Annie Proulx - Postcards

ANNIE PROULX

Postcards

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in paperback in 1994 by Fourth Estate and by

Harper Perennial in 2006, reprinted 7 times.

First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1992

Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9781841155012

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007385553

Version: 2018-05-23

‘Annie Proulx has come close to writing “The Great American Novel”’

New York Times

‘Postcards feels like a fifth or sixth novel, not a first. Language that sizzles like meat in a pan … A wonderful writer and an astonishingly accomplished novel’

Chicago Tribune

‘Her first novel fulfils the promise of her short stories … hugely ambitious … The natural description is superb. The dialogue has a raspy bony twang to it. She pushes language to breaking point … a gifted prose stylist who renders her characters on the page to mesmerizing effect’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘The author’s literary ancestors range from Edith Wharton to Nathaniel West. But Proulx sees the grand side too … She sees every part of the national configuration and wraps every character here in a crazy-quilt of literary affection’

Los Angeles Times

‘Postcards triumphantly delivers. You could use the word “great” about Postcards without embarassing yourself’

Boston Globe

‘Rich, boisterous, remarkable … Annie Proulx draws characters who matter’

Washington Times

For Roberta

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Postcards

Preface

I

1 Blood

2 Mink’s Revenge

3 Down the Road

4 What I See

5 A Short, Sharp Shock

6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch

7 When Your Hand Is Cut Off

8 The Bat in the Wet Grass

9 What I See

10 The Lost Baby

11 Tickweed

12 Billy

13 What I See

II

14 Down in the Mary Mugg

15 The Indian’s Book

16 The Bigger They Are the Higher They Burn

17 The Weeping Water Farm Insurance Office

18 What I See

19 The Lonely Hearts Prisoner

20 The Bottle-Shaped Tombstone

21 The Drive

22 The Dermatologist in the Wild Wood

23 Ott’s Lots

24 The Indian’s Book Again

III

25 Garden of Eden

26 Bullet Wulff

27 Crazy Eyes

28 The Kernel of life

29 Dazed and Confused

30 The Troubles of Celestial Bodies

31 Toot Nipple

32 Pala

33 Obregón’s Arm

34 Tumbleweed

35 What I See

36 Shotguns

37 The Indian’s Book

38 Looks Like Rain

39 The Logging Road

IV

40 The Gallbladders of Black Bears

41 The Tropical Garden

42 What I See

43 The Skeleton with Its Dress Pulled Up

44 The Runty Rider Curses Judges

45 The Lone One

46 What I See

47 The Red-Haired Coyote

V

48 The Hat Man

49 What I See

50 The One Only One

51 The Red-Shirt Coyote

52 La Violencia

53 The Fulgurite Shaped Like a Bone

54 What I See

55 The White Spider

56 The Face in the Moss

57 The Jet Trail in the Windshield

58 What I See

Acknowledgments

Also By Annie Proulx

About the Publisher

‘But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’

DASHIELL HAMMETT, The Maltese Falcon

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT UP he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

He couldn’t get any air, but stood on his knocked-out legs gasping and wheezing. It was like he’d taken a bad fall. Dazed. He could feel the blood hammering in his throat. But there was nothing else, only the gasping for breath and an abnormal acuity of vision. Mats of juniper flowed across the field like spilled water; doghair maple crowded the stone wall wavering through the trees.

He’d thought of the wall walking up the slope behind Billy, thought of it in a common way, of working on it sometime, setting back in place the stones that frost and thrusting roots had thrown out. Now he saw it as a scene drawn in powerful ink lines, the rock fissured with crumpled strings of quartz, humps of moss like shoulders shrugging out of the mold, black lignum beneath rotten bark, the aluminum sheen of deadwood.

A stone the size and shape of a car’s backseat jutted out of the wall, and below it was a knob of soil that marked the entrance to an abandoned fox den. Oh Jesus, it wasn’t his fault but they’d say it was. He grasped Billy’s ankles and dragged her to the wall. He rolled her up under the stone, could not look at her face. There was already a waxiness to her body. The texture of her bunched stockings, the shape of her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead in the moment before the flames consume or the sucking water pulls them under. The space beneath the rock was shallow. Her arm fell outward, the hand relaxed, the fingers curled as if she held a hand mirror or a Fourth of July flag.

Instinctively he translated the withering shock into work, his answer to what he did not want to understand, to persistent toothache, hard weather, the sense of loneliness. He rebuilt the wall over her, fitting the stones, copying the careless, tumbled fall of rock. A secretive reflex worked in him. When she was locked away in the wall he threw on dead leaves, tree limbs and brush, raked the drag marks and scuffed ground with a branch.

Down the back fields, keeping to the fence line, but sometimes staggering onto open ground. No feeling in his legs. The sun was going down, the October afternoon collapsing into evening. The fence posts on the margins of the fields glinted like burnished pins, the thick light plated his face with a coppery mask.