Born William Sydney Porter in 1862, O. Henry ran into trouble early on. Working as a banker as a young man, he was indicted on money embezzlement charges. Whether he was a criminal or just bad with math is unclear—in “The Gift of the Magi” he describes a character as having “One dollar and eighty-seven cents… And 60 cents of it was in pennies,” a mathematical impossibility. Regardless, he decided that fleeing the country was better than going to jail, so he traveled to Honduras, where he coined the term “Banana Republic.”

Unfortunately, O. Henry’s wife became deathly ill while he was in hiding, so he returned to the U.S. to see her and was promptly locked up. In prison, his popularity took off. He developed the pen-name “O. Henry,” which some believe is short for Ohio Penitentiary. While behind bars, he wrote over a dozen short stories.

He kept the pen-name upon his release from prison and published over 300 stories before his death in 1910. Today, the O. Henry Prize commemorates his legacy as an award for the best short story of the year.  Below is his short story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” which first appeared in the Post in 1903.

Famous Contributors: O. Henry The Saturday Evening Post

Tonight Reuben and I linger in the kitchen longer than usual. It’s August in Tampa, maybe the hottest day of 
the year; we’re both reluctant to leave the air conditioning. Finally we join Ted and Carolyn on the porch. They’re 
sitting in their usual spots on the wicker sofa, red-faced 
from laughing.

“What’s so funny?” says Reuben.

Carolyn wipes a tear from her eye. “I can’t say.” She gives me a wink. “There’s a lady present.”

Carolyn’s stories are usually bawdy or scatological, 
full of burps and farts and bodily emissions. She has the vocabulary of a trucker or a sailor. Reuben and I joke that we get together so Ted and Carolyn can curse. It feels good to joke about it. It reassures me that my jealousy of Carolyn is in remission. For a long time it consumed me. From the day he met her, Ted became more critical of me: my fears, my shyness, the time I spend in the bathroom putting 
on makeup or taking it off. He never complained about those things before. Not until Carolyn reminded him of everything I wasn’t.

“How’ve you been, Ted?” says Reuben, offering his hand. “Did Carolyn tell you what happened yesterday?”

“What?” says Ted.

“Get this,” she says. “Yesterday I had my first cutaway with a student.”

Carolyn works part-time as a skydiving instructor. Every weekend she does a dozen tandem dives with novice divers strapped to her belly. I listen as she explains how yesterday, diving with an exceptionally nervous student, she realized that their shared parachute had failed to open.

“Twenty seconds,” she says, pausing for effect. “I had 20 seconds to cut loose the chute and open the safety. Otherwise—” she claps her hands together. “Splat.”

“Cut it loose?” I say.

“When the chute opens there’s a whole mess of ropes,” Ted explains. “If you don’t cut it loose, the second chute will get tangled up in them. Then you’re cooked.”

I feel suddenly queasy. I have a desperate fear of heights; the thought of jumping out of an airplane makes me sick. Reuben puts his hands over my ears.

“Poor Nora,” he says. “Don’t listen. You’ll have nightmares.”

There’s more to the story—the intricacies of packing a parachute; comparisons to Carolyn’s two previous cutaways, both on solo dives—but I’m not listening. I’m watching Ted watch her. His blue eyes flash, and a spot of red appears in each cheek. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this is why I keep inviting Reuben and Carolyn back. My husband is never more interesting to me than when we’re in Carolyn’s presence. Years ago—I’m not sure of this, but I think it’s true—he watched me that way. Every night he came into the restaurant where I worked and sat at the bar for hours, nursing a single beer. The stalker, my friends called him. Twelve years later his eyes skim over me; I am like a familiar painting, like the house he grew 
up in. I look at him the same way. Only when Carolyn comes do I notice his clean profile, his resonant voice, his wrists turning in the cuffs of his shirt. I remember that my husband is a handsome man.

We met Reuben and Carolyn two years ago, in a Thai restaurant on Dale Mabry Highway. We sat on opposite sides of the room; between us, a table of young men celebrated a birthday. The men toasted, laughed, drank. They wore stylish sweaters; they sang “Happy Birthday” in resonant tenors. Then, halfway through their meal, the birthday boy pitched face forward into his curry. An ambulance arrived. Just as the man was carried out on a stretcher, a waiter came out of the kitchen balancing two trays: Carolyn and Reuben’s pad thai, Ted’s and my yellow curries.

“We’re game if you are,” Carolyn called across the room. “We’re both organ donors, by the way.” We laughed, Reuben ordered a round of Korean beers, and by the end of the night they’d moved to our table. They fascinated me, the silver-haired gentleman and his young wife, her hair so short that a waiter had once called her “Sir,” even though she and Reuben were holding hands at the time. We all laughed when Reuben told this story, though later the whole thing struck me as strange. Carolyn is tall and slender, with delicate features; it seemed impossible that anyone could mistake her for a man. Stranger still, neither Carolyn nor Reuben seemed bothered by the waiter’s comment. This, I’ve since concluded, is the difference between them and us. In Carolyn’s place I would have been mortified. In Reuben’s place—having a stranger think he was sharing a romantic dinner with another man—Ted would have been livid.

At the end of the evening we swapped phone numbers. “We’ll never see them again,” I told Ted; but a few days later, Reuben called, inviting us to their house for a barbecue. We played badminton in their yard that evening, slightly drunk: Ted and I on one side of the net, Reuben and Carolyn on the other. After 10 minutes Reuben and I put down our racquets and stood off to the side swapping recipes for bouillabaisse. Finally we retired to the patio, watching Ted and Carolyn as we talked. They played until full dark, visible only by their white tennis shorts, their long bodies graceful as dragonflies.

They are alike in more ways than I can count. They both love dogs, action movies, college football; they are both skiers, scuba divers, climbers of rocks. From a distance they even look alike: blond hair, muscled calves, sinewy forearms. To me they are like champion horses, beautiful because of their strength.

The Florida evening is loud with bugs, the neighborhood coming back to life after the shuttered, sultry afternoon. There are katydids, dogs barking, kids playing baseball in 
the park down the street. We hear a loud crack, the satisfying collision 
of bat and ball.

“Good hit,” says Carolyn. “Sounds like a homer.”

Ted rolls his eyes. “I wish they’d go back to school already. Ask Nora. They make me nuts.”

I shrug. “They make him nuts.”

Reuben and Carolyn don’t have children either. For them the choice was easy, according to Ted; for us it’s been a struggle, a decision made after years of persuasion (his) and regrets (mine). Ted says Carolyn has no interest in babies, that she’d rather spend her best years rock climbing and skydiving than potty training and watching cartoons, and I know this only makes him love her more.

They agree on everything. The best scuba spots (the North Wall of Grand Cayman), the best way to catch a hammerhead (live blue runners), the best autumn marathon (Marine Corps; they trained together last summer). At least once in the course of the evening, they’ll say the same thing at precisely the same time. “In stereo,” Reuben will joke when it happens. I’ll laugh along with everyone else, relieved that the moment has passed.

“How are the mosquitoes treating you?” I ask. I’ve already shooed two away from my face. As the sun sinks lower, it’s only going to get worse.

“So far, so good,” says Carolyn, oblivious to the pink welt rising on her cheek.

Ted shrugs. “You know me.”

I do. Ted grew up in Florida, yet he’s never felt a mosquito bite in his life. He’s always surprised the next morning to find his arms and legs covered with red bumps. He has climbed Mt. McKinley, run four marathons, and dives to depths of 140 feet, yet he’s unaware of certain facts about his body: that he’s allergic to cats, that red peppers give him heartburn, that his arms become more freckled every year from not wearing sunscreen. He can’t tell when he’s dehydrated, constipated, or catching a cold. He doesn’t realize he’s losing his hair.

“My potatoes are boiling,” I say, getting up. “Any volunteers to make a salad?” We’re having shark steaks, from the 5-foot hammerhead Ted caught in the Keys last weekend, and his favorite garlic mashed potatoes. Ted does the catching, cleaning, and grilling. I do everything else.

“Sure,” says Reuben.

“We’ll take Buck to the park,” 
says Ted. “I’ll start the grill when 
I get back.”

Reuben follows me inside. I mix the salad dressing; he takes a head of romaine from the refrigerator 
and rinses it at the sink. We don’t talk much, but I admire the way 
he moves around my kitchen, humming softly. His forearms are tanned from the golf course. Everything about him murmurs gentleness and competence.

“We have good news tonight,” 
he says, reaching into the cupboard for a bowl. “I’m retiring. I resigned last week.”

For a moment I’m speechless, stunned by the thought that I’m old enough to have a friend who’s retired. I’ve never asked Reuben’s age, but I know he’s got 20 years on the rest of us, maybe more.

“Wow,” I say. “Congratulations.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for awhile.” He tears the lettuce into the bowl. “Don’t get me wrong. I love my work.” For nine years he’s been president of First Florida Bank. “But I’d like to be home for dinner once in awhile. I’d like to spend a little time with my wife.”

“She must be thrilled.”

Reuben chuckles. “I think she’s a little worried. I’ve been a workaholic since she met me. She’s afraid I’ll 
lose my mind.”

“You can travel. Play golf. You’ll find plenty to do.”

“I think so.” He looks up from 
the salad. “I’ve got one project 
lined up already.”

He’s about to say more when we hear Ted clattering up the porch stairs. He takes a glass from the drainer and fills it with water.

“You’re bleeding,” I tell him.

“Am I?” Ted looks at his legs. A bright string of blood is trickling down his blond shin; Buck must have tried to climb him, crazy to get the frisbee out of his grasp. He swipes the blood away with his sweaty forearm, then takes the glass out to the porch.

Reuben laughs. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: How 
can a person not know he’s bleeding? It gets back to the question I’ve always had about Ted: Is he brave because he fears nothing, or because he feels nothing?

A moment later Carolyn comes into the kitchen, her T-shirt plastered to her sweaty back. Her hair is sticking straight up and there’s a smear of dirt on her face. She looks terrific. I think of my family’s medicine chest when I was a little girl: the ointments and laxatives, the ovals of pink felt for the bony joint of my mother’s big toe, sore and swollen from years of stuffing her wide, flat feet into dainty pumps. Carolyn’s medicine chest would contain no evidence of the sad, secret maintenance a woman’s body requires: the depilatories and mustache bleaches, the yeast treatment creams, the Midol. I know this is true because I’ve checked.

“Nora, that’s one hell of a dog you’ve got,” she says, rinsing 
her hands under the faucet. “He’s 
a champ.”

I smile. “He says the same about you.” Naturally, Buck loves Carolyn. She grew up on a dog ranch in northern Minnesota with a father who bred huskies and raced dogsleds. I wonder if that cold childhood is responsible for her fast metabolism, her miraculous pink-and-white-skin.

She watches me drain the boiled potatoes into the sink. “Can I help?”

“Can you peel potatoes?”

She frowns. “How tough can it be?”

Reuben laughs. “I’ll be out on the porch,” he says. 
“Nora, keep her away from the stove. And don’t let her
 chop anything.”

On the climbing wall Carolyn can balance her entire weight on one toe and four fingers, so graceful it hurts to watch her. In the kitchen she’s like a teenage boy, all 
knees and elbows. I stand next to her at the sink and 
show her how the skins slip right off when the potatoes 
are cooked long enough.

“Will you look at that?” she marvels, as if I’ve demonstrated an ability to move objects with my mind. She digs into a potato with her fingers and laughs delightedly as the skin peels away. “Where did you learn this?”

“I’m an Irish girl. I was peeling potatoes before I could walk.” I cut the potato into quarters. “My mother could peel a dozen a minute.”

Carolyn whistles through her teeth. “Geez. I don’t know any of this stuff.” She reaches for another potato. “You can do anything.”

A flush warms my face. Like all redheads I have treacherous skin, the kind that hides nothing. “You’re joking.”

“No, really.” Carolyn touches my arm. “You’re like an Amish woman. You make all this amazing food, and you don’t even have a microwave.”

I laugh out loud. “You’re too much.” I set down my knife and do something I’ve never done before: I give Carolyn a hug. She’s a foot taller than I am; I stand on my toes to grasp her shoulders. She smells of soap and grass and chewing gum, like a little girl.

The screen door slams; we hear Ted’s whistle, his heavy footfalls. Carolyn releases me, like a teenage brother too embarrassed to touch. Ted comes into the kitchen carrying a couple of empties.

He says, “Did Carolyn really peel a potato?”

We eat on the screened porch. Carolyn tells another story, and Reuben raves about the fresh artichokes. Ted keeps our glasses filled.

“I talked to the travel agent,” says Ted. “She found us 
a terrific condo on Cayman Brac, but we have to reserve 
this week.”

Carolyn glances at me. “I’m not sure we should drag these guys on another dive trip.”

“Nora doesn’t mind,” says Ted.

Our last time in the Caymans, Ted and Carolyn did 14 dives in 10 days. I spent every afternoon drinking margaritas in the tiki bar with Reuben. It wasn’t a bad trip.

Ted clears the plates from the 
table. Reuben and I each left some potatoes; Ted’s and Carolyn’s plates are as clean as if they’ve licked 
them. He takes the leftovers down 
the porch stairs and whistles for the dog. Reuben leans back in his chair and smokes a cigar. He and Carolyn hold hands under the table. That’s something kids do, something Ted 
and I used to do, so long ago I can’t remember what it felt like.

I turn to Carolyn. “I heard the 
news. Reuben already told me. You must be thrilled.”

Carolyn looks at Reuben, confused. “News?” she repeats.

I refill my wine glass. “About his retirement.”

Carolyn laughs. “Oh, that good news.” She runs a hand through her hair. “Yeah, it’s great. Two more weeks and he’s a free man.”

We have coffee and dessert on the porch; Reuben helps me clear the cups and plates. When I come back outside Carolyn is leaning over the railing, staring into the distance. Ted has his back to us, his fingers in a pot of saguaro cactus, checking to see if it needs water.

“Climbing in the morning?” he asks. “6:30?”

“Me?” says Carolyn.

“Of course,” says Ted. “Who else?”

He’s right—neither Reuben nor I would be caught dead rock climbing—but the remark comes out sarcastic and a little cruel.

“Sure,” says Carolyn. “I’ll meet you at the wall.”

At 11:00 p.m., Reuben and Carolyn get up to leave. We walk them down the porch steps to their Jeep. Reuben’s arm is around Carolyn’s waist and they stumble slightly, trying to walk side by side down the narrow stairs. For a second I feel Ted’s hand at the small of my back. Then it goes away so quickly I wonder if I imagined it.

“I have to tell you guys something,” she says. “I’m going to burst.” She turns to me. “We’re adopting a baby girl from Romania. She’s not coming for another three weeks, but I couldn’t wait.” She grabs my hand, not Ted’s. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

Baby. I remember a time, months ago, when I ran into Carolyn in my gynecologist’s waiting room. It surprised me, then, that Carolyn would need such a doctor; that she possessed the same invisible network of tubes and organs I did. Equipment we’d both opted—I thought—not to use. She’s been trying all along, I think. Trying to have a baby.

“A baby,” I say. For the second 
time that night I take her in my arms. “A baby.”

I can imagine her as a mother. I’ve seen the transformation before, ambitious friends who quit their jobs in advertising or finance; glamorous friends who cut their hair and began wearing sweat suits. Somehow on Carolyn motherhood will look different, a breathtaking feat.

Ted won’t see Carolyn for a couple of months. Week after week she’ll break their climbing date. “She’s busy with the baby,” I’ll tell him; but he’ll be dejected, inconsolable, like Buck when we leave for a weekend and put him in the kennel. When Reuben and Carolyn finally invite us to their place, Ted will bring gifts he picked out himself: a miniature fishing vest, a GoreTex windbreaker. “It’s technical,” he’ll say of the windbreaker, as though the baby might find herself in a rainy wilderness where hypothermia was a danger. Carolyn will exclaim over the tiny clothes, but she’ll fold them and put them back in their boxes, and Ted will know that he has lost her.

Ted doesn’t know any of this now, but he suspects. I feel it in his body, his arm creeping around my waist. Together we watch the Jeep back out of the driveway. Carolyn drives one-handed, her left arm hanging out the window. We stand in the yard a long time, until the red taillights disappear at the end of the street.

Cutaway The Saturday Evening Post

Read “The Geometry of Love” by John Cheever [PDF]

The Geometry of Love, by John Cheever The Saturday Evening Post

Read the short story “Swindler’s Luck” by Ben Hecht [PDF].

Swindler’s Luck The Saturday Evening Post

Among his numerous short stories is the classic “To Start a Fire,” which captures the despair of a man trying to build a fire in a snow-bound wilderness to save his life.

London wrote over 25 novels and 65 short stories, in addition to an assortment of essays, poetry, non-fiction, and plays, despite the fact that he died in 1916 at the young age of 40. “A Goboto Night” is one of 18 stories the Post printed by London.

At Goboto the traders come off their schooners and the planters drift in from far wild coasts, and one and all they assume shoes, white duck trousers and various other appearances of civilization. At Goboto mail is received, bills are paid, and newspapers, rarely more than five weeks old, are accessible; for the little island, belted with its coral reefs, affords safe anchorage, is the steamer port of call, and serves as the distributing point for the whole wide-scattered group.

Life at Goboto is heated, unhealthy and lurid, and for its size it asserts the distinction of more cases of acute alcoholism than any other spot in the world. Guvutu, over in the Solomons, claims that it drinks between drinks. Goboto does not deny this. It merely states, in passing, that in the Goboton chronology no such interval time is known. It also poins out its import statistics, which show a far larger per capita consumption of liquors. Guvutu explains this on the basis that Goboto does a larger business and has more visitors. Goboto retorts that its population is smaller and that its visitors are thirstier. And the discussion goes on interminably, principally because the disputants do not live long enough to settle it.

Goboto is not large. The island is only a quarter of a mile in diameter, and on it are situated an Admiralty coalshed—where a few tons of coal have lain untounched for twenty years—the barracks for a handful of black laborers, a big store and warehouse with sheet-iron roofs, and a bungalow inhabited by the manager and his two clerks. They are the white population. An average of one man out of the three is always to be found down with fever. It is the policy of the company to treat its patrons well, as invading companies have found out, and it is the task of the manager and clerks to do the treating. Throughout the year traders and recruiters arrive from far dry cruises and planters from equally distant and dry shores, bringing with them magnificent thirsts. Goboto is the Mecca of sprees, and when they have spreed they go back to their schooners and plantations to recuperate.

Some of the less hardy require as much as six months between visits. But for the manager and his assistants there are no such intervals. They are on the spot, and week by week, blown in by monsoon or southeast trade, the schooners come to anchor, cargoed with copra, ivory, nuts, pearl shell, hawksbill turtle and thirst.

It is a very hard job at Goboto. That is why the pay is twice that on other stations, and that is why the company selects only courageous and intrepid men for this particular station. They last no more than a year or so, when the wreckage of them is shipped back to Australia, or the remains of them are buried in the sand across on the windward side of the islet. Johnny Bassett, almost the legendary hero of Goboto, broke all records. He was a remittance man with a remarkable constitution and he lasted seven years.

Nevertheless, at Goboto they tried to be gentlemen. For that matter, though something was wrong with them, they were gentlemen and had been gentlemen. That was why the great unwritten rule of Goboto was that visitors should put on pants and shoes. Breech-clouts, lavalavas and bare legs were not tolerated. When Captain Jensen, the wildest of the blackbirders though descended from old New York Knickerbocker stock, surged in, clad in loin-cloth, undershirt, two belted revolvers and a sheath-knife, he was stopped at the beach. This was in the days of Johnny Bassett, ever a stickler in matters of etiquette. Captain Jensen stood up in the sternsheets of his whaleboat and denied the existence of pants on his schooner. Also he affirmed his intention of coming ashore. They of Goboto nursed him back to health from a bullet-hole through his shoulder, and in addition handsomely begged his pardon, for no pants had they found on his schooner. And finally, on the first day he sat up, Johnny Bassett kindly but firmly assisted his guest into a pair of pants on his own. This was the great precedent. In all the succeeding years it had never been violated. White men and pants were undivorceable. Only niggers ran naked.

II

ON THIS night things were, with one exception, in nowise different from any other night. Seven of them with glimmering eyes and steady legs had capped a day of Scotch with swivelsticked cocktails and sat down to dinner. Jacketed, trousered and shod they were: Jerry McMurtrey, the manager; Eddy Little and Jack Andrews, clerks; Captain Stapler, of the recruiting ketch Merry; Darby Shryleton, planter from Tito-Ito; Peter Gee, a half-caste Chinese pearl-buyer who ranged from Ceylon to the Paumotas; and Alfred Deacon, a visitor who had stopped off from the last steamer. At first wine was served by the black servants to those who drank it, though all quickly shifted back to Scotch and soda—pickling their food as they ate it ere it went into their calcined, pickled stomachs.

Over their coffee they heard the rumble of an anchor-chain through a hawspipe, tokening the arrival of a vessel.

“It’s David Grief,” Peter Gee remarked.

“How do you know?” Deacon demanded truculently, and then went on to deny the half-caste’s knowledge. “You chaps put on a lot of side. I’ve done some sailing myself, and this naming a craft when its sail is only a blur, or naming a man by the sound of his anchor—it’s—it’s unadulterated poppycock.”

Peter Gee was engaged in lighting a cigarette and did not answer.

“Some of the niggers do amazing things that way,” McMurtrey interposed tactfully.

As with the others, this conduct of their visitor jarred on the manager. From the moment of Peter Gee’s arrival that afternoon Deacon had manifested a tendency to pick on him. He had disputed his statements and been generally rude.

“Maybe it’s because Peter’s got Chink blood in him,” had been Andrews’ hypothesis. “Deacon’s Australian, you know, and they’re daffy down there on color.”

“I fancy that’s it,” McMurtrey had agreed. “But we can’t permit any bullying, especially of a man like Peter Gee, who’s whiter than most white men.”

In this the manager had been in nowise wrong. Peter Gee was that rare creature, a good as well as clever Eurasian. In fact it was the stolid integrity of the Chinese blood that toned the recklessness and licentiousness of the English blood that had run in his father’s veins. Also he was better educated than any man there, spoke better English as well as several other tongues, and knew and lived more of their own ideals of gentlemanliness than they did themselves. And, finally, he was a gentle soul. Violence he deprecated, though he had killed men in his times. Turbulence he abhorred. He avoided turbulence as he would the plague.

Captain Stapler stepped in to help McMurtrey:

“I remember when I changed schooners and came into Altman the niggers knew right off the bat it was me. I wasn’t expected, either, much less was I expected to be in another craft. They told the trader it was me. He used the glasses and wouldn’t believe them. But they did know. Told me afterward they could see it sticking out all over the schooner that I was running her.”

Deacon ignored him and returned to the attack on the pearl-buyer.

“How did you know from the sound of the anchor that it was this whatever-you-called-him man?” he challenged.

“There are so many things that go to make up such a judgment,” Peter Gee answered. “It’s very hard to explain. It would require almost a textbook.”

“I thought so,” Deacon sneered. “Explanation that doesn’t explain is easy.”

“Who’s for bridge?” Eddy Little, the second clerk, interrupted, looking up expectantly and starting to shuffle. “You’ll play, won’t you, Peter?”

“If he does, he’s a bluffer,” Deacon cut back. “I’m getting tired of all this poppycock. Mr. Gee, you will favor me and put yourself in a better light if you tell how you know who that man was that just dropped anchor. After that I’ll play you piquet.”

“I’d prefer bridge,” Peter answered. “As for the other thing, it’s something like this: By the sound it was a small craft—no square-rigger. No whistle, no siren was blown—again a small craft. It anchored close in—still again a small craft, for steamers and big ships must drop hook outside the middle shoal. Now the entrance is tortuous. There is no recruiting nor trading captain in the group who dares to run the passage after dark. Certainly no stranger would. There were two exceptions. The first was Margonville. But he was executed by the High Court at Fiji. Remains the other exception, David Grief. Night or day in any weather he runs the passage. This is well know to all. A possible factor, in case Grief were somewhere else, would be some young dare-devil of a skipper. In that connection, in the first place, I don’t know of any, nor does anybody else. In the second place, David Grief is in these waters, cruising on the Gunga, which is shortly scheduled to leave here for Karo-Karo. I spoke Grief on the Gunga in Sandfly Passage day before yesterday. He was putting a trader ashore on a new station. He said he was going to call in at Babo and then come on to Goboto. He has had ample time to get here. I have heard an anchor drop. Who else than David Grief can it be? Captain Donovan is skipper of the Gunga, and him I know too well to believe that he’d run in to Goboto after dark unless his owner were in charge. In a few minutes David Grief will enter through that door and say: ‘In Guvutu they merely drink between drinks.’ I’ll wager fifty pounds he’s the man that enters and that his word will be: ‘In Guvutu they merely drink between drinks.’”

Deacon was for the moment crushed. The sullen blood rose darkly in his face.

“Well, he’s answered you,” McMurtrey laughed genially. “And I’ll back his bet myself for a couple of sovereigns.”

“Bridge!—who’s going to take a hand?” Eddy Little cried impatiently. “Come on, Peter.”

“The rest of you play,” Deacon said. “He and I are going to play piquet.”

“I’d prefer bridge,” Peter Gee said mildly.

“Don’t you play piquet?”

Peter nodded.

“Then come on. Maybe I can show I know more about that than I do about anchors.”

“Oh, I say—” McMurtrey began.

“You can play bridge,” Deacon shut him off. “We prefer piquet.”

Reluctantly Peter Gee was bullied into a game that he knew would be unhappy.

“Only a rubber,” he said, as he cut for deal.

“For how much?” Deacon asked.

Peter Gee shrugged his shoulders. “As you please.”

“Hundred up—five pounds a game?”

Peter Gee agreed.

“With the lurch double, of course, ten pounds?”

“All right,” said Peter Gee.

At another table four of the others sat in at bridge. Captain Stapler, who was no card-player looked on. McMurtrey, with poorly concealed apprehension, followed as well as he could what went on at the piquet table. His fellow Englishmen as well were shocked by the behavior of the Australian, and all were troubled by fear of some untoward act on his part. That he was working up his animosity against the half-caste and that the explosion might come any time was apparent to all.

“I hope Peter loses,” McMurtrey said in an undertone.

“He won’t if he has any luck,” Andrews answered. “He’s a wizard at piquet. I know by experience.”

That Peter Gee was lucky was patent from the continual badgering of Deacon, who filled his glass frequently. He had lost the first game handily and, judging from his remarks, was about to lose the second, when the door opened and David Grief entered.

“In Guvutu they merely drink between drinks,” he remarked casually to the assembled company ere he gripped the manager’s hand. “Hello, Mac! Say, my skipper’s down in the whaleboat. He’s got a silk shirt, a tie and tennis shoes all complete, but he wants you to send a pair of pants down. Mine are too small, but yours will fit him. Hello, Eddy, how’s that gari-gari? You up, Jack? The miracle has happened. No one down with fiver.” He sighed happily. “I suppose the night is still young. Hello, Peter, did you catch that big squall an hour after you left us? We had to let go the second anchor.”

While David Grief was being introduced to Deacon, McMurtrey dispatched a house-boy with the indispensable pants, and when Captain Donovan finally came into the room he was garbed as a white man should be—at least in Goboto.

Deacon lost the second game, and an outburst heralded the fact. Peter Gee devoted himself to lighting a cigarette and keeping quiet.

“What?—are you quitting because you’re ahead?” Deacon demanded.

Grief raised his eyebrows questioningly to McMurtrey who frowned back his own disgust.

“It’s the rubber,” Peter Gee answered.

“It takes three games to make a rubber. It’s my deal. Come on.”

Peter Gee acquiesced and the third game was on.

“Young whelp—he needs a lacing,” McMurtrey muttered to Grief. “Come on, let us quit, you chaps. I want to keep an eye on him. If he goes too far I’ll throw him out on the beach, company instructions or no.”

“Who is he?” Grief queried.

“A left-over from last steamer. Company’s orders to treat him nice. He’s looking to invest in a plantation. Has a ten-thousand-pound letter of credit with the company. He’s got ‘all-white Australia’ on the brain. Thinks because his skin is white and because his father was once Attorney-General of the Commonwealth that he can be a cur. That’s why he’s picking on Peter, and you know Peter’s the last man in the world to make trouble or incur trouble. Confound the company! I didn’t engage to look after infants with bank accounts. Come on, fill your glass, Grief. The man’s a blighter, a blithering blighter.”

“Maybe he’s only young,” Grief suggested.

“He can’t contain his drink—that’s clear.” The manager glared his disgust and wrath. “If he raises a hand to Peter, so help me, I’ll give him a licking myself—the little, overgrown cad!”

The pearl-buyer pulled the pegs out of the cribbage board on which he was scoring and sat back. He had won the third game. He glanced across to Eddy Little, saying:

“I’m ready for the bridge now.”

“I wouldn’t be a quitter,” Deacon snarled.

“Oh, really, I’m tired of the game,” Peter Gee assured him with his habitual quietness.

“Come on and be game,” Deacon bullied. “One more. You can’t take my money that way. I’m out fifteen pounds. Double or quits.”

McMurtrey was about to interpose, but Grief restrained him with his eyes.

“If it positively is the last, all right,” said Peter Gee, gathering up the cards. “It’s my deal, I believe. As I understand it, this final is for fifteen pounds. Either you owe me thirty or we quit even?”

“That’s it. Either we break even or I pay you thirty.”

“Getting blooded, eh?” Grief remarked.

The other men stood or sat around the table and Deacon played again in bad luck. That he was a good player was clear. The cards were merely running against him. That he could not take his ill luck with equanimity was equally clear. He was guilty of sharp, ugly curses and he snapped and growled at the imperturbable half-caste. In the end Peter Gee counted out, while Deacon had not even made his fifty points. He glowered speechlessly at his opponent.

“Looks like a lurch,” said Grief.

“Which is double,” said Peter Gee.

“There’s no need your telling me,” Deacon snarled; “I’ve studied arithmetic. I owe you forty-five pounds. There, take it!”

The way in which he flung the nine five-pound notes on the table was an insult in itself. Peter Gee was even quieter and flew no signals of resentment.

“You’ve got fool’s luck but you can’t play cards,” Deacon went on. “I could teach you cards.”

The half-caste smiled and nodded acquiescence as he folded up the money.

“There’s a little game called casino; I wonder if you ever heard of it—a child’s game?”

“I’ve seen it played,” the half-caste murmured gently.

“What’s that?” was the resulting snap from Deacon. “Maybe you think you can play it!”

“Oh, no, not for a moment! I’m afraid I haven’t head enough for it.”

“It’s a bully game, casino,” Grief broke in pleasantly. “I like it very much.”

Deacon ignored him.

“I’ll play you ten quid a game—thirty-one points out,” was the challenge to Peter Gee. “And I’ll show you how little you know about cards. Come on, where’s a full deck?”

“No, thanks,” the half-caste answered. “They are waiting for me in order to make up a bridge set.”

“Yes, come on,” Eddy Little begged eagerly. “Come on, Peter, let’s get started.”

“Afraid of a little game like casino!” Deacon girded. “Maybe the stakes are too high. I’ll play you for pennies—or farthings, if you say so.”

The man’s conduct was a hurt and an affront to all of them. McMurtrey could stand it no longer.

“Now hold on, Deacon. He says he doesn’t want to play. Let him alone.”

Deacon turned raging upon his host; but before he could blurt out his abuse Grief stepped into the breach.

“I’d like to play casino with you,” he said.

“What do you know about it?”

“Not much, but I’m willing to learn.”

“Well, I’m not teaching for pennies tonight.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Grief answered. “I’ll play for almost any sum—within reason, of course.”

Deacon proceeded to dispose of this intruder with one stroke.

“I’ll play you a hundred pounds a game, if that will do you any good.”

Grief beamed his delight. “That will be all right—very right. Let us begin. Do you count sweeps?”

Deacon was taken aback. He had not expected a Goboton trader to be anything but crushed by such a proposition.

“Do you count sweeps?” Grief repeated.

Andrews had brought him a new deck, and he was throwing out the joker.

“Certainly not,” Deacon said. “That’s a sissy game.”

“I’m glad,” Grief coincided. “I don’t like sissy games, either.”

“You don’t, eh? Well, then, I’ll tell you what we do. We’ll play for five hundred pounds a game.”

“I’m agreeable,” Grief said, beginning to shuffle. “Cards and spades go out first, of course, and then big and little casino, and the aces in the bridge order of value. Is that right?”

“You’re a lot of jokers down here,” Deacon laughed, but his laughter was strained. “How do I know you’ve got the money?”

“By the same token I known you’ve got it. Mac, how’s my credit with the company?”

“For all you want,” the manager answered.

“You personally guarantee that?” Deacon demanded.

“I certainly do,” McMurtrey said. “Depend upon it, the company will honor his paper up to and past your letter of credit.”

“Low deals,” Grief said, placing the deck before Deacon.

The latter hesitated in the midst of the cut and looked around with querulous misgiving at the faces of the others. The clerks and captains nodded.

“You’re all strangers to me,” Deacon complained. “How am I to know? Money on paper isn’t always the real thing.”

Then it was Peter Gee, drawing a wallet from his pocket and borrowing a fountain pen from McMurtrey, went into action.

“I haven’t gone to buying yet,” the half-caste explained, “so the account is intact. I’ll just indorse it over to you, Grief. It’s for fifteen thousand. There, look at it.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. It’s just the same as your own and just as good. The company’s paper is always good.”

Deacon cut the cards, won the deal and gave them a thorough shuffle. But his luck was still against him and he lost the game.

“Another game,” he said. “We didn’t say how many, and you can’t quit with me a loser. I want action.”

Grief shuffled and passed the cards for the cut.

“Let’s play for a thousand,” Deacons said when he had lost the second game. And when the thousand had gone the way of the two five-hundred bets he proposed to play for two thousand.

“That’s progression,” McMurtrey warned, and was rewarded by a glare from Deacon. But the manager was insistent. “You don’t have to play progression, Grief, unless you’re foolish.”

“Who’s playing this game?” Deacon flamed at his host; and then, to Grief: “I’ve lost two thousand to you. Will you play for two thousand?”
Grief nodded, the fourth game began and Deacon won. The manifest unfairness of such betting was known to all of them. Though he had lost three games out of four Deacon had lost no money. By the child’s device of doubling his wager with each loss he was bound, with the first game he won, no matter how long delayed, to be even again.

He now evinced an unspoken desire to stop, but Grief passed the deck to be cut.

“What?” Deacon cried. “You want more?”

“Haven’t got anything yet,” Grief murmured whimsically, as he began the deal. “For the usual five hundred, I suppose?”

The shame of what he had done must have tingled in Deacon, for he answered: “No, we’ll play for a thousand. And say! Thirty-one points is too long. Why not twenty-one points out—if it isn’t too rapid for you?”

“That will make it a nice quick little game,” Grief agreed.

The former method of play was repeated. Deacon lost two games, doubled the stake and was again even. But Grief was patient, though the thing occurred several times in the next hour’s play. Then happened what he was waiting for—a lengthening in the series of losing games for Deacon. The latter doubled to four thousand and lost, doubled to eight thousand and lost, and then proposed the double to sixteen thousand.

Grief shook his head. “You can’t do that, you know. You’ve only ten thousand credit with the company.”

“You mean you won’t give me action?” Deacon asked hoarsely. “You mean that with eight thousand of my money you’re going to quit?”
Grief smiled and shook his head.

“It’s robbery, plain robbery,” Deacon went on. “You take my money and won’t give me action.”

“No, you’re wrong. I’m perfectly willing to give what action you’ve got coming to you. You’ve got two thousand pounds of action yet.”

“Well, we’ll play it,” Deacon took him up. “You cut.”

The game was played in silence, save for irritable remarks and curses from Deacon. Silently the onlookers filled and sipped their long Scotch glasses. Grief took no notice of his opponent’s outbursts, but concentrated on the game. He was really playing cards, and there were fifty-two in the deck to be kept track of and of which he did keep track. Two-thirds of the way through the last deal he threw down his hand.

“Cards put me out,” he said. “I have twenty-seven.”

“If you’ve made a mistake!” Deacon threatened, his face white and drawn.

“Then I shall have lost. Count them.”

Grief passed over his stack of takings, and Deacon with trembling fingers verified the count. He half shoved his chair back from the table and emptied his glass. He looked about him at unsympathetic faces.

“I fancy I’ll be catching the next steamer for Sydney,” he said, and for the first time his speech was quiet and without bluster.
As Grief told them afterward: “Had he whined or raised a roar I wouldn’t have given him that last chance. As it was he took his medicine like a man, and I had to do it.”

Deacon glanced at his watch, simulated a weary yawn and started to rise.

“Wait,” Grief said. “Do you want further action?”

The other sank down in his chair, strove to speak but could not, licked his dry lips and nodded his head.

“Captain Donovan here sails at daylight in the Gunga for Karo-Karo,” Grief began with seeming irrelevance. “Karo-Karo is a ring of sand in the sea, with a few thousand cocoanut trees. Pandanus grows there, but they can’t grow sweet potatoes or taro. There are about eight hundred natives, a king and two prime minsters, and the last three named are the only ones who were any clothes. It’s a sort of God-forsaken little hole and once a year I send a schooner up from Goboto. The drinking water is brackish, but old Tom Butler has survived on it for a dozen years. He’s the only white man there, and he has a boat’s crew of five Santa Cruz boys who would run away or kill him if they could. That is why there were sent there. They can’t run away. He is always supplied with the hard cases from the plantations.

“Naturally you are wondering what it is all about. But have patience. As I have said, Captain Donovan sails on the annual trip to Karo-Karo at daylight tomorrow. Tom Butler is old and getting quite helpless. I’ve tried to retire him to Australia, but he says he wants to remain and die on Karo-Karo, and he will in the next year or so. He’s a queer old codger. Now the time is due for me to send some white man up to take the work off his hands. I wonder how you’d like the job. You’d have to stay two years.

“Hold on, I’ve not finished. You’ve talked frequently of action this evening. There’s no action in betting away what you’ve never sweated for. The money you’ve lost to me was left you by your father or some other relative who did the sweating. But two years of work as trader on Karo-Karo would mean something. I’ll bet the ten thousand I’ve won from you against two years of your time. If you win, the money’s yours. If you lose, you take the job at Karo-Karo and sail at daylight. Now that’s what might be called real action. Will you play?”

Deacon could not speak. His throat lumped and he nodded his head as he reached for the cards.

“One thing more,” Grief said. “I can do even better. If you lose, two years of your time are mine—naturally without wages. Nevertheless, I’ll pay you wages. If your work is satisfactory, if you observe all instructions and rules, I’ll pay you five thousand pounds a year for two years. The money will be deposited with the company, to be paid to you with interest when the time expires. Is that all right?”

“Too much so,” Deacon answered. “You are unfair to yourself. A trader only gets ten or fifteen pounds a month.”

“Put it down to action then,” Grief said with an air of dismissal. “And before we begin I’ll jot down several of the rules. These you will repeat aloud every morning during the two years—if you lose. They are for the good of your soul. When you have repeated them aloud seven hundred and thirty Karo-Karo mornings I am confident they will be in your memory to stay. Lend me your pen, Mac. Now, let’s see.”

He wrote steadily and rapidly for some minutes, then proceeded to read the matter aloud:

“I must always remember that one man is as good as another, save and except when he thinks he is better.

“No matter how drunk I am I must not fail to be a gentleman. A gentleman is a man who is gentle. Note: It would be better not to get drunk.

“A good curse, rightly used and rarely, is an efficient thing. Too many curses spoil the cursing. Note: A curse cannot change a card sequence nor cause the wind to blow.

“There is no license for a man to be less than a man. Ten thousand pounds cannot purchase such a license.”

At the beginning of the reading Deacon’s face had gone white with anger. Then had arisen, from neck to forehead, a slow and terrible flush that deepened to the end of the reading.

“There, that will be all,” Grief said, as he folded the paper and tossed it to the center of the table. “Are you still ready to play the game?”

“I deserve it,” Deacon muttered brokenly. “I’ve been an ass! Mr. Gee, before I know whether I win or lose I want to apologize. Maybe it was the whisky, I don’t know, but I’m an ass, a cad, a bounder—everything that’s rotten.”

He held out his hand and the half-caste took it beamingly.

“I say, Grief,” he blurted out, “the boy’s all right. Call the whole thing off and let’s forget it in a final nightcap.”

Grief showed signs of debating, but Deacon cried:

“No; I won’t permit it. I’m not a quitter. If it’s Karo-Karo, it’s Karo-Karo. There’s nothing more to it.”

“Right,” said Grief, as he began the shuffle. “If he’s the right stuff to go to Karo-Karo, Karo-Karo won’t do him any harm.”

The game was close and hard. Three times they divided the deck between them and “cards” was not scored. At the beginning of the fifth and last deal Deacon needed three points to go out and Grief needed four. “Cards” alone would put Deacon out, and he played for “cards.” He no longer muttered or cursed, and played his best game of the evening. Incidentally he gathered in the two black aces and the ace of hearts.

“I suppose you can name the four cards I hold,” he challenged, as the last of his deal was exhausted and he picked up his hand.

Grief nodded.

“Then name them.”

“The knave of spades, the deuce of spades, the tray of hearts and the ace of diamonds,” Grief answered.

Those behind Deacon and looking at his hand made no sign. Yet the naming had been correct.

“I fancy you play casino better than I,” Deacon acknowledged. “I can name only three of yours, a knave, and ace and big casino.”

“Wrong. There aren’t five aces in the deck. You’ve taken in three and you hold the fourth in your hand now.”

“By Jove, you’re right,” Deacon admitted. “I did scoop in three. Anyway, I’ll make ‘cards’ on you. That’s all I need.”

“I’ll let you save little casino—” Grief paused to calculate. “Yes, and the ace as well, and I’ll make ‘cards’ and go out with big casino. Play.”

“No ‘cards,’ and I win!” Deacon exulted as the last of the hand was played. “I go out on little casino and the four aces. Big casino and ‘spades’ only bring you to twenty.”

Grief shook his head. “Some mistake, I’m afraid.”

“No,” Deacon declared positively. “I counted every card I took in. That’s the one thing I was correct on. I’ve twenty-six and you’ve twenty-six.”

“Count again,” Grief said.

Carefully and slowly, with trembling fingers, Deacon counted the cards he had taken. There were twenty-five. He reached over to the corner of the table, took up the rules Grief had written, folded them and put them in his pocket. Then he emptied his glass and stood up. Captain Donovan looked at his watch, yawned and also arose.

“Going aboard, Captain?” Deacon asked.

“Yes,” was the answer. “What time shall I send the whaleboat for you?”

“I’ll go with you now. We’ll pick up my luggage from the Billy as we go by. I was wailing on her for Babo in the morning.”

Deacon shook hands all around, after receiving a final pledge of good luck on Karo-Karo.

“Does Tom Butler play cards?” he asked Grief.

“Solitaire,” was the answer.

“Then I’ll teach him double solitaire.” Deacon turned toward the door where Captain waited, and added with a sigh—”And I fancy he’ll skin me, too, if he plays like the rest of you island men.”

A Goboto Night, by Jack London The Saturday Evening Post

Of all these stories, and all of his works, his best remembered piece is the short story “The Snow Goose.” It is unapologetic melodrama, but it is also one of those rare sentimental stories that can still surprise you with its effectiveness.

Read the original publication of “The Snow Goose,” by Paul Gallico [PDF].

The Snow Goose The Saturday Evening Post

In the April, 1944, issue in which “Soft-Boiled Sargeant” appeared, the Post included this small vignette about the early life of the famous, highly talented, and reclusive writer.

A Thin Slice of College

J D. Salinger at the ripe-on-the-bough old age of twenty-five regards himself as the dean of college failures, having been in the freshman class of three colleges but never having quite got into a sophomore class. The apparent reason for this was an allergy to elm trees and ivy.

Mr. Salinger finally overcame his aversion to academy life long enough to take a short-story course at Columbia under Whit Burnett, editor of Story, who published a story of Mr. Salinger’s in his magazine four years ago.

Soft-boiled Sergeantby J.D. SalingerApril 15, 1944

Previous to that successful foray into education, Mr. Salinger had breezed through the grammar schools of his native Manhattan and the Valley Forge Military Academy. He went to Europe at the age of eighteen to learn the Polish ham business from the sty up, and actually spent two months at Bydgoszcz (Polish pigs are fed a daily ration of szcz mixed with a little wcyz), where he helped slaughter pigs and drove by wagon through the snow with a big slaughter master who amused himself between slaughters by popping with his shotgun at sparrows, light bulbs and fellow employees. Both before and after this tenuous apprenticeship, young Mr. Salinger spent his time in Vienna. All of this was, of course, prewar.

Mr. Salinger now has the same number of stripes on his sleeve as his soft-boiled sergeant.

Short Stories by J. D. Salinger The Saturday Evening Post

Outside the theater, a group of true believers had come to take advantage of the opportunity that grace and the modern cinema affords them. They had anchored a plastic statue of their savior to a station wagon luggage rack, and driven to the far side of the parking lot (as close as the law will allow them, I suppose) to wave signs and hand out tracts. I drove past, looking away, and waited in the car until a parking space opened at the front of the lot, then ducked my head as I got out and entered the theater, thankful that they couldn’t see me.

Perhaps a similar vigil still takes place outside Nick’s house, where his mother and stepfather may have settled back into the guarded normality of a troubled marriage, or are separated and deciding to divorce. Nick isn’t with them, for better or worse: He is marking time for the summer with his father’s family, as he did last summer, or maybe taking an extra term in school. In any case I’ve had no news of him since the bitter blessing that we—all of us here: the couple in front of me, the child above, a last few stragglers taking their seats as the lights dim—have come to witness on the screen.

Below me a family creeps in, cowed by the darkness and the lighted screen, and finds their seats: Three children sit between their parents. They pass a bucket of popcorn among them. After a few ads for coming attractions, a cartoon comes on, a Bible story told in singing animation: the price we pay for seeking moral uplift at the multiplex. A group of vegetables, complete with eyes and ears, faces and—presumably—souls, reenact the story of Lazarus. A cucumber evangelist—unidentified, but most certainly John, who is called the apostle Jesus loved—relates the Savior’s journey to the house of Mary and Martha, both stalks of broccoli, to find that their brother Lazarus has recently died. At the tomb, Jesus (shown only as a portentous shadow at the foot of the screen), commands the stone to be rolled away. We are transported to the inside of the tomb where light floods the interior as the stone is withdrawn and the Shadow falls across the open door. We hear His voice bid the dead arise and see a crown of cauliflower, laid peacefully on a slab of rock, stir beneath what appear to be a waxed paper shroud. Outside the tomb, the crowd watches first in dread, then amazement as the ruffled, white head inches toward the opening, and Lazarus, blinking, emerges unspoiled into the light. I unzip my jacket and expose the collar that marks me, as much as it can in the dark, for what I am.

And what are we to make of this? What are we to do, marvel as much at the vibrant and tasteless retelling as the miracle itself? How are we to regard the Shadow at whose hands—if It has hands—the miracle has been enacted? What are we to feel for this cruciferous family, reunited and happy in the end? And the crowd of onlookers—a whole produce department of greens and legumes—will they, animate creatures all, ever reconsider what they’ve witnessed, and who or what has not been saved? Why Lazarus, they fail to ask, and why not someone else? For whom is this particular miracle meant?

Of course they won’t. A miracle simply occurs—there is no further question. But why? Will no one ask what the leper felt as he returned to his home to find his children frightened strangers, his wife mistrustful and grudging in her embrace? Or what exactly the blind man saw as his parents aged and died in his restored sight? Or how Lazarus felt on the 10th anniversary of the miraculous day after his long sleep in the tomb?

On that question, the Gospel of John is silent; Lazarus is never mentioned again. As the sun set and the long line of astonished onlookers thinned and drifted off, convinced and unsettled, did he lie down and, for a moment, wish for the cool dark from which he’d come, for the oblivion he hadn’t asked to be awakened from? Did he wonder what, exactly, he’d been spared—and to what purpose? So that he could serve, unvolunteering, as the sign of another’s promise? To live out this odd twilight life the target of stares and whispers? To spend the rest of his days in numb disbelief, dreading again his approaching end? What sort of blessing, what sort of salvation, was this? And what is Nick doing now, I wonder, as the cartoon’s credits end and the feature, made in this odd afterlife of his, begins? I cross my legs and consider the darkness: With all eyes forward, I am all but invisible and no more interesting, unrecognized, than anyone else here who has come to watch the movie and not search the audience for a face they might have seen on television. I am as alone and untroubled as cauliflower in the tomb.

In the classroom he was restless, his fingers drumming out figures of notes, his desktop an imagined piano, his eyes studiously vacant, as if he knew I noticed and would assume him lost in thought, mentally rehearsing a particularly vexing piece. As if he assumed I’d admire his application, his dedicated skill. I did. Nick was a worker, a practicer. Not an original mind, no—I knew this after a week of class: He listened attentively when others spoke, then rehearsed their thoughts in his own balanced prose. His gift is a sort of mimicry, a talent for restatement; and what he writes, he writes beautifully. But still he says nothing new. He has his quirks (for a while all praiseworthy things are ‘quite lovely’—a phrase I underline in red and urge him to avoid), but he’s a talented student, and if he affects nonchalance in his judgments, if his words sometimes stray into pomposity (quite lovely?—from a 17-year-old?), then the sin is easily forgiven: What a teacher praises—what a teacher can come to love, if he is not careful—is the rapt attention of a good student.

The Bishop had hinted as much—and a good deal more. “And this was a student in your classes?” I shrug. It isn’t a question. “And that was all?”

“We hit it off. I got to know him, and his family.” My hands are open, palms up, in my lap. The afternoon sun is bright on the blinds behind him at his enormous desk.

“We had common interests, mostly music, and he excelled in class.”

“And that would explain your visit to the hospital?”

“Not entirely.” I stiffen at his tone, sit up, and level my eyes on his. “There’s also a matter of pastoral care—a student of mine, after all.”

He leans forward, pressing the point. “One you had gotten to know quite well.”

“Yes.”

He looks down. “And his family. Of course.”

Our friendship begins when I recognize a melody he’s whistling at the start of class, less for his own pleasure than to be heard taking pleasure in it, and look up from the roster. “Who’s whistling Liszt?” The class goes silent, off guard, and he raises his hand, caught in an instant of perfect confession. We talk for a moment, before I have to return to taking attendance, about recordings and performers, and after class I quiz him further. His preferences are odd for his age, the landmark recordings of a generation ago. Mention of newer players draws a blank. That night I pull down a recent performance of the second Liszt concerto and burn him a copy. When he comes in the next day, he’s done the same for me with his own recording.

Of course the movie gets the dynamics more or less exactly wrong. The child on the screen is dogged and noble, talentless but determined to rise above his failings. His teacher, a man—a priest—decidedly unlike me, a photogenic firebrand against my clumsy middle age—sees this hidden potential. A bond grows over remedial studies after school. They struggle together, battle the material, and inevitably the boy not only masters his work, but writes an essay, which, in its insight and daring, wins him a scholarship—though not before the necessary complication requiring the miracle arises.

Nick was not insightful or daring. He was a skillful redactor of what he learned. I watched him work hard and read thoroughly, and I also watched him work to please me, which is always the first task of a good student. I was flattered when he glossed my comments in his papers; gratified, as we started a slide lecture in my Art History class, to see him set up the projectors before I could ask; and finally entertained at the comments his friends repeated, angling for some favor of their own—I was his favorite, I was the one he respected. And if I grew to forgive him his occasional solipsism, if I passed over the error that I might have noted in one of his less-talented classmates—and if a common interest seals the bond as we traded discs weekly and discussed music in my classroom over lunch—then it is in just such currency that the debts of affection between teacher and student are paid.

He loved Rachmaninoff and Chopin, the grand and sentimental pieces teenagers always do, and prided himself on his taste. He gave the impression that what he admired somehow made him smarter, as if an inclination for the classics is the mark of sophistication. I didn’t correct that, but when I could, I brought in pieces that I knew would challenge him, and if I hit the mark, I was glad: I am a teacher, after all, and he was a child.

But he was not my child, and when the talk turned to family (I was curious, I’ll admit: Who nurtured his interests? Who first played that Liszt concerto for him? Who preceded me?), his conversation cools. I have met his mother, a pert and careful woman, young to have a child in high school, but already in a second marriage: “She’s just a Midwestern cheerleader,” he says with a shrug. And his stepfather?

“He’s an ass.”

“Why do you say that?”

He looks away. “He just is.”

“Everyone hates his father at your age—I did.” The disc player on the table beneath the chalkboard falls silent. The disc within hisses to a halt. The piece has ended.

“He’s an ass. That’s all. It’s private.” He stands up to leave as the bell rings. I am his teacher, after all—and only that. And he is a child.

The Bishop shifts in his seat and drums his plump fingers on the surface of his desk. “I’ve had a chance to review the file,” he says casually, tapping a manila folder as if he expects me to recognize it. He sits forward and smiles, resting his elbows on the desk as if sharing a confidence. “I won’t be recommending further action.”

“Further action?” I stare back blankly across the expanse of his desk. “I don’t understand. This is what you wanted to tell me?”

“No, no—of course not.” And he is suddenly all business, drawing himself up and brushing off the blotter as if sighting a crumb. “There’s the question of how we should respond.”

“Respond to what?”

“Well, there hasn’t been a complaint—not exactly.” He opens the file and leafs through the top few pages before lifting out a form. Light from the window behind him glows through it, lighting it in reverse. “This is the police report.”

“The police report? How did you—”

“It’s public record.” He looks at me sternly for a moment, then the conspiratorial smile reappears. “Miracle cures. Any doctor can tell you stories, maybe a few of them—things he’s heard of, even seen. And with the Church still investigating.” Another shrug. “Cooperation is easy in some things.”

“A police report of the cure?”

“Oh, goodness no—the cure?” He chuckles to himself, then, “Of the domestic disturbance, as they call it.” He lays the paper flat and points to the phrase as if citing a verse, “The argument between the mother and stepfather.” He frowns and looks up. “You’re certainly aware of that?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it seems that a certain comment has arisen. About your place on the staff, your work, and your relationship with the boy.” He looks up, brightly. “I understand. I taught for a while myself. A particular fondness, right?”

“Well, yes, but as a student. A student in class—”

“And whose treatment in a hospital you were aware of.”

“Only after prayers were requested. On the announcements.”

“But also before that, I believe.” His eyes are down, he is arranging a sheaf of papers before him in a grid: a game or a puzzle he appears absorbed in working out. “The relationship, I mean.”

“The parents requested his schoolwork—the mother called me.”

“There,” he says, dropping a last page into place. “She called you. And you took that as an invitation to visit—of course. Due diligence as teacher and pastor. Entirely plausible.”

The diagnosis, when it came, was less a surprise than a possibility I had consciously put out of mind. For a week he had found it hard to type, and the imagined improvisations no longer occupied his fingers on the desktop. He complained of headaches, and a looseness in his handwriting crept into his papers. He was absent on a Friday, and three days later his mother called the school with the news. A biopsy would be performed that afternoon. Prayers were requested.

The whole anxious episode is omitted from the film. Our hero learns of his student’s illness and unthinkingly, selflessly rushes to the ward, arriving before the child is out of the anesthetic. But I sat in the parking lot where a few days later the faithful would come to stand with signs and prayers of their own, and I debated what right I had to be there, what right to intrude. I was not family, and this was not an occasion for a casual call, no matter how I would later make it seem to the Bishop. Even the Gospel story has Jesus hear the suggestion that for Lazarus nothing more could be done. But still he caused the stone to be rolled away, and still I got out of the car and crossed the lot to the hospital. Miracles are worked, after all, and worked as much for those whose lives are affected as for the crowd of witnesses inevitably gathered to certify that something—something improbable, something that should not have been accomplished—has taken place in their sight.

And that was not quite how it happened. In the film, in the minds of those around me in the theater, a young man in a black and Roman collar, clean-cut and desperately hopeful, extends his hand toward the boy in the hospital bed. He raises his other hand to God and offers a prayer intimated in whispered voice-over. In the film—in fantasy—the child is angelically asleep, but Nick was awake when I arrived, and smiled as I said hello. He turned his head to show me the scar. His mother, watching from the corner, smiled palely, dark circles under her eyes. I placed my hand on his head impulsively and gently brushed the stitches with the side of my thumb. “Does it hurt?”

“Just a slight headache—just like they said.” His scalp is warm beneath my palm, and for a moment I am acutely conscious of how much I care for him—how I would lift him up and hold him if I could. But he is too old for that: He’s 17—another fact the believers in the parking lot and in the seats around me have gotten wrong; they see a winsome cherub, not the unshaven adolescent in a rumpled hospital bed, his body giving off the tang of unwashed flesh in the still heat of his room.

His mother sighs and smiles again, and is about to speak when I look down sharply. I had felt a crumbling sensation under my thumb, as if a thin crust of blood had dried along the edges of the incision and is now flaking away. But this is more: The stitches themselves break apart, spilling down the side of his head and trailing past his ear. I jerk my hand away, afraid I might have hurt him, horrified at the thought. “What’s that?” he asks, suddenly alert. His mother starts up and stares. She sees what I see: The bristles of the sutures are scattered on his neck and shoulder, below a wound that looks half-erased, a sketch of an injury left incomplete, with the skin whole and unbroken where it had once been sewn.

“What is it?” he asks, sitting up, and I place my hand back on his head and push him gently down, my thumb retracing the path it had swept along the bristling surface of the scar. His mother and I gape unthinking as the last of the ugly line crumbles and falls away, the stitches dropping across his cheek as his hand comes up to feel them. She gasps and takes an incredulous step back from the bed before looking wildly toward the hallway and lurching from the room, a hand across her mouth as a sob escapes her. I take my hand away: Only a slight red line remains of where the incision had been. “What?” he demands. But I can’t speak. His mother is shouting in the hallway. “Is it all right?” he asks. My stomach buckles, and I step back into the bathroom behind me. Doubled over, head swimming, I hear the nurses rush into the room where their patient now shows no evidence of their care. The miracle is complete.

But the film shows something different. The priest, alone with the boy in the bed, kneels and extends his hand in thrilled assurance toward the sleeping child, his prayer no less fervent for his confidence in what will happen next. His hand makes contact, squarely covering the dark line in the skin with his palm, and a sort of electric pulse passes between them as the light around the bed shifts subtly and music wells up. The camera stays on the tense and ministrative hand until the swell of sound peaks and it relaxes and pulls away: His scar is gone, the healthy flesh restored. The boy’s eyelids flutter as he wakes and turns his face upward, into the light. Around me in the darkness, a few of the faithful break into weak applause. A cell phone lights up in the rows below, creating a halo around its user’s head before it is snapped shut.

Of course there was no music. There was no glow or odor of sanctity in the room—if anything, the heat from the closed window and the crush of bodies brewed the sour reek of vomit and, before Nick was bundled onto a gurney and rushed from the room, the place had the usual human scent commingling about us, all sickness and confusion as the hurried nurses quelled raised voices, made a few hushed and urgent intercom calls and then, as his mother and I watched from the hallway, wheeled him away to certify the substance of things hoped for.

I leaned forward and placed both hands flat on the Bishop’s desk. “If I’ve been accused of something, I believe I have the right to—”
“There’s been no real complaint. None whatsoever.” He gathers up the papers one by one and taps their edges flush. “Not about you, at least. But the atmosphere among the students, the parents at the school—you understand?” It isn’t a question.

“I have a job, don’t I?”

“We’ll cover for you, there. The term is ending after the coming week. Certainly you can leave plans, a final exam. That can be taken care of?”

“Then where are you sending me? What’s going on?”

“Healing is what’s going on, that’s all: a time to recoup, to meditate on a fortunate event. At a distance.”

“Where?”

“Another parish school—you’ll have work to do, real work with new students. Just as you’ve done so well in the past. But a different setting. At least for the time being.”
I
n the diagnostics waiting room, his mother holds my hand and weeps, her face buried in a tissue she clutches to her nose. She rocks in her seat as the bay window before us shows her son’s body, shrouded in a blanket, his head at the center of the machine that rotates around him and maps the site of the surgery, the machine that will confirm my worst fears: There is no longer any scar—that much we know—and every trace of the surgery is also gone. The growth that had revealed itself to the same instruments the afternoon before is now missing from the readings, a dark knot in his brain has been untied without evidence, and only the clear, untroubled map of God’s creation is manifest on the screen before the frowning technicians.

That night, my picture appears on television, and I have to take the phone off its hook. After a dozen calls—from the formerly hopeless and the newly curious—I’d sat down for a moment, considering whether someone might not have heard the story, might not have seen the doctors interviewed, might not have heard the word miracle flaunted as if it were not a term of personal judgment—someone who, absorbed in their own sorrows, might be in genuine need. Then the phone begins to ring again, and I count 25 long pulls at the bell before it stops. I take the receiver from its cradle and wait for the dial tone to cut off.

Two days later he is home from the hospital, his discharge as much for his sake as to discourage the throng of well-wishers who have come to glean their share of the story. They have massed at the edge of the hospital grounds, clutching rosaries and placards attesting to their faith. They have prayed and stared up, unsure exactly which window lit the scene they replay in their minds: A man in a black and Roman collar, clean-cut and hopeful, places his hand on the head of a boy in the bed beside him. They have found out the back entrances, hidden themselves in closets and posed as patients or staff. The night before he is discharged, a police officer is posted at either end of the corridor, as if the boy had somehow become dangerous. One confused and resourceful young woman, finding his room, knelt beside him for a few moments as he slept, staring raptly at his face in the half-light before she is apprehended and escorted out of the building. That night she appears on the evening news, recounting her story: an incurable illness, vaguely described, which is already—she is sure of it—cured. First Nick’s picture, then mine, taken from a recent yearbook, is flashed on the screen behind the sound of her voice. “God is here with us,” she intones. “I could feel Him.”

A similar scene plays out at school: Students slow their steps as they pass my room, staring in bemusement. Sharp whispers before the bell each hour settle into rapt distraction. My students are uncomfortably quiet, both alert and distracted. No hands go up when I ask a question or prompt a response. Each hour is measured out and endless. Conversation falters over lunch. A fellow teacher in the room across the hall, an older woman who has never stopped mourning a child lost to leukemia a decade before, waylays me at the end of the day. “Is it true?” she asks, her eyes tense and despairing. Why could a miracle not have happened for her? she must wonder. Why Nick and not her child? When I visit him a day later I find a group on the street outside his house, and the word goes out as I climb the steps: The wonder-worker has arrived.

The visit is difficult. I sit stiffly in a chair opposite him; he is stretched out on the couch under an afghan. His stepfather, a tongue-tied, rough-edged man, frets between us, uneasy with a priest in the house, as if he fears he might give inadvertent offense less to me than to God Himself. Nick is dull and tired, still on the pain medications his doctors prescribe and irritable from all of the attention. Mine is not the only phone off the hook these days. “They get all excited if I look out a window,” he says, waving loosely at the street. And for my part I am ill at ease as well: What is there to say? News of the doctors’ reports, news that no verifiable cause can be found for the missing lesion—a spot incontrovertibly documented on celluloid—has been confirmed in the local papers, witnessed on the evening news. After a few minutes of polite conversation, I rise to leave, and as the door shuts behind me, I hunch my shoulders and look down, ducking into the car and driving off in the direction opposite the shouts from the corner.

On screen the story also ends abruptly, but before I would have called it done. After a scene of thanksgiving, after an embrace that clumsily includes the priest, the boy, his mother, and a doctor (once doubtful, now brought to the threshold of belief, we are somehow assured), the miracle worker throws his coat over his shoulder and boards an elevator. He descends to the lobby in silence, accompanied by medical staff and a girl in a wheelchair, and watches the girl ushered out by her parents through wide glass doors. Then he follows, the street gradually filling with light until he is no more than a thinning silhouette, a shadow in the white confusion of the day. The screen fades to white and music rises as credits roll upward. So it ends.

But nothing really ends, of course. Mornings I am greeted uncomfortably or—which is worse—too warmly, though the all-consuming topic is never broached, and soon I am alone in the teachers’ lounge, alone at the mailboxes in the office. Attendance declines in my classes as students stay away or their parents have them transferred, and I stop taking attendance. The woman across the hall hurries to class and shuts her door, refusing to meet my gaze. I am surprised in the school parking lot, interviewed and prodded, and stutteringly made to explain that I had no explicit desire for a cure, and no comment on the outcome—and I am asked why not? As if a miracle had to have been my intent; as if I must have meant somehow to consciously manipulate the mechanics of grace.

And soon we are all back in the news. His mother and stepfather have had an argument, and the watchers outside the house, alert to every noise and nuance of light and shadow on the drawn curtains, call the police. Their miracle, they imagine, is in danger. On the evening broadcast Nick and his mother are shown being escorted from the house, their eyes averted, his mother holding a handkerchief to her face. The next day school is alive with rumors, and I learn that they have taken refuge in a local motel. I have no doubt about what has happened: A marriage already sinking has been asked to carry the weight of an act I did not ask to perform, of the blessings we’ve all received unbidden. How much grace, I wonder, should anyone have to bear? The credits over, the screen ahead fades slowly to black, and I get up, zipping my jacket up to my chin, hunching my shoulders and looking down as I find the exit.

A few days later Nick stops by school, returning a disc I had loaned him. His face looks puffy and flushed against the collar of his white shirt, but he tells me only good news: The brain scans still show nothing, his doctor has taken him off his medication, and his handwriting is improving. “Here,” he says, handing me a small envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Just a card,” he says, and shrugs. “It took me an hour and a half to write.”

I turn it over, rub my thumb across my name on the envelope as I did when I brushed the stitches away. But my name, in his odd, attenuated handwriting, remains.

“I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t mean to—”

He bristles: This is not the scene he’d decided on. “That’s all right. That’s private. Never mind.” Private? Of course. In the end, I’m his teacher. “Look, I’m going to spend the summer with my dad. I’ll see you when I’m back.” That’s a lie, and we both know it, but we say goodbye, and I watch him walk down the hallway, his white shirt catching the glare of the sunlight through the windows above the rows of lockers, before he turns and disappears down the stairs.

The Bishop looks up from the file. “Maybe in the fall all of this will have blown over. Then we can talk again.”

“I asked for none of this,” I say pleadingly. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Of course not. Miracle cures! Not every unknown is the agency of the divine.” He turns in his chair, looks out the window behind him. Trees are coming into leaf on the grounds below. “But something did occur—a miracle, if we read the papers. And a miracle is upsetting—by its nature, upsetting—and that upset requires an opportunity to heal.”

Outside the theater I am blinded in the midday light and stumble into a boy who’s placed himself squarely in the path of the exiting audience. His head is shaved and he wears a starched white shirt, and for a moment my heart stops before my vision clears, and he pushes a pamphlet into my hands. “Do you believe in Jesus?” he asks me.

I squint back at him. “What?”

“Do you believe in Jesus?” he asks again. He smiles, and the effect is to wipe Nick more firmly from my mind, brush his face away and replace it with this new one in just the way I once erased a scar from an inch of incised flesh. No music, no holy, hopeful glow, only the murmurs of the crowd that parts around us and fans out into the parking lot and the hard light of a summer afternoon, the light that must have made Lazarus blink back sharp tears as he awakened and, pulling the shroud away, stared uncomprehending at the crowd coming into focus before him.

I hand the pamphlet back. I know everything it could possibly say, and what it doesn’t say as well. “Of course,” I tell him as I shoulder past and find my car, relieved again to be unrecognized.

Who was the apostle Jesus loved? It wasn’t John. It was Lazarus, whom he sent ahead into death only to call him back again; Lazarus who made the journey first. And what did that love provide? A lifetime of doubt and discomfort. That is the miracle.

For more information on The Lorian Hemingway Competition go to www.shortstorycompetition.com

“Lazarus”: The Expanded Version The Saturday Evening Post

Post readers may not know that Doyle published several times in our magazine. Three of his short stories — none, alas, featuring Holmes — appeared in the late 1920s.

Without further ado, we present “The End of Devil Hawker,” a Regency-era adventure that include a cameo appearance by Lord Byron. It appeared in the Post on August 23, 1930.

The End of Devil Hawker
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
August 23, 1930

(1859-1930) The creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote a variety of short stories, historical novels, non-fiction, and more. A physician, like Holmes’ companion Dr. Watson, Doyle only began because he had trouble establishing a lucrative medical practice. His creation of Holmes made him a global celebrity. In later years, he came to resent the detective he created, but realized that Holmes would always be a good financial provider for him.
Doyle was an athlete who excelled in soccer, cricket, and golf. In addition to his contributions to literature, Holmes was a humanitarian who championed the cause of George Edalji.

Edalji, a man with British and Indian parents was accused of blackmail and animal mutilations. Doyle’s non-fictitious detective work proved Edalji’s innocence and was a factor in the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in England.

Doyle’s three stories in the Post are “The Death Voyage,” “The End of Devil Hawker,” and “Maracot Deep.”

Read The End of Devil Hawker, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. August 23, 1930. [PDF]

The End of Devil Hawker The Saturday Evening Post

Read the original story, published in October, 1915 [PDF].

Commutation: $9.17
by Sinclair Lewis
October 30, 1915

Commutation: $9.17 The Saturday Evening Post

“Writing a book, grandpa?” she asked from the backseat.

“Why?” I said, eyeballing her in the mirror. She was smiling at her friend. “What’s it to you?

“A subplot is not just another plot, you know,” she said.

“I know that,” I said.

“It’s an echo of the main plot,” she said.

Roslyn is 14 years old. She’s read all of Poe already.

“Hemingway said it,” she said.

“Really, Ros?” I said. “You’re reading Hemingway?”

Hemingway was someone I had wrestled with. Hemingway was something I knew about.

“We found it in the stuff at his house,” said Olivia, who is 15.

“I like the story where they cut each others’ hair off,” said Ros. “Shorter and shorter. Really short.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Really interesting,” murmured Olivia.

That’s when we found out what was really going on.

She was ours now, Roslyn, daughter of Nell and our son. She came into our lives at the age of nine, reluctantly on her part. Could we ever do enough for her? A child of the wilderness, she arrived in Key West “learning to love alone,” she once told me.

The story's author, Mark Howell, won honorable mention in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.Photo courtesy Mark Howell.

Wanting to save her from herself, I tried to give her everything. She’d have none of it. Her grandmother tried a bit of the opposite with no more success. It was not dire things that happened so much as disobedience awesome enough to leave us breathless.

How many days had she skipped school? Especially days when I myself had dropped her off and picked her up.

My theory, shared by Olivia, was that Ros’s face looked the same on both sides. A rare thing shared by movie actors and models, a symmetrical face is immediately attractive to babies, to teachers, and to sheriff’s deputies. Ros had won face-offs with all three.

The cell phone we bought for her, to keep us in touch, had cut her off from us completely, linking her with a circle we had no part of. The only way we kept in touch was through transportation. A bike or a bus would never get her from New Town across to the other side of the island—to the heart of the heart of Old Town—in anywhere near the time she needed to get there. So we gave her a ride.

I was never quite sure where she actually went. “We have a back way in,” was what she told us. I only knew that it was at the far, purple end of Mullet Lane, where I dropped her off just about every weekday.

“Bye,” I’d say each time, and each time she’d bounce out of the back seat, slam the door and canter off down the lane, cell phone in ear, directly to whatever mystery awaited her at the end of the lane.

I was conflicted about the gateway and she knew it. Olivia was one thing, but who else hung out beyond it? She said his name was Carlos, a boy in high school. His mother owned a cottage there, or someone in her family did, and Carlos and his gang had built tiki huts in “a garden beyond the garden,” according to Ros.

I mean gang in the friendliest way. It was good these kids were still in town. Ros had only one real friendship, with Olivia—and that could be turbulent—but in fact she knew a load of kids. In common with each other, they were all, unsteadily, losing their orbit around school.

One time when her class-cutting got really out of hand, I went in search of Ros, following clues given me by Olivia who had never cut a class in her life. Her penciled sketch got me to Big Pine Key, north of Key West, 30 miles of bridges and islands and then left at a crossroads and at last, in the back country, an overgrown grove of campers and trailers.

At the fence I’d called Roslyn’s name. From a variety of windows popped the heads of several girls. Then came the heads of the boys, older and with longer hair. I had blundered onto Pinocchio Land. Here was where the runaways came, where they paid the rent with whatever it was they could lift from their parents’ houses and pawn for cash.

To our knowledge Ros never revisited Pinocchio Land once her path slid across Carlos, whose mixed group of former Goths and travelers at the end of the lane were managing, somehow, mostly, to stay in school. Ros and Olivia, I guessed, were the youngest of them.

Until that evening when I picked them both up in the car and Ros came up with her nugget on subplots, I had no idea she’d scored a bulls-eye in our family’s literary history.

Hemingway and me, we go way back, to school afternoons as a young idiot reading my own life revealed in his writing; later still to the oceanic work not published for years, providing pleasure purely in writing, in pure writing, in writing “beyond the bones of the others.”

Truth, as a consequence, pierced deep.

“You’ve been hanging out at his house all this time?” I asked her in the car.

“We swim in his pool after hours,” said Olivia. They squealed.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Are you making this up?”

Ros described the pool; Olivia told of its temperature. They recited the story of Ernest being pissed off with Pauline about the thing.

“You told me about these people,” said Ros. “Are you conflicted about this, grandpa?”

“Oh, I cannot begin to tell you,” I said. “I am lost for words. We must talk.”

“Turn the car round,” she commanded. “We’re going back in.”

“Yes!” said Olivia.

So I turned the car around. We arrived back at the lane and my heart began to beat with a serenity that my mind felt when I first opened a book by him.

The girls instructed me to park at the end of the lane. Twilight had come fast. Within a minute, in a tropical switch from one world to another, the streetlights were brighter than the daylight.

We snuck out of the car and the two of them crept away to the right, away from the gateway that had caused me so much conflict.

How we entered the grounds is a secret that I swore to Ros I would never reveal, and her secret is safe with me. But we did get in, to the empty house and the garden at night, as different from the open house and the public garden of daytime as moon from sun.

The girls ran barefoot across the lawn. They led me by unknowable means inside the writing lodge and to a bloated trunk stamped E.H. on its hide. They took me to his collection of Western novels and a shelf of his own books in strange languages (“Far Vail Till Vap Neu”). They took me to his master bedroom, the big bed and its carved headboard illuminated by the tall windows. On the pale bedspread sprawled a great white cat. A snoozing black cat lay wedged between the mattress and a corner post.
They played with the cats like the bed was their own, and for the moment it was. Ros was at peace in this place. She seemed at home.

“What have you learned here?” I asked, then conflicted the question. “Have you learned anything?”

They looked at each other, unwrapped their limbs from the cats and loped off to another room on the northwest corner.

Somehow a book had already been liberated by the time I got there, from out of a glassed-in bookcase. They were sitting on the floor with it. “This one’s the best,” said Olivia.

I noticed it wasn’t one of Hemingway’s own copies. It was published years after he killed himself. A bright red book covered in plastic. Olivia pointed the spine at me.
“The Garden of Eden,” it said.

“It’s crazy,” said Ros. “He’s a famous writer—” she looked at me with scorn  “—and his wife wants him to have sex with another woman on their honeymoon.”

“Wait,” said Olivia, “that’s not it. They swim in the cove together, they eat all these meals. It’s about everything.”

“Yes,” said Ros.

“She wants him to cut his hair like hers,” said Olivia. “And bleach it the same color.”

“Shorter and shorter,” said Ros.

“So he doesn’t know who he is,” said Olivia.

“Then,” blurted Ros, “she burns all his writing,”

“That is too bad!” I said. A grievous shock. I almost shouted. “He deserved that?”

“He was two-minded, Grandpa. It’s a sin.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Look at how he handled his wives,” she said. “It wasn’t so good.”

“You think I’m two-minded?” I said. I was still on my knees.

“You want to talk,” she said, “and then you say you’re lost for words.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It’s difficult, Grandpa. It’s hard when you’re like that.”

Olivia slammed the book shut. “The cats!” she yelled.

Both of them were up and gone before I was on my feet. I trailed their chattering down the stairs and into the blacks and the blues of the garden. We regrouped in a far corner of the grounds, around a lignum vitae tree. It was wizened and wise though probably still young. “I love this tree,” I said.

“Of course,” said Ros.

“Cats!” yelped Olivia once more and all kinds of them began arriving, silent creatures pretending neglect and neediness but their smarts gave them away. They were interested in us—or not, as the case may be—yet they harbored no pretense in their minds. We messed about with the cats for quite a while, stunned to be in a cave of bushes with them, amid the broken flowerpots and piles of dirt.

“Do you want to go see the basement?” Ros asked me.

“Nah,” I said. “Too deep.”

The three of us quit the grounds then, in the secret way, and reentered the world.

Weeks after that sacred night, Roslyn marched in through the front door. Instead of retreating to her room, she came straight for me and she hugged me.

I realized she was leaving us.

“I love you, Grandpa,” she said. “Say thanks to Grandma. I love her.”

I leaned back. “You’re going to your father’s?”

“I bought the ticket,” she said.

I hugged her again. “I want you to be a movie star,” I said. “I’m quite single-minded about it.”

“Why am I crying, Grandpa?”

Kids don’t understand why they cry, they don’t know their emotions. I’d have to give this my truest shot.

“We cry for what we can’t be,” I said. “But you don’t need to cry. You can be Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland…”

“Some role models,” she said, her perfect face creased and wet. She sobbed again. “I’m crying because I’m happy, Grandpa.”

And with that she left us.

Not Just Another Plot The Saturday Evening Post

“Henry, it’s time to go.”

The little boy turned slowly, as though the cold had frozen his joints. He walked stiffly to the car, and she helped him climb in. She leaned over, checking his face for any signs of frostbite. None. That was good. She pulled him into the blanket with her, his cold piercing her warmth. She hugged him to her, willing her body to warm his.

Her lips moved in a silent supplication as she turned her attention to the car. She pulled the choke out and reached forward to turn the key. She was muttering as she reached for the starter pedal above the gas pedal. Awaken hulking beast. I have performed the rituals prescribed by mechanical law. Awaken!

Her foot pressed the starter. No growl. No whimper of protest. Nothing.

Naomi turned another page in this rite. Their house was on a hill, the lane stretching down to the main road. She had parked the car, as she always did, facing down that hill and in second gear with the emergency brake locked. It was a long hill. If the lane wasn’t too icy, and if the rear tires found purchase and spun the engine, and if the oil wasn’t too cold, and if she eased the choke in at just the right time, and if she didn’t have to stop before pulling on the road running past their home …

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

If all those things happened, they would be on their way to Billings.

She loosened the brake and stepped on the clutch.

Nothing. The cold had locked the car in place, the wheels too stiff to roll.

She rocked back-and-forth in the seat, willing the cold to free her car. Henry rocked, too, although he didn’t know why. The car groaned with the thought of moving.

The cold had turned its oil to glue. She asked too much. But Mother Earth put her shoulder behind the car, and it rolled ahead, shuddering with the cold.

When the car was going fast enough — please God, make it fast enough — Naomi eased the clutch out. The back of the car slewed first one way and then the other. The engine growled, unwilling to suck cold air, but it couldn’t resist Mother Earth. The engine sputtered and caught, the car leaping ahead, and then it died, gravel clattering against the frame.

Naomi depressed the clutch, willing the car to roll again, to roll fast enough to start. Gravity won. The engine caught, and Naomi eased the choke forward, backing off whenever the engine coughed.

No cars were coming, so she swung on the road. They were moving fast enough to keep the car running in second gear. When the moving gears had warmed the oil, she would try shifting into high, but for now, she would drive in second.

She eased one hand under her blanket, willing it to lose the sting of an icy steering wheel. She drove that way, warming one hand and then the other.

The car’s heater was working, the fan scratching its protest. Eventually, the heater would take the sting from the air, perhaps keeping the windshield free of frost. Naomi reached forward, scratching at the windshield with her fingernails, long strips of frost curling off the window. There, the car was running as well as it could, and she could see out the window. Naomi and Henry Wolf Song were on their way to Billings.

Naomi eased back in the seat, sensing for the first time the knotted muscles in her stomach.

“Why does the cold bite?” Henry whispered.

Naomi smiled. “Do you remember last summer when we were in town, and I bought you a root beer, and it was so cold, and it tasted so good?”

Henry nodded.

“I think the winter wind wants to taste us because we’re warm, to see if we taste as good as a cold root beer on a hot day.”

“How does it bite if it doesn’t have any teeth?”

“Your grandmother doesn’t have any teeth, but she bites, doesn’t she?”

“But I can see my grandmother, and I can’t see the wind.”

Naomi put her hand over her mouth in mock despair. “Oh the shame of it, I have a son who cannot see the wind. How will I ever hold up my head again?”

Henry giggled. “So how can you see the wind?”

“It depends how the wind dresses. Sometimes in the summer, it dresses in the dust it takes from the road. You can see the wind then, can’t you?”

Henry nodded.

“And in the fall when it wears the leaves from the trees?”

Henry nodded again.

“And in the winter when it wears the snowflakes?”

“Yes.”

“So you can see the wind whenever it’s dressed, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t see it when it’s undressed, can you?”

“No.”

“But you can’t see your grandma when she isn’t dressed, either, can you?”

Henry giggled. “No.”

“So maybe the wind is like your grandmother.”

Henry laughed. “Sometimes my grandma yells like the wind.”

Naomi laughed, and that is how they went to Billings that cold day in December.

The two-lane highway from the reservation was snow-packed most of the way, and Naomi’s hands were aching with the strain of correcting each tiny slip before it sent them spinning into the ditch. As they reached the Billings city limits, she took first one hand from the wheel and then the other, shaking the ache away.

There, a parking spot. The car slid into the spot, Naomi jerking the wheel to evade the cars parked on either side. Naomi’s hands were shaking as she reached down to pull the key from the ignition.

“How would you like a bottle of root beer, Henry?”

He looked up at her, eyes shining. “Could I have some hot chocolate?”

Naomi walked stiff-legged from the department store. The clerk had followed her every step. He knew she was a thief because she was Indian. All Indians are thieves. He didn’t want Henry to try on the coat, because all Indians are dirty, lice-ridden.

She didn’t want Henry to know that to be Native American is to be hated. He would come to know that, but she wanted him to have a childhood first. She wanted him to know what it is to be loved before he learned what it is to be hated. So she told him they were given paper throwaway cups in the Five and Ten because they were special.

Henry looked up. “Mr. Wind isn’t wearing any clothes today,” he said.

Naomi smiled. “No, he isn’t, but he’s certainly having a good time, isn’t he?”

A question crossed Henry’s face.

“He’s running past us on the way to a party.”

Henry grinned. “He will eat icicles at his party.”

“And snow.”

Henry giggled. “He will be so fat he won’t be able to run.”

Naomi smiled, “And snow eater will come and eat all his snow.”

“Who’s snow eater?”

“Snow eater lives in the Southwest where it is hot all the time. Sometimes he sneaks into Montana and steals the snow from the north wind.”

Henry laughed. “I wish snow eater would come today.”

Naomi smiled. “Maybe he will.”

The car sulked against the curb, apparently piqued at being left alone amidst a crowd of newer, nicer cars.

Naomi opened the door for Henry and slipped her package on the backseat. She whispered incantations to herself as she walked around to the driver’s side. Please start. Please start. Please start. Start and I’ll ask my brother to change your oil when it warms up.

She opened her blanket as she climbed into the car, inviting Henry to snuggle to her for warmth.

The key resisted going into the ignition. Too cold. Too cold. You ask too much.

Naomi reached down and pulled the choke. Key on. Choke out. Her foot reached tentatively for the starter.

Please start. We have no money. There is no place for us to stay. Please start. Please.

Naomi pressed the starter. … Nothing. No squeaks. No groans. No clicks. Nothing. She leaned over, pressing her forehead against a steering wheel that burned as though it were red hot and not icy cold. She took a deep breath and tried to put her thoughts in order. A service station squatted across the street. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon. No money, no service. Money stations. That’s what they were, money stations.

Maybe a passerby would give her car a push, as the hill outside her home had done that morning. Maybe the car would cough and snort and then growl its rancor at being called to run on so cold a day, but carry them grudgingly to their home on the reservation.

But who would stop on the street to answer a blanket Indian’s appeal for help? Naomi’s eyes roamed the street. They stopped at the service station. She might go there. Maybe he would give them a push just so he wouldn’t have to look at them. Maybe he would give them a push so his other customers wouldn’t think that he served Indians in his service station.

Naomi put her hand to her mouth. Asking for help involved great risk. The man in the service station might call the police. An Indian woman was begging on the street.

Didn’t the city of Billings have vagrancy laws so good people didn’t have to put up with that? That’s what he might say to the police if Naomi asked for help.

Henry might spend his first night in jail, then. He might learn what danger lurks in venturing into Billings on a cold winter night. Naomi pulled Henry to her. He looked up at her, the question plain on his face. Always there were questions on Henry’s face, but not questions yet about the risk of coming to Billings.

Naomi sighed. She had no food to give her son and no place to stay. They couldn’t sleep in the car. The cold would come in the night as they clung to each other. It would shake them to get their attention, and then they would stop shaking and wait for death. Henry was too little to fight the cold. He would go first. She would keen, then, mourning the loss of her son’s life. They would see the pain on her face when they found her.

Naomi nodded. Jail was not so bad. She climbed from the car, reaching inside to wrap Henry in her blanket. She stood, coughing as the icy air burned her lungs.

“Stay here, Henry. I’ll be right back. Lock the doors, and don’t let anyone in until I get back.”

Naomi paused, looking both ways before stepping into the street. The street was snow-packed and slick. Cars wouldn’t be able to stop if they wanted to — if they wanted to. She drove that thought from her mind, just as she tried to ward off the cold’s embrace. She thought of summer days along the creek with Henry, feeling the kiss of the sun on her skin as Henry tried to coax a brook trout to his baited hook. The image almost drove the day away, almost caused her to step in front of a passing car.

She shuddered. She had to pay attention or Henry would lose his mother just as he had lost his father. Now. Naomi stepped into the street, walking flatfooted, willing her shoes to grip the street so she would not fall.

She tried to read the man’s face as she approached the station. He stood behind the counter, watching her as she walked up to the door. He was dressed in full-length, grease-stained coveralls. Grease marked his face, too, as though he were painted for war, as though he would call the police about this vagrant come calling.
The brass door handle stung her hand. The station was warmer, but not by much. Naomi wished the room were colder so she could hide behind her breath. She looked into the man’s blue eyes, seeking compassion and finding none. Still, she had to try.

“My car won’t start. I have a little boy.”

The man stared at her, and her hopes crashed. Words tumbled from her mouth. “I have no money. I have no money to make the car run. I have no money for a place for Henry or me to stay. We have nothing to eat.”

The man nodded, leaning over to take a jacket from a coat tree beside the counter.

“You drive. I push. Okay?”

Naomi nodded.

He stopped to open the garage’s bay door, and the two of them walked across the street. He opened the car door for her and held it as he gave her instructions.

“Put the car in neutral. Okay?”

Naomi nodded.

“When I push you away from the curb, you turn that way. Okay?” he said, gesturing to the left with his head.

“We do this quick. Okay?”

“Yes, quick.”

He shut the door and walked to the front of the car. The sidewalk had been swept free of snow. His feet would find purchase to start the car backward. That would give him time to brace his feet on the curb. With his feet locked, he would shove the car into the street. He would have to put all this strength into that shove or the car could roll back and crush his legs.

He looked through the window at Naomi. She nodded. The car was in neutral. He leaned forward, bracing himself against the bumper. He didn’t think the radiator would
tolerate the pressure he would have to put against it.

He took a deep breath and shoved, muscles knotting in his legs and back and arms. The car was stiff with the cold. It didn’t want to move. A growl built in his throat, and he shoved until he thought his muscles would tear loose from his bones. The car groaned away from its resting place, picking up a little momentum as it moved away from the curb.

The attendant leaped ahead, bracing his feet against the curb and his shoulder against the bumper. He was lying almost parallel to the ground as he shoved with all the strength of his legs and back. Tendons glowed from the muscles in his neck, and the car yielded, picking up speed as it lurched into the street. He chased the car; feet scrabbling to push it farther up the street. Then he stood, hands on knees, sucking great drafts of icy air into his lungs.

“Brakes.”

The car stopped, and he walked to the driver’s window. Naomi rolled it down halfway.

“Now, I push forward and you drive car into garage. Okay?”

Naomi said, “I have no money.”

“Into garage. Okay?”

She nodded.

The street inclined slightly, and when she released the brake, the car rolled reluctantly forward. He chased it, shoving whenever his feet found purchase. Naomi turned the car into the station, and he used the car’s momentum and his own strength to push it into the garage bay.

He appeared again in the window.

“Chairs in office. I turned up the heat. You would sit there, please.”

Naomi climbed out, Henry following. Two chairs perched near a gas wall furnace, laboring now to warm the office. The two huddled in the circle of warmth around the stove.

The attendant picked up the telephone in the office, speaking in a lilting language Naomi hadn’t heard before. A disagreement. She could understand that from the tone of his speech if not the words. “Det er Jul, Inga,” he said as though the words settled the debate and hung up the telephone.

“You wait here,” he said nodding at Naomi and stepping into the garage bay.

Henry stepped to the glassed door and peered into the garage. He glanced back at his mother. She was lost in thought. He slipped through the door and along the wall toward the man.

The man was focused on the engine. Still, he heard

Henry coming.

“You climb up on bumper. You see what I am doing.

This is battery,” the man said. “I am checking battery.

You never do this. It has acid in it. It will burn holes in you. Maybe make you blind. You do not do this unless a grownup is there. Okay?”

Henry nodded.

“Good.”

Henry watched the man draw liquid from the battery.

“That’s what I thought. Your battery is no good.”

The door opened between the office and the garage bay. A woman stepped through.

“Good. You are here,” he said.

He looked at Henry. “What is your name?”

“Henry.”

“Good. Henry, you come with me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

The trio stepped into the office to answer the question on Naomi’s face.

“The battery is no good,” Henry said, eager to share his mechanical expertise.

Naomi’s face fell. “I have no money.”

“Ya, well I would like you to meet my wife, Inga. She brought sandwiches for you. We have some pop in the machine, and some coffee. Okay?”

“I have no money.”

“Ya, well you eat, now.”

“Henry, when you finish eating you come help me. Okay?”

Henry beamed, mouth full of the venison sandwich Inga had given him.

Inga’s eyes blurred. “God Jul,” she whispered, stepping into the cold.

Henry emerged from the garage 45 minutes later.

“The oil was old and black, so we gave the car some new, thinner oil. …” Henry looked at the mechanic for confirmation. He nodded.

“And we tuned it.”

Again the look and the nod.

“And we put in some more antifreeze.”

“That Henry, he is smart,” the attendant said. “He helped me a lot.”

Henry beamed.

“I think he needs to be paid. A workman is worthy of his hire.”

Naomi shook her head, but the attendant reached under the counter and pulled out a pocketknife. “See, Henry, this is the way it works. You always carve away from your hands. You have to be very careful. Okay?”

Henry nodded, wonder marking his face.

Naomi reached for the knife.

The man shook his head, giving the knife to Henry. “When he can open it, then he will be ready to use it. Okay?”

Naomi nodded.

“The car, it runs fine now. Okay? You have gas?”

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Henry said, and the attendant smiled.

“God Jul,” he said.

Henry turned to Naomi as she drove away from the station. “What did he say?”

The road disappeared behind the tears in Naomi’s eyes. She blinked until they cleared.

“I think he was saying merry Christmas. It is a merry Christmas, isn’t it Henry?”

Henry’s thoughts turned to the Tonka truck in the store and the bridge he might have built across the spring if he had that truck, but then he smiled. “We had sandwiches, and I learned to be a mechanic, and now I have a knife, and Uncle Lester can show me how to carve willow whistles this spring when the snow eater comes and takes all the snow.

“I think this is a wonderful Christmas. Okay?”

“I think so, too. Okay.”

Henry giggled, “Okay.”

“Okay.”

Henry’s expression grew serious.

“Did he help us because we are special?”

“No,” Naomi said. “He helped us because he is special.”

“So we are all special?”

Naomi nodded, smiling, and that is how they drove back to the reservation.

Henry’s Christmas The Saturday Evening Post

Roscoe Hammond was moving his big, two-story house. I was there the night the truckers came with their big wheels and listened as Roscoe phoned three dozen pals.

“Arnie,” Roscoe cried, “what are you doing at midnight? We’re trucking the damned house two miles uphill. Going to paint it all kinds of Hindu Bombay colors. You ever see those juggernaut films? The big icons? They roll through the streets, all different colors, and the wheels, Jesus, 5 feet round, like circular rainbows, with legs and feet and big mascara eyes.

“So what we got here is a juggernaut house moving-housewarming. But hey, Arnie, you still play trombone? Can you call the guys? I need a trumpet, a drummer, piccolos, an oboe, hell, an accordion. We’ll fill all the rooms with liquor and pals, playing Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. We’ll gas the big bungalow and make it jump. OK, Arnie? Yeah!”

Roscoe hung up, all smiles.

Arnie showed up first, playing that brass, making us yell, “Dorsey, not dead!”

By 11:15 p.m., we had enough brass for a quintet, but we waited for Artie Shaw’s Johnny Beckett and his clarinet, thinking “Frenesi” might be the fire to run our juggernaut.

“Hell, no,” cried Arnie. “We need something wild. It’s gotta be “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” The truck drivers, all baby boomers, heard us start shouting “Chattanooga” and tromped on the gas.

The juggernaut wheels creaked and groaned. Its arms and legs spun; the big, dark, mascara eyes glared; and we were off.

Just then, the ladies began to appear in twos and threes, dropped off by rambling cars.

There were great shouts of hilarity mixed with brass, as the girls climbed aboard, carrying lit candles, like lunatic nuns.

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

I jumped off the juggernaut and photographed the big house moving by, like a big birthday cake, candles lit in every window.

So now we were playing and drinking and squeezing the ladies and shouting with laughter as the big, brightly colored Indian wheels of the juggernaut rolled with its arms and legs and big staring eyes. It shrugged, like an elephant in heat, with a beautiful burden of people who got louder and louder as we wheeled toward the sky.

By 11:20 p.m., Arnie moaned, “Hell, I know what’s wrong. We need real gas!”

He shouted out the window at the nearest liquor store, “Beer!” and “Vodka!” and then “Jack Daniels!” and the drinks came running.

At the same time, more musicians piled on, including Biggs Bromwell and his drums.

We were rumbling through ramshackle neighborhoods, and people came, yelling, to the curb.

“Blues in the Night.” “Love Me or Leave Me.” “Stormy Weather.” “Am I Blue?”

And then, from each room, a different player picked up a tune like “Moonlight Serenade” and flung it on to the next room for variations, and the whole house was shivering and roaring and shaking.

Things got more wild, more frantic, because even more cars were zooming up and dropping guys with their ukuleles or kazoos.

By 1 o’clock in the morning, we were taking on strangers from every jazz joint in town, and people, we heard, were on their way from San Clemente and were calling ahead to reserve a room on the juggernaut and provide a portable piano.

By 1:30 the house was so crammed with wild singers and players that we began to worry about the drag. When you’ve got 60 people in a house, that’s close to 10,000 pounds. Add five or 10 more and the whole thing begins to sink.

I climbed and sat with Arnie on the roof because there were too many elbows with the crowd down below.

So Arnie was up there, swinging his trombone, and I was there with my flute, and we were waking neighbors all along the way. You could see the lights going on in the houses on both sides as we rumbled past, and people stared out at this great big Indian elephant rolling by long after midnight.

At a little after 2 o’clock, Arnie got a worried look. “My God, we gotta be careful. If we overload this beast, we might just break free and head back downhill.”

Which is exactly what happened.

Molly, a lady friend of Arnie’s, arrived around 2:30. She was a really big lady, 250 pounds on the hoof.

Arnie cried, “Wait! How much you weigh?”

She shrieked, “That’s like asking a woman her age!”

She jumped and landed and that did it. When her body hit, our Indian elephant shivered and froze.

All the wheels creaked, the legs stopped running, the mascara eyes stopped staring, and the whole house, for a terrible instant, stood horribly still, as if it had suffered a heart attack.

Everyone sucked their breath, and we waited to see what might happen next.

Then, by God, a screeching of those big, giant, painted, multilegged, mascara-eyed wheels. The connection to the trucks came loose, and the juggernaut, in the middle of our housewarming, started to wheel back downhill.

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

Nobody knew what to play. There must have been a lot of talk, a lot of shrieking and gibbering, and then a genius thought, why not play Khachaturian’s “Gayne,” which was a storm inside of a hurricane inside of a cyclone. The faster the house ran, the louder the music of Khachaturian.

People leapt out of their houses, trying to run and latch onto our elephant thundering by. We thought they were trying to stop us, but no, they just wanted on for the lunatic ride.

So, with screaming and yelling, we sailed back through the middle of the night streets, past all the dark houses, waking people along the way, playing Khachaturian even louder, all the way to the sea, and out along the pier, and then to the end of the pier and off, and into the night tide.

Our juggernaut wheels spun off, all arms, legs, and eyes, and “Gayne” stopped dead. From all the rooms we heard seaside music, or ocean liner music, as the juggernaut became a houseboat with all its candles flaming, every room bright as we sailed out into the bay, and strangers on the wharf waved their handkerchiefs and sang “Farewell to Thee.” Up on the roof, I stared back because I had heard something very faint and beautiful. A rowboat was following us, with the promise of dawn ahead.

Straddled in the rowboat was Eddie Roark, stutter-plucking his big harvest moon banjo. His wife rowed as he picked and plucked “I Get the Blues When It Rains.”

“Oh, no,” I bleated. “The blues I can’t lose when it rains.”

By the time the rowboat caught up with us, I was crying.

I thought I would never stop.

Reprinted with permission by Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 2009 by Ray Bradbury

Juggernaut The Saturday Evening Post

Item by item he studied income and outgo, figures and totals, enjoying his task and the sense of accomplishment in a life now more and more isolated and without change.

Dangerous Giftby Harry KlingsbergAugust 8, 1959

He began to feel a chill; rising and moving about a bit creakily, he crossed the room and built up the fire again. A rejuvenation, the old man mused as he stood watching, hardly possible with himself. His reflective mood lengthened. Why, he wondered these days, had he lived so long? Was there, perhaps, something else in the world for him to do? Some unfinished business to attend to? Idle speculation, he decided, with an impatient shrug, and returned to the papers on his desk.

“For dessert,” Martha Doowinkle said, “we’ll have a cherry cobbler.”

“Sounds special,” John Doowinkle said. An assistant district attorney, he was a slight man, wearing glasses and, from the cut of his jaw, rather stubborn by trait.

“But we’ll have it later,” Martha said. “Paul and Sue Leland are coming over.”

“Paul and Sue – Oh. The newlyweds you matched up at the shore last summer.”

“All I did was to have two nice young people meet,” Martha retorted coldly. “Anyway, they’re back from their honeymoon…”

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Dangerous Gift The Saturday Evening Post

"A Most Beautiful Model"
by Michael Forrestier
July 25, 1959

This week Tim’s dream of bliss was to mix all those rainbow colors together and make a painting of a rocket ship in flight. There was a cup of just the right vivid red to do the streaks of fire, to show the rocket jets roaring out into space.

Only one thing stood between Tim’s dream and its fulfillment: a ticket on the box that said $1. Tim didn’t have one dollar. And he must never, never ask for money.

At the top of the old converted house, Tim rapped gently on the door of 4B. He went in and held the knob to keep the door from slamming. Tim couldn’t see much of him because most of Mr. Burford was behind the large…

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A Most Beautiful Model The Saturday Evening Post