Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

The visitor who arrives one mucky night is not a stranger; or not exactly a stranger, though he is in fact strange. He’s an old friend of Mr. White’s, a man who, when young, was prone (more so than Mr. White) to wild and defiant inclinations. In the way of certain trouble-prone boys, he eventually joined the army. He’s been away on military errands for more than two decades, most recently in India. He’s spent the last twenty years helmeted, taciturn, a defender of the Empire, in realms of superstition, of blessings and curses, of darkly magical acts that are usually faked but can seem, on occasion, to be not exactly genuine, but … other than counterfeit, as well.

The visitor brings with him a gift, the severed paw of a monkey, which he claims has the power to grant three wishes.

The Whites are unsure about how to receive this particular present. They could use three wishes — a single wish would be riches beyond calculation. But, really. This gruesome, withered little thing, its dead, brown-black fingers curled into themselves? It would seem that Mr. White’s old friend has lost his mind, which is not unusual among men who’ve been long in strange and remote places.

Still, it’d be impolite to refuse it. Right?

Mr. White takes the paw into his own hand, and is astonished and appalled when it convulses, ever so slightly, upon contact with the flesh of his own palm.

Before he can cry out, though, the visitor has snatched it back. He says, in an unsteady voice, that he was about to commit a crime. He’s been unable to rid himself of the paw, he’d thought he could free himself by giving it to a poor, innocent family …

The Whites just stare at him. What is there to say?

The visitor tells them he bemoans the day he ever laid tired eyes on the monkey’s paw.

With a spasm of lunatic resolve, he throws it into the fireplace.

Mr. White just as quickly retrieves it, singeing his own fingertips. He’s embarrassed for his friend. He assures him that a gift is a gift. He says he’s always been drawn to exotica, and there’s not much of that in this neighborhood.

The visitor, looking gaunt and terrified as a muskrat in a trap, stumbles to the door. Before taking his leave, he warns the Whites not to wish on the paw, and implores them, should they find themselves wish-prone, to restrict their requests to the most sensible possible desires.

Then he’s out the door. The rain absorbs him back into the night.

Mother and son are quick to render their verdict. They break out in gusts of laughter.

Sensible wishes? Please send us a new dustpan? Grant us, if you will, fewer roaches in the larder?

Mr. White remains silent. He closes the door, through which rain is blowing like a swarm of hornets.

He could swear he felt the paw clench when it was given to him. He’s holding it again, though, and it’s inert as death itself.

Mr. White can manage only a muted protest on the poor man’s behalf. “He’s been harmed by too much strangeness, you didn’t know us when we were boys…”

Mrs. White snatches the paw from him, mutters an invented incantation, and says, “I wish…”

She pauses. She claims she has nothing to wish for (she who washes dishes in an old iron pot, who does her best to coax fires out of soggy logs).

“I wish for two hundred pounds,” she says eventually, two hundred pounds being the sum still owed on the cottage. With two hundred pounds, this warren of dim, low-ceilinged dankness could be theirs.

A more sensible wish is difficult to imagine.

Nothing happens. No wad of bank notes manifests itself in the sugar bowl, no coins rattle down the flue.

They take themselves off to bed.

Once Mr. and Mrs. White are settled under the quilts together, she does not wonder, even as sleep descends, why she married a man who’d convey her, after their modest village wedding, to a place like this. (Should she have guessed, when he appeared at their marriage ceremony in his father’s mothballed suit, when he insisted that a carriage was a needless expense?) Mr. White, a troubled sleeper, does not inquire inwardly, as he turns this way and that, trying to find a sleep-friendly position, about his choice of a wife so lacking in ambition or faith. He does not ask himself, Why would full ownership of this hovel so much as cross her mind, even in jest?

* * *

The next morning, the son leaves for work. By late afternoon, a representative of the factory arrives to inform Mr. and Mrs. White that there’s been an accident. Their son has been snatched up by his machine, as if he were the raw material for some product made of manglement, of bone shards and snapped sinews, of blood-spray that turned quickly, before the eyes of the other workers, from red to black.

The man from the factory is appropriately, professionally sympathetic. He knows there’s no compensation for a loss like this. The factory owners do, however, maintain a practice of paying the families of the men who are, on occasion, taken by the machines. It’s not much, God knows, but the company is prepared to offer the following sum of money to the boy’s parents …

You do not, of course, need me to tell you the actual figure.

Nor do you need me to tell you — certainly not in detail — about the boy’s grief-deranged mother, who made the wish in the first place; about how she, late one night — several days after what remains of her son has been sealed into its box (there was no viewing of the body), after the box has been interred in the weedy churchyard — takes up the monkey’s paw and calls, into the empty parlor, into the rain beyond the parlor, “Bring him back.”

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens immediately.

It takes several hours for the Whites, after they’ve gone to bed, to hear the sound of approaching footsteps, coming from outside. It takes only moments, however, for them to realize that the footsteps possess a measured slowness, an aspect of drag, as if each step did not involve boot-sole leaving the surface of the ground and so has to be painfully gained, a slide through the sludge, before the next step can be negotiated.

Both of them understand it at the same moment. It’s a long walk from the cemetery.

Mrs. White rushes down the narrow stairs, with Mr. White behind her.

“He’s back!” she declares.

He can barely bring himself to respond. “ It’s back.”

The mauled corpse, the creature made now of shattered bone and crushed mask of a face (the creature who had once toddled giggling after a rubber ball, who had skated cheerfully on ponds with its friends) is back. It is, even now, creaking through the garden gate.

It has been summoned. It still recognizes the light in the window.

As Mrs. White struggles to unbolt the door, Mr. White takes up the monkey’s paw. He’s prepared to shout, “Make it go away.”

And yet, he remains silent. He knows what he should do. But he can’t bear the idea of his wife throwing open the door and finding nothing but wind outside. He’s not sure he could survive the sorrow and fury she’d aim at him when she turned back from the empty threshold.

So Mr. White stands in the middle of the room, holding the monkey’s paw tightly in his hand, as his wife throws the door open, as he and his wife behold what stands before them, expecting to be welcomed in.

* * *

They have lived together now, the three of them, for more than a year. The creature sprawls, during the days, in the upholstered chair, beside whatever flicker of fire has been coaxed from the wet logs. When night arrives, the creature hauls itself wordlessly upstairs, clumping on each tread, where it remains in its bedroom (there’s no telling whether it sleeps) until morning comes again, when it resumes its place at the fireside.