Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Pa, let’s go home. Let’s go home,” she said.

Her father bent and put his hands into the river. He brought them dripping to his face. “That’s dirty there, Pa,” she said. A mad dry buzzing started up somewhere — hornets or wasps. Helen looked around but saw nothing.

“God listened and didn’t say yes or no,” her father said. He was squatting at the river and now looked back at her, his chin creasing. The back of his shirt was wet. “If I could read him right it was something like this — that I was caught in myself and them money people caught in themselves and God Himself caught in what he was and so couldn’t be anything else. Then I never thought about God again.”

“I think about God,” Helen said. “I do. People should think about God then they wouldn’t have wars and things…”

“No, I never bothered about God again,” he said slowly. “If he was up there or not it never had nothing to do with me. A hailstorm that knocked down the wheat, or a drought — what the hell? Whose fault? It wasn’t God’s no more than mine so I let him out of it. I knew I was in it all on my own. Then after a while it got better, year by year. We paid off the farm and the new machines. You were in school then, in town. And when we went into the church they said hello to us sometimes, because we outlasted them hillbillies by ten years. And now Mike ain’t doing bad on his own place, got a nice car, and me and Bill get enough out of the farm so it ain’t too bad, I mean it ain’t too bad. But it wasn’t money I wanted!”

He was staring at her. She saw something in his face that mixed with the buzzing of the hornets and fascinated her so that she could not move, could not even try to tease him into smiling too. “It wasn’t never money I wanted,” he said.

“Pa, why don’t we go home?”

“I don’t know what it was, exactly,” he said, still squatting. His hands touched the ground idly. “I tried to think of it, last night when you called and all night long and driving in to town, today. I tried to think of it.”

“I guess I’m awful tired from that bus. I… I don’t feel good,” Helen said.

“Why did you leave with that man?”

“What? Oh,” she said, touching the tip of one of the weeds, “I met him at Paul’s cousin’s place, where they got that real nice tavern and a dance hall…”

“Why did you run away with him?”

“I don’t know, I told you in the letter. I wrote it to you, Pa. He acted so nice and liked me so, he still does, he loves me so much… And he was always so sad and tired, he made me think of… you, Pa… but not really, because he’s not strong like you and couldn’t ever do work like you. And if he loved me that much I had to go with him.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“Come back?” Helen tried to smile out across the water. Sluggish, ugly water, this river that disappointed everyone, so familiar to her that she could not really get used to a house without a river or a creek somewhere behind it, flowing along night and day: perhaps that was what she had missed in the city?

“I came back because… because…”

And she shredded the weed in her cold fingers, but no words came to her. She watched them fall. No words came to her, her mind had turned hollow and cold, she had come too far down to this river bank but it was not a mistake any more than the way the river kept moving was a mistake; it just happened.

Her father got slowly to his feet and she saw in his hand a knife she had been seeing all her life. Her eyes seized upon it and her mind tried to remember: where had she seen it last, whose was it, her father’s or her brother’s? He came to her and touched her shoulder as if waking her, and they looked at each other, Helen so terrified by now that she was no longer afraid but only curious with the mute marble-like curiosity of a child, and her father stern and silent until a rush of hatred transformed his face into a mass of wrinkles, the skin mottled red and white. He did not raise the knife but slammed it into her chest, up to the hilt, so that his whitened fist struck her body and her blood exploded out upon it.

Afterward, he washed the knife in the dirty water and put it away. He squatted and looked out over the river, then his thighs began to ache and he sat on the ground, a few feet from her body. He sat there for hours as if waiting for some idea to come to him. Then the water began to darken, very slowly, and the sky darkened a little while later, as if belonging to another, separate time, the same thing as always, and he had to turn his mind with an effort to the next thing he must do.

The 1970s saw continued frankness about sex in short fiction, although a scarcity of love stories. Many characters confused love and lust, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sexual revolution and the mood of experimentation. This was the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe called it.

Some writers began to experiment with surrealism and new forms. Series editor Martha Foley believed that “a danger confronting the experimental writer is to forget that style and content should be indivisible.” Influential magazines that published cutting-edge fiction, such as Ontario Review, Fiction International, and New Letters , were founded at this time. Donald Barthelme’s stories appeared five times in the series, but Foley’s taste clearly tended toward realism. She never chose stories by John Barth and only two by Robert Coover.

From 1958 to 1971 Foley’s son was listed as coeditor of The Best American Short Stories , although many people were skeptical about his actual involvement. David was an aspiring painter and was known as a lost soul. He died in 1971 as a result of addiction. His death sent Foley into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. In 1975 she moved to a two-room apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, and became isolated. She was barely able to survive on the $6,000 a year that she earned as the series editor. Again and again she was criticized for her narrowing tastes and predictable choices — Joyce Carol Oates appeared seven times in thirteen years, Peter Taylor six times in ten years.

In 1977 Foley died of heart disease. There was no memorial service or funeral for her. She had named no next of kin and had no living relatives. She left many of her own short stories incomplete, as well as the manuscript for a novel and a draft of a memoir, which was finished by Jay Neugeboren and published as The Story of Story Magazine in 1980.

None of the in-house editors at Houghton Mifflin could agree on how the series should continue. Heated discussions about creating a panel of judges and arguments about whom to approach to fill it ensued. The editors finally decided to ask the critic and editor Ted Solotaroff to oversee the series, but he said no. He did propose that they invite a different writer to steer the volume each year. Houghton Mifflin agreed, and Solotaroff signed on as the first guest editor.

Shannon Ravenel, a young editor who had known Foley at Houghton Mifflin, was asked to serve as the annual series editor. Ravenel had grown up in South Carolina, mostly in Charleston. She said, “I had a mixed raising in ‘low country’ and ‘up country’ South Carolina.” An avid reader since childhood, she had sought work in publishing; “In college (Hollins — all girls) my major (English literature) professor and advisor, Louis Rubin, told me I should NOT go back to Charleston, get married and spend my life socializing and belonging to the Junior League. He told me that I should be an editor (I liked ‘workshopping’ my fellow creative writing students’ work much better than I liked writing my own).” After college Ravenel had moved to Boston and gotten a job in Houghton Mifflin’s trade editorial department as a secretary. “And three or four years into it I was beginning to scratch my way into an editorial job by asking if I might read the literary magazines that the department subscribed to that nobody else seemed to read. Doing that, I ‘discovered’ a couple of new writers that Houghton Mifflin eventually published and I was on my way. I also had the gall to suggest a few stories to the venerable Martha Foley who told me to mind my own business!”