Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Mind you don’t turn over in that chair,” said Dennis. “I knew well I could never do better.” His bosom began to thaw and simmer. It was going to be all right with everything, he could see that.

She sat up and felt his sleeves carefully. “I want you to wrap up warm this bitter weather, Dennis,” she told him. “With two pair of socks and the chest protector, for if anything happened to you, whatever would become of me in this world?”

“Let’s not think of it,” said Dennis, shuffling his feet.

“Let’s not, then,” said Rosaleen. “For I could cry if you crooked a finger at me.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER’S biography in the 1943 volume of The Best American Short Stories reads:

He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, a descendant of a once-wealthy family. His schooling was intermittent and he spent most of his youth loafing around his father’s livery stable. He wrote poetry, strongly influenced by Omar Khayyam and Swinburne, but, he says, it was no good except as an aid to love-making. Jolted out of his lazy life by the First World War, he joined the Canadian air force. After the war he turned to earning a living at odd jobs such as house-painting, selling books in a department store, and shoveling coal into a factory furnace. He started writing fiction and suddenly, he explains, “I discovered that writing was a mighty fine thing. It enables you to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow.”

Faulkner (1897–1962) published a book of poems, The Marble Faun , in 1924. He went to work for a newspaper in New Orleans, where he met and befriended Sherwood Anderson. After Anderson persuaded him to try writing fiction — and to write about the region he knew best — Faulkner published his first novel, Soldier’s Pay , in 1926. He went on to publish a series of celebrated short stories, poems, and novels. Among his best-known books are Absalom, Absalom! As I Lay Dying, Light in August , and The Sound and the Fury .

In his writing, Faulkner portrayed a character’s subjective experience, his or her stream of consciousness, written in dialect. His work explored themes of race and class and featured a broad swath of characters of varying ages and backgrounds. His stories appeared six times in The Best American Short Stories during the 1930s alone. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. William Faulkner died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four.

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I

We could hear the water running into the tub. We looked at the presents scattered over the bed where Mamma had wrapped them in the colored paper, with our names on them so Grandpa could tell who they belonged to easy when he would take them off the tree. There was a present for everybody except Grandpa because Mamma said that Grandpa is too old to get presents any more.

“This one is yours,” I said.

“Sho now!” Rosie said. “You come on and get in that tub like your mamma tell you.”

“I know what’s in it,” I said. “I could tell you if I wanted to.”

Rosie looked at her present. “I reckon I kin wait twell hit be handed to me at the right time,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what’s in it for a nickel,” I said.

Rosie looked at her present. “I ain’t got no nickel,” she said. “But I will have Christmas morning when Mr. Rodney give me that dime.”

“You’ll know what’s in it, anyway, then and you won’t pay me,” I said. “Go and ask Mamma to lend you a nickel.”

Then Rosie grabbed me by the arm. “You come on and get in that tub,” she said. “You and money! If you ain’t rich time you twenty-one, hit will be because the law done abolished money or done abolished you.”

So I went and bathed and came back, with the presents all scattered out across Mamma’s and Papa’s bed and you could almost smell it and tomorrow night they would begin to shoot the fireworks and then you could hear it too. It would be just tonight, and then tomorrow we would get on the train, except Papa, because he would have to stay at the livery stable until after Christmas Eve, and go to Grandpa’s, and then tomorrow night and then it would be Christmas and Grandpa would take the presents off the tree and call out our names, and the one from me to Uncle Rodney that I bought with my own dime and so after a while Uncle Rodney would prize open Grandpa’s desk and take a dose of Grandpa’s tonic and maybe he would give me another quarter for helping him, like he did last Christmas, instead of just a nickel, like he would do last summer while he was visiting Mamma and us and we were doing business with Mrs. Tucker before Uncle Rodney went home and began to work for the Compress Association, and it would be fine. Or maybe even a half a dollar and it seemed to me like I just couldn’t wait.

“Jesus, I can’t hardly wait,” I said.

“You which?” Rosie hollered. “Jesus?” she hollered. “Jesus? You let your mamma hear you cussing and I bound you’ll wait. You talk to me about a nickel! For a nickel I’d tell her just what you said.”

“If you’ll pay me a nickel I’ll tell her myself,” I said.

“Get into that bed!” Rosie hollered. “A seven-year-old boy, cussing!”

“If you will promise not to tell her, I’ll tell you what’s in your present and you can pay me the nickel Christmas morning,” I said.

“Get in that bed!” Rosie hollered. “You and your nickel! I bound if I thought any of you all was fixing to buy even a dime present for your grandpa, I’d put in a nickel of hit myself.”

“Grandpa don’t want presents,” I said. “He’s too old.”

“Hah,” Rosie said. “Too old, is he? Suppose everybody decided you was too young to have nickels: what would you think about that? Hah?”

So Rosie turned out the light and went out. But I could still see the presents by the firelight: the ones for Uncle Rodney and Grandma and Aunt Louisa and Aunt Louisa’s husband Uncle Fred, and Cousin Louisa and Cousin Fred and the baby and Grandpa’s cook and our cook, that was Rosie, and maybe somebody ought to give Grandpa a present only maybe it ought to be Aunt Louisa because she and Uncle Fred lived with Grandpa, or maybe Uncle Rodney ought to because he lived with Grandpa too. Uncle Rodney always gave Mamma and Papa a present but maybe it would be just a waste of his time and Grandpa’s time both for Uncle Rodney to give Grandpa a present, because one time I asked Mamma why Grandpa always looked at the present Uncle Rodney gave her and Papa and got so mad, and Papa began to laugh and Mamma said Papa ought to be ashamed, that it wasn’t Uncle Rodney’s fault if his generosity was longer than his pocketbook, and Papa said Yes, it certainly wasn’t Uncle Rodney’s fault, he never knew a man to try harder to get money than Uncle Rodney did, that Uncle Rodney had tried every known plan to get it except work, and that if Mamma would just think back about two years she would remember one time when Uncle Rodney could have thanked his stars that there was one man in the connection whose generosity, or whatever Mamma wanted to call it, was at least five hundred dollars shorter than his pocketbook, and Mamma said she defied Papa to say that Uncle Rodney stole the money, that it had been malicious persecution and Papa knew it, and that Papa and most other men were prejudiced against Uncle Rodney, why she didn’t know, and that if Papa begrudged having lent Uncle Rodney the five hundred dollars when the family’s good name was at stake to say so and Grandpa would raise it somehow and pay Papa back, and then she began to cry and Papa said “All right, all right,” and Mamma cried and said how Uncle Rodney was the baby and that must be why Papa hated him and Papa said “All right, all right; for God’s sake, all right.”