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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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?
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.
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.