the time we get there. Berriault is masterful at setting up this relationship. Right away we get their age difference, and Arnold feeling subordinate. Although Eugie is annoyed with Arnold waking him up as he did, Eugie nonetheless gets up to help him pick peas - he doesn't say no. (Berriault gives us the incredible sentence about the kitchen being cold that morning, but it will be "unbearable" with heat later in the day.) Then we have the wonderful physical descriptions of the boys - Eugie tall and strong, with curly hair. He has status and admirable attributes. He likes himself. Arnold is "enthralled" with him. Then we have Arnold: undersized and with straight hair. He is, in many ways, the lesser of the two. Finally, I loved the sentence, "Arnold followed Eugie down the slope, stealing, as his brother did. from one shock of wheat to another." Arnold is mimicking Eugie's gestures, running his hand along the stalks of wheat. He wants to be like Eugie. This is such an honest and rich description of a relationship between two brothers - six years apart. I am able to hold onto the tension between their annoyances and admiration at the same time. Again, we have no reason not to believe what comes next.
Perfectly described! I also felt strong foreshadowing in that initial moment when Arnold admires Eugie sleeping and is discomfited by their role-reversal in that moment, making Eugie immediately a vulnerable character in the story. Then you add in a gun and, well.
I understand the question George poses, but, through no fault of my own, I am at a disadvantage in answering it. Unfortunately, in south Louisiana where I live, this sort of gun accident isn't as rare as it should be. I personally know people involved in the same or similar accidents. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries used to run PSAs warning against such things as going through fences with a loaded gun, getting in or out of boats with a loaded gun, etc. So, I bought the incident in the story because it was familiar. I am profoundly sorry for this, and don't mean to kill a literary buzz.
On the other hand, I can detach myself enough to consider the question from a "normal" person's perspective. I bought it (or bought it slightly used) because the writer conveyed what shock is really like. i.e. out-of-body, incomprehensible. And, if an incident registers as incomprehensible, then the witness, especially a child, might "choose" to ignore it and go about his business. This is familiar in child abuse and rape cases.
This is one of the greatest stories I have ever read. I wrote six pages in my SC notebook about it. Thank you for this.
I live in rural Indiana. Tragic farm accidents are so common. Everybody knows somebody who was hurt or killed in an accident with a gun, machine, tool, animal, etc. Seemed to me the author had known that life or researched it well. The only completely unbelievable part was people coming over to their house to talk about it. Rural Hoosiers don’t talk about it, they just deliver tons of food while the family has no appetite to eat.
Your comments remind me of Harry Crews's A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He writes about growing up rural south Georgia, and (this is long ago memory so I apologize) writes about how everyone he knows, everyone around him is missing a limb or appendage or is injured in some way, and so he and his brother are in awe when they look at the Sears, Roebuck catalog because everyone in the catalog, in contrast to his world, is in one piece.
Quite a book, "A Childhood...." Now, there's a memoir with such stunning (or should I say "compelling"?) initial pages that a reader might be gripped by the throat and have to read on, or toss it across the room in rage.
I don't think you've killed the literary buzz. If you bought it because it's the sort of incident you're familiar with then that's a valid reaction, IMHO. We all bring something of ourselves to these readings and when a piece of fiction mirrors real life it can be a very powerful – and emotive – thing.
I live in the UK, so these sorts of accidents are exceptionally rare. But I bought it without hesitation because I've read about such incidents in the news, and everything in the description made it feel unquestionably real to me.
I came at it from a similar place. I grew up with a boy who had accidentally shot his younger brother. He lived his entire life like he was trying to escape that moment.
Interesting. I bought the story because it was so familiar, and it was not about guns. These comments are very helpful, thank you. The incomprehensibility of it. This story took me two weeks to read. I got to the killing and after that it was sometimes a line a day.
I was thrilled to see this story be included. It is one of my all-time favorites. So it was hard for me to read it as if I hadn't read it before, but I slowed down and tried. It is a crushing story of guilt and shame. And grief and misunderstanding and judgment. This time, I focused on how she both stays inside the boy's thoughts to show what he doesn't know, can't understand, but also stood outside him to show how his family and the townspeople judge him. The POV is really interesting because she straddles that line between close third and omniscient. As soon as I saw the gun, I was on alert. A child with a gun, in the world where I live, is a dangerous thing. I completely buy the killing of Eugie. It's just that kind of fluke that can happen in life. I didn't question it at all. Again, since I've read it so many times, it is hard to gauge my resistance, but I don't think I felt any. This story worked so beautifully and tragically. What stays with me every time I read it is Arnold's childlike adherence to the rules (pick the peas early) and then his acceptance of his family's and the town's judgment of him as a bad person, someone who would kill his brother and not show any remorse or grief. We see what the characters can't see. Thank you, George, for including this wonderful story.
Straddling that line between close third and omniscient, is exactly right in my mind. Such a deft balancing act. It amazes and baffles and aggravates me, how well done it is.
This narration shift, inside of Arnold's perspective, and then distanced from himself by shock after the tragic event, is not something I noticed as well as you did! I'm eager to go back now and read it all line by line attending to this the way Mark said he did. What a great tool to emply in order to represent the dissociation Arnold experienced. Also, that you noticed his childlike adherance to the rules, is important because we need to reflect later so much on his level of intention. He was following rules, following elders, noticing but not determining, still being guided and told. Had his brother balked at shooting ducks out of season, what do we believe Arnold would have done with the gun? Exactly. That's a critical place the story could have taken a turn and did not, so we ended up uncomfortable instead, because we felt where the story was headed then, if not why.
Yes, do a line by line analysis! It really enriched my understanding of the story and taught me how much GS has put into my silo and how brilliant GB is!
I am reverberating with multiple intersecting views of the story and can hardly find a way to put my thoughts together right now, except to respond to others' comments. It's like being on literary LSD. Phew! The one word that keeps coming up is 'BALANCE'.
Hopefully, once I come down from tripping I can write something coherent.
Thank you, Jan. Your comment and those below have helped smooth a few of the furrows in this brow. Looking forward to the mulitiple readings to come.
Thank you for detailing how the narrator straddles different POVs. I was tracking that and couldn't put words to it. It introduced a quiet confusion for me that underlined the unfolding of the story. An utterly heartbreaking story of a 'boy and a group' struggling to locate a senseless death into a matrix of reasonableness.
Same Mark, I thought Chekov right away. But now I am not sure if I was surprised by its early use. I do know that I thought that maybe the author was going to toy with the gun and our expectations.
I think I bought it because from the moment Arnold picked up the gun, I dreaded what would surely happen - someone was going to get shot. I was invested, even before it became clear that Eugie was coming with him.
I had that too: “No! Leave the gun!”
Me too. As soon as Arnold picked up the gun, I knew Eugene would be shot. It had to happen. When it did, I was grateful that the author didn’t make the actual incident bear all the dramatic weight of the story (if that makes sense). The starkness of the shooting, Eugie’s death, made it all the more tragic. Arnold’s reaction, the reactions of the people around him were agonizing.
I honestly don’t know what to do with it, because, initially, when he went on to pick peas, I was also stunned. I also wanted/expected a more “typical” response (from nine-year-old Arnold). Slowly, as I saw what was happening to him, I lost my uncharitable view, and I suffered along with him. When his mother relents (ever so slightly) and it seems too late, I could howl.
Maybe having been a father had something to do with my same reaction: Do NOT take that gun, young man.
Yes, the second I knew it wasn’t duck season, I knew. And was compelled to see it through.
Now that I think about it, it NOT being duck season seems like a serious tell. Arnold is starting out not doing the RIGHT thing. So it only stands to reason, within the context of the story, that he will continue in that direction until he's gone so far there is no return.
It seems to speak to his disassociating from what happened and leaving to pick the peas anyway
Yes, it not being duck season somehow made the lead-up more ominous and the accident more believable--maybe because it emphasized his immaturity and added a reason not to bring the gun.
But could somebody tell me what is actually the implication of it 'not being duck season'? On first read I assumed it meant simply that there wouldn't be any game...'Don't be silly, Arnold, you won't find any ducks in (whichever month it is)'. And the fear of being derided or made to feel small/foolish is significant in Arnold from early in the story. But then it turns out there ARE ducks on the lake...So is 'out of season' the time when it is considered wrong to shoot ducks? (When they are mating??) Did Arnold and Eugie know that Arnold was intending something forbidden? (If so, Eugene offers to become complicit in the misdeed.)
Without elaborating an answer too far while I'm still working out all the facets of this part myself, Rachel, it's important to understanding the psychology and the culture surrounding Arnold that not only did Eugie not stop Arnold from bringing the gun to pick peas, as they often did, nor stop him from shooting at Ducks out of season, upon entering the house to announce the tragedy to his family, Arnold is greeted by his father expecting a lot of peas picked for the long time they took, and also asked if Arnold had success shooting a duck. His father valued the needed food higher than the poaching law, even when broken by his very young son, and there's a lot to flesh out about that. I'm still thinking through it, myself. Arnold was simply doing right by the priorities placed upon him by his family, his culture, his elders, and especially his beloved older brother (if not the law) in each way he was shown and allowed.
Thanks Traci
The implication of not being in duck season is that he could be in trouble if caught by a sheriff deputy or game warden.
Thanks Greg!
That makes a whole lot of difference to how I interpret the story. So Arnold is transgressing from the beginning, and knows it, and so does Eugene. The risk-taking is part of Arnold's excitement in going out with his older brother. But the accident wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been transgressing.
Yes, and when the sheriff asks about the gun, he brings up that it was out of duck season: “Out of season?”
He nodded.“That’s bad,” said the sheriff."
Yes, I agree about 'it's not being duck season' made it inevitable that tragedy was going to happen, but when Eugie was shot DEAD, I went into shock and wanted to undo it. I had to reread the several grafs before the shot and after to get back to the reality of the story. The accidental brutality of accidents. It's unbelievable how Berriault had me live through what Eugie and all members of the family and community were having to live through.
Yes, exactly. I think it's because we've been trained by reading--and writing--fiction to know that something bad will happen with the gun. The Tolstoy thing: The gun on the wall has to go off.
Same. The moment I knew it would be a tragic story.
I was there when he picked up the gun too.
I believed it because this is the way tragedy occurs. Quickly and unexpectedly, in the most ordinary of circumstances. Arnold's entire mistake takes place in a single line: "His rifle caught on the wire and he jerked at it." It's sparse and devoid of excuses. And those moments after--in which he's quietly confused--I felt those viscerally because I've been there. Standing outside a neighbor's home, it suddenly exploded into flames when I rang the bell. You're trying to make the leap from mundanity to enormity and your brain won't catch up. A very deftly written scene.
Reminds me of the Auden poem, The Old Masters. Starts with “About suffering, they were never wrong” and talks about the old master paintings where tragedy occurs almost in the background of mundane life. One reference is to a painting of Icarus falling in the background while a farmer ploughs a field. (Forget who painted that).
Bruegel...I love this poem. And I know EXACTLY what you mean...thank you for pointing it out. If you can bear to read my response to George's exercise, you'll see how my point is that we are primed right from the beginning to expect death to walk in and take Eugie. Just as Auden's analepsis (ooh...fancy!) pushes us on to the inevitable, so Berriault's does the same. By the way, isn't that a masterful opening line, "About suffering" (YES? YES?"), "they were never wrong" (WHO?! WHO?!), "the Old Masters" (Ahhhhhhhh!). It seems to me that Berriault does exactly the same.
This is my favorite poem ever, and i hadn't made this connection. WOW!
Brueghel. Of course. Yes, a great opening!
Oh my word, TJ. Chills are running down my backside with this scene you created with 'it suddenly exploded into flames when I rang the bell'. And you actually lived with this reality and are living it. Words escape me...It's like the shock of knowing Eugie's dead, really dead, though I the foreshadowing of great tragedy was in the story from the beginning.
"The ducks rose up crying from the lake..."
That did it for me. An achingly sad line. Combined with the description of Eugie climbing the earth... I almost couldn't finish the story. The death of children, even accidental, is something I have such a hard time with in stories. I knew this was a powerful piece, but the dread was too much. Maybe I experienced the shock that Arnold did (if he in fast did.)
This story has a lot of resonance, and that matters a lot to me - but ultimately, I'm not sure I like it. I imagine the late great John Gardner saying, "Well, you better read it again."
Can a story be too real?
Stories aren’t real. But they can be really triggering. I avowed never to read Steig Larson again after Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. That dude was too vested in female sexual torture.
With these ducks now combining in my head with Tony Soprano's ducks, I'm now beginning to think that there must be a PhD in all of this: "An ontological examination of the anatine in twentieth century American literature."
In answer to the question re: why I bought the accidental killing, I think it's partly because Berriault began with such an ordinary, utterly relatable first scene. The exchange between the brothers felt so real that I immediately fell into a state of mind where suspension of disbelief was a given.
Agreed. My reading of that scene, though, is that it underscores the family dynamic - the dominant son, the subservient son. The fearless (and rather unpleasant) older son and the fearful, dominated, routine-driven younger one. Arnold, in my reading, is lost from the beginning.
Well put. This makes me think of some others' comments about Arnold's discomfort with Eugie's vulnerability when sleeping at the beginning. He can't tolerate the idea of the world being any other way than with Eugie as the powerful one, which makes his later denial of Eugie's ultimate vulnerability so believable.
Yes!
Absolutely. The very pointed word "subordinate" as applied to Arnold occurs in paragraph 1. That's extreme economy in writing, there. The larger family dynamic, as you say, points to more than this one tragic event, and then I gain more empathy for Arnold.
I also became extremely empathic towards Arnold as I reread the story line by line. Is Arnold a 'stone' boy or as I would argue is he 'stoned' by the community? His father seems to be the only one who may appreciate what's happened to his youngest son and his mother, though extremely shut off, may have some burgeoning curiosity/concern about/for him.
Ooo, great point.
Yeah, it’s funny how quickly we sense we’re in the hands of a master, so we give ourself to them. We get off that fence that makes us keeps asking, “Is this a special one? An average, flawed one? A dog?”
Agree, the physical details also added to this state of mind
The question: Why do we buy it?
This one is easy for me to answer because I’ve seen it. The whole scenario. The siblings, the gun, the death, the wait, the shut down, the utterly horrible response by family and friends.
I’ve been an RN 42 years. We see a lot. I will say that her telling of this story gutted me. The set up was beautiful. I could feel and smell the farm, the pond, everything. I was angry at the mom’s response, I was horrified by the police response, I was understanding of the young brother’s anguish. I felt grief. The emotional response is truly something magical that only gifted writers can induce.
Responding to this late, but I think the under-discussed part of all this is how the adults behave, and what harm they are doing the boy. Yikes.
Yep AI. I once took a 35mm slide picture on a high street. It was of a warning sign on a barrier put around a open man-hole cover in the depths of which gas or maybe electricity were working. It simply read, in big red capital letters, BEWARE PARENTS - GREAT DANGER TO CHILDREN. Yikes!
Thank you for the laugh!
You're welcome. Thank you for tripping a memory out of storage.
I relish your attention to the sensory dimension of Gina Berriault's 'telling' Janice.
I also think that signalling your emotional responses, that is responses plural not singular, to the way different characters react to what is an overwhelmingly tragic - notwithstanding however often 'seen' in your 42 years of caring professional experience as an RN - incident points us towards the fact this story is about more than its eponymous 'Stone Boy'.
Do 9 year olds, in rural agricultural families and communities in the Disunited States of Americ, get to possess hand-me-down .22 caliber lever action rifles to this day I find myself wondering? Do they 'graduate' to handling and firing off Kalashinovs by the time they turn 15?
I'm responding above to your having 'seen it', so many times, and saying you find the question 'an easy one . . . to answer' Janice . . . and also to you sharing your tracking along the path through 'the siblings, the gun, the death, the wait, the shut down, the utterly horrible response by family and friends' . . . Arnold, his kin and his kith are realists . . . taking the hit of bad luck on the chin and, stoically, moving on . . . we've seen what we've seen, enough, nothing more to see, move on . . . in young Arnold's case stepping up and into the breach in his the front line of his farming family's eke-a-meagre-living way of life.
In regard to the hand-me-down gun in rural America, I would say that it is common, but rare for a child that young being able to get it down and take it out. In my later post, I point out that at fifteen, Eugie should be familiar with gun safety, but because Berriault tells us that Arnold's father gave it to him after no one else was using it anymore, perhaps Eugie did not consider it a dangerous thing any more, it was Arnold's. In this situation, the shooting of a duck was not a sporting moment, but a matter of bringing home food, just as picking the peas was a matter of supplying food.
Thanks Greg. Arnold is, in one way I'm seeing it, a young boy apprenticed in the subsistence family's activities of farming-hunting-fishing-foraging-gathering-preserving. He's been put to work, of necessity, and contributing for some time: his overalls and calloused hands, that turn off the rusty alarm each morning tell the tale.
I think there is actually more subtlety to what GB is suggesting. Both Arnold and Eugie know it's not 'duck season' to my way of reading the story. Eugie confronts Arnold with this fact and Arnold sniggers and says, 'No, I don't know [that]'. Arnold is tired of being the younger brother under Eugie's dominance and wants to become bigger--through the use of the rifle, to gain his older brother's respect and become more of an equal. He also wants to dominate Eugie--it's exhausting always being the runt of the family with cast off rifle, which creates great ambivalence and 'discomfort' in him.
I read that exchange about ducks not being in season to hunt as their inside joke about being able to shoot ducks when they wanted or needed to without getting caught because they are largely out of view from other people. Additionally, when they get to the wheat field, Eugie grabs the head of wheat and pulls the kernels, which are quite chewy when harvest time is near, and Arnold does the same. The younger brother follows the lead of the older brother, which could indicate that Eugie has also shot a duck out of season.
'More subtlety you say Blaze?' thought Rob.
"Why I agree, without reservation" he, Rob, went on to say aloud, yet again and, as always, rather too loudly, for some.
"Sorry," said Blaze, on realising she was being spoken to, "Is it me your lookin' for, or is it someone else you thought you were set to be speaking to?"
"It's Arnold I'm thinkin' of" said Rob. "I'm wonderin' if, as he and sleepy Eugie were headin' out to pick cool mornin' peas, Arnold might have been replaying a song he'd recently heard played over, ag'in and ag'in, on the radio?"
"Wha'ssa song Rob?"
"Not sure I know the title Blaze but here's how it goes . . .
[Coughs to clear throat]
"When I was young times were bad
'n money was hard to find,
world that I knew was my backyard,
my folks were poor, 'n in debt.
Of all us three kids I was the youngest one
so always the last in line. Toys I got 'n
clothes I wore, were there's
before they ever were mine."
"Guess you could be right Rob."
"'Bout what Blaze?"
"Why 'bout Arnold havin' a motive, course. What else?"
"I'd like to say no Blaze but you might have hit the nail on the head . . . "
"Go on Rob, spit what you're thinking right out."
"Well. If Arnold was whistlin' what we think he might have been , and what's maybe more not just whistlin' a merry tune but singin' the words along with it stands up plain as a pikestaff that Arnold, some fancy lawyer might argue, had motive to murder his older brother. Stands to reason Blaze, don't it."
"Surely does Rob, surely does."
"All points bulletin then?"
"Yes . . . of course, only way to go . . . though given the stack of evidence that's piling up,; high as the sky, against my old mucka' I'm finding all this, what's happened way before lunch. is turnin' my blood a little cold."
Great riff, Rob, in which you manage to get me to agree with you about Arnold being motivated to murder Eugie. You even have me say, 'Sorry'!
I do agree with you that there is a background veiled threat on Arnold's part towards his older brother. If we don't think literally-concretely but think literarily-metaphorically-unconsciously, I wholeheartedly agree that fratricide is in the air. Having a motive to murder someone doesn't mean when that someone dies, we murdered them. And for a 9-yo boy who so admires and loves his older brother and wants to emulate him, Arnold would be horrified to think he planned and executed the murder of Eugie. He felt rivalrous as most siblings do.
I see hate and love as two sides of the same thin coin for all of us. Hate means here all the petty and not so petty ways we feel negatively aggrieved towards those that we love. It's roses and thorns, bad body order and the sexual pheronomes, etc. What's so beautiful about GB's writing is her balancing these aspects so delicately and with nuance.
Words are wonderful when it comes to exploring aren't they Blaze?
By now I'm quite familiar, no more than 'quite' mind, with the words which, in their sequence, comprise the text of 'The Stone Boy' but still working on which story they add up to. I expect to continue to be doing so, not just until I come to some final resolution as to what is the 'best' way of seeing what the story that the words set down on the page add up to but more likely when I come back to read this story. That's why, in my book, it is a 'great' short story.
As you put it, so well, 'what's so beautiful about GB's writing is her balancing . . . aspects so delicately and with nuance'. I'm glad you've enjoyed my 'riff Blaze. I was partly trying on a coat - one styled to make the case that 'Arnold had Motive, and that morning matched it up with Means and Opportunity' - to see how it fits. I was also, in part and simultaneously, trying to get within a fiction making mindset to explore what it might feel like to write the case against Arnold in the way court room prosecutors have to in order to get the jurors to believe their take on what happened.
On balance, the majority verdict (maybe as close to 11 to 1, with the 1 fretting that she might be making the wrong call) with me is that "Arnold is just a normal nine year old, no way was this incident other than a tragic accident, so please dismiss Your Honour and let Death by Misadventure be recorded here in Court and in the Coroner's Office." ⚖
I did see this 9 y.o. tried in court both through your words, in the sheriff's office and in the living room with by the men. The community as a whole has indicted him as being without feeling and destined to a life of crime. You put that scene into a formal courtroom and added motive.
This raises an important point. Words are powerful and one of the main ways we play with and work out ideas which you were doing--a kind of word play to test out possible other narratives, but when do we so play with an author's or another's words that we distort the truth?
I don't have too much fear that for all the 'overthinking' and 'over-commenting' (referencing my recollection of an entirely reasonable observation made by someone elsewhere, earlier, in this thread of conversation) that there is a danger of 'distorting the truth' in relation Gina Berriault's short story 'The Stone Boy'.
For me it stands, like any original, great work of art: inviolate as finalised by published by its creator but also a cultural artefact which invites us to enjoy reading as a story and as a route to engaging our creative minds with the challenges of comprehending what meaning(s) the story may have for its readers and also what gaining enhanced insights into the way that such a story is made.
Looked at one way the volume and diversity of posts in response 'The Stone Boy' is, already, past overwhelming but seen another way, I'm asking rhetorically, have reached or passed the point where diminishing returns have set in? No way from where I'm perched diving and dipping into the flow of comments that are being freely shared.
Each of us who are opting to post comment and are open to converse a little online are bringing who and what we are - ourselves and our baggage might be another way of putting it - to this latest, amazing, word party here in Story Club. Personally I'm delighting in the diversity of the thoughts being shared and thoroughly enjoying enjoying have my old bones being rattled about and shaken up so purposefully.
It's, for me, brilliant to able to 'shoot the breeze' and 'chew the fat' about 'The Stone Boy' with mindful folks like your self Blaze. It's like being, Hemingway style, not just being a reader but being a crew member aboard a significant literary endeavour, an enterprise in which such investment as I am able to make has a potential (or perhaps, more accurately, is already realising its potential) to return significant 'writerly dividends'.
I'm not, metaphorically, thinking of Captain Cook's 'Endeavour' or Captain Kirk's 'Enterprise' but A.E. van Vogt's 'Voyage of the Space Beagle'. Have you ever read this sci-fi novel Blaze? It's years since I happened to but its premise that, rather like Noah's Ark, the crew were comprised of leading experts, even Laureates I dare say, in their fields - chemists, sociologists, botanists, psychologists, meteorologists, artists, linguists, writers etcetera, etcetera . . . - has always stick with because of the one crew member who was different. This individual was labelled a Nexialist, whose special talent was for being able (a) to hold the ring on creative team working across specialisms and (b) to keep the lid on disruptive discordance breaking out between specialists. The thing that strikes me about this voyage of adventure that we are crewing on board the 'SS Story Club' is that we are all encouraged to be Nexialists: fielding and making sense of the rich river of diverse, considered commentary that we are not just watching flow past but trying to navigate.
Nothing I or Thou may think or write is going to damage Gina's great short story Blaze, but such thinking and writing may just, under George's genial provocation, nudge us a a notch or two further up the road to enhancing our capacity to write cogent and compelling short fiction.
Hasta luego . . .
I wanted to respond to your comment. When I said I have seen this, remember, I’ve seen a lot in 42 years of being a nurse. Mentioning the gun in my response was a bit metaphorical; with “gun” standing in for many unintentional, accidental deaths. And the responses are similar. It was not a comment about guns in general.
Nothing wrong, in my book, with being 'a bit metaphorical' in reaching for words with which to make sense and share our thoughts on what's going on in terms of the story being told and the way the fiction has been fabricated. Most, if not all accidental deaths are, in hindsight, avoidable . . . which is what, I'm thinking as I type, makes them tragic, Murder implies motive, means and opportunity but only means features in an accidental death. In this story the rifle is, or at least at present seems to be, the means by which the writer chooses to effect the fatality. It could, conceivably, be the case that Gina Berriault considered a knife or a farm tool or a fire started getting out of control as the means by which Eugie would die; though, if she did so, probably not for long because generally hunters don't knife or spear or ignite ducks: they shoot them.
Thanks for you response to my comment Janice, makes me think a bit further.