Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

He put his two down on her three; the slick feathers let the bodies slide liquidly on one another. He asked, “Shall I get you the shovel?”

“Get it for yourself; you bury them. They’re your kill,” she said. “And be sure to make the hole deep enough so he won’t dig them up.”

While he went to the tool shed for the shovel, she went into the house. Unlike her, she did not look up, either at the orchard to the right of her or at the meadow on her left, but instead held her head rigidly, tilted a little, as if listening to the ground.

He dug the hole, in a spot where there were no strawberry plants, before he studied the pigeons. He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair; for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant, open earth he dropped one broadly banded in shades of slate blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over with rhythmic patches of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, yet with a salmon glaze at the throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

RAYMOND CARVER (1938–1988) was born in Oregon and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father worked in a sawmill and his mother as a waitress and a retail clerk. In his early twenties Carver attended a creative writing course taught by John Gardner, who became an important force in Carver’s work. Carver later studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

His first story to appear in The Best American Short Stories was “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” But it was not until 1982 that another story, “Cathedral,” was selected.

Carver’s style has been described as minimalist. His reaction was, “There’s something about ‘minimalist’ that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don’t like.” This impression has been put into discussion and correction since the publication of Beginners , the original version of the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , which had caused him to be categorized as a minimalist.

Carver is the author of five collections of stories and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote six books of poems published posthumously in All of Us , his collected poems. In 1983 he received the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988. He also received two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Hartford. After a ten-year relationship, he and the writer Tess Gallagher celebrated their marriage in July 1988. Raymond Carver died at fifty from lung cancer on August 2, 1988.

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WHEN HE WAS 18 and left home for the first time, in the fall, Ralph Wyman had been advised by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School in Weaverville and trumpet-player in the Elks’ Club Auxiliary Band, that life today was a serious matter; something that required strength and direction in a young person just setting out. A difficult journey, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a comprehensible one, he believed.

But in college Ralph’s goals were still hazy and undefined. He first thought he wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, and he took pre-medical courses and courses in history of jurisprudence and business-law before he decided he had neither the emotional detachment necessary for medicine, nor the ability for sustained reading and memorization in the Corpus Iuris Civilis , as well as the more modern texts on property and inheritance. Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in the Department of Business, he also took some lower-division classes in history and philosophy and English. He continually felt he was on the brink of some kind of momentous discovery about himself. But it never came. It was during this time, his lowest ebb, as he jokingly referred back to it later, that he believed he almost became an alcoholic; he was in a fraternity and he used to get drunk every night. He drank so much, in fact, that he even acquired something of a reputation; guys called him Jackson, after the bartender at The Keg, and he sat every day in the cafeteria with a deck of cards playing poker solitaire, or bridge, if someone happened along. His grades were down and he was thinking of dropping out of school entirely and joining the air force.

Then, in his third year, he came under the influence of a particularly fascinating and persuasive literature teacher. Dr. Maxwell was his name; Ralph would never forget him. He was a handsome, graceful man in his early forties, with exquisite manners and with just the trace of a slight southern drawl to his voice. He had been educated at Vanderbilt, had studied in Europe, and later had had something to do with one or two literary magazines in New York. Almost overnight, it seemed to him, Ralph decided on teaching as a career. He stopped drinking so much and began to bear down on his studies. Within a year he was elected to Omega Psi, the national journalism fraternity; he became a member of the English Club; was invited to come with his cello, which he hadn’t played in three years, and join in a student chamber music group just forming; and he ran successfully for Secretary of the Senior Class. He also started going out with Marian Ross that year; a pale, slender girl he had become acquainted with in a Chaucer class.

She wore her hair long and liked high-necked sweaters in the winter; and summer and winter she always went around with a leather purse on a long strap swinging from her shoulder. Her eyes were large and seemed to take in everything at a glance; if she got excited over something, they flashed and widened even more. He liked going out with her in the evenings. They went to The Keg, and a few other nightspots where everyone else went, but they never let their going together, or their subsequent engagement that next summer, interfere with their studies. They were serious students, and both sets of parents eventually gave their approval of the match. They did their student-teaching at the same high school in Chico the next spring, and went through graduation exercises together in June. They married in St. James Episcopal Church two weeks later. Both of them held hands the night before their wedding and pledged solemnly to preserve forever the excitement and the mystery of marriage.

For their honeymoon they drove to Guadalajara; and while they both enjoyed visiting the old decayed churches and the poorly lighted museums, and the several afternoons they spent shopping and exploring in the marketplace (which swarmed with flies), Ralph secretly felt a little appalled and at the same time let down by the squalor and promiscuity of the people; he was only too glad to get back to more civilized California. Even so, Marian had seemed to enjoy it, and he would always remember one scene in particular. It was late afternoon, almost evening, and Marian was leaning motionless on her arms over the iron-worked balustrade of their rented, second-floor casa as he came up the dusty road below. Her hair was long and hung down in front over her shoulders, and she was looking away from him, staring at something toward the horizon. She wore a white blouse with a bright red scarf at the throat, and he could see her breasts pushing against her front. He had a bottle of dark, unlabeled wine under his arm, and the whole incident reminded him of something from a play, or a movie. Thinking back on it later, it was always a little vaguely disturbing for some reason.